Felon's two lives stun a congregation

Arrest abruptly ends deacon's charade

RICHMOND, VA. -- Robert E. Jones, the church deacon, went to Sunday services weekly and played his guitar as the choir sang hymns.

Danny Chavis, the fugitive, was wanted for more than a decade after a woman was robbed of $9 and raped as she walked along Raleigh's New Bern Avenue in 1994.

The same man lived both lives.

Two years after his lives collided, a week after he was sent to prison, those in Richmond who knew Robert Jones still struggle with a sense of betrayal.

"All he did was deceive everyone," said LaVerne Robertson, the pastor of the Richmond church where Jones worshiped. "We didn't know who we were dealing with."

Danny Chavis, a one-time football player at Enloe High School, transformed himself into Robert E. Jones when he fled Raleigh shortly after the Jan. 4, 1994, attack on Jeanie Friar, who confronted her attacker in court last week and consented to her name being used.

Last Friday, he admitted he was the Danny Chavis who forced Friar to perform oral sex on him while he directed his friend Christopher McClam to rape her.

Chavis' admission of guilt resulted in a 40-year prison sentence. It was the maximum he could face under his plea agreement, but he might do less time if he's paroled for good behavior. McClam, arrested shortly after the attack, is already serving a life sentence in prison; he'll be eligible for parole in 2020.

Family in the dark

When Chavis fled Raleigh 14 years ago, he left behind a family who wouldn't know whether he was alive or dead for years. They declined to speak with a reporter at his sentencing, and efforts to reach them were unsuccessful. Chavis, 45, also turned down an interview request, as did the woman he married in Virginia, Glenda Jones.

Just 170 miles north of Raleigh, in Virginia's capital city, Chavis took on the Jones alias and built a new life. He became a devoted member of Mansion Avenue Triumphant Baptist Church, on the edge of a weathered section of South Richmond with a Sunday congregation of more than 100.

Jones, recovering from a crack cocaine habit, asked Robertson's brother Doc, a former drug counselor, to recommend a place to worship. Doc Robertson suggested Mansion Avenue, which at that time was being led by his father.

"I didn't even know it, that he was living under these aliases," Robertson said.

Over the years, Jones' life fell into a comfortable rhythm. He became a church deacon in 1998 and married Glenda Jones, a nursing aide, in 1999, helping raise her two children. He had a valid Virginia driver's license and lived with his wife in a small brick home with a tidy yard on Hagueman Drive, in a modest older neighborhood on the southwest side of Richmond.

Jones worked as a handyman and bricklayer and was remembered by his fellow church members for volunteering -- mowing the church's lawn without prompting and helping the elderly members of the congregation.

Speak no evil

"There's nothing bad I could say about him," said Caroline Banks, a member of Mansion Avenue's choir. "He was an easy person that I could talk to."

During most of his years in Richmond, Jones steered clear of trouble with the law. The one exception: a 1994 incident, shortly after the rape in Raleigh, in which a man using the name Robert E. Jones was arrested on robbery charges. The suspect had fingerprints that matched Chavis'. But the charges were dismissed, and Richmond authorities never realized that Jones was actually Chavis -- a felony fugitive from Raleigh.

Twelve years later, that 1994 set of fingerprints is what Raleigh police Sgt. J.J. Matthews used to track down Chavis and dismantle the life of Robert E. Jones. Matthews also compared an old mug shot of Chavis with the driver's license photo of Jones and had a strong hunch he was chasing the right man.