Bio

Earl Preston Jones was born in 1935. By the early 1980s, he was living in Inglewood, California, and owned a rental house in the Sun Valley area of Los Angeles. In February 1982, Jones leased the Sun Valley property to Charles Rambert and Patricia Khan. The landlord-tenant relationship quickly became strained, mainly over rent and housing-related disputes. Court records state that Jones had previously agreed to reduce the rent in exchange for carpentry work Rambert performed on the house, but the dispute later escalated.

Murder Story

On June 5, 1982, Earl Preston Jones entered the Sun Valley house he owned and shot his tenants, Charles Rambert and Patricia Khan, while they were asleep. The victims were killed at point-blank range with a 12-gauge shotgun. Contemporary reports list Rambert as 28 or 31 years old and Khan as 30 or 31, with the age differences likely due to reporting inconsistencies.

The killings followed a rent dispute. Authorities said Jones had ordered Rambert and Khan to leave the property, but they refused and told him he would have to evict them through legal channels. Prosecutors argued that Jones chose violence instead of pursuing eviction.

Court records show that days before the murders, Jones made threatening statements about the tenants. He told one witness that if they did not move out, he would “blow them away.” He also told a prospective renter that the house would be available “one way or the other” and displayed a shotgun while saying he could use it to move the tenants out if necessary.

Jones was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder. The jury found firearm-use allegations and multiple-murder special circumstances true. He was sentenced to death on February 22, 1985. The California Supreme Court later affirmed his conviction and death sentence in 1991.

Defense attorneys attempted to present evidence that Jones was mentally ill, which could have affected the penalty phase, but available reports state that Jones refused to cooperate with them. His federal habeas proceedings were still pending years later, but he was never executed. Earl Preston Jones died in prison on February 3, 2006, while still under a death sentence.