Brother and Sister Become Youngest Murderers in US History
The True Story of Curtis and Catherine
In 1999, 12-year-old Curtis and 13-year-old Catherine Jones were charged as adults with first-degree murder, making them the youngest people in the United States to ever face such charges. The two were accused of killing Sonya Nicole Speights, their father's girlfriend, by shooting her nine times and hitting her four times.
Some people believed that the Jones siblings killed Speights because she was taking attention away from them, but the two maintained that they were motivated by sexual abuse. Catherine had told her brother that a male relative had acted inappropriately while watching her shower, and when the Florida Department of Children and Families decided not to investigate, Catherine planned to kill her father, her male relative, and Speights. Curtis offered to help.
The duo went after Speights because they believed she was allowing the sexual abuse to continue. However, after shooting her, the children realized that they had made a mistake and initially claimed that it was an accident.
The Jones siblings were eventually convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 18 years in prison. They were released in 2015, and Catherine has since become an advocate for juvenile justice reform.
Police found them after they ran away and hid in a wooded area. They were the two youngest people in U.S. history to be charged as adults with first-degree murder.
The two kids, who were facing life sentences, agreed to plead guilty to second-degree murder, for which they were each given 18 years in prison and probation for the rest of their lives.
Because of the plea deal, there was no trial or testimony, so Curtis, Catherine, and their lawyers didn't get a chance to show the documents from the authorities that would later be renamed the Department of Children and Families(DCF). Those documents showed that welfare investigators had found signs more than once that both Curtis and Catherine were being abused by a certain family member, a family member who, according to Florida law, was a registered sex offender.
Why did they stop the investigation after seeing evidence that the children were victims of sexual abuse?
The fact that the documents showing that the children were sexually abused never got to a jury probably, and unfairly, sealed the fate of the two kids, who were just acting out of self-defense. They've spent almost 20 years in prison, they'll still be on probation for the rest of their lives, and they'll still have to live with the fact that they were found guilty of murder.
Without an aggressive and competent lawyer, juveniles are often scared into taking plea deals, as was the case here. If there had been a trial, DCF documents might have shown a possible reason for what happened, which might have made prosecutors want to lower the charges.
Catherine Opens up To Tell Her Story A Decade Later
The story was never told until 2009, when Catherine agreed to meet with a reporter from Florida Today.
In the horrible story she told, her white biological mother fled for her life and left her children behind after years of domestic abuse.
The family member who is said to have abused Catherine and her brother spent six years in prison in Alabama for a robbery. He was later found guilty of having sex with a 14-year-old girl in Brevard.
Now he lived with them, and he and Curtis shared a bed. FLORIDA TODAY won't name the family member because he was never charged in this case.
Catherine told said, "He would make me perform oral sex until I threw up." She added that her father and Speights, who was his girlfriend at the time, did not believe her.
All of the assertions could be easily checked through records, such as child welfare reports, sheriff investigations, and school memos, which lawyer and Florida State University professor Paolo Annino used to try to get clemency for them.
When I went to see Catherine at Homestead Correctional Institution in 2009, she told me that she was willing to do anything to get away from the hell she was born into, even though she felt bad about taking a life. Even jail was a better place.
