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them?’”  
    Nearby, at Grace Hospital, Louis was undergoing emergency surgery. Though he had lost a substantial amount of blood, all four bullets had passed through his body and he was expected to recover. Days later, he would learn that the ballpoint pen had saved his life. Had the first bullet not deflected off the pen, the surgeon told Louis, it would have entered his heart instead of his lung.
    While Louis lay in the intensive care unit following surgery, McDowell County deputies, asked to assist in the manhunt, located the ditched Cadillac behind an elementary school in Nebo, a tiny community a few miles from where the shooting took place. There was no sign of the driver and his passenger. Several troopers were dispatched to Nebo where they joined the deputies in sealing off the area. Not yet sure who they were looking for, the patrolmen stopped everyone coming through Nebo and checked their licenses.
    Meanwhile, with help from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, the highway patrol office in Morganton began gathering the first important bits of information about the Cadillac’s occupants. What eventually emerged was a chilling portrait of two deadly criminals on the run.
    The driver was Ronald Sotka, forty-one, better known as Ronald Freeman, a Tennessee prison escapee who was serving consecutivelife sentences for the 1970 murder of his pregnant wife and stepdaughter. A former church deacon from Knoxville, Freeman had maintained his innocence even after he had been found guilty and sentenced to 198 years in prison.
    His passenger was James E. Clegg, thirty, a habitual criminal who had escaped with Freeman and three other inmates from Fort Pillow State Prison in Tennessee on February 18. Two of the five convicts had been captured within days. Clegg, Freeman, and a third man were still at large.
    Authorities considered Clegg and Freeman “extremely dangerous.” Three days after their escape from prison, the pair had walked out of the woods near Brownsville, Tennessee, and shot and killed a fifty-nine-year-old businessman who was grilling steaks in his backyard. Afterwards, they kidnapped his wife and drove her 400 miles across the state to a rest stop near Knoxville, where she was released unharmed. The fugitives were then picked up by an unidentified woman who apparently harbored them in her home.
    From there, Clegg and Freeman drove to Asheville, North Carolina, where they rented a car and traveled to Cleveland, Ohio, to see Freeman’s brother, who gave them $1,200. Returning to Asheville, Clegg and Freeman purchased a two-tone older-model Buick for $850. On their way east, seventy miles past Morganton, the engine gave out. The men ditched the Buick and stole a 1978 Cadillac from a Mocksville garage. In an apparent effort to mislead police, they got back on Interstate 40, heading west again, when they were stopped for speeding by Louis Rector.
    Trooper Don Patterson remembers the first few frustrating hours of the search.
    â€œIn the beginning, we had about thirty or forty troopers working on the scene, in addition to other law enforcement officers. Tracking dogs were brought in, but they didn’t find anything. Around 7:00 A.M.  we realized we were hunting for two Tennessee escapees. We got a highway patrol helicopter from Raleigh but it was too foggy to go up. Later, when the weather cleared, I accompanied the helicopter crew since I knew the area, but that didn’t help either. All we could see from the air were patrol cars and roadblocks.”
    Troopers at ground level weren’t doing much better. Excitement mellowed to boredom as the hours dragged on and the search through rain-soaked woods led to one dead end after another. Bloodhoundspicked up a scent near the abandoned Cadillac, which led to a cemetery half a mile away. Then the trail stopped. At one point, troopers thought they had someone cornered in a house, only to discover that their “fugitive”