‘I am very scared.’ Missing Richmond mom was killed; ex-EKU honors professor charged.
Richmond police have charged the husband of Ella Diebolt Jackson, a Richmond woman who has been missing since last fall, with her murder.
Glenn Jackson, 39, was arrested Friday and charged with murder-domestic violence and tampering with physical evidence, Richmond police said in a news release.
While police said they have not found Ella Jackson’s body, they said in the release that when they executed a search warrant on the couple’s home and vehicles, they found “a significant amount” of her blood in the trunk of Glenn Jackson’s vehicle.
Jackson was reported missing on Oct. 22. Police said Glenn Jackson told them that he last saw her Oct. 20.
According to the release, investigators learned that the 48-year-old mother had met with a domestic violence advocate a few days before she disappeared, leaving behind her young son and all her belongings.
Police said in the news release that they found “several recordings that Mrs. Jackson secretly made of her and Mr. Jackson’s arguments. Mrs. Jackson also told several individuals that she was afraid of Mr. Jackson, and if anything ever happened to her, her husband would be responsible.”
Glenn Jackson has worked as an honors instructor at Eastern Kentucky University, where he has taught English and honors rhetoric. A university spokeswoman said Friday evening that Jackson’s official title was senior lecturer in English. She said he has not been employed there since February.
Ella Jackson’s ex-husband, Jason Hans, a professor of family sciences at the University of Kentucky, said in a lengthy Facebook post Friday night that the two had remained close friends after their divorce more than 10 years ago. She let him know beginning in 2015 that she was afraid for her safety, he said.
Hans wrote: “The messages and rushed phone calls were all too regular in recent years: ‘I need your help,’ ‘I am very scared,’ ‘I am scared to the point of not being ok to get out of the bedroom to get a cup of milk or change my tampon,’ ‘I am being awakened at almost 3 in the morning and dragged through the house,’ ‘It is getting seriously scary [and] I am very worried about my child and myself.’”
Though he had offered to provide financial support so that she could leave, Hans said Jackson worried that her husband would take their child from her if she did.
“Ella loved her boy more than life itself, so she refused to risk it until a fail-safe exit plan was in place,” Hans wrote.
He said Jackson had met with an attorney three days before her disappearance.
“After years stuck in a cycle of violence, Ella had recently begun working in earnest with a lawyer on an exit plan,” he wrote.
Hans said Ella Jackson was a native of Russia but fled to the Ukraine, where she had family, to escape a previous abusive marriage.
Hans said he met Jackson in 2003, a year after his first wife had been murdered.
“Even as the emotional scars of our respective and all-too-recent histories continued to haunt us, Ella and I quickly developed a deep appreciation and love for one another,” Hans wrote. “Although neither of us necessarily needed to be rescued, it’s difficult to characterize our experience together as anything less than a mutual rescue.”
Though the couple later divorced, he said they “remained among one another’s most cherished people in life, even as we also moved along with our independent lives.”
Hans said he obtained guardianship of Ella Jackson and Glenn Jackson’s 6-year-old son on Friday.
Ella Jackson also had an adult son who told WLEX last fall that she talked to him or texted him every day.
This story was originally published April 24, 2020 at 5:55 PM.
