Scottsdale shooting suspect left divorce full of discord, YouTube channel full of grudges

Show Caption Hide Caption YouTube videos tied to Dwight Jones air grievances in custody battle Before the Scottsdale shootings, Dwight Lamon Jones apparently posted YouTube videos outlining what he saw as a conspiracy to take his son away.

For almost a decade, it seems, Dwight Lamon Jones held onto a grudge.

Jones, found dead Monday morning of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a north Scottsdale hotel room, is suspected in a string of shootings in Phoenix and Scottsdale over the past week.

But before he started shooting, Jones, 56, apparently created almost 10 hours of online video outlining what he saw as a conspiracy by his ex-wife, psychiatrists, lawyers and the Maricopa County judicial system to rig a divorce case and steal custody of his son.

A YouTube channel titled "exposing lowlifes" housed 18 videos that included a taped interview between his ex-wife and a famous psychiatrist and a long letter to his estranged son.

Steven Pitt was just one of the people named. The forensic psychiatrist was retained by his wife's attorney, Elizabeth Feldman, to complete a psychiatric assessment of Jones in 2009.

Jones was angry, he told Pitt during a four-hour interview in the psychiatrist's office on the border of Phoenix and Scottsdale. He told the story in one of the YouTube videos. He insisted his wife had abused their son and had multiple affairs, yet she was the one attempting to make him look violent and paranoid so she could have full custody of their child.

Jones would ultimately lose custody of their son. Nine years later, police said, he shot Pitt dead outside that same office in broad daylight on Thursday afternoon.

Less than 24 hours later, police believe, Jones walked into the Scottsdale office of his wife's former lawyer with a loaded gun. Regardless of who was the intended target, only two paralegals — Veleria Sharp and Laura Anderson — were left in the office on that Friday afternoon. Police said Jones shot both of them dead.

Sometime that same day, Friday, police believe, Jones shot Marshall Levine inside another Scottsdale office building. The psychologist, life coach and hypnotherapist had no apparent record of involvement in Jones' long divorce case.

But he shared an office space with Karen Kolbe, who had been his son's counselor. She had tried to convince his son to fear Jones, he would insist in one of the videos posted just six days before Levine was killed.

Then, there was nothing. For one day, the legal and mental health community waited to learn whether who — if anyone — would be next.

Suspect in Scottsdale shootings dead, police say Police say a man suspected of murdering a prominent forensic psychiatrist and two paralegals at their offices in Phoenix and Scottsdale is dead.

It was his ex-wife's new husband who figured it out. Connie Jones issued a statement Monday.

"Personally, I have feared for my safety for the past nine years," she said. "I cannot express the emotions I feel for the innocent families touched by this senseless violence."

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She went on to say her current husband, who is a retired police detective, recognized the connection and notified Phoenix and Scottsdale police.

The three days of fear came to an end early Monday morning in an Extended Stay America hotel near Shea Boulevard and Scottsdale Road. Phoenix police said officers had tracked Jones over the last day and a half before ultimately making contact with him at the hotel. Officers were evacuating adjacent hotel rooms when Jones opened fire one last time.

He fired seven or eight rounds, police said, before turning the gun on himself.

He died alone.

But he left two more victims.

On Sunday afternoon — before police were tracking Jones, they said — he had driven his gold Mercedes to Fountain Hills, headed for a house in a cul-de-sac. Inside, he killed a man and a woman, police said.

A video tale

Little is known about the final years of his life. Jones was born in North Carolina, according to public records, then graduated from a Missouri high school before joining the Army. Later he spent time in Texas. His last known address was a Tucson apartment, though in his videos he mentioned living out of a hotel. At one time he coached tennis, though it's unclear when he last worked.

All that remained was a YouTube channel.

The man narrating the videos never provided his name. The camera never showed his face. He identified himself only as Connie Jones’ ex-husband, and he spoke from behind the camera, dedicating almost 10 hours of footage to one purpose: trying to prove that he had been robbed of his son.

The account uploaded 18 videos in the three weeks before the shooting began. The last one was posted on May 25 — six days before Pitt was gunned down.

In one series of videos, the narrator rambled through an open letter to his son, whom he said he had not seen in almost a decade. Another string played a taped interview between Pitt and his ex-wife, which the narrator repeatedly paused to interject his commentary.

“I’m going to try to give you the short version of a very long story about how this lowlife got away with it,” he said at the beginning of a five-video series posted May 25, six days before the first shooting. The camera focused on an empty white mask.

In it, he unspooled a tale of “thugs,” “crooks” and “lowlifes,” all of whom supposedly joined forces with his ex-wife. He claimed that she abused their son, then manufactured a domestic-violence incident that cascaded into a conspiracy.

A biased judge, he said, let his ex-wife's attorney select Pitt as the psychiatrist who evaluated him. Then, he claimed, she paid those psychiatrists to paint him as mentally unstable. Then she somehow convinced them to ignore his evidence. Counselors drove a wedge between him and his son. Doctors changed statements. A murder-for-hire plot targeted him. Law enforcement misread every situation and assumed her gun belonged to him.

“Three words that helped her: Black, man, and gun,” he said. “Hysteria.”

