Long before he became a murderer, Mark Rodney Jones raped a girl and made her think she was going to die

Murderer Mark Rodney Jones claimed he didn’t think Bradley Breward would die from torture. But a young girl Jones once raped had feared she was going to die too.

Mark Rodney Jones leaves the Supreme Court in Launceston in 1998, the year he was convicted of raping a 17-year-old girl.

TALL, well-built and dressed in a dark suit, Mark Rodney Jones listens intently and scribbles down notes.

The 43-year-old father, from West Launceston, is on trial in the Supreme Court for murder, and he isn’t just sitting back and awaiting his fate.

Jones appears to be meticulously documenting the evidence from witnesses, one of whom was even with Jones in a cramped Newnham unit as he waterboarded and suffocated Bradley Wade Breward to death.

Occasionally, Jones passes a note to his lawyer, Greg Richardson, who concludes the trial as he began it — telling the jury Jones didn’t mean to kill Mr Breward and that he only tracked him down for information because, after weeks spent publicly appealing for information about his allegedly stolen ute, he had no other leads.

The jury had to consider Jones’ intent, and whether there was any reasonable doubt that he knew or ought to have known that waterboarding a man and twice holding a plastic bag over his head for up to 40 seconds would kill.

It took them just over two hours to find him guilty of murder.

Bradley Breward was murdered by Mark Rodney Jones on New Year’s Day 2017. Picture: supplied.

In their deliberations, they were not allowed to know that Jones’ penchant for violence and ability to inflict enough pain on an individual — to the point they feared death — had been the subject of a court hearing before.

Jones was just 19 when a jury found him guilty of a rape and attempted anal rape in a Devonport car park in 1995. He was sentenced to three years’ jail.

But his lawyer, Tim Ellis — who later took silk and eventually became the state’s director of public prosecutions — appealed as far as the High Court, which ruled the trial judge had erred in his direction to the jury, quashed Jones’ conviction and ordered the matter back to trial.

Then-DPP Damian Bugg, QC decided against filing another indictment.

Jones then spent just eight months as a free man before raping a 17-year-old girl he met at a high school leavers’ party in Launceston.

The court heard the girl was strangled hard enough for her nose and eyes to bleed. Like Mr Breward, she thought she was going to die as Jones attacked her.

Jones, then 22 years old, pleaded guilty to two counts of rape and a further two counts of anal rape.

He was sentenced to four years’ jail. Crown prosecutors thought it was manifestly inadequate and lodged an appeal, which led to an extra year being added to his sentence.

Jones was only brought to justice at all after detectives had him extradited from NSW, where he had taken up the alias Simon Hammond and became engaged to a 30-year-old woman after fleeing Tasmania.

Sentencing submissions in the Breward matter, due to be made before Justice Robert Pearce this Thursday, may give an insight into Jones’ life between the 1998 rape conviction and the morning he became a murderer, almost two decades later.

Mark Rodney Jones, pictured competing in a body building contest. Picture: Rx Muscle

What is known is Jones was a self-employed builder who became a bodybuilder and took up powerlifting. He was also a father.

During the trial, Jones sat in the dock and watched as a two hour-long interview with a pair of detectives was played to the court, in which he gave a blow-by-blow of what he had done to Mr Breward on New Year’s Day 2017 and spoke of how he had analysed his actions in the weeks afterwards.

When asked why he had disposed of his victim’s body in a lake and burnt much of the evidence, Jones claimed to have been thinking of his son.

“So he doesn’t end up like these little shits who steal cars and do things wrong — he needs a dad,” Jones said.

“I didn’t want to get caught; I didn’t want to lose my life.”

He didn’t mention, and perhaps didn’t know, that Mr Breward, 22, had a son too.