Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, October 20, 1993 TAG: 9310200215
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By RON BROWN and LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Eric Lee Patterson, a convicted bank robber who was paroled from prison less than a year ago, was charged with murdering 30-year-old Steven Theodore Johnson.
Police said Johnson, of Wilmont Avenue Northwest, was found lying on the floor of an apartment at 410 Westside Blvd. minutes after midnight. He had been stabbed in the chest.
When a third man at the apartment - who was in the shower at the time of the stabbing - tried to call police, Patterson pulled the telephone cord out of the wall, police said.
Wearing only a towel, the witness ran from the apartment and knocked on doors of adjacent homes, calling for help.
Police first spotted Patterson in some woods around the 3800 block of Shenandoah Avenue shortly after 2 a.m. He ran and eluded police until he turned himself in shortly after 7 a.m.
Patterson was being held Tuesday in the Roanoke City Jail in lieu of $50,000 bond on a charge of first-degree murder. Johnson's slaying was the ninth so far this year in Roanoke.
Police declined to say what the motive was, but they said there was evidence of crack cocaine in the apartment where the slaying occurred.
Both Johnson and Patterson had lengthy criminal records.
Court records show Johnson had been convicted of possession of cocaine and several misdemeanor charges in recent years.
In 1989, Patterson was convicted of robbing what was then the Colonial American National Bank on Melrose Avenue.
He later testified that he was so addicted to crack cocaine that he robbed the bank in a desperate effort to get help - hoping he would be arrested and treated for his $400-a-day habit.
"I would have sold my soul, if I could have, in order to get crack," he wrote in a letter filed in Roanoke Circuit Court.
When he was not arrested immediately after the bank robbery, Patterson held up a convenience store before he eventually flagged down a passing police officer and turned himself in, according to earlier testimony.
A Roanoke judge sentenced him to seven years in prison for both robberies. Patterson was released in December 1992 on mandatory parole.
In 1989, Patterson wrote a letter to the judge asking that his sentence be reduced.
"This is my first and last time getting into major trouble," he wrote. "I really need more help than punishment, so I don't do something this stupid again."
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