On January 7, 2013, police in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, were called to an apartment in the 200 block of West Walnut Street. A neighbor’s son had noticed a smell coming through a vent for days, maybe weeks. The building manager opened the door for them. He did not go in, but he could tell something had happened. The place was topsy-turvy.
Inside, police found a 59-year-old man lying face down in the kitchen. He had been stabbed in the chest and tied up with shoelaces. He had been dead for days. Someone had turned the heat all the way up. The only thing missing from the apartment was a 40-inch flat screen television.
The man was Alan Wayne Hess. He was born in York, Pennsylvania, and had once lived in Mannheim, a small town in Lancaster County. He was a handyman who helped rehabilitate homes in Lancaster City. He loved to read and spent many hours at the library. He got around town on a bicycle.
For a long while before the end, Hess did not have a steady place to live. He stayed at the Water Street Rescue Mission, a shelter in Lancaster, off and on. He ate breakfast at a program run out of St. James Episcopal Church. His obituary noted that throughout his adult life, he often expressed gratitude for the help he received from Water Street Ministries.
People who knew him described him in almost the same words. His brother Randy called him smart and easygoing. His stepsister Donna called him a nice, easygoing guy who lost his way. Detective Nathan Nickel, who caught the case, called him quiet. A nice guy, but kind of a loner. He kept to himself.
Randy lived in North Carolina and had barely spoken to his brother in 25 years. At some point, when their mother died, Donna hired a private detective just to find him so an estate could be settled. The detective found him living on Strawberry Street in Lancaster. Not long before he died, something changed. A friend of his had an apartment on West Walnut Street, and that friend was away. Alan Hess moved in to look after the place.
For the first time in a long while, Hess was off the streets. The neighbors did not know. As far as they were concerned, the tenants still lived there. That may be part of why, when something happened to him in there, nobody came for days. The mailbox was overflowing, and there was a smell.
The death was ruled a homicide. Police at the time thought he might have been dead for a week, maybe 10 days. There was no sign that anyone had forced their way in. There were signs of a struggle, but not of a search. The apartment had not been ransacked. One thing was gone: a 40-inch flat screen television. Its serial number was known. Police would spend more than a year looking for that television.
Investigators collected what they called a significant amount of physical evidence from the apartment. Among it, from close to where Alan Hess was found, was an ashtray with several cigarette butts in it. It went into evidence, and there it stayed.
The first investigation was not lazy. Detectives interviewed his family and friends. They went through hours of security camera footage. They identified several persons of interest and one by one ruled them out. What they could not find was a reason. Here was a quiet man, 59 years old, who did not use drugs, who spent long hours at the library, and who had just for once gotten a roof over his head. Who would want him dead?
That same season in the same city, somebody else was very busy. His name was Shawn DeAndrew Jones. He lived on High Street and had a record going back to 2005. Burglary, theft, drugs. In the space of a few weeks around the new year, this is what he did.
On December 15, 2012, he broke into a house on Laurel Street, about a block from where he lived, and raped a woman who was asleep inside. On January 3, 2013, he stole a car. On January 12, five days after police found Alan Hess on that kitchen floor, Jones pried open the door of an old deli on West King Street and took cigarettes and cash. Then he tried to break into an electronics store on the same street. The alarm went off. Officers found him nearby and he dropped the pry bar he was carrying.
There is no public record that anyone in January of 2013 connected him to Alan Hess. Jones went to the county jail on theft and burglary. While he was there, DNA evidence tied him to the rape on Laurel Street. In February of 2015, he pleaded guilty. For the rape, the burglary, and a separate assault case, he was sentenced to 7 to 14 years in state prison.
So by the time he was sentenced, the man who killed Alan Hess was headed to a Pennsylvania state prison for other crimes. And a cigarette with his DNA on it was sitting in evidence in Lancaster, untested. Every year he sat in that prison, the answer sat in that evidence. It would take nine more years for anyone to put the two together.
Alan Hess’s memorial service was held on January 18, 2013, at a funeral home in Mannheim. He was buried privately at a Mennonite cemetery in Pa Township. His brother said friends from Water Street came to the service. They knew him better than I did, Randy said. But I never thought it would be homicide.
In May of 2014, the local paper LNP started a series on unsolved killings in Lancaster County. The first story was about Alan Hess. The headline was a question: Who would murder Alan Hess? Police told the paper they were still trying to find that television. The story printed its serial number. They asked anyone who knew anything to call Crimestoppers. The answer to the headline’s question was already sitting in their own evidence, waiting for somebody to ask it.
The years went by, the way they go by in a cold case. Nathan Nickel eventually retired from the city police. The case was reassigned to a detective sergeant named Shawn Gunnet. Shawn Jones, meanwhile, was keeping busy in a different way. At one point, he went to court to challenge the prison system’s policy against pornography sent through the mail. He argued it was unconstitutional. As his remedy, he asked the court to dismiss every charge against him, release him, and wipe his record clean. The court called it frivolous. He stayed where he was. So did the ashtray.
A Lancaster police sergeant, Todd Greger, would later put it this way. Just because someone labels something a cold case, he said, doesn’t mean we aren’t constantly revisiting that case. Then somebody went back into this one.
