On the night of May 4, 1979, 25-year-old Eva Gayle Patterson was raped and murdered in her bedroom in Eatonville, Mississippi, a rural area about seven miles north of Hattiesburg. Her throat was slashed and she died as she tried to reach a neighbor’s home.
Patterson’s husband, Dwayne, was away, working on an offshore oil rig. Their two sons, who were 4 years old and 3 years old, were at home. The older boy told police that he saw the attack and that one man was involved.
The crime shocked the community. A reward of $7,500 was quickly offered and the Forrest County Sheriff’s Department assembled a team of seven detectives to work solely on the case.
On May 29, 1979, the police arrested 19-year-old Larry Ruffin, who had been serving a sentence for a burglary conviction but was on a furlough at the time of the crime.
Ruffin was interrogated, and police said he confessed to the crime, led them to the scene to show them how entry was made, and implicated two other men, Bobby Ray Dixon, and 29-year-old Phillip Bivens.
In October 1980, Bivens was arrested in Fresno, California. That same month, Dixon was arrested. He was in prison on a parole violation.
During Dixon’s interrogation, police said he confessed and implicated Bivens and Ruffin. The police also said that Bivens confessed to being involved.
On October 22, 1980, Dixon pled guilty to murder and rape. He was sentenced to life in prison.
On November 4, 1980, Bivens pled guilty to murder and rape. He was sentenced to life in prison.
Both men agreed to testify against Ruffin.
In December 1980, Ruffin went to trial in Forrest County Circuit Court. His attorney had sought to bar the prosecution from presenting his confession. During a pretrial motion to suppress the confession, Ruffin testified that he had been beaten by detectives until he confessed. The motion had been denied after the detectives denied that Ruffin had been physically abused.
During Ruffin’s trial, Bivens and Dixon both testified. Dixon recanted his confession and said that it was false and that he was not involved in the crime nor were Bivens or Ruffin.
On December 5, 1980, a jury convicted Ruffin of murder and rape. He was sentenced to life in prison.
Nearly 30 years later, In June 2010, Innocence Project New Orleans (IPNO) and co-counsel Rob McDuff obtained a court order for DNA testing with the consent of the Forrest County District Attorney’s office. Testing was performed on semen left on the victim’s body. The tests excluded Ruffin, Bivens and Dixon. The DNA profile was run through the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), a database of convicted offenders and DNA profiles from unsolved cases. The profile implicated Andrew Harris, who had been convicted of raping another woman in her home in the same county on August 29, 1981, after Patterson was murdered. He had been convicted in January 1982 and sentenced to life in prison for that crime.
On December 22, 2010, a Forrest County grand jury indicted Harris for the rape and murder of Patterson.
Based on the results, IPNO and McDuff filed motions calling for the three men’s convictions to be vacated and dismissed. By that time, Dixon, who suffered from seizures his entire life, had been diagnosed with lung cancer that had spread to his brain. He had been released on medical parole on August 20, 2010. Ruffin had died in prison in 2002.
On September 9, 2010, Forrest County Circuit Judge Robert Helfrich vacated the convictions of Dixon and Bivens. Their charges were dismissed. Biven was then released.
On December 7, 2010, Dixon died.
On December 14, 2010, the case was presented once more to a Forrest County Grand jury. The grand jury declined to indict the men.
On February 18, 2011, Judge Helfrich issued an order formally exonerating Ruffin. “Larry Ruffin is officially exonerated and declared innocent of the crime of capital murder for which he was convicted in 1980 in Forrest County,” Helfrich wrote. “That conviction is null and void.”
In November 2012, the Forrest County District Attorney’s office said that the Harris prosecution was being passed to an inactive file, meaning that Harris would not be prosecuted. At that time, Harris was 61 years old and already serving a life sentence for the 1982 rape conviction.
In January, 2013, lawyers for Bivens and the estates of Dixon and Ruffin filed a federal civil-rights lawsuit against Forrest County law enforcement officials alleging the men had been beaten and threatened to falsely confess. Bivens asserted in the suit that he had been threatened with the death penalty.
Bivens died in August 2014.
In 2015, the state agreed to pay $500,000 to Ruffin’s estate, and $375,000 each to the estates of Bivens and Dixon.
In 2016, Forrest County settled the federal lawsuit for $16.5 million.
In November 2012, the Forrest County District Attorney’s office said that the Patterson case was being moved to an inactive file, meaning that Harris would not be prosecuted. At that time, Harris was 61 years old and was serving a life sentence for the 1982 rape conviction.
– Maurice Possley
Posting Date: 08-29-2011
Last Update Date: 03-28-2026
