WHEN you look into the teary eyes of baby-faced murderer Michael Jones, in his beige prison uniform, it’s easy to feel a tinge of sympathy.

Then you remember what the 20-year-old did. Sympathy quickly becomes outrage.

Jones, along with his murderous mates Chancey Luna and James Edwards Jnr, crossed paths with Aussie Christopher Lane for only a few seconds.

But they left the 22-year-old dying on a nature strip next to a quiet country road in Duncan, Oklahoma after the baseball player was shot once in the back.

Jones, who was then 17, was sentenced to life with parole for being the driver. Triggerman Luna, then 16, will die in prison. Edwards, who was 15, was last week sentenced to 25 years.

Why did three teenagers target Lane, who was innocently jogging on a humid afternoon on August 16, 2013?

We travelled to Davis Correctional Facility in Oklahoma, to ask Jones face-to-face.

It’s the first time any of the boys have spoken publicly about the murder.

Jones had told us in a letter he wanted to speak out in the hope of one day meeting the Lane family so he could apologise and explain his actions.

“Are you ready to tell us the truth?” we asked him.

“Yeah,” Jones replied. He asked for a box of tissues.

“It’s going to be one of those conversations,” he said.

Jones claims he still doesn’t know why Lane was shot. Police are adamant he continues to lie to protect himself.

Jones told us he spent the night before partying at a friend’s house smoking meth amphetamine. Luna and Edwards — better known as Bug by his friends — were drinking alcohol and taking Xanax.

That day Jones dropped Luna at home and Edwards at a friend’s house before returning to pick them up in the afternoon.

“We went to a store and bought some cigarettes and I bought a cigarillo (cigarette papers) so we could roll up some weed and then we went driving around while Bug (Edwards) was rolling up a joint,” he told us.

“I’m just driving down the road and I heard Chancey (Luna) kind of snicker in the back seat and I hear Bug kinda laughing and I asked him (what) was so funny. They told me not to worry about it. Just to keep driving. And we come to a peak of a hill and that’s when I saw Chris jogging and right before we passed him Chancey shot at him and I heard him scream.”

Lane was hit once below his shoulder blade. The bullet pierced his heart and lungs. He had no chance.

Doctors say he could’ve been shot in a hospital and they still couldn’t have saved him.

“I heard him scream and I looked out my window … and I seen him grabbing his back. Kinda went to fall I guess,” Jones continued.

“I didn’t think anything. I just thought get away. I never thought about him dying, you know. In my head I literally thought that the worst thing that could happen was that he was gonna be hurt.”

Far from regret, the boys celebrated. “This may sound crazy. But they were excited. They were happy. Their exact words was (sic) ‘you got that n***a, you shot him, you got him’.”

The boys turned into a residential area as they sped away.

It was at that moment Richard Rhodes had gone to investigate hearing what he was convinced was a shot and saw the black car swerving around the corner in front of him.

Rhodes’ testimony was the breakthrough that would eventually lead to the arrests.

Jones went to an abandoned motel where they would hide the 22 Snubbed Nose pistol in the car’s air intake.

“I wasn’t scared,” Jones told us. “I wasn’t thinking about Chris. I wasn’t really thinking about anything. I’d been smoking meth amphetamines and I’d been up for about three days and I know people that have never done meth amphetamines don’t know what it does to you. But let me tell you. I didn’t care about. I didn’t care about you. I didn’t care about my momma and daddy. I didn’t care about nothin’ (sic).”

The boys then drove Edwards to the local courthouse, where the known troublemaker had an appointment with a parole officer. A security camera captures Edwards hugging Luna.

“Chancey started laughing again and gave him a hug and told him that he loved him and that it’d be all right,” Jones said.

As Jones and Luna drove back towards the scene of the shooting, the full extent of their actions hit them.

“The road had been blocked off and that’s when Chancey looked at me and told me that he thought he had killed Chris. And I told him that couldn’t be and you’re not to even think like that. That’s horrible.”

Hours after shooting Lane, the teenagers would threaten to kill another young man — Chris Johnson — travelling to a car park opposite Johnson’s house ready to fight.

