The oldest child, Michael, developed a premature interest in sex, tortured his younger siblings, killed their pets and those of their neighbors, and became increasingly sadistic, she wrote. Beginning when she was 9 years old, Michael held her face-down in a horse tank and sexually abused her with the barrel of a gun, screaming, "You're a girl! Nobody cares about you."
The abuse continued through her teenage years, but her mother and father refused to believe her, intervene or discipline Michael. So, she turned to an apparition of an angel who would soothe her during the rapes and beatings. "Her arms reached out and gently placed me in her lap," she wrote. "No longer in pain, I concentrated on being rocked, back and forth."
When she was 20, Jones found a way out of her abusive home by signing on as a United Airlines flight attendant -- a job that took her to Chicago, the East Coast, Europe and finally Denver, where she married and bought her first home. After a divorce brought on by her husband's infidelity, Jones experienced suicidal depression and began seeing a psychologist who diagnosed her "alters" -- or alternate personalities.