WHEELING — A circuit judge has ruled that the phone calls made in jail by a man accused of triple homicide will remain as evidence in his upcoming trial.

Circuit Judge David Sims ruled on Tuesday that Gerald Jako’s defense was not able to provide “any legal authority” supporting that the defendant’s rights under the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States have been violated. This means that the motion the defendant made to suppress Jako’s phone calls while in custody has been denied.

Jako faces three counts of murder and two counts of concealing a deceased human body in the 2018 murder of Trevor Vossen and his pregnant girlfriend, Lauren “Lulu” Cree-Jenkins. Jako is accused of luring Vossen and Cree-Jenkins to a Wheeling house, killing and dismembering them before burying their remains in Raleigh County with help from his girlfriend, Dana Marie Bowman.

At the pre-trial hearing on July 15th, Jako’s lawyers argued that Jako had not been given sufficient proof that his phone calls were being monitored while at the Southern Regional Jail, where Jako stayed from August to September 2018. However, Sims found that Jako was provided with sufficient notice through a written notice Jako signed, verbal warning at the beginning of his calls and written notices posted at the locations of phones used by inmates.

Because of these three different warnings provided, Sims found the defendant’s argument that Jako was not provided with proper notice that phone calls may be “monitored, intercepted, recorded, and disclosed and correspondence read” without merit.

While the defendant’s main argument in the pre-trial hearing was that the signs surrounding the phone calls may have been defaced, Sims found the requirement for the state to check that the written notices are in place “every minute of everyday” an “impossible burden.”

“Signs may be temporarily tampered with, defaced, or destroyed but the Division of Corrections repairs or replaces signs that are damaged,” said Sims in the ruling.

The defendant’s motion to suppress Jako’s phone calls being denied could bear significant weight in the trial scheduled to begin Sept. 18, as Assistant Ohio Country Prosecutor Shawn Turak used calls Jako made to his girlfriend from jail to convict him of a 2018 robbery. In the calls, Jako intimidated her into refusing to plead guilty.

Turak will now be able to use what Jako said in his jail phone calls from August to September 2018 as evidence in the murder trial.