“This one goes to a special someone,” Jerry Gill captioned the picture of himself holding what appeared to be a doll in a life sized noose. “Hang in there babe there’s still hope.”
Gill, a 29-year-old resident of Jefferson City, Missouri, uploaded the picture to Facebook on November 10, the first in what appeared to be a weeklong series of misogynistic posts ending on Saturday, November 19. That’s when Gill kidnapped his ex-girlfriend and held her hostage in a car for days before eventually shooting her, the woman told police. The woman escaped with her life, while Gill went on the run, allegedly stealing a vehicle at gunpoint and hiding in the woods until his Saturday capture.
“Bitchs out here are whores and if they say their not there just lieing whores [sic],” Gill posted to Facebook on the evening of November 19. It was one of the latest in a series of inflammatory posts including images proclaiming “I [heart] Being White,” “white lives matter,” and a September declaration that he was feeling “homicidal not suicidal”.
But offline, Gill’s apparent rage had terrifying consequences. That same afternoon, Gill allegedly forced an ex-girlfriend into his car, the unnamed woman told police. There he allegedly held her captive for days, seizing her cell phone, and beating her with his fists and a stolen police baton, Jefferson City’s News Tribune reported.
Gill allegedly imprisoned the woman for three days, forcing her to urinate in her pants when he refused to let her out to use the bathroom. But when Gill finally relented and drove her to a bathroom in a public park on November 21, the woman saw her first chance at escape. After using the bathroom, she refused to reenter the car. Gill allegedly began shouting at her, witnesses told police.
Then he drew a gun, she said. Screaming that he’d kill her, Gill allegedly fired multiple shots at the woman, striking her once in the arm before he fled. Witnesses took the woman to a nearby middle school for safety, where an ambulance transported her to a hospital with non-life threatening injuries.
Meanwhile, Gill fled, vanishing completely until Wednesday, when a man in a rural corner of the heard an unusual noise on his property. Mike Hagen, who lives at the end of a rural street, heard the sound of an engine near his home, and drove his all-terrain vehicle down the road to investigate. There he ran across Gill, who had run out of gas on a different ATV, which Hagen recognized as having been stolen from a neighbor. The heavily armed Gill allegedly pulled a gun and demanded they trade ATVs.
"I told him, you can have it, brother,” Hagen told the News Tribune. “It's not worth getting shot over."
Gill drove off again, leading police on a Thanksgiving weekend chase through the rural area where he stole Hagen’s ATV. “Lock your doors,” locals in Hagen’s area were warned on Facebook. Then, on Saturday, police spotted Gill emerging from the woods in a sparsely populated stretch of forest and farmland southwest of Jefferson City. It is unclear how long he had hidden in the woods. Police managed to arrest Gill “without incident,” they announced in a statement, despite Gill carrying a small arsenal of firearms and knives.
“He had a loaded shotgun, a handgun and several knives on his person,” the Cole County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement to The Daily Beast.
Gill was charged with armed criminal action, false imprisonment, and two counts of second-degree domestic assault.
While he awaits trial, his now-silent Facebook has taken on a grim new significance. “Hang in there babe there’s still hope,” he captioned the picture of a doll in a noose. “Damn spoke [too] soon… flat lined.”