KING OF THE ESCAPE ARTISTS

Quick with a gun, controversial, no prison could hold him -- these were the words used in talking about Roy Gardner. The historian, Wayne T. Walker, described him as “short and cocky, with gimlet blue eyes and short-cropped black hair... He acted tough. He was.” Roy Gardner was born on January 5, 1886, into a bone-poor family of sodbusters who settled in Trenton, a wart of a town in the heart of Missouri. He was only 8 when his family moved to Colorado Springs, where his father managed an electricity plant. Roy was an angelic-looking kid who devoted himself to his studies and graduated from high school at the top of his class.

The prosperity of 1914 -1918 was a long way off and millions of people were out of work and the price structure was as shaky as a Ford Tin-Lizzy bouncing over a rutty dirt road. If there was a better way to survive other than join Uncle Sam’s army, historians failed to record it. Roy Gardner enlisted in the 22nd Infantry at Fort Worth, Texas and was stationed in the Philippine Islands from 1903 to 1905. A year later, the U.S. Government listed him as a deserter. He needed the discipline of service life like a fish needs an umbrella.

The AWOL Gardner drifted to Noglas, Mexico, then to Arizona where he purchased a wagon and a team of mules and went into the business of smuggling arms and ammunition to the army of rebels attempting to overthrow the Mexican government. Police pursuers caught up with him at Cananea, and spirited him off to Hermosillo. A red-angry jury convicted him and a tongue-lashing judge sentenced him to death. That was suppose to be the end of Roy Gardner. Instead the legend grew.

Taken to prison he was tossed into a dungeon and left for several days in solitary confinement and total darkness. When he was judged to have reached the breaking point, he was dragged to the torture chamber, where cords were tightened in the manner of a tourniquet until his body grew numb. Early one morning when the guard brought him his breakfast, Gardner had disappeared like a Poltergeist. Armed-to-the-teeth posses set out in vain across the sun-blasted desert for him, but he had already escaped into Naco, Arizona, where he remained sacrosanct from the law.

In the summer of 1910 Gardner entered the Gilindemann Jewelry Store on Market Street in San Francisco and asked the proprietor to show him a tray of diamonds. Before you could say “abracadabra” he had snatched up the tray of diamonds, ran out the door, and vamoosed down the street like his ass was on fire. As he rounded Market onto Ellis he ran smack into Sergeant George McLaughlin, a hippopotami police officer with cannon arms, who wrestled him to the ground and handcuffed him. Brought before Superior Court Judge Robert Lawlor on a charge of robbery, Roy was sentenced to five years penal servitude in San Quentin.

In 1912 God and Gardner saved the life of a guard during a violent prison riot. As a reward, the governor paroled Gardner and helped him get a job as an acetylene welder at the Mare Island Navy Yard. In June 1913, Roy married a buxom waitress named Dolly Nelson, who had been on more laps than napkins. On September 23, 1917, a daughter was born and the Gardners were as happy as clams. For while, life ticked on like a fine Swiss watch. In time, Gardner was promoted to superintendent of welding at the Linde Air Products Company in San Francisco. He salted away a nice nest egg and moved his family into beautiful home with a garden and a Tom Sawyer pickit-fence. He entertained politicians and top business men. For a while life, was peaches and cream. But then, adversity fell on the Gardner family like the rain that falleth from the skies.

In 1920 Gardner traveled to Tijuana on business. While there, he decided to do some gambling. As quick as a hiccup, he went bust. How could he tell Dolly that he had gambled away their entire savings account ? While passing the post office, an idea came to him. He bought a pistol, returned that night, and hid in the back of a mail truck as the driver pulled away from the depot.

The truck had traveled barely a mile when Gardner thrust the gun in the driver’s midriff and ordered him to pull over. In a wink, he grabbed two mail sacks. leaped from the truck, and fled, leaving the driver trembling like an abandoned puppy. The caper had been as easy as spearing antipasto. Returning to his hotel room, Gardner dumped his cache on the bedspread. To his dismay, he had pilfered $82,000 in securities and some Canadian currency. With the postal authorities aroused, he quickly checked out of the hotel and into another under a pseudonym.

At breakfast, in the hotel lobby, Gardner opened his morning paper and news of the postal robbery popped out like an unleashed spring. More distressing, the article said police had a suspect. The thief had checked out of his hotel room leaving several mail sacks behind. In his haste, he also left a suitcase with his name stenciled on it. Quicker than that, Roy scooped up his meager belongings, rented a jalopy, and made tracks for Del Mar, a pygmy town outside San Diego. Out in the boonies, amid a mattress of slough grass and rocks, he buried his bonds and notes.

