Crime & Safety

Daughter Reveals History of Domestic Abuse in Couple's Violent Death

Prior to the shootings, Julie Welch said that her father showed his wife a bullet with her name written on it.

The daughter of a Dunedin couple found dead has told the Tampa Bay Times in an exclusive interview that 46 years of domestic abuse precipitated the shooting death of Glenna Jones by her husband Michael Jones. He then turned the gun on himself.  

Although in a suicide note Michael Jones, 66, blamed his wife for events that led to him killing her and then committing suicide, the couple's daughter, Julie Welch, offered a different version of events.

According to Welch, prior to the shootings, Welch cut his 66-year-old wife's face out of family photos, destroyed her garden, removed Mother's Day gifts she had received over the years and had written her name on a bullet. Welch found a journal written by her mother, as she cleaned out the couple's Dunedin home following the shooting deaths.

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But Welch already was familiar with her father's history of domestic abuse toward her mother, she said. "His hope was that everyone was going to see what a great man he was and his achievements, and how she brought him down," Welch said about the suicide note that her father left behind.

Welch told the Times that she felt compelled to speak out about the domestic abuse with the hope that another victim might make the decision to leave a similar situation.

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She believes that her mother's traditional beliefs about marriage combined with her religious upbringing kept her in a marriage that became increasingly more dangerous.

On May 18, Michael Jones bound his wife, put her in the couple's PT Cruiser and drove to Chassahowitzka Wildlife Management Area in Hernando County, where he fatally shot her in the forehead and then turned the gun on himself. (See Dunedin Man Who Killed Self, Wife May Have Been Delusional.)

Jones had been unemployed for several years and had a history of mental illness.

For writer Keyonna Summers' complete story, read "Daughter of Dead Couple Tells Story of Father's Long Abuse of Mother."


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