During the early afternoon of Friday, September 2, 1994, Elaine Schub and her companion, Joe Kaplan, checked in as guests in room 237 at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Blue Ash, Ohio, a suburb of Cincinnati. Schub and Kaplan had come for Schub’s grandson's bar mitzvah, scheduled for the next day. Schub's best friend, 67-year-old Rhoda Nathan, flew in from New Jersey later that afternoon also to attend the event and shared their room.
Schub and Nathan stayed in the bedroom of the hotel suite, while Kaplan stayed in the front room using a foldout bed. On Saturday morning, September 3, Schub and Kaplan left the room just before 7:30 a.m. to meet relatives at the complimentary breakfast served on the first floor. Schub told Nathan to go back to sleep, since she did not need to be at the temple that morning as early as the family. Kaplan had the only room key for the group and made sure the door was locked when he and Schub left for breakfast.
At approximately 8:08 a.m., when Schub and Kaplan returned to the room, they discovered Nathan lying nude on the floor. Employees and hotel guests rushed in. A cardiologist, a respiratory therapist, and a nurse happened to be at the hotel at the time, and they helped resuscitate Nathan.
Initially, it appeared that Nathan had fallen after a heart attack.
Later that day, Nathan died. At the hospital, medical personnel saw that Nathan's hair was soaked with blood and that she had suffered severe head trauma. An autopsy was performed and revealed that she had a broken jaw, a broken orbital bone, 17 cracked ribs, and at least one tooth had been knocked out. Her death was classified as a homicide.
Schub told police that Nathan was not wearing her ever-present pendant necklace. The pendant was said to be a one-of-a-kind piece of jewelry that Nathan's late husband had made from his mother's wedding band and consisted of several connected gold bars, one containing diamonds. According to Nathan's daughter-in-law, Nathan never took the pendant off. Schub said it appeared that money was missing from Nathan’s purse.
The police set up a command center in a banquet room near room 237. Hotel employees on duty, as well as hotel guests, were questioned. Police narrowed their focus to three employees with prior criminal records. After eliminating two of them, the remaining employee, 42-year-old Elwood Jones Jr., became the sole focus of the investigation.
Crime Stoppers offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to a conviction.
That focus was amplified when police learned that Jones had filed a worker’s compensation claim for a hand injury suffered the same day as the crime and had applied for medical benefits after receiving treatment.
On September 12, 1994, Blue Ash Police Sergeant Robert Lilley interviewed Dr. John McDonough, who had treated Jones. McDonough had classified the injury as a fist-to-mouth injury because it contained “Eikenella corrodens,” a bacteria found in dental plaque. McDonough said he had asked Jones if he had punched someone in the mouth.
That same day, Jones and his girlfriend, Earline Metcalfe, who also worked at the hotel, were located at Metcalfe’s home. Both agreed to be interviewed at the police station.
During the interview with Sgt. Lilley and Blue Ash Police Officer Larry Stokes, Jones said that he and Metcalfe arrived at the hotel around 5 a.m. on that Saturday. He said he signed out a hotel master key at the front desk as he did every day at work. Since he was not due to clean the hotel banquet rooms until 10:00 a.m., he began to help Metcalfe set up the complimentary breakfast area. Shortly after 6:00 a.m., Jones said he learned that a coworker would not be in to work that morning, so he went to the second floor of the hotel to begin cleaning the banquet rooms. He said that at around that time, he slipped and fell on steps outside the hotel, cutting his left hand while taking trash out to the hotel dumpster. He said he finished cleaning the banquet room and went downstairs to help with the hotel's complimentary breakfast.
Jones said that he worked at the breakfast from approximately 6:30 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. that day. He said he was cleaning tables in the dining area when he heard screams from the second floor as well as a trouble call over a coworker's employer-provided walkie-talkie.
Jones said he hurt his hand again later that day, but thought nothing more of it until September 6 when it bothered him enough to seek medical treatment. He insisted that he never left the breakfast area on September 3 between 6:30 and 8:00 a.m. and that he was never inside Room 237 since he had no reason to be in any of the guest rooms at the hotel. When Lilley asked if he was involved in the murder, Jones asked to speak to an attorney, and the interview ended.
The police searched Metcalfe’s residence and confiscated clothing. They also seized Jones’s car which was parked in Metcalfe’s driveway. The car was taken to the police impound lot. Police also searched Jones’s home in Cincinnati. While many articles of clothing, including Jones’s shoes, were seized, none yielded any trace evidence of blood. Police said they found Nathan’s pendant in a toolbox in the truck of Jones’s car. Also recovered from the toolbox was a master key to the hotel, which could open room 237. Police also recovered door security chains.
Several pieces of evidence were tested for the presence of DNA. The last DNA tests were completed in August 1995 and did not connect Jones to the crime. The case was then submitted to a Hamilton County grand jury. On September 27, 1995, Jones was indicted on charges of aggravated murder, aggravated robbery, and aggravated burglary. He was eligible for the death penalty.
