Curtis Jones charged with murder in death of Iowa City bail bondsman

A man charged in the slaying of an Iowa City cab driver earlier this year now faces a new murder charge in the death of an Iowa City bail bondsman who was found shot to death in his office seven months ago.

Curtis C. Jones, 41, of Mount Pleasant will face a first-degree murder charge in the death of Jonathan Wieseler, police and prosecutors said at a news conference Monday announcing the charge.

Jones is already in jail facing a first-degree murder charge in connection with the death of Iowa City cab driver Ricky Ray Lillie, 46, in June. He is set to face trial on that charge on April 9, 2018, in Scott County.

Jones was out on parole, released last fall seven years early following an armed robbery conviction. He was paroled even though he had been deemed a high risk to commit more violence, according to state records.

Wieseler, 34, was found dead in his office at Lederman Bail Bonds on April 23. His death was ruled a homicide.

An Iowa City police complaint states that between 10:20 and 10:32 p.m. on April 22, Jones shot Wieseler in the head with a small caliber firearm, killing him.

MORE: Six months after his death, slain bail bondsman's family, friends work to honor his memory

The shooting happened while Jones was in the course of committing a first-degree robbery, Johnson County Attorney Janet Lyness said at the news conference Monday afternoon.

Jones was captured on surveillance video on April 22 within blocks of the scene of the shooting and was seen driving a vehicle that was later searched by police, according to the complaint.

Forensic testing showed that evidence seized through the search warrant had DNA from both Wieseler and Jones, the complaint states.

Jones is scheduled for an initial appearance Tuesday morning at the Johnson County Courthouse.

First-degree murder carries a penalty of life in prison without the possibility of parole. Jones also faces up to 25 years if convicted of first-degree robbery in Lillie's death. He is currently being held in the Johnson County Jail on a $1 million bond.

Wieseler grew up in Sioux City, graduating Sioux City North High School in 2001 and moved to Iowa City, where he received undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Iowa before taking a job at Lederman as a bail bondsman, according to his obituary. He was an avid reader and big sports fan, especially of the Hawkeyes.

Harmony Hauser, Wieseler's fiancee, told members of the media after the news conference that she's thankful police have filed charges in the case, calling the last seven months "a trying time."

"I just want to thank all the people that have been working so hard to be able to make an arrest," Hauser said. "And I hope — and I know — that he’ll be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law."

Hauser said Wieseler was kind, gentle, considerate, loving, intelligent and "the love of my life."

"He would do anything for anybody," she said.

She and Wieseler had planned to marry in June.

Adam Santi, a longtime friend of Wieseler's who had been set to be the best man at his wedding, said the announcement that charges have been filed is bittersweet.

"I think everybody that loved Jon is still mourning and still struggling with that loss," Santi said.

Santi said he's still wondering how his friend could have been killed this way. The details included in the charge against Jones begin to provide some answers, but still leave him with questions, he said.

"I don’t know that I will have closure with this," Santi said. "I think that this is something that — it’s just unthinkable, that it happened — and I don’t know that there will be closure."

Since Wieseler's death in April, Iowa City has seen two other homicides: Lillie, who was found shot to death in his cab in June, and 22-year-old Kaleek Jones, who was fatally shot on the pedestrian mall in August.

Court documents related to the Lillie homicide show police questioned Jones about Wieseler's death, but they previously declined to identify him as a suspect.

Police say Jones entered Lillie's cab June 27, taking an uninterrupted ride to the 500 block of Ernest Street. Jones then allegedly shot Lillie in the head and was seen on surveillance video shortly after 11 p.m. leaving the location where Lillie's body was found, according to an Iowa City police complaint.

Several items belonging to Lillie were missing from the cab, the complaint states. Police at the time said they could not comment on what had been taken.

Lillie's body was found about 3:40 a.m. on June 28 in a Yellow Cab taxi at 520 Ernest St., a multi-residential building behind the Alexis Park Inn on South Riverside Drive. The Johnson County Medical Examiner’s Office ruled the death a homicide and the cause of death as gunshot wounds to the head.

Jones was granted parole in November 2016 after the Iowa Board of Parole ruled that he was unlikely to be a "detriment to the community." But records show Jones had been deemed a high risk to commit more violence and had recently escaped from a halfway house.

Lyness declined to comment on the parole board's decision at the news conference, but Santi said it was "disturbing" that Jones had been released after being judged to be at risk to re-offend.

"I think that it’s a huge failure of our justice system — that they knew that there was a problem with him and they let him go, and now there’s two people dead and he hasn’t been out of jail for, what, a year?" Santi said.

Iowa City Police Chief Jody Matherly said he's glad to see that arrests have been made in all three of Iowa City's 2017 homicide cases.

"There’s certainly more work to do to address crime in our community, and we continue to do that," he said. "But these officers and detectives have worked very hard throughout these past few months — particularly on these cases, but also on other serious cases that we’ve had."

Matherly declined to comment specifically on the investigation or why it took seven months to bring charges, but he called it a detailed and time-consuming process and said police worked as quickly as they could within legal and procedural constraints.

"We want accuracy, not speed, on these cases," Matherly said.

Detective Mike Smithey, who worked both the Lillie and Wieseler homicide cases, praised his colleagues in the Iowa City Police Department for their work on the investigation, which involved a dozen investigators, two supervisors, patrol units and crime scene technicians, he said.

"We had such a good team, and everybody put their lives on hold here," he said.

Reach Stephen Gruber-Miller at 319-887-5407 or sgrubermil@press-citizen.com. Follow him on Twitter: @sgrubermiller.