Sarah Richardson, the daughter of the enigmatic Noahide archaeologist Vendyl Jones, was found dead in her West Bank home last week.
Police suspect that the 73-year-old Jewish convert was killed by her son, Joel — who suffered from mental illness — in her Maale Levona settlement home on May 27.
Richardson moved to Israel as a child on the eve of the 1967 Six-Day War with her father, a Christian preacher turned archaeologist who spent the latter part of his life trying to track down lost ritual objects of the First and Second Temples.
“When we came to the apartment, we saw the son digging a hole in the garden with a shovel,” a police officer told Channel 12. “He kept us from going inside, and that immediately raised suspicions that he was trying to bury his mother and hide evidence.”
Police initially detained the 37-year-old son and transferred his mother’s body to the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute for examination. Forensics experts were unable to determine the cause of her death, leading to his release under restrictive conditions.
Joel was later arrested again after his father called the cops, reporting that he had threatened him with a knife.
During a subsequent conversation with police, Joel confessed to murdering his mother and even reenacted how he killed her at the scene of the crime. The son also told investigators that he “received messages from God” commanding him to kill either his father or their dog, according to Channel 12.
Anat Kirshenberg, the suspect’s lawyer, maintained that police extracted a false confession from him, taking advantage of his psychological distress.
A hearing for Joel was held on Sunday in the Rishon LeZion Magistrate’s Court. He was found fit to stand trial after undergoing two psychiatric evaluations and had his detention extended by six days as police continue their investigation.
Sarah Richardson was one of three women murdered within a single week amid a particularly deadly year for gender-based violence.
In 2008 — two years before Jones passed away from cancer at age 80 — Richardson gave an interview to “Eretz Binyamin,” a publication owned by the Binyamin Regional Council in the West Bank, in which she recounted her family’s move to Israel.
Born in Texas, Jones built his career as a Baptist minister in a small North Carolina town that lived in the shadow of the local Ku Klux Klan chapter.
The preacher angered the white supremacist group with his sermons lauding Jews as the “chosen people” and his repeated attempts to bring black worshipers into the congregation, Richardson told the paper.
“The Ku Klux Klan would come to our house at night and break the windows and car windshields. Sometimes, they would also shoot at the house,” she recalled. Eventually, its leading members were prosecuted and imprisoned, putting an end to the KKK’s hold over the town.
While still in the US, Jones became increasingly fascinated with Jewish tradition. He began to learn Hebrew and study the Torah, eventually becoming a Noahide — a gentile who takes on the seven Noahide Laws, which are a set of obligations all human beings must adhere to, per Jewish tradition.
Jones also “fell in love” with studying the ancient Jewish temples and came to view the recovery of its ritual objects in the Land of Israel as key to bringing about messianic redemption, his daughter said.
“We packed up and sailed to Israel by ship. The journey took two weeks,” Richardson recalled in the interview. “From a distance, we saw Haifa; and to us, it looked like a city of gold.”
Jones conducted eight separate digs at Qumran, a West Bank site near the Dead Sea where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. He believed that the archaeological site is also the location of several Temple artifacts, including the Ark of the Covenant.
Jones travelled back and forth between Texas and Israel until his death in 2010.
Richardson took up her father’s profession before his passing. She aided him in his archaeological digs, but broke from her father’s Noahidism. She converted to Judaism and moved to Maale Levona, a small West Bank settlement south of Ariel, where she resided until her sudden murder.
“I love the land, I love Judaism and I love working with my father. And even though today we come from two ends — he from Noahidism and me from Judaism — we complement each other, like one flame burning in honor of the Temple,” Richardson said.
