Escapee captured after 19 years

The man, imprisoned for a Raleigh rape, was living in Indiana with a fake name and new life

A man who escaped from prison 19 years ago while serving a 60-year sentence for a rape in Wake County was captured in Indiana over the weekend, the Daily Reporter in Greenfield, Ind., reported Monday.

Joseph Dixon Midyette, 48, had been living in Indiana under the name Bruce Youngs, married and running his own business, the newspaper reported. Proceedings to extradite Midyette to North Carolina are under way, Indiana officials said Monday.

Midyette was arrested in 1985 in Fresno, Calif., in connection with a rape there. Investigators in Raleigh, however, had been looking for him for months on four charges related to a rape here. The Army also had issued a bulletin around the same time for his arrest, listing him as a deserter from Fort Benjamin Harrison, Ind.

Midyette pleaded guilty to sexual assault in California and then was extradited to North Carolina.

The Raleigh case involved a woman who said Midyette slept on her sofa on Dec. 31, 1985, the night they met. She said he came back a second time, asking to use her phone. This time, she said then, he forced her to perform oral sex and have sex with him three times over an hour.

Midyette's defense attorney said at the trial that the sex had been consensual. But Midyette was convicted and sentenced to 60 years for the offenses.

But he escaped from the Union Correctional Center in 1988 -- about two years into his sentence. From there, records show, he bounced around to several states, including Florida and Indiana, where he served prison time as Bruce Youngs for a rape in Marion County, jail records show. At the time, technology didn't exist to check Midyette's prints against offenders nationwide.

He again was arrested as Youngs on Friday night by the Hancock County Sheriff's Office for erratic driving, the Daily Reporter reported. Another local agency, which has a national fingerprint registry, matched Youngs' prints to those of Midyette. Authorities are unsure whether anybody knew of his real identity in Indiana.

"He told [his wife] what the deal was over the phone," Maj. Joe Hunt of the Hancock County Sheriff's Office told the Daily Reporter. "She had no idea. I felt bad for the whole family. [They said] he had been nothing but a good husband."

Wife 'in a daze'

Donna Grant Youngs, Midyette's wife, said Monday evening that she had just returned home from the hospital and was recovering from back surgery. She declined to comment on last weekend's events.

"I don't have anything to say to anybody," she said over the phone. "I am just in a daze."

Information obtained on Midyette through public records searches indicate that the Social Security number he was using had belonged to an Oregon woman who is deceased.

N.C. Department of Correction spokesman Keith Acree said late Monday that after Midyette is extradited to North Carolina, he will be readmitted to the prison system to serve the remainder of his sentence here.

"And he may be charged with the escape, if that's what [Union County] wants to do," Acree said.

(News researcher Lamara Williams contributed to this report.)