At the center of this tragic case is a young woman named Geraldine “Gerri” Jones, whose life was cut short on November 15, 2000, when she was brutally murdered in her home in Columbia, Missouri. The police managed to secure a confession and closed the case almost immediately and prosecutor Kevin Crane got a conviction without ever having to go to trial. From the State’s perspective, this was a slam dunk.
Marna Weber’s case is complex, and a more detailed account and analysis follows on subsequent pages, but stripped down to its simplest form, the State of Missouri contend that then 32 year old Marna Weber killed her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend, Gerri , in a jealous rage, while blacked out on Xanax and alcohol. While it is a convenient theory, the evidence does not bear out the “jealous girlfriend” narrative. Moreover, despite the characterizations of the State, Marna Weber had neither opportunity, nor motive to kill Gerri Jones.
Marna maintains that she was at home, passed out from heavy alcohol and drug use, and was no where near the scene of the crime at the time the crime was committed. She alleges that both she and Gerri suffered diabolical abuse at the hands of the same man, Marna’s then boyfriend (and the victim’s ex-boyfriend), Robert Wayne Lawson, and that it was he who, in fact, killed Gerri Jones. There is an overwhelming amount of evidence to suggest not only that this is true, but that the Columbia Police Department and State’s prosecutor, Kevin Crane, knew this to be true, at the same time they were striking a plea agreement to put Marna Weber away for the crime, irrespective of the facts. An entry in the attorney’s case log contains a notation that reads, “No Evidence. Believe Lawson did it.”.
As you peel away the layers in this case, it appears that the rush to judgement by police and the State might have been premature at best, or downright criminal at worst. In order to demonstrate why, we will look at the State’s side of the story and timeline, the confession, the evidence (and why it was withheld) and all the other material facts. We will examine Marna’s side of the story and see how that matches the evidence, ultimately arriving at only one possible conclusion….Marna Weber did not murder Geraldine Jones.
