Calhoun —- Jerry Jones showed no mercy when he murdered his 10-month-old daughter and three members of his ex-girlfriend's family for revenge, prosecutors said Wednesday, and for that, they said, he deserves to die.

Jones' attorney agreed that the crimes that shattered Gordon County were "horrible," but he said those crimes can be attributed to mental illness and lifelong family lessons that promises of suicide and threats with guns would cause lost loves to come back.

"What demons led Mr. Jones to that terrible day?" defense attorney Jack Martin asked the just-seated jurors to consider.

Jones has pleaded guilty to the crimes that drew national media to the small town of Ranger, about 60 miles northwest of Atlanta, in January 2004. Jones said he killed the four people to get back at his ex-girlfriend, Melissa Peeler.

Peeler's parents, Tommy and Nola Blaylock, were shot. The Blaylocks' other daughter, Georgia Bradley, was shot, smothered and strangled and left in a closet in her mobile home next door to her parents' trailer. Jones strangled the 10-month-old daughter he had with Peeler, using a cord cut from a hair dryer for a noose.

Jones then called Peeler in Oregon where she was visiting a prospective truck driving partner to taunt her, telling her about the murders and promising to kill her three other daughters —- two of them his —- if she called the police. When he was cornered the next day outside Chattanooga, Jones shot himself in the chin as the three terrified girls watched. Jones, who will be 36 on May 1, pleaded guilty a year later to all the charge, even though Gordon County District Attorney Joe Campbell was seeking the death penalty.

"This case can be summed up by one word," prosecutor Laura Murphree said: "Revenge" —- the word Jones wrote when asked after the murders why he did it.

"That man over there ... showed no mercy," Murphree said during opening statements in the trial to decide Jones' punishment: life in prison with or without the possibility of parole, or death.