Father suspected of murdering 5 children in U.S. state S. Carolina: authorities

A father was booked into a jail Thursday in the U.S. southern state of South Carolina after he was arrested on charges of murdering five children, ages one to eight, local authorities said.

Lexington County Sheriff Lewis McCarty said in a news release that police suspected Timothy Ray Jones, 32, "willfully and maliciously killed his five children by violent means at his Lexington home."

Jones was arrested last Saturday at a checkpoint in Mississippi after police found blood, cleaning products and children clothes in his car, McCarthy said.

Police believed that Jones murdered his children about one week before their mother, who is divorced from Jones, reported them missing on Sept. 3. Later the bodies of the five children were found dumped near a highway in Camden, Alabama.

Lexington County Coroner Earl Wells said that an investigation into the cause of the children' deaths was continuing. Jones was arrested for cocaine possession and car theft respectively in 2001 in Chicago of Illinois, where he grew up.

Jones is scheduled to make his first court appearance Friday to face five murder charges.