True Case Chronicles: A man who drove a murderer to a Fayetteville apartment complex won't be parole eligible until 2042

Jesse Lee Westeen

Jesse Lee Westeen was twenty years old and still living in the orbit of Northwest Arkansas when two people he knew, or at least knew well enough to drive toward, were shot to death in a Fayetteville apartment.

He was born December 15, 1986. He entered state prison on September 23, 2008, the day after a Washington County judge signed a fifty-year sentence. As of September 3, 2026, inmate ADC 142827 remains at the Maximum Security Unit under a C2 custody classification and an I-C good time class.

His projected parole or transfer eligibility date is April 4, 2042. The state lists one ADC incarceration and no prior prison sentence history.

The dead were Kevin Barkley Jones and Kendall Rachell Rice, both twenty-four, both natives of Fort Smith. Jones had graduated from Southside High School in 2001 and later moved north to Fayetteville to be closer to his parents. His mother was Janis Jones.

Contemporary accounts identified his father as Robbie Jones, a football defensive coordinator. Rice had attended Greenwood schools and Southside as well. She had only recently come to Fayetteville. In Fort Smith she had worked at the Electric Cowboy, a nightclub.

They were a couple. They lived at the Club at the Creeks apartments, formerly the Law Quad, on West Sycamore Street in Fayetteville, a stretch of student and working rental housing that had already seen one unsolved killing a year earlier when twenty one year old Nina Ingram was found strangled in the same complex.

On the morning of April 3, 2007, Janis Jones found her son and Rice shot to death inside the apartment. Fayetteville police treated the scene as a double homicide. News reports in the days that followed said the pair had been shot.

Within forty-eight hours detectives had two suspects in custody. On April 6 they arrested Gregory Christopher Decay, then twenty one, and Jesse Lee Westeen, then twenty. Decay, a Hurricane Katrina evacuee from New Orleans who had come to Northwest Arkansas looking for a different life, was charged with two counts of capital murder.

Westeen was charged with two counts of being an accomplice to capital murder. Prosecuting Attorney John Threet later announced he would seek death against Decay and would not seek death against Westeen. Police and later prosecutors said Westeen drove Decay to the apartment so Decay could shoot the couple.

Gregory Christopher Decay,

The state’s theory, later recited by the Arkansas Supreme Court when it affirmed Decay’s convictions, was that Decay knew Jones and Rice because he had sold them drugs, that he believed they had burglarized his apartment and stolen marijuana and an assault rifle he claimed to own, and that he killed them out of revenge.

Decay first denied involvement. Officers contacted him as early as April 4. After an individual told investigators that Decay had admitted the killings,

Decay was arrested on April 6. He then gave two oral statements and one written statement. He eventually confessed. The next day, from the Washington County Detention Center, he made recorded collect calls to family that the state later played for a jury.

A photograph of Decay holding an assault rifle came into evidence to corroborate the claimed theft and the claimed motive.

Westeen’s public footprint in the case is narrower because he never went to trial. The case number that still follows him, 72CR-07-999B, is the companion file to Decay’s 72CR-07-999.

Docket entries show a first appearance on April 10, 2007, a warrant and criminal information on May 4, and a closed felony case in Washington Circuit Court before Judge Durrett of the Fourth Circuit, Division 6.

On July 24, 2008, Westeen pleaded guilty to two counts of first degree murder, class Y felonies under Arkansas Code 5-10-102. He was twenty at the time of the offense as the court counted it. On September 22, 2008, the court imposed 300 months on the conviction that appears on his ADC face sheet.

Other court summaries and later news accounts of the companion case state that he received twenty-five years on each count, ordered consecutive, for a total of fifty years, which matches the fifty-year 0 month 0 day term the prison system still carries. He was received at ADC the next day.

Decay did go to trial. A Washington County jury convicted him of two counts of capital murder on April 23, 2008, and the following day recommended death, the first such recommendation in the county in twenty-seven years. Judge William A. Storey sentenced him to death on each count.

The Arkansas Supreme Court affirmed in November 2009. Later Rule 37 litigation over alleged ineffective assistance of counsel was remanded in 2013 for written findings, then rejected on the merits in September 2014. Decay’s confession, the jail calls, and physical evidence, his lawyers later told a court, made a clean denial defense nearly impossible. Those same records are why Westeen’s role is described so consistently in later coverage. He was the driver.

What is not in the public file is a rich pre homicide biography of Westeen. The Division of Correction lists no earlier prison terms. Available circuit records for this case do not recite a string of prior Washington County felonies. No published opinion lays out his childhood, work history, or exact words to detectives.

The record that exists is the record of a young man who, at twenty, put a killer at a doorway and then spent the rest of his recorded adult life inside the Arkansas prison system. That absence itself is part of the story. The victims left school yearbooks, a nightclub job, a mother who opened an apartment door and found her child dead. The accomplice left a number, a sentence, and a projected date in 2042.

Victimology in this case is ordinary in the way that makes the violence feel closer. Jones and Rice were not strangers pulled from a highway. They were Fort Smith kids who had followed family and work into Fayetteville’s rental belt.

Jones wanted to live nearer his parents.

Rice had just arrived. They were the kind of couple whose names appear in high school alumni notes and in a mother’s 911 aftermath. The state’s evidence placed them in a drug relationship with Decay, the kind of small market dealing that in 2007 Northwest Arkansas could look like a side hustle until it became a reason to die.

Whether they actually stole a rifle and marijuana was Decay’s belief as he described it to police. The belief was enough. Two people ended on the apartment floor. A mother found them. A city that had already buried Nina Ingram in the same complex now had two more names.

Investigation moved fast by homicide standards. Discovery on or about April 3. Arrests April 6. The speed suggests either a small social circle or a talkative one. Someone told police that Decay had claimed the murders. Detectives already knew the names in the apartment. They already knew who sold whom what.

Westeen’s presence in that circle is the only explanation the official record offers for why a twenty-year-old with no prior prison history is now approaching two decades inside a maximum-security unit. He was not alleged to have pulled the trigger. Arkansas first degree murder reaches a person who, with the purpose of causing death, causes death, and it also reaches an accomplice who aids that purpose.

The plea accepted that he aided it.

There is no published direct appeal in Westeen’s name of the kind that produced Decay v. State. A guilty plea in Arkansas generally waives all but narrow issues. The online docket does show later activity long after the case was marked closed.

In April 2021, something was filed under a cover sheet. In June 2021 the court entered an order denying a motion. In January 2022, the court sent a letter. The public index does not attach a written opinion that explains what he asked for. Whatever it was, it did not change the fifty-year structure or the 2042 eligibility date listed in September 2026.

Current status is institutional and static. He is housed at the Maximum Security Unit. Custody is C2, not the tightest classification in the system but not minimum either. Good time class I-C means any acceleration of release is limited. Detainers are not listed on the snapshot provided with the inmate search. He has been in continuous ADC custody since late September 2008. He will be fifty-five if he reaches the listed eligibility date. The victims would have eben forty-three.

The Club at the Creeks is still a place on a map. Fort Smith Southside still graduates classes. The Electric Cowboy is a line in old articles.

Janis Jones’s discovery of her son is the sentence that begins the official appellate story of the shooter. Westeen’s name appears in that story as a clause. He drove. He pleaded. He is still there.

That is the whole public life of ADC 142827, assembled from an inmate face sheet, a companion capital case, two Fort Smith lives cut short at twenty four, and a plea that traded a death qualified trial for half a century.