Mobile And Vicinity Search For Negro Clayton Is Renewed Believed Assaulter and Other Desperate Convicts Are Hiding on Hollinger’s Island – Another Chapter in Old City Bond Refunding Controversy

• Walter Clayton (Attempted Lynching)

Special to The Times-Democrat.

Mobile, May 26. – Believing that the hiding place of Walter Clayton, the escaped negro murderer and criminal assaulter, and several other desperate convicts, has been located, Deputy Sheriffs McKenzie, Gillis, Cazalas, Findley and Pedro left Mobile at noon to-day heavily armed for Hollinger’s Island, a thickly wooded section of Mobile county, which is cut off from the mainland by Dog river, and about seven miles south of the city, on the west shore of Mobile Bay.

Report had it several weeks ago that Clayton and three other escaped convicts, one of whom is believed to be a white man, wanted in Pensacola for murder, left their rendezvous on a desolate island in Raft river. Traces of the men were found at the time, but their hiding place was unknown to the county officers until last night, when Ed Franklin, a negro who escaped from Pratt Mines, where he was serving a life sentence for murder, was recaptured and landed in jail here.

To the county officers Franklin admitted that he and three other convicts, one a white man, and among whom was Walter Clayton, the much wanted negro escaped from the island in Raft river in a skiff. One of the descriptions of the convicts Franklin claims are in hiding on the island fits that of Walter Clayton.

“Mobile And Vicinity; Search For Negro Clayton Is Renewed; Believed Assaulter and Other Desperate Convicts Are Hiding on Hollinger’s Island – Another Chapter in Old City Bond Refunding Controversy.” The Times-Democrat (New Orleans, LA), May 27, 1908.