Shawn Gunnet went through the entire case file with Drew Hollinger, the department’s evidence manager. They were looking for one thing. What in this file had never been tested for DNA? They went back to the crime scene photographs and compared them against the evidence logs. They found the ashtray.
It had been close to the victim’s body. Throughout that apartment were the butts of the brand Alan Hess smoked, except for one. In that ashtray, among the others, was a single butt of a different brand.
This next part is reasoning, not something the police spelled out. Alan Hess smoked one brand, and that brand was all over the apartment. One butt that did not match meant that at some point somebody else had smoked in that room. It could have been anyone’s, even the tenants from before. It does not tell you who or when. That is exactly why it needed a lab and not a guess.
The police department’s own words for it when this was all over: a crucial piece of evidence that seemed out of place. It had never been tested. Why not? The public record does not say. The reporting notes only that why some items were not tested before was never specified.
Gunnet and Hollinger sent that cigarette, along with some other items, to the Pennsylvania State Police Crime Lab. The report came back in 2024 with a possible suspect: Shawn Jones. The reason the lab could put a name on it at all is the part that stings. His DNA was already on record because he was serving a state prison sentence for something else.
The public record does not describe a scientific breakthrough here. It describes two people going back through old photographs and noticing a brand. The answer had been sitting in evidence since 2013.
The detective who first caught this case had retired by now. He was about to come back. When Nathan Nickel left the Lancaster City Police, he did not leave the work. He became a special agent with the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General.
On Thursday, May 1, 2025, he went to a state prison in Centre County, SCI Benner Township, with Shawn Gunnet to sit down across from the man whose DNA was on that cigarette. Twelve years after he first caught this case, the original detective was in the room. The interview was recorded.
According to prosecutors, Jones quickly admitted it. He told them it happened a few days before January 7. The local paper had described that apartment back in 2014. Sparse, like a typical bachelor pad. The front door opened into a small living room. The bedroom was off to the left, and the kitchen was beyond it.
Jones said he came in through an unlocked door. He was taking the television from the living room when he ran into Alan Hess. They struggled, and Jones stabbed him in the chest. Police say Hess was also bound with shoelaces, and Jones left with the TV. Police say he later sold it to feed his drug addiction. The television they had chased for more than a year, serial number and all, had gone for drugs.
He also described details police had never released, the kind only someone who had been in that apartment would know. The two men had never known each other. The police department’s summary put it in plain words. Hess had been housesitting for a friend and was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
That phrase is accurate, and it is also incomplete. The wrong place in this case was the first place he had lived in a long while.
The next day, Friday, May 2, 2025, Shawn Jones was charged with criminal homicide, burglary, and robbery. He was 54 years old. He had said it to two investigators in a prison interview. Would he say it again in a courtroom?
On July 29, 2025, Jones waived his preliminary hearing. That is the early hearing where prosecutors have to show a judge there is enough evidence to go to trial. By waiving it, Jones let that step go without a fight, and the case went up to county court. A trial was set for August of 2026. It never happened.
On July 29, 2026, one year to the day after that hearing, on a Wednesday morning, Shawn Jones pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, burglary, and robbery. In Pennsylvania, second-degree murder is the charge for a killing that happens while someone is committing a felony. Here, the felonies were the burglary and the robbery he pleaded guilty to alongside it.
The plea came with an agreed sentence. Judge Meyer Spawn gave him 25 years to life and ordered him to pay back more than $4,000 in restitution. The sentence runs consecutively. It does not start until he finishes the prison sentence he is already serving. The years for Alan Hess begin only after the years for everything else are done.
Many of the investigators who worked the case were in the courtroom. The prosecutor, First Assistant District Attorney Travis Anderson, spoke about them. They never gave up on this case, he said.
Jones spoke too. He told the court he had committed a terrible act in taking a person’s life. His lawyer said he wants to spend the rest of his time in prison teaching other people not to follow the path he did. According to one television report, the judge condemned the senseless violence over material items and also called Jones’s recorded confession a demonstration of sincere remorse.
The mayor of Lancaster publicly applauded Sergeant Gunnet and Drew Hollinger by name. The city police put out a statement that included this line. Given his history of violent crime, our community is safer.
But what stays with you about this case is not how it ended. It is how long it did not.
Put the whole thing in one line and it sounds impossible. A man who had just gotten off the streets was killed for a television. The man who killed him was arrested five days after the body was found in the same city for breaking into another building. His DNA ended up on record, and a cigarette with that DNA on it sat in a Lancaster evidence room for 11 years untested.
It is true that they never gave up on this case. Two people went back into an old file, through old photographs, and saw one cigarette that was the wrong brand. That is real police work, and it is why this story has an ending.
It is also true that for 11 years, the answer was in an ashtray taken from beside Alan Hess’s body.
When Jones was charged, the local paper tried to reach Randy Hess. It could not. His brother had said it himself years before. The friends from Water Street knew Alan better than he did.
He helped fix up houses in Lancaster. He spent long hours at the library. He rode a bicycle around town. And not long before he died, for the first time in a long while, he had a place to go back to.