Jones was arrested later that day. At the police station, Sgt. Lilley showed him a copy of the indictment and informed him he was charged with stealing Nathan’s pendant necklace.
“What necklace?” Jones asked.
Lilley then showed him a photograph of the pendant. Jones said he had never seen it before in his life. When Lilley said it had been found in the trunk of his car, Jones declared, “Not in my f------ car.”
In November 1996, Jones went to trial before Judge Ralph Winkler and a jury in Hamilton County Circuit Court.
The defense argued that no forensic evidence linked Jones to the crime and that the pendant had been planted by police. The defense sought to introduce an affidavit that Jones had provided years earlier when he was in prison for a different crime. In that affidavit, Jones alleged police had knowingly presented perjured testimony to obtain a death sentence in the murder prosecution of John William Byrd Jr. That claim had been rejected, and Byrd later was executed. The defense sought to present evidence of that affidavit, but Judge Winkler denied the motion.
The defense also argued that the crime scene had been tainted because of the initial belief that Nathan had had a heart attack. Dozens of people had tramped in and out of the room, the defense said. Most employees had master keys, the defense noted, and the police had failed to investigate a hotel employee who quit the day after the murder just three weeks after being hired.
Dr. McDonough testified that when he treated Jones, he took a culture of the hand wound, a gash on his knuckle, and that testing revealed the presence of a “mixed flora” of organisms including Eikenella corrodens. He said this was an extremely rare mouth organism, and the presence of it in a wound required that there be some force; “a simple cut won’t cause it.”
The evidence showed that Jones had been tested prior to the trial and was negative for the presence of the bacteria. However, he had undergone two regimens of antibiotics for treatment. Dr. McDonough testified that he did not know whether the antibiotics would eliminate the bacteria.
Dr. John Gerber, the pathologist who performed the autopsy, testified that Nathan suffered a broken jaw, a tooth was knocked down her throat, she had 17 cracked ribs, and a bone around her eye was broken.
FBI specialist William J. Stokes testified that the characteristics of a walkie-talkie available to employees at the hotel such as Jones resembled certain wounds on Nathan's body. Lieutenant Colonel William Oliver, a medical doctor and forensic pathologist with the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, testified he examined the metal door chains found in Jones’s toolbox and a walkie-talkie used by hotel employees. Dr. Oliver opined that there was “a correspondence in shape and scale” between the door chains and the walkie talkie and the marks on the victim's body and that he could not rule out “a correspondence” with markings. During cross-examination, he conceded that he could not say for certain that a walkie-talkie or hotel door chains made the wound.
Michael Trimpe, a trace evidence examiner for the Hamilton County Coroner's office, and Dr. Gerber testified that bruises on the body resembled heel marks consistent with Jones's shoes and with the hotel walkie talkies.
The defense called Dr. Joseph Solomkin, who questioned the likelihood of Dr. McDonough's conclusion. Dr. Solomkin testified that it was possible that the Eikenella corrodens had come from some source other than an assault victim's mouth.
The prosecution presented testimony that the pendant was a unique item that had been made by Nathan’s late husband, using in part the wedding ring of his mother.
Several hotel employees testified about seeing Jones on the morning of the crime. They said he was calm and showed no wounds or blood on his hotel uniform.
During closing arguments, the prosecution argued that discovering the pendant in the trunk of Jones’s car was the equivalent of having a fingerprint linking him to the murder.
On November 26, 1996, the jury convicted Jones of aggravated murder and aggravated robbery. As he was led from the courtroom, Jones declared, “I’ve been set up. I’m not guilty. That’s all I can say.”
On December 11, 1996, after seven hours of deliberation, the jury recommended that Jones be sentenced to death. On January 9, 1997, Judge Winkler imposed the death sentence. As he was led away, Jones shouted, “I never did anything. I’m still not guilty.”
In August 1998, the Ohio First District Court of Appeals upheld the verdict and sentence. In December 2000, the Ohio Supreme Court also affirmed the conviction and sentence. Jones filed a petition for post-conviction relief which was denied and that ruling was upheld as well.
In 2001, Jones filed a federal petition for a writ of habeas corpus. During that litigation, the court ordered the case file be turned over to the defense. This resulted in the production of more than 4,100 pages of various reports, interviews, and other documents. The defense argued that some of the documents were exculpatory and should have been produced prior to trial. The petition for a writ, however, was denied, and the denial was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in 2010.
On November 18, 2010, Jones filed a postconviction application for DNA testing. The motion was granted on February 17, 2012. The results from these initial DNA tests did not implicate Jones or an alternative suspect because it was determined that the DNA profile on the pendant belonging to Nathan was insufficient for comparison purposes. On April 8, 2014, supplemental DNA testing was ordered, but the results were inconclusive due to an insufficient amount of DNA.