While a judge said Jones' claims of child abuse were “egregious and unsubstantiated," court records detail a hellish divorce after a marriage gone bad.

Craig Harris outside home of Scottsdale shooter's last murder victims Craig Harris takes you outside the home of Scottsdale shooter's last two murder victims.

A contentious divorce

Connie Phillips and Dwight Jones married in June 1988 in North Carolina. He worked as she went to medical school there. And in 1997, when their son was born, they decided that because she could make more money as a radiologist than he could with his GED, that he would stay home and take care of the child.

For the next 12 years of their 22-year marriage, he was the child’s primary caretaker. And then when their son was old enough to go to school, again according to the court record, Connie wanted him to go back to work, but he refused.

He was living very well on her doctor’s income.

In the court record there were claims of domestic violence. In December 2007, Dwight allegedly struck Connie and fractured her sternum. In April 2009, she said, he pinned her to a couch with a knee on her chest.

Things came to a head on May 6, 2009.

Dwight had brought their son home from a basketball game and was criticizing his performance. He allegedly said the boy was “too much like a little girl,” among other disparaging remarks. Connie intervened and it escalated to violence, much of it caught on an audio recording.

Connie claimed Dwight pinned her to a wall and struck her in the face with a forearm.

“I’ll take you out to the motherf---ing pool and drown you,” he said.

She called police and that resulted in a standoff with a SWAT team. When Jones surrendered, he came out with the boy in front of him, an act Connie and her legal team described as like a human shield. A Scottsdale police officer later denied that in a deposition.

Connie had Dwight involuntarily committed to a mental hospital, but according to records, he was not found to be mentally "abnormal."

She filed for divorce six days later. And she carefully rearranged her bank accounts to keep her husband from accessing them, according to court filings.

Experts' assessments

Pitt first appears in the record on July 20, 2009, retained by Connie to do a risk assessment of Dwight. Over the course of the divorce case, she paid him more than $25,000.

In his report, filed in April 2010, he said of Dwight that “without psychiatric intervention and treatment, Mr. Jones’ mental state is going to continue to unravel. He will become increasingly paranoid, likely psychotic, and pose an even greater risk of perpetuating violence.”

There was no more violence documented.

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But Connie repeatedly took out orders of protection against him. She hired a private investigator, who searched the husband’s rooms of their house and claimed to find a gun (he denied it was his), a semen-detection kit and three pairs of the wife’s panties. The detective also tailed Jones to a strip joint on Seventh Street in central Phoenix, and claimed he spent most days there from mid-afternoon to midnight. Connie claimed he had spent $50,000 on gambling and strip clubs.

Later, Connie married that private investigator, former Phoenix police Detective Richard Anglin.

Connie had been ordered to pay Dwight $3,800 per month in temporary spousal support as they awaited the divorce trial. He still had his Mercedes.

She also tried to stop the father from having his supervised visitation with their son.

Suspect connected to four Scottsdale murders commits suicide Anne Ryman, senior reporter for azcentral.com, reports from Scottsdale scene where suspect connected to four murders reportedly committed suicide.

Reports from those visitations showed that Jones almost always acted appropriately with the boy, asking about his school, and discouraging him from violent video games. On a few occasions in 2010, the boy fell asleep, once even slurred speech, and Jones called 911, concerned that the boy was on drugs, or was adversely affected by drugs he had been prescribed. He was not allowed to go to the emergency room.

Then the son stopped coming. Or Connie stopped bringing him. Dwight’s attorney claimed she was driven to the visitations with an armed bodyguard.

The mental health practitioner who supervised Dwight's visitations wanted to find out why the boy was not coming, and so he reached out to his therapist, Karen Kolbe. She told him it would be inappropriate to talk to him about the treatment she was administering. Connie also objected.

But Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Pamela Gates found Kolbe to be unreasonable and suggested it was one of "possible acts to alienate the child from father." Then she ordered all the therapists to confer.

End of the records

They went to trial in family court on September 20 and 21, 2010. Pitt testified. When it was over, Connie Jones was ordered by Gates to pay $6,000 per month in spousal support for five years, and she was ordered to attend anger-management classes.

Dwight Jones was ordered to pay $550 per month in child support. And a few months later he was ordered to have a psychiatric evaluation.

The visitations continued.

So did the orders of protection.

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But Connie Jones refused to go to anger management classes. Dwight Jones resisted undergoing the psych eval.

The trial filings then shifted to spousal payments. Connie Jones was in arrears for tens of thousands of dollars. Dwight Jones filed several motions to be paid half of the couple’s joint IRA account, more than $100,000 which Connie Jones was ordered to pay in July 2013. It was not paid until January 2016.

But then the five years of spousal maintenance ran out. The boy reached the age of emancipation. And the couple settled.

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The court record essentially ended in March 2016.

It's unclear what, if anything, caused Dwight Jones to start shooting more than two years later.

By midday Monday, the video channel was offline, replaced by a standard banner saying it had been "terminated due to multiple or severe violations of YouTube's policy."

Randy Anglin, Richard's brother-in-law, said the couple were in seclusion "out of town." They had never been in any real danger.

While they were unharmed, they were grappling with the reality of the situation.

"They're going to have to explain what happened to their son," he said.

Lily Altavena contributed to this article.

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