Elwood Jones Surprises a Hotel Guest
(‘Punch Line,’ Forensic Files)
Back in 1996, the case against hotel worker Elwood Jones seemed as solid as cast iron. The handyman had prior convictions for theft and possessed a master passkey for rooms at the Embassy Suites in Blue Ash, Ohio.
Two years after guest Rhoda Nathan was discovered beaten to death and a piece of her jewelry turned up in Elwood’s car, Judge Ralph Winkler sent him to death row.
But in a surprising development in 2023, Elwood exited prison on two feet after a different Hamilton County judge ordered a new trial.
Social gal. A look into the reasoning behind that decision seems in order — but first, here’s a recap of the Forensic Files episode “Punch Line” along with extra information from internet research:
Rhoda Silverman was born in the Bronx on January 15, 1927 and then lived in New York City for 18 years, according to her obituary in the Asbury Park Press. She married Robert Nathan and had two sons, Valentine and Peter.
By 1994, she was a 67-year-old widow, but still a livewire. Rhoda lived in Toms River, New Jersey and enjoyed local theater, tennis, golf, travel, and orchestrating family celebrations, according to the Justice for Rhoda Nathan website. An Asbury Park Press story described her as a popular member of the Dover Township retirement community.
Friends up in the air. She also stayed close to her old acquaintances, including childhood friend Elaine Shub. In September of 1994, Rhoda flew to Ohio to attend the bar mitzvah of Elaine’s grandson.
On the airplane, a married couple named the Cantors who were headed to the same bar mitzvah introduced themselves to Rhoda and ended up dropping her off at the Embassy Suites, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer.
Rhoda and Elaine shared Room 237, along with Elaine’s boyfriend, Joe Kaplan.
Egg in the a.m. The hotel was configured with an atrium surrounded by guest rooms. No one could slip into a room without chancing detection.
Or so it seemed.
According to the Cincinnati Post, unlike other rooms, Rhoda’s had an exterior door partly blocked by plants and a low wall.
On the day of the event, September 3, 1994, Elaine and Joe left the room early in the morning to grab a bite in the atrium — where the hotel had an omelet station — and give Rhoda a chance to shower and dress in privacy.
Sudden terror. Unfortunately, it was just enough time to allow a thief to sneak into what he probably thought was an empty room.
When Joe, Elaine, and Elaine’s daughter Cynthia Kirsch returned from breakfast, they allowed Cynthia’s 6-year-old son to turn the key in the lock. The door opened to the sight of Rhoda on the floor.
Elaine screamed in horror.
Guests try to help. Although Season 4 of the Accused podcast said that police at first thought Rhoda had simply suffered a heart attack, her friends described her as having a face so swollen and battered that they could barely identify her — far more physical trauma than a cardiac arrest would cause. Rhoda had a shattered jaw and broken ribs. Investigators would later identify door chains and a walkie-talkie as objects possibly used in the attack.
“They just beat the living daylights out of her,” police chief Michael Allen said, as reported by the Associated Press.
A cardiologist and a nurse staying at the hotel tried to revive Rhoda, with no luck.
Emotionally scarred. Dorothy Cantor told the Cincinnati Enquirer that she was stunned to learn that the nice woman she and her husband had just met was now gone.
Cynthia would later tell the Accused podcast that Elaine Shub was never the same after that day.
Rhoda’s son was devastated. “As she passed away, so did my family,” recalled Valentine Nathan in a video on the Justice for Rhoda Nathan website. “We drew apart. There was nothing there to draw us back in together. It was horrible.”
Dental damage. Because of her facial injuries, the Nathans had to give Rhoda a funeral with a closed casket. “My baby, my baby,” said Rhoda’s 92-year-old mother, Sarah Silverman, as she looked at the coffin.
Meanwhile, the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office had sent detective Peter Alderucci to the crime scene. He found one of Rhoda’s teeth on the floor; another would turn up in her stomach. A necklace given to Rhoda by her husband, who had it custom-made with diamonds once belonging to his mother, was missing and so was $500 in cash from Elaine’s purse.
