Another arrested
By DON FLETCHER
News Staff Writer
While one of the area’s most colorful sex offenders was sentenced last week to spend a lengthy period behind bars for trying to live undetected in Atmore, another convicted local sex offender was arrested for failing to meet reporting requirements.
Frederick “Hollywood Fred” Barkley, 58, of Atmore was sentenced last week in Escambia County Circuit Court to serve 15 years and a day in prison.
Barkley was arrested here in August 2017 for three violations of Alabama’s Sex Offender Registration & Notification Act. He was jailed on one count each of failure to register, failure to report and failure to have “sex offender” notated on his state driver’s license.
The former Baldwin County resident, who got his nickname from his flashy clothes and peroxide-bleached hair, has a long rap sheet that includes an attempted murder charge. That evolved from an incident during which he threw a coffee table at his elderly spouse, who was the former wife of the late William J. Hearin, former chairman of the board and publisher of the Mobile Press-Register.
The spouse later dropped the charges against Barkley, but the marriage was annulled when he was sentenced to serve time on a child-enticement conviction.
Court records show that he has also been convicted of third-degree theft of a gas barbecue grill in Bay Minette, and was given a 25-year sentence in Baldwin County for drug possession, with an additional 20 years tacked on under a state law that applies to defendants with three previous felony convictions.
While “Hollywood Fred” was taken back to the Escambia County Detention Center to await transfer to state corrections officials, Roger Hall was being processed and booked into the same facility for a SORNA violation.
Hall, 36, of a Liberty Street address in Atmore, was convicted in Escambia County Circuit Court in 2014 of second-degree rape. According to court documents, Hall was released from prison earlier this year and was required to make quarterly visits to the Escambia County Sheriff’s Office, where he had to provide updates to his residency and employment status.
An ECSO report showed that Hall reported as he was supposed to in April but failed to report at all during the month of July.
According to an employee of the county jail’s booking and release division, Hall remained in jail on Monday, October 28, under a $125,000 bond.