Lester Jones: Models Inc.
Models Inc.:AccusedLester Jones·VictimPaige Birgfeld
Case at a glance
- When
- June 28, 2007
- Where
- Grand Junction and Delta County, Colorado
- Perpetrator
- Lester Ralph Jones
- Outcome
- Convicted in December 2016 after an earlier mistrial and sentenced to life without parole; kidnapping count vacated on appeal in 2022, life sentence upheld
The case
Paige Birgfeld was a mother of three in Grand Junction, Colorado. Alongside her public businesses, she privately ran an escort service called Models Inc. On June 28, 2007, she left home and did not return. Three days later her red Ford Focus was found burning in an empty lot a couple of miles from her house, with the driver’s seat pushed far back. Paige was 5 feet 4.
Phone records showed calls to Paige’s escort line from a disposable TracFone. Walmart security video showed Lester Ralph Jones buying one. Jones was 6 feet 5, worked at an RV business about 500 feet from where her car was found, and had prior convictions for assault and attempted kidnapping. In March 2012, Paige’s remains were found in Wells Gulch in Delta County and identified by dental records. Jones was arrested in November 2014.
His first trial ended in a hung jury and a mistrial in 2016. At a second trial, on December 27, 2016, a jury found him guilty of murder and kidnapping, and he was sentenced to life without parole. In June 2022, the Colorado Court of Appeals vacated the kidnapping conviction because it merged with felony murder but upheld the rest, and his life sentence stood.
Case photographs
Where it happened
Grand Junction, where Paige Birgfeld disappeared in 2007
More cases like this
The Sleepover
Ashley Freeman turned sixteen on December 29, 1999, and her best friend Lauria Bible stayed over at the family trailer near Welch, Oklahoma. Before dawn the trailer was in flames, and the two girls were gone.
The Night Shift
Nineteen-year-old Katie Poirier was working the late shift alone at D.J.'s Expressway Conoco in Moose Lake, Minnesota, in the spring of 1999 when a man walked in before closing. A grainy security tape captured what happened next — and launched a desperate search.
The Speed Freaks
Wesley Shermantine and Loren Herzog grew up inseparable across Fine Road in tiny Linden, California. What the two friends did in the methamphetamine years would leave San Joaquin County digging for victims decades later.
The Cleveland Monster
Michelle Knight was rushing to a custody hearing in 2002 when a familiar Cleveland school bus driver named Ariel Castro offered her a ride — with a quick stop at his ordinary-looking house on Seymour Avenue.
The Animal
In July 1979, Rose Hlavka came home to a silent Portland apartment and found her twenty-year-old sister Anna Marie strangled with a clock radio cord — a crime so cold it would wait decades for an answer.
The Viking Princess
Seven-year-old Athena Strand, who dreamed of being a Viking princess in pink armor, hopped off the school bus near her home in Paradise, Texas, in November 2022. By nightfall she was missing — and the search led to a delivery driver named Tanner Horner.
The Christadelphian
Springfield, Vermont, seemed like a postcard New England town until thirteen-year-old Sherry Nastasia vanished in August 1979. Over the next four years more young girls were taken — and the clue that finally broke the case was a church sweatshirt.
The French Nanny
Sabrina Kouider craved fame and glamour long before she and her partner Sam Medouni brought a shy French au pair named Sophie Lionnet into their London home to care for the children. Behind that front door, Sophie's life became a nightmare no one outside could see.
Jason Neal has been writing true crime since 2019 and is the author of the True Crime Case Histories book series.
The full written account of this case is in True Crime Case Histories: Volume 2: Book · Paperback · Audiobook