John Wesley Jones
John Wesley Jones was 23 and lived in Crawfordville, Georgia.
Case summary
Incident
On October 3, 1942, Ethel Jones, of Crawfordville, Georgia wrote a letter requesting an investigation into the June 19th death of her son, John Wesley Jones. Jones, 23, had been serving a five-month sentence at the Richmond County Stockade in middle Georgia for larceny. Ethel Jones wrote that she had received a telegram that her son had died of heat exhaustion while in custody. But when the body was turned over to her, Ethel Jones saw marks on her son’s head that indicated, she wrote, that he had been beaten to death.
Aftermath
On October 19, 1942, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover replied to Ethel Jones that her letter had been forwarded to Assistant Attorney General Wendell Berge for an opinion. On October 28, Berge sent a letter to J. Saxton Daniel, the U.S. attorney for Savannah, Georgia, requesting that Daniel provide information and recommendations regarding the matter. On October 31, 1942, Assistant United States Attorney Julian Hartridge requested the FBI investigate.
According to a report made on December 10, 1942, FBI Special Agent Joseph F. Burns’s investigation revealed that the blood that Mrs. Jones saw on her son’s head came from an incision made in the embalming process and that his death was due to natural causes. On January 5, 1943, in a memorandum to Hoover, Berge wrote that the Department of Justice had authorized the U.S. Attorney to close the file on the complaint.