Spokane man gets four years in assault

A Spokane man with a history of violence, including imprisoning a woman, has been sentenced to four years in prison for choking, beating and sexually assaulting another woman in August.

Clayton Dennis Jones III, 38, also known as Billy Jack Twoeagles, pleaded guilty in October to second-degree assault with sexual motivation in a plea bargain in which a first-degree rape charge was dismissed.

Jones faced a standard range of 44 to 53 months in prison when Spokane County Superior Court Judge Linda Tompkins handed down a 48-month term last week.

Court documents indicate Jones reacted violently when a woman complained that he failed to give her a ride home from work after taking her car. He threw her against a wall, choked her and tossed her onto a bed where he ordered her to remove her clothing.

Jones forced the woman to perform a sex act with a knife at her throat, and continued to threaten her with the knife while roughing her up. He hit her on the head with a wooden club, pulled her hair, bit her and raped her so violently that she screamed in pain, according to court documents.

The victim told authorities that Jones told her, “Submit, submit, submit,” while he raped her. He quit and left the house when three other people who lived there intervened.

The crime was similar to one in August 1999, in which Jones was sentenced to a year in jail for attempted unlawful imprisonment of another woman.

In that case, he persuaded a woman who had broken up with him to take him into her home because he was sick. The next day, court documents say, Jones refused to let the woman get dressed, telling her, “You’re not going anywhere if you’re naked.”

Armed with a knife, Jones threatened suicide and refused to allow the woman to leave.

While he was preoccupied in another room, she put on some shorts. Jones caught her and tried to rip off her shorts, but she broke free and ran to a neighbor’s house.

According to court documents, Jones entered the neighbor’s house and threatened the neighbor while complying with an order to leave.

A charge of first-degree child molestation was dismissed in 1997 when a 4-year-old girl was unable to identify Jones as the man who molested her when she visited the home of a friend, where Jones was living with the friend’s mother.

At the time, Jones had just completed a three-year prison sentence for first-degree robbery.

He and two other men chased, beat and robbed a man who was walking in front of the Ridpath Hotel downtown in February 1994.