Roy was magnetized to bad luck as steel comes to lodestone. A hiker was relieving himself in the bushes when he observed Roy digging in the dirt. He rushed to a phone and gave the cops a description of the suspicious digger. Now there were more cops dogging Roy’s trial than there were bluefish in Barnegat Bay and they finally collared him. At a police lineup the postal driver recognized him as the gunman who held him up. A grouchy judge with a walrus mustache sentenced him to 25 years at McNeil Island in Washington State.

Dewy-eyed Dolly caught the first train from San Francisco for a sojourn with her spouse in Los Angeles before his train pulled out for McNeil Island. She was shocked and mortified that her Roy had run afoul of the law. She cried a river, kissed him good-bye, and vowed to wait forever. Not even God has the patience to wait forever.

On June 5, 1920, just outside Salem, Oregon, Roy peered out the window of the chug-a-lug train and gasped, “My God -- look at that ten-point buck!” Deputy Marshals Mike Cavanaugh and Herb Haig tripped over themselves to get a better view. Roy grabbed Haig’s gun from its holster and barked, “Hands up!” He disarmed Cavanaugh and ordered one of the other McNeil-bound prisoners to handcuff the officers together. He took $200 from the officers, leapt from the train, and disappeared into the wilderness faster than a Jack Rabbit.

In Rainer, Washington, Roy swiped a motorboat. Downriver, at Astoria, he bought a train ticket to Bellingham, where he stole a roadster. He floorboarded it across the back-country roads to Sumas and crossed unnoticed into Canada. in Saskatchewan, using a false moniker, he got a job as a welder.

The following year, Roy slipped back into the U.S. like a minnow through a whale net. He began traveling from Minneapolis to Colorado as a salesman of welding paraphernalia. While riding a train to California, he couldn’t resist the temptation to rob several mail pouches from the express car. Police posses were after him like a swarm of angry bees. But Roy was running so fast that not even junk mail could catch up with him. On May 8, 1921, Roy arrived in Sacramento and phoned Dolly, who was toiling as a handcrafter in Napa. They agreed to met at a secret rendezvous. But the switchboard operator was under police instructions to monitor all calls to Dolly. When Dolly arrived in Sacramento, the gumshoes were not far behind. Roy smelled a rat, escaped the trap and high-tailed-it north to Roseville and checked into the Porter House Hotel.

On the night of May 19th, Roy drew a gun on the express messenger of Train No. 10, eastbound from Sacramento, and robbed him of two mail sacks. The hunt for Roy Gardner picked up momentum now. Hundreds of posters bearing Roy’s picture were distributed with a reward offer of $5,000. At dawn on May 20th, as train No. 20 was leaving Roseville, a railway messenger was dozing off when he heard a raspy voice say, “Throw up your hands before I blow your head off!” When the Overland Limited reached the Newcastle yards, the bandit lept from the train and darted down the tracks with an armful of mail. The messenger phoned the home office who recognized the description of the elusive bandit, Roy Gardner.



Ralph Decker

The proprietor of the Peerless Cafe in Roseville recognized the photo on the flyer as that of Neal Gaynor. a regular at her cafe. She matter-of-factly told him that he resembled the picture on the wanted poster displayed in her window. The regular guffawed and said that Gardner would be a fool to hang around that part of the country. Nevertheless, $5,000 was a lot of money and the cafe owner scrawled a nervous letter to the railroad postal inspectors about her suspicions. On May 23rd, a convoy of police, headed by Under-sheriff Al Locke, arrived in Roseville.

Gardner was gambling at the Porter House Hotel when Locke slipped up behind him and nudged a .45 Clot into his back. “Stand up, Roy!” he thunderingly announced. “And don’t do anything you’ll regret.” He was obligingly returned to Sacramento under heavy guard and identified by mail messenger Decker as the gunman who had robbed him. Headlines followed his admission to several robberies including the March 1921 mail robbery in Centerville, Iowa; the Southern Pacific station robbery in Bakersville, California, in March 1920; and a bank heist in Palisade, Nevada.

Subsequently, Roy Gardner was indicated by the United States grand jury in San Francisco and brought before U.S. District Judge Joseph Van Fleet. Found guilty of robbing the U.S. mails, he was sentenced to an additional 25 years at McNeil Island. At his sentencing, he told the judge that he would guide Southern Pacific deputies to the spot where he buried the plunder from Train No. 10 on May 19th, if his wife were given a portion of the $5,000 insurance reward fund.

