More than two decades after the body of 10-year-old Jeffrey Curley was found in a cement-filled tub at the bottom of a New England river, one of two men convicted for the boy’s murder finally admitted to smothering the child with a gasoline-soaked rag.
‘I am guilty of that murder. I murdered Jeffrey Curley,’ Charles Jaynes, now aged 44, told the Massachusetts Parole Board at his first-ever parole hearing on Tuesday.
Jaynes is serving a life sentence plus 10 years on charges of second-degree murder and kidnapping for the October 1997 death of Jeffrey in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Jaynes had previously denied his guilt, but five or six years ago he privately confessed to a friend and a cleric behind bars.
Convicted killer Charles Jaynes, 44 (left), appeared before the Massachusetts Parole Board on Tuesday and for the first time publicly admitted that he killed Jeffrey Curley, 10 (right)
Jaynes, then aged 22, first met Jeffrey in April 1997 and instantly became sexually drawn to the young boy.
At Tuesday’s hearing, which Jaynes attended remotely, he admitted to ‘absolutely grooming’ the 10-year-old with the promise of a new bicycle.
Jaynes told the parole board that his accomplice, Salvatore Sicari, then 21, had put him up to the idea of having sex with Jeffrey and then killing him.
Sicari is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for a first-degree murder conviction.
On October 1, 1997, Jaynes and Sicari saw Jeffrey walking from his grandmother’s house and lured him into the backseat of their car by promising to take him to the store to buy him a new bike.
‘He said, “You guys are my best friends,”‘ Jaynes quoted Jeffrey as saying. ‘I headed in the direction of the bike shop because I didn’t want Jeffrey to be suspicious.’
Jaynes said he ‘absolutely groomed’ Jeffrey with the promise of a new bicycle after meeting the boy in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in April 1997
Jaynes (pictured left in December 1997) claimed that it was his accomplice, Salvatore Sicari (right), who had put him up to the idea that he could have sex with the boy and then kill him
After Jaynes said he suffocated Jeffrey with a rag, Sicari sexually assaulted his body. Then, they placed the corpse in this tub filled with concrete and dumped it in a Maine river
Jaynes drove the boy to the back of a supermarket, ‘so we could have privacy and murder Jeffrey,’ he told the board, according to Boston Herald.
The 250-pound Jaynes got into the backseat, wrapped his arm around Jeffrey’s shoulder and pressed a rag soaked with gasoline against his face until he suffocated.
He explained that he chose that method of killing because he ‘didn’t like the idea of broken bones or blood.’
Jaynes said that despite what the prosecutors said at his trial, he did not kill the boy because he refused his sexual advances, but rather to impress Sicari, who wanted the child dead.
Barbara Curely, Jeffrey’s mother (left), spoke of the heartbreak of losing and living without her son. His father, Bob (right), called Jaynes ‘the devil’
Shaun Curley, Jeffrey’s brother, said the parole hearing was nothing more than a publicity stunt for Jaynes
He also said he committed the crime to see if he could get away with it ‘like on TV and the movies.’
Jaynes and Sicari then placed Jeffrey’s body in the trunk of their Cadillac and drove to Jaynes’ apartment in Manchester, New Hampshire, where Sicari sexually assaulted the child’s corpse.
Afterward, the two men placed the body inside a container filled with cement and lime, drove to Maine and dropped it in the Great Works River, a tributary of the Piscataqua River.
Police who later searched Jaynes’ apartment found Jeffrey’s dungarees and a maroon and gold football jersey with the No. 32 that his mother said he was wearing the afternoon he disappeared.
At the hearing, Jaynes said he kept the jersey ‘as something to remember him by.’
In Jaynes’ Cadillac, police said they found pornographic magazines and receipts for the lime, concrete and storage container used to dispose of the body.
Authorities searched for the body for four days based on a description of the location they said was given by Sicari, who said he wasn’t sure how to get there because he had dozed while Jaynes drove.
Several days after Jeffrey’s disappearance, police recovered the duct-taped tub of concrete under 6 feet of water.
Jaynes, who previously tried to get his name changed to Manasseh-Invictus Auric Thutmose V, denied making the confession to gain fame or notoriety
Parole Board Chairwoman Gloriann Moroney asked Jaynes whether his decision to make a public confession was motivated by a hunger for fame or notoriety, invoking his failed 2012 attempt to change his name to Manasseh-Invictus Auric Thutmose V, but he denied it.
Moroney noted that in prison Jaynes has racked up more than 40 disciplinary reports for various violations, some involving violence, and told him that he still has ‘a tremendous amount of work to do’ in order to get to the bottom of his sexual deviance that led to the heinous crime.
Jeffrey’s parents and brother attended the hearing to oppose Jaynes’ release, reported CBS Boston.
‘He took away a piece of my heart. He took my little man. He changed all our lives forever that day more than you could ever imagine. I will never have another happy day, my heart is broken,’ said Jeffrey’s mother, Barbara Curley.
Shaun Curley, Jeffrey’s brother, dismissed the hearing as ‘nonsense’ and a publicity stunt for Jaynes, and argued that he deserves to die in prison, according to Boston 25 News.
‘The real Charles Jaynes is the devil. That’s the face of the devil right there,’ said Bob Curley, Jeffrey’s father.
The parole board is expected to take several weeks to reach a decision on whether Jaynes should be released.