This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2010, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
When the curtain opened at the Oquirrh Hills Elementary School auditorium and revealed 540 hand-crafted stocking hats with pom-poms on top, the man who spent a year crocheting the gifts was not there to see the sheer delight on the faces of the children.
He was sitting in the medium-security section of the Utah State Prison, where he has lived for 27 years after his conviction for murder in 1983.
"I do service projects in the name of my victim, Kim Chapman," said Robert E. Jones in a telephone interview arranged by the prison on Thursday, the day before his creations were distributed to the students at the Title I school in Kearns during a surprise assembly.
Eighty-six percent of the more than 500 students at Oquirrh Hills qualify for free school lunch, said principal Vicki Ricketts. The bright, multicolored hats represented a rare treat for many of the children.
Ricketts introduced prison volunteer Viki Hatton moments before opening the curtain and revealing the gifts. The children sat on the floor of the auditorium, not knowing exactly why they were there. Once the curtain opened, their quiet and polite demeanor exploded into squeals of joy.
Jones spent the entire year crocheting the hats, and he paid for the yarn from his own earnings. He makes 40 cents an hour at various jobs at the prison.
"I can't undo what I did," he said of the man he shot to death in Ogden nearly three decades ago. "So I try to think of ways I can give back to the community in the name of Kim Chapman, who did not deserve to die. I try to preserve his memory."
Ricketts explained to the students during the assembly that the person responsible for the gifts they were about to receive had killed a man many years ago and has been in prison ever since. Oquirrh Hills was chosen as the recipient school of Jones' labor after Hatton met Oquirrh Hills resource teacher Sheral Schowe during a dinner with a mutual friend and learned of the students' needs.
Jones, 58, had asked Hatton to find a worthy school for the hats he created using skills his grandmother taught him when he was 6 years old.
He has completed more than two dozen service projects during his 27 years at the prison, said Hatton, who got to know Jones while volunteering at the prison with her husband. Other projects include hand-crafted leather belts he made, designing a garden at the V.A. Hospital in Salt Lake City and purchasing computers for needy students with his meager earnings.
"A lot of these prisoners try to do some kind of restitution while in prison," Hatton said. "Many of them have some real talents."
She told the students, as they quickly put on their new hats, that Jones stayed up until the wee hours many times during the past two months so he could finish all the hats in time for the pre-Christmas assembly.
Now he'll figure out his next project and who will benefit from it.