A Wilkes-Barre woman who mistook Pennsylvania State Trooper’s text messages as coming from a potential john finds herself snared in an undercover sex trap, according to charges filed Tuesday.
Jessica Louise Jones, 23, is accused of inadvertently setting up a “car date” in the Buffalo Wild Wings parking lot in Wilkes-Barre Twp with an undercover officer.
Troopers with the Organized Crime Division had already traded numbers with Jones during an investigation into pornography, according to the report. But when one of the troopers began contacting her on Dec. 10 afternoon, Jones did not know the call, and then assumed she was talking to a john, the lawsuit alleges.
She wanted to meet the trooper on a “date” where she will perform two undisclosed sex acts — one for $60 and the other for $100, the lawsuit states.
When Jones arrived at the conference, she was arrested and searched by troopers, finding in her purse a hypodermic needle, police said.
She initially refused to meet someone for sex, but she admitted it after learning to write a trooper, saying she needed money to feed a drug addiction, the complaint says.
Police say Jones stayed with three men at nearby Wood Spring Suites on Bear Creek Boulevard, including her jobless boyfriend Rob Hunter, who backed her decision to engage in prostitution. Jones denied being the victim of human trafficking however, the lawsuit states.
According to the lawsuit, a room scan turned up about four grams of crystal methamphetamine, 24 grams of psychedelic mushrooms and a minor amount of marijuana.
Investigators say that Hunter was later imprisoned in another case at the Luzerne County Correctional Facility, and that his recorded phone calls featured him bragging about having “sold every drug known to man,” says the complaint.
Court documents indicate Hunter was not charged in the case yet.
Jones was charged by police with promoting prostitution and possessing paraphernalia to drugs. Judge of the Magisterial District Thomas F. Malloy Sr. arraigned her on Tuesday’s charges and ordered her to be detained with $5,000 bail.
Also charged with possessing drug paraphernalia was a dazed man who was sitting on the hotel room bed surrounded by hypodermic needles, Daniel Franklin Zeigler, 40, of Danville. He had been published on his own acknowledgment.