The Hamilton County Coroner declared Rhoda’s death a murder. Because she had few defensive wounds, prosecutors believe someone overpowered her completely. She was naked, making it unlikely that she opened the door to let the anonymous killer in.
Handy clue. Investigators turned their attentions toward Elwood Jones, a 42-year-old handyman for the hotel. He started work at 6 a.m. on the morning of the homicide. Later that day, he acquired a bandaged wound on his left hand, and he went for treatment four days later.
When hand surgeon Dr. John McDonough cut into Elwood’s severely infected finger, blood and tissue spurted 10 inches across the operating room table. The doctor took photos of the wound to show students because it was so unusual. (Warning: Between those photos and the autopsy pictures, you probably shouldn’t plan on dining while watching this episode.)
Elwood’s hand injury required antibiotics, two operations, and a five-day stay in the hospital.
“The virulence of that infection was a clue to the mystery,” intoned Forensic Files narrator Peter Thomas.
Violent provenance. Elwood told the doctor that the cut came from a trash bin lid, but hotel employees recalled that he blamed it on metal stairs. Another version had Elwood saying he got the cut when he fell onto a garbage bag containing glass and later aggravated the wound while breaking down a dance floor at the hotel, according to a Northeast Suburban Life article from June 5, 2019.
Lab tests revealed the infection came from eikenella corrodens bacteria, found in oral plaque. The doctor identified the wound as a “fight bite” — from a fist coming into violent contact with human teeth.
So who was this man who quickly became the chief suspect in a beloved grandmother’s murder?
Respectable beginnings. Elwood “Butch” Jones came into the world in 1952, born to schoolteachers in Ohio. In addition to their own seven children, Elwood’s parents took in kids who didn’t have good homes.
At some point in Elwood’s life, he started accruing theft convictions — at least one of them for a burglary.
Having already married and divorced once, Elwood was living with his girlfriend, Yvonne, in the East Walnut Hills neighborhood of Cincinnati at the time of the homicide. He was also having an affair with a co-worker named Earlene Metcalf.
Sharp-dressed man. A search of his and Yvonne’s apartment turned up the Embassy Suites master passkey in Elwood’s possession, even though he no longer worked at the hotel by that time. A toolkit in the trunk of his car contained the necklace given to Rhoda by her husband.
Police arrested Elwood, and he was indicted in 1995. With his sleek physique and tinted aviator-style frames, he looked more like an opening act for Sammy Davis Jr. than a maintenance man gone homicidal.
Alternate suspects? Prosecutors believe Jones saw Elaine Shub and Joe Kaplan leave for breakfast on that morning of September 3 and thought the room was empty. He took along his toolkit so he could say he was doing maintenance work if the occupants returned unexpectedly. When Rhoda surprised him by emerging from the bathroom, he beat her with his fists, door chains, and possibly his walkie-talkie and stole the necklace plus Elaine’s cash.
Elwood’s defense team argued that police, who had access to his car keys, planted the necklace in his toolkit to frame him.
Tow-truck driver Jimmy Johnson said that, in the course of doing repair work on Elwood’s car on September 4, 1994, he dumped out all the tools in Elwood’s trunk and saw no necklace like the one that detective Mike Bray said he later discovered.
There was also the matter of a local jailbird named Linda Reed who said that a woman she met while locked up admitted that her husband murdered someone and then framed a Black man.
Typical accusation. The defense contended that investigators launched the case against Elwood because of public pressure to solve it after they muddied up the murder scene.
(I’m always skeptical about contentions that police erred by failing to keep crime scenes pristine. In the case of Rhoda, first responders didn’t know a murder had taken place. And even if they did suspect it, they had to walk into the room and move things in the course of trying to revive her and then removing her body.)
In 1996, a jury found Elwood guilty of aggravated murder and he received a death sentence. He stayed on death row for 27 years, all the while claiming innocence and writing letters to ask for help.
