Escaped Convict Joe Patterson Captured at Haw River, Returned to Guilford County, March 6, 1922

Bring Escaped Convict Back to Guilford County. . . Joe Patterson, Convicted of Highway Robbery, Captured at Haw River

Joe Patterson, young white man, one of the 16 convicts who escaped from a house at the Guilford county camp about a month ago, was brought back Friday night to serve out his term of two years, imposed following his conviction at the December term of Guilford court on a charge of highway robbery.

Patterson was captured near Haw River Friday afternoon by Alamance county officers and a Guilford convict guard went there for him Friday night.

The crime for which Patterson was convicted was a very brutal one. While J.P. Ratcliffe, an elderly man, a resident of Proximity mill village, was feeding his hogs on the edge of the village one night in November, a man came up and ordered him to hold up his hands. Mr. Ratcliffe thought the man was joking but he soon found out better. The fellow knocked him in the head with a stick, stole his money and left. Mr. Ratcliffe carried all his money on him, a hefty roll of greenbacks. The trial of the case excited a good deal of interest. Patterson maintained to the last that he was innocent and sought to prove an alibi, but the jury did not believe his story.

Only one other of the 16 men has been sent back to the convict camp, and he returned of his own will. Van Miller, haunted by the dread of being captured and tired of hiding, gave himself up to a private citizen, asking that he not be given extra time. He was not given extra time as punishment for escaping.

Twenty-eight prisoners are at large, four who got away in a bunch before Patterson and the 15, and 10 men who escaped later from the city stockade. It is expected that some of them will be taken sooner or later, as Patterson was. A week ago, a convict went into a barn at Durham, spent the night and swapped his stripes for a suit of clothes he found in the barn in an old trunk. It is supposed that he was a Guilford convict and the fact that Patterson was captured in an adjoining county, another getting no further than Durham, gives ground to the belief that some of the others are not a thousand miles from here.

From the front page of The Greensboro Patriot, March 6, 1922