Another front page headline in The Eunice News on June 22, 1971, read, “Man shot at Frey’s desperate character”
The Eunice News article read, “The man killed in the attempted robbery of Harry Frey home was apparently one of the South’s “Public Enemy Number Ones.”
The dead man was identified as Lonas Ray Caughorn, 45, who had a police record dating back in 1941.
His FBI records show that he has escaped at least seven times from prisons in Tennessee, Georgia and Louisiana.
According to the FBI, Caughorn was wanted in connection with such crimes as car theft, robbery, grand larceny and armed robbery.
A native of Knoxville, he began his crime career at the age of 16 when he stole a car in 1941.
The curly-haired Caughorn’s first escape was from Tennessee’s Brushy Mountain Prison in March 1948. He was recaptured and fled again from the same prison the following September.
In 1953 he escaped from a DeKalb County, Georgia, work camp, and two years later he broke out of Louisiana’s Angola Prison.
In February of 1958, Caughorn escaped from Tennessee’s main state prision in Nashville. Recaptured in Atlanta, he was sent to Georgia’s Rock Quarry Prison in Buford. He escaped from there Jan. 3, 1959, in a prison truck.
A month later Knox County officers pulled him from bed at his mother’s home near Knoxville.
He was lodged in county jail to wait his return to Georgia and it was from this lockup that he staged in May 1959, his most spectacular escape.
He flashed on two jail guards a pistol which had been smuggled to him in his jail cell, locked the guards in the cell and fled with the jail’s only set of keys.
Recaptured in June 1959, in Cleveland, Ohio, Caughorn was returned to Knoxville where he was sentenced to five years in federal prison for jail breaking.
His next escape was from Reidsville, Georgia, prison on Sept. 3, 1963.
Knoxville police had no records of his whereabouts since that time.