An agreement was struck, and on June 9th, Gardner, flanked by a menacing score of guns, marched up a grassy escarpment and pointed to the skeleton of a windblown spruce. The booty was buried there, he said, but desperate digging turned up nothing. Gardner later admitted that the plunder was not buried there and that his lie was a desperate ploy to escape. There was no more tarrying. Gardner was quickly put on the McNeil Island Special, Train No. 1. He was guarded not only by fast-shooting U.S. Marshal Tom Mulhall, but also by Alvin Wrinckle. a lank, stringy veteran of many posse hunts. As an added precaution, the cagey gangster was heavily manacled, and his feet were weighted down by a 50-pound “Oregon Boot.” As the train left Vancouver, Washington, Roy asked to use the toilet, and his shackles were removed. Inside the restroom he removed a cleverly concealed .32-caliber pistol, put there earlier by a cohort. When he stepped out of the toilet, he stuck the gun in Mulhall’s protruding paunch and ordered him to release another desperado named Norris Pyron, who was also on his way to life at McNeil Island. He then instructed Pyron to handcuff the two embarrassed officers to the seat. After relieving the officers of their weapons and $123 in cash, the two men leapt from the train and disappeared into the wild game country of Castle Rock, Washington.

With Roy Gardner’s name and picture on every front page in the country there was no let-up in the intensive manhunt for the man newspapers had dubbed “King of the Escape Artists.” Every law enforcement agency and agents of the Southern Pacific Railroad were one step behind him. On June 12th, a blustering posse tracked Pyron to a location near Kelso. He was returned to McNeil Island and placed in a maximum security block. Goaded and bullied by the warders, he stubbornly refused to tell which way Gardner went.

On June 18th, a special agent of the Northern Pacific announced that Gardner had been captured in Centralia, Washington, He was registered at a hotel and, fearing that someone would recognize him, he plastered his face with more bandages than Betty Crocker has blue ribbons. His landlady, worried that her new roomer was suffering from a contagious disease, called Officer Louis Sonny of the Centralia Police Department. A doctor was brought along to remove the bandages, and Roy Gardner was revealed. This time he was delivered safely to McNeil Island. Roy was participating in the Labor Day prison baseball game on September 5, 1921, when he ran out for a pop fly -- and kept going! When he reached the barbed-wire fence, he took wire cutters from his pocket and cut through the fence. Shots were fired, but too late. Roy stretched his long legs and vanished over the hill. Warden John Maloney took personal charge of the search. A cordon of guards frantically searched the island while wolfhounds vacuumed the area with their noses. Boats were restricted from coming anywhere near the island for several days. But Roy was nowhere to be found. In a letter to his wife. Roy detailed his flight from the “escape-proof” prison. He said he had been wounded in his escape and hid in the prison barn until daybreak. He remained there, getting nutrition from cow’s milk, for a week. Then he swam the choppy waters to Fox Island, where he remained for another week, living off the milk of farmer’s cows and fruit in the orchards.

On November 15th, a mail clerk was accosted by a man brandishing a gun and ordered to lie down in the rear of his truck. Instead, the wiry mail clerk wrestled the bandit to the ground and held him until his co-workers summoned the police. At his trial, Gardner told the court that pressure on his brain from a metal plate in his head made him insane. Unmoved, the judge sentenced him to another 25 years -- this time in the U.S. penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas. Headlines screamed: “GANGSTER GARDNER BRAGS, ‘LEAVENWORTH WILL NEVER HOLD ME!’ ”

Roy Gardner tried umpteen times to escape from Leavenworth but each time his attempts were thwarted. An uneasy warden transferred him to Atlanta on January 24, 1925, the same day Johnny Torrio sank to a Chicago pavement with five garlic-tipped slugs in him ( He managed to live to a ripe seventy-five and die in bed). After several attempted escapes, he was taken from Atlanta in 1934 to Alcatraz Island.

Dolly remained as faithful as a bird dog, constantly writing to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, begging him to commute her husband’s sentence. When that didn’t work she went to church and asked got to help. But God was out to lunch.

Roy Gardner was finally paroled in 1938, but by this time Dolly’s patience had run out. She had re-married and was living in Napa. Heartbroken Roy landed a job in a chintzy San Francisco hotel as a baker. In 1940, a maid entered his motel room and found a note warning her not to go into the bathroom for the deadly potassium cyanide fumes. Police found the one time “Most Wanted” gangster sitting on the toilet, a suicide. More than any other gangster of his era, Roy Gardner became a touchstone of his time.
 



Roy Gardner