Steadfast story. On September 10, 2000, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported seeing court papers suggesting that Ohio judges had criticized prosecutors for using improper courtroom statements to win death-penalty convictions in numerous cases, including that of Elwood Jones. Among the prosecutors’ offending statements was that Elwood valued a stolen necklace more than Rhoda Nathan’s life. But that revelation didn’t lead anywhere for his case.
It wasn’t until 2022 that Elwood had some real luck. Pro bono defense lawyers, including Erin Barnhart, who called the prosecution’s evidence junk science, persuaded Hamilton County Judge Wende Cross to rule that he deserved a new trial because 4,000 investigative documents, including 400 hotel guest surveys, had been withheld from the defense during the trial.
Criminals aplenty. According to reporting from WLWT, the defense lawyers’ salvos included the allegation that some hotel guests said they saw a white man dashing out of the building and into the woods around the time of the murder and that the local police reported that they received a confession to the crime from someone other than Elwood Jones. There was also a confusing contention that Rhoda Nathan’s necklace was merely a piece of mass-produced jewelry.
“I’m not a murderer,” Elwood said in an interview. “I was a thief and I’m the first to tell you I’ve got a past.” According to the Accused podcast, the Embassy Suites in Blue Ash employed other people with police records — the hotel was having a tough time filling positions and it qualified for a tax credit for employing those who had trouble securing jobs. Over the years, the property had received many complaints of items disappearing from their rooms, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer.
His defenders also pointed out that Elwood’s narrative has remained the same since the murder happened in 1994. “A few stories have changed since then, but not Jones’,” the Cincinnati Enquirer wrote.
Rhoda Nathan’s family begged Judge Cross to keep Elwood in prison until the new trial. The state of Ohio tried to persuade her, too. “He’s 70 years old,” said assistant prosecutor Seth Tiger. “He’s got a lot of crime left in him.”
Elwood won. Wearing an electronic monitoring device on his leg and having posted no bond money, he emerged from razor wire on January 14, 2023
Comfort and reunions. “Because of all the bad rulings that have come out over the years,” Elwood told USA Today, “it’s kind of hard to comprehend when something good happens.”
In a March 2023 interview with USA Today, Elwood said he’s grateful to be able to make his own coffee and enjoy the company of his sister’s American bulldog while staying at her home on house arrest. Other family members come to visit him.
He spends some of his time sewing stuffed animals to give to people who have helped him, according to USA Today.
Fans materialize. The Nathans and prosecutors dismiss Elwood’s plea of innocence as a typical attempt at a SODDI (some other dude did it) defense.
“The issues Judge Cross rested her decision on have been decided on by the sixth circuit court of appeals, the federal court, at the district level and at the court of appeals, and all were rejected,” said Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters, adding that it’s a rare day that he doesn’t think about Rhoda Nathan.
Chief Assistant Hamilton County Prosecutor Mark Piepmeier complained about the existence of what he termed Elwood Jones groupies.
Kickoff coming in 2024. “Now, thanks to misleading TV crime shows and inaccurate podcasts, Elwood Jones has gained enough support to be granted a new trial,” Valentine Nathan said in a video interview on the Justice for Rhoda website. “My mother is not here and this guy is still breathing and still appealing. Him constantly trying to do these appeals and bring everything back is torment of me and torment of my family.”
Elwood’s adversaries and supporters await his new trial, originally scheduled to begin on February 5, 2024 — but now delayed with the possible start time of summer or fall 2024 (thanks to reader Marcus for sending in the update). Because of a medical condition, he no longer has to wear an electronic monitoring device.
In the meantime, rewinding all the way back to 1994 for a moment, what happened with the bar mitzvah plans that prompted Rhoda’s fateful visit to Cincinnati? The ceremony actually did take place right after the tragedy, according to Dorothy Cantor, who cited the Jewish tradition of using happy occasions to help people celebrate life amid horrible events.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
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