Deputies in an Arizona county were flagged down in the middle of the night last week by a man who confessed to murdering his stepfather.
According to the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department, deputies charged Jay Albert Stevens, 52, with first-degree murder and booked him into the Cochise County Jail after allegedly murdering a 61-year-old man at approximately 1:00 a.m. on Thursday.
Authorities initially reported that Stevens “indicated that he did not have the address of where the incident occurred, but he was able to lead Deputies to a residence,” where they found a man deceased.
My Herald/Review Media later reported that Stevens eventually told sheriff’s investigators he shot his stepfather in the chest twice with a .40 caliber handgun because the victim accused him of never reading the Bible, among other reasons.
“I was gonna bury him, but I’m too lazy to dig a hole that big,” Stevens told authorities, adding he thought about chaining his stepfather’s body to his truck where he would “drag him out into the desert.”
Instead, however, authorities discovered the dead man’s body between the house and the garage.
According to the investigator’s report observed by local media, Stevens moved to Arizona approximately four years ago to care for his ailing mother. He claimed no one in the family “liked his stepfather,” adding he was an alcoholic who “brainwashed” Steven’s mother into becoming one, too.
“This has been building in me for a long time,” Stevens said. “What I did today was just probably 20 years of (expletive).”
Before killing his stepfather, Stevens told investigators that the two had spent most of the day drinking beer until they began discussing the Bible in the garage. The situation escalated when his stepfather said he did not understand the book because he didn’t read it enough.
Stevens then went into his bedroom and “stewed” over the argument for several hours until he built up the “gumption” to grab a gun and confront his stepfather in the living room.
The report reads Stevens walked up to the man, pointed the gun “right up to his face,” and told him to “(expletive) off.”
Stevens fired the first round into his stepfather’s chest.
When he realized his stepfather was still alive, he fired another round in his chest and then began to repeatedly punch the victim in the face out of “anger and rage.”
At that point, Stevens removed his stepfather’s “bloody (expletive) out of the house,” took his dogs to his sister’s house nearby, admitted to shooting their mother’s husband, and told her to call the sheriff’s office.
He left her house and began walking on a local avenue until spotting authorities to confess his crime.
Stevens is being held at the county jail on a $1 million bond.