Jeremy Bryan Jones

Jeremy Bryan Jones

Police were happy to have him in custody, but the seriousness of the situation had yet to come to light.

As a matter of procedure, Burch had Chapman's fingerprints run through the FBI's database, the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System.

This database holds more than 200 million sets of prints, and is tapped more than 50,000 times each day by law enforcement agencies around the world.

The AFIS data on John Paul Chapman came back naming the John Paul Chapman alias he had been using even though Jeremy Bryan Jones' fingerprints had been in the system since 2000, when he skipped bail in Oklahoma.

Obviously, the FBI later admitted, there was a glitch.

This attempt was the fourth time the AFIS failed to match Jones' true identity to his original prints a mistake that apparently had deadly consequences.

Between October 2003 and June 2004, Jones, posing as John Paul Chapman, was arrested three times in Georgia on minor offenses.

All three times, authorities sent his prints to the FBI, but the computer system never made a match. Had the match been made, local authorities said, Jones would have remained in jail.

Instead, he was released, and police say he killed four more women: Katherine Collins, whose body was found in New Orleans on Feb. 14, 2004; Amanda Greenwell, a 16-year-old Douglas County girl, whose body was found in April 2004; Patrice Endres, a hairdresser who vanished on April 15, 2004; and Nichols, found in her Alabama home in September, 2004.

Jones was charged in the deaths of Collins, Greenwell and Nichols. He remains a suspect in the Endres slaying.