Frederick Patterson III was 21 when he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. According to The News Herald and AP, on February 1, 2018, a Florida judge convicted him of killing Scott Collinsworth, 45, his cellmate at Apalachee Correctional Institution, in October 2015. But that wasn’t the whole story: two weeks before he was sentenced, on January 15, Patterson had already killed another cellmate, 82-year-old Arthur Williams, in Marianna, Florida.
According to police reports, officers arrived around 2 a.m. and found Williams face down in a large pool of blood, with catastrophic blunt-force trauma to the face. Patterson reportedly said he had been sharing a cell with Williams for about two weeks and had been planning to kill him that whole time. Officers wrote that Patterson said: “I killed him, and now there’s one less child molester on the streets”. Williams had been charged with aggravated stalking and inducing a minor to get into a vehicle, charges for which he had not yet been convicted, and had been declared incompetent ten days earlier. In his pants were two sheets with photos of both victims marked “Chomo #1” and “Chomo #2”, prison slang for child molesters. Officers said Patterson was matter-of-fact and smiling during the interview.
He now faces a first-degree murder charge and remains in solitary confinement.