On June 8, 2015, the Ohio Supreme Court granted the State's motion to set an execution date and ordered that Jones's sentence be carried out on January 9, 2019. On September 5, 2017, Governor John Kasich issued a warrant of reprieve resetting Jones's execution date to April 21, 2021. On December 29, 2020, Governor Mike Dewine issued a warrant of reprieve resetting Jones's execution date to December 6, 2023.
On February 25, 2019, Jones’s attorneys, David Hine, Emily St. Cyr, and Ravert Clark, filed a motion seeking permission to file a delayed motion for a new trial.
Judge Wende Cross granted the motion and held an evidentiary hearing over three days in August 2022.
Following the hearing, the defense attorneys filed a 65-page memorandum summarizing the evidence presented at the hearing, including:
The prosecution withheld an autopsy finding that Nathan was positive for the highly contagious Hepatitis B. Jones was negative. Infectious disease expert Dr. Steven Burdette testified for the defense that the disparity called into question the prosecution theory that Jones gashed his hand during a beating of the victim.
Dr. Burdette testified that there was no evidence that Nathan had an Eikenella infection and that, in fact, Jones had a strep infection in his hand wound. He also testified that Dr. McDonough was “[A]bsolutely wrong” when he said the only way Jones could have gotten Eikenella bacteria in his hand was by punching someone in the mouth.
The police “ignored dozens of potential suspects and significant tips in hundreds of pages” of responses to questionnaires from hotel guests and failed to disclose the documents to the defense.
The prosecution did not disclose police interviews with Nathan’s family members who said the pendant was not crafted from the wedding ring of her late husband’s mother, and likely was purchased in a jewelry store.
The undisclosed police files showed that a guest in the hotel said that on the morning of the crime, she left the hotel through a side door between 7:30 and 8 a.m. She said a white man went out the door in front of her very hastily, ran through the hotel parking lot, and sprinted into the woods. The door, she said, had been propped open with a yellow cup. There was no evidence that information was investigated.
Two hotel employees told police they saw two men leave Nathan’s room on the morning of the murder. One was a white man, the other was Black, the employees said.
In the weeks after Jones was arrested, two women, Delores Suggs and Linda Reed, were incarcerated in the Hamilton County Justice Center. Suggs said that Reed told her that her husband, Earl Reed, had admitted committing the murder and framing a Black man for the crime.
In 2016, Suggs was watching television and saw a program about a wrongful conviction case. She flashed back to her conversation with Reed and ultimately sent a message to Jones in prison.
Beth Mohr, a police practices expert, described the police investigation as one of the most egregious examples of cognitive bias she had seen in 40 years of investigating police practices. She said the police investigation was so flawed and incomplete that it “resulted in a likely perversion of justice.”
On December 20, 2022, Judge Cross issued a 19-page ruling vacating Jones’s convictions and ordering a new trial.
Judge Cross said the more than 4,000 pages of documents that were not disclosed to the defense at the time of the trial were “replete with impeaching and exculpatory evidence.”
The judge cited several areas of important evidence that was not disclosed, including the test showing Nathan was positive for Hepatitis B; the information from the guest who saw the man dash out the side door that was propped open and run into the woods; the statements from hotel employees who saw the two men, one white and the other Black, run out of Nathan’s room; as well as evidence that the police had met Nathan’s family in New York to discuss the pendant and “learned that it was not unique or made from a family heirloom.”
“The police investigation of the murder of Ms. Rhoda Nathan was mishandled by the Blue Ash Police Department in 1994,” Judge Cross declared. “By the evidence there are many unanswered questions about the events that occurred at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Blue Ash, Ohio during the weekend when Ms. Nathan was killed. Unfortunately, this mishandling resulted in the jury considering evidence based on an incomplete police investigation and flawed circumstantial evidence. Additionally, the jury did not have the benefit of considering material evidence which was known to the [police] and the State prior to trial but not disclosed to the Defense.”
On January 14, 2023, Jones was released on bond pending a possible retrial.
The defense sought to bar testimony at a retrial from any witness who had since died. Significantly, this included the testimony of Blue Ash police officer Michael Bray, who was the officer who claimed he found the pendant in the toolbox of Jones’s car. At the time, the defense was highly skeptical of Bray’s testimony since there was no police report from Bray about the discovery. Jones had always claimed the pendant was planted.
In September 2025, the Ohio First District Court of Appeals agreed that such testimony would be prohibited at a retrial.
On December 12, 2025, Hamilton County Prosecutor Connie Pillich said the prosecution would not retry the case. “I did not take this extraordinary step lightly…But after reviewing the evidence, I am not convinced that Mr. Jones killed Rhoda Nathan,” Pillich said.
She said that “ a new trial, without evidence, witnesses and up-to-date science would be futile.”
In January 2026, attorneys for Jones filed suit seeking for Jones to be designated as a wrongly imprisoned individual which would pave the way for him to receive compensation from the state of Ohio. In July 2026, Jones filed a federal civil-rights lawsuit against the city of Cincinnati and police officer alleging that they manufactured and suppressed evidence.
– Maurice Possley
Posting Date: 12-24-2025
Last Update Date: 07-31-2026