Johnson’s father called police. When they arrived they matched the description of Jones’ black Ford Focus with the car seen speeding away from Lane’s murder.

In the first police interviews, Jones was cocky. Asked why the shooting happened, he shrugged his shoulders, fiddled with the handcuffs on his wrists and replied: “Boredom, I guess.”

The admission echoed around the world.

But then Jones would begin to break. Crying. Banging his head on the table. Begging to be allowed to go home to his “baby mamma” — his girlfriend who would deliver his daughter just two weeks later.

Jones wouldn’t be allowed to go home. He’ll be 55 years old when he first becomes eligible for parole after pleading guilty to second degree murder.

Police are convinced he’s a liar as well as a murderer.

Investigators believe Jones was at a notorious drug house with Luna and Edwards, when Chris Lane jogged past. Police say they jumped in Jones’ car and hunted Lane down.

A surveillance camera on a school captured Lane jogging past; the last image of him alive, seconds later Jones’ black car was seen following him. Stalking the young Aussie, like a lion stalks its prey.

Edwards told police that Jones swerved the car towards Lane to give Luna an easier shot.

Jones told us it’s not true.

“I told the police that was part of it. I drove the vehicle, yes. I drove the vehicle used in a homicide, yes. I fled the scene of a homicide, yes. I didn’t stop and help Chris, yes. I helped hide the murder weapon, yes. I did all of these things and that’s bad and I’m paying (for it). That’s why I plead guilty.”

“If I could go back knowing what I know now I would’ve stopped the vehicle to help Chris and not because I got caught. Not because it was the right to do but because I know he was badly injured and I know the severity of how bad he was hurt now.”

The pain of Jones’ action is etched on the faces of two families. The Lanes and his own. They both lost sons that day. One took the life of the other.

“I actually thought he’d grow up to be a preacher,” Michael’s father Gene said.

The grandson of a local preacher, Jones had grown up in church.

Wracked with guilt, Jones’ parents had never spoken before. Gene, a burly oil man, burst into tears as soon as he met us.

“We were not bad parents. We raised our kids with love,” Sheryl Roberts, Jones’ mother, tell me. Constant criticism that their bad parenting was to blame still stings.

“They were taught what was right and what was wrong and you had asked if we felt like parents should be held accountable. I think that up to a certain points, parents can be held accountable, but at some point your kids have to be accountable.”

Peter Lane will never forget the phone call which delivered the terrible news.

He thought it was his son Chris. But it wasn’t Chris.

Half a world away, the Lane family not only had to come to terms with news of Chris’ death, but also the brutal circumstances.

“I just kept saying incoherently, ‘I want him home, I want him home’,” Chris’ mother Donna remembered. “I just wanted my boy home.”

Only days before they had waved Chris off from Australia for what should have been his final year at American college.

“The process of planning a funeral for your son. I thought I was going to his graduation,” Mrs Lane said.

Mr Lane has no sympathy for the teenage killers, especially after coming face-to-face with Chancey Luna during his murder trial.

Remarkably Mrs Lane calls her son’s killers “naughty boys”.

“Well they’re boys they’re not men. And they’re naughty because they consciously made a decision and I’m so saddened that they didn’t stop the car, and get out and check on Christopher, ‘cause no-one deserves to be killed and to die on the side of the road alone. And that’s why I think that they’re naughty.”

One of those boys sat in front of us desperately seeking forgiveness.

Tears flowed when we asked Michael Jones about what he would like to say to the Lane family.

“I know there’s not a whole lot that I can say because sorry, sorry is not gonna fix anything,” he begins.

Jones claims the hardest part of being in jail is only being able to see his three-year-old daughter on occasional supervised visits.

The Lane family will never get to visit Chris.

Michael Jones cries when reminded of their pain. But it’s difficult to know whether it’s true sorrow or just jailhouse remorse.

Watch Mike’s full report Seven News Investigates — In Cold Blood: The Chris Lane Story on Tuesday at 8.30pm on Seven.

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