Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, April 6, 1990                   TAG: 9004060476
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

HUSBAND CONVICTED IN MALL WIFE KILLING

Raymond W. Jones, 56, pleaded no contest during a hearing in Roanoke Circuit Court to murder and use of a firearm.

Jones, a thin, balding man with tattoos on both arms, told police he "just went off his rocker" when his estranged wife, Patricia Jones, refused to speak to him last December when he visited her at her job at the lunch counter of Woolworth's at Towers Shopping Center.

In what prosecutors called an "execution-style killing," Patricia Jones, 33, was shot three times in the chest at point-blank range by her husband as she sat across from him at a lunch counter booth.

Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Mac Doubles said he will ask for the maximum sentence - life in prison - when Jones is sentenced.

Authorities have said that although Jones told them he was trying to cope with a drinking problem and depression brought on by a failing marriage, he told them at one point that he had no intention of killing his wife when he sought her out the morning of Dec. 11.

"I loved the damn woman," police detectives in earlier hearings have quoted Jones as saying. The shooting happened just three weeks after the Joneses separated.

But other witnesses have told authorities that Jones said he planned to "put a hurting" on Patricia Jones. Shortly before the shooting, Jones was seen at Virginia Metal Manufacturing in Roanoke, where he brandished his pistol and threatened to kill his estranged wife.