Diary Reopens 1975 Murder Case

It was almost 30 years ago that 14-year-old Robin Gilbert sneaked out of her parents' home to have a late-night cigarette. She was found dead the next morning, her body dragged hundreds of yards and left covered in brush.

A medical examiner's finding that Gilbert died from heart disease kept the case closed for more than two decades — until an anonymous tip and a diary led authorities to exhume Gilbert's body and charge her former neighbor, David Allen Jones, with murder.

Jury selection in the case starts Monday in Middlesex Superior Court.

"We hope that this will be able to bring some closure for this family," said Middlesex District Attorney spokeswoman Emily LaGrassa. "It must be hard for them so many years later."

On the night of July 1, 1975, Gilbert was watching a horror movie with a friend at her home in Reading, about 15 miles north of Boston. With her parents asleep upstairs, Gilbert sneaked out in her socks for a cigarette at a nearby hangout spot on a golf course.

The next morning, a man walking in the park found her body.

Though her clothes were torn and her body had been dragged, the state medical examiner ruled that she died of heart disease, a decision that dumbfounded police, said retired Reading Police Chief Edward Marchand, who was a sergeant when Gilbert was killed.

Because of the difficulty of appealing such a ruling, it effectively closed the case, and her body was buried.

"The pathologist, he was like God," Marchand said. "It really bothered a lot of people at the time, the family and everybody, what had happened."

In 1996, an anonymous call led police to the diary of Marjorie Jones, David Jones' mother, who had died of cancer that year. Police will not give details, but say something in that diary led them to David Jones, who was 16 at the time of the killing.

The Jones family lived down the street from the Gilberts, and the boy had been seen holding hands with Robin. Gilbert's sister said Jones called Robin at the house before she sneaked out. A few months after Gilbert's death, her sister returned to the house to find Jones there, and the two struggled before he left.

Investigators interviewed dozens of witnesses, and exhumed Gilbert's body in 1997. Her body was re-examined by another medical examiner, who found that her heart was not diseased and ruled the case a homicide.

Jones, who was married and working as a short-order cook outside Atlanta, was arrested in 1997. He fought efforts to return him to Massachusetts, and it took years to have his case transferred out of juvenile court. He was charged with murder in 2000 and pleaded innocent.

Eileen Agnes, Jones' attorney at the time of his 2000 arraignment, did not return calls Sunday seeking comment.