A 65-year-old man pleaded guilty Monday to the 2001 killing of his girlfriend whose skeletal remains were found in a suitcase two years ago in a wooded Bessemer area.

Brian Edward Jones was charged with murder and abuse of a corpse after he surprised Bessemer police by showing up out of the blue March 2022 and confessing that he had killed 41-year-old Janet Jones Luxford in 2001 at a Bessemer hotel by hitting her in the throat with a golf club.

Luxford’s remains were found two days after his revelations. Despite his confession, Jones was planning to argue self-defense at trial.

Instead, Jones on Monday pleaded guilty to murder, and apologized to Luxford’s daughter, who last saw her mother when she was just 14 years old. He said he did not mean to kill her.

Jefferson County Circuit Judge David Carpenter sentenced Jones to 21 years in prison. Prosecutors offered that amount because that was the number of years Luxford was missing before Jones came forward and confessed.

As part of the plea, the abuse of corpse charge was dismissed.

Jones has been held in the Jefferson County Jail since his arrest on March 29, 2022.

Jones’ trial was set to begin Monday. The case was prosecuted by Jefferson County Bessemer Cutoff Assistant District Attorneys Brent Butler and Kaemi Velez Cauldeeron.

Jones was represented by lawyer Edmond Earle.

Luxford, a mother three, was last seen alive in 2001 and was listed in multiple online missing persons’ databases.

She was reported missing about a year later, on Sept. 22, 2002, by her daughter who filed the report with the Napa Police Department in California.

The original detective who interviewed Jones in 2001, Todd Shulman of Napa Valley Police Department, arrived in Bessemer Monday for the trial.

Assistant District Attorney Lane Tolbert, on behalf of District Attorney Lynneice Washington and the prosecutors, said they were thankful with the resolution of the case.

“We’re thankful the family was able to get some sense of closure out of this,’’ Tolbert said, “and that justice, no matter how delayed, is still coming for you.”

According to the daughter, Luxford had left her Jacksonville, Fl. home and was later seen at a motel in Bessemer leaving with an unidentified trucker.

Luxford was never heard from again.

Amanda Luxford Fernandez, Luxford’s youngest child, told AL.com in a previous interview that she lived with her after her parents divorced. Her two siblings lived with other family members.

Luxford remarried and was a stay-at-home mom until, right before her disappearance when she began working at hotels in Jacksonville.

“She was a great woman,’’ Fernandez said. “She was sweet, she had a southern drawl, and she loved country music. Reba McEntire had always been her idol.”

“She loved with everything she had,’’ she said.

It was at the hotel Luxford met Jones and the two started seeing each other.

Luxford had struggled with drug use in her past, and Fernandez believes the drug use resurfaced when Jones came into the picture.

“She was always a great mom,’’ she said. “She never put anything before her children until this man came along.”

Fernandez was living with her stepfather or friends while Luxford was out and about with Jones.

Fernandez’s stepfather would let her visit her mother on occasional afternoons, but never stay with her.

Fernandez, who was in court for Monday’s guilty plea, previously said she had met Jones and never liked him.

“I always thought he was a shady person,’’ Fernandez said in 2022. “He had these eyes that are very dark. That’s what I remembered of him.”

At one point after meeting Jones, Fernandez said, Luxford tried to take her own life.

“She was in the hospital because they had wrestled with the knife my mom had used to try to hurt herself,’’ Fernandez said.

“She ended up slicing her right hand down to the bone, so she cut all the tendons in her right hand.”

“At the time this man hurt my mother, she was basically defenseless,’’ she said. “She was 4-feet, 11-inches and not even 100 pounds. She was a very small woman, which is how she was able to fit in a suitcase.”

Luxford spent 72 hours in the hospital. On the day she was released, Fernandez went to school and returned home to find her mom gone.

“He convinced her on packing up everything. Not only did I lose my mom, I lost everything of my childhood,’’ she said.

“She took her pictures, her wedding dress that she married my father in which was supposed to be mine, my christening gown.”

“They had left to go to Alabama, and I never heard from her again,’’ she said.

It was a Sunday in 2022 when Jones came showed up on the Bessemer Police Department’s radar.

Police were in the middle of a separate homicide investigation when they received a call from a man – later identified as Jones – stating that he had information about a homicide.

Officers initially thought he may have witnessed the deadly shooting outside the Bessemer restaurant that day but quickly realized Jones was talking about an entirely different murder.

Jones, a truck driver, then told police that Luxford was his girlfriend at the time and that he accidentally killed her following a fight between the two while they were staying at a hotel on Ninth Avenue S.W. in Bessemer.

Jones told investigators he remembered the day he killed Luxford because it was the same day Dale Earnhardt was killed in a final-lap collision in the Daytona 500.

According to the murder warrant against Jones, he intentionally caused her murder on Feb. 18, 2001, by hitting her in the throat, causing her to collapse and causing her death, with a golf club.

He was willing to lead investigators to Luxford’s remains so she could get a proper burial but did not want to talk with detectives much beyond that.

Jones told investigator the reason he had not come forward before was that he did not want to disappoint his parents. His parents died in 2021, and he decided it was now time to come clean.

On March 29, 2022, Jones led police to where he left her remains in the area of Harmer Street and Valley Creek. A subsequent search of the area revealed human skeletal remains.

Those remains were retrieved by the Jefferson County Coroner’s Office and ultimately determined to be those of Luxford.