Alcatraz Ghost Story, page 14
Dear Sir—This appeal to you is from a penitent criminal fugitive seeking just one more chance to prove to the world that I can be a man among men. I am now a fugitive convict with two twenty-five-year sentences awaiting me. It is true, Mr. Harding, I have committed a number of crimes for which I am truly sorry.
I have spent many sleepless nights in and out of prison trying to figure a way to atone for and undo the things I have done. I have broken the heart of the dearest little woman that ever lived, my wife, and my little baby, Jean, is growing up with the stigma of her father’s shame upon her. Mr. Harding, I am going to ask you to grant me one more chance by suspending the sentences now awaiting me.
I am not asking for, nor am I entitled to a pardon. In fact, I am not entitled to any consideration from you whatever, but I am hoping and praying that you will grant me my one and only chance to prove to the world that a criminal can reform and be an asset to society and a good husband and father.
Mr. Harding, if you will grant my appeal I promise before my God that you will never regret it. Let me be a protege of yours, to point to in years to come as a man to whom you extended a helping hand and pulled from the mire when everything seemed lost.
If necessary I will work my fingers to the very bone to repay those whom I have wronged. The man doesn’t live who is more sorry than I am for the crimes he has committed.
As I understand it, the object of sending a man to prison is not to punish him, but to reform him and try to return him to civil life a useful member of society. If you will return me to society and my wife and baby, Mr. Harding, I solemnly promise that I will devote the remainder of my life to honesty and integrity.
By looking up my record you will find that I have committed a number of so called desperate robberies. That is a mistake because I am not a desperate man. I have what the police call a ‘clean’ record. In my entire criminal career I have never killed or injured any person. Please bear that in mind, Mr. Harding, when you decide this appeal.
I am now confined to my bed suffering from two bullet wounds that I received in my recent escape from the federal prison at McNeil Island. Mr. Harding, if it takes mental and physical suffering to reform a man, then I have been reformed a hundred times over, because I don’t believe the man who lives who has suffered both mentally and physically as I have.
In closing, let me ask you to please grant me just one more chance to make good, If I fail in any sense of the word, then I am ready and willing to go back and serve every day of my time.
Yours in all sincerity, (Signed) Roy G. Gardner
In addition to his appeal to President Harding, Roy provided a detailed description of the escape to the editors of The San Francisco Bulletin. He wrote that he was indeed shot twice; the first bullet hit him in the fleshy part of his thigh and caused him to stumble, but he managed to continue moving. At this point, Inmate Bogart passed him, but Bogart only made it about twenty yards further before spinning around after getting struck in the back and collapsing. As Roy passed the prone Bogart, Roy said he felt “awfully lonesome about that time. Seven rifles spitting at me and badly wounded with 75 yards to go.”
The second bullet caught Roy in the shin, and he fell but managed to get himself up and climb over a second fence, where he then hid beneath the brush beyond the perimeter.
In Roy’s account, Warden Maloney and Dr. Jento moved within ten feet of him and when the order went up to set the brush on fire, Roy “figured that was no place for Dollie Gardner’s husband” and he crawled back to the fence. He remained hidden against the fence and around dusk he heard reporters asking Warden Maloney questions, including an inquiry of the name of the guard who fatally shot Impyn. Warden Maloney responded that he didn’t know and wouldn’t tell him even if he did know.
Roy wrote, “I could tell him who shot me all right.”
Roy remained hidden and at midnight, he coughed to create a diversion from the guard patrolling the fields. When the guard approached to investigate, Roy moved in the opposite direction to take shelter in a nearby prison barn, where he was able to get water “that revived me like a good shot of hop.” He collapsed in the loft of the barn and passed out for about two hours due to loss of blood. He remained hidden in the barn in the daytime and at night he milked the cows for sustenance: “That milk sure was a life saver.”
Roy said that he remained hidden in the barn for two days and two nights, and then made his way to the north part of the island under the cover of fog and darkness. On Saturday and Sunday, he observed the boat traffic and then early Monday morning he made his swim to Fox Island. “If I had not had the tide with me I never would have made it because it was the coldest swim I ever expect to take. It probably felt colder on account of my having lost so much blood, but at that I believe a polar bear would freeze in that water. I thought I was a powerful swimmer, but I don’t think so now. That swim sure got my goat.”
Once on Fox Island, Roy explained, he lived off the land, eating berries and dairy milk from cows. Roy concluded by saying, “I can’t tell you where I went after I left Fox Island because you would have a line on my present whereabouts if I told you that. I can say this much, though: I am with a friend who is a real friend and here I will stay until my leg is entirely healed, if it takes six months. Please tell my little wife not to worry. I am sure everything will be o.k. soon. I wish you would tell the whole world for me that I am through as a criminal.”
Roy’s final request to the editors of the San Francisco Bulletin was that they publish President Harding’s response to his appeal.
“Ridiculous,” was Warden Maloney’s reaction to Roy’s appeal to President Harding and his description of the escape. “It’s all a fake; it would be impossible for any man to swim to Fox Island as this letter states. No man of intelligence would attempt it. It’s the farthest point of land from McNeil Island, with the exception of only the mainland at Stellacom. It’s better than two miles across there and I’ll agree with whoever wrote that bunk that a polar bear would freeze to death in the water.”
When the news of Roy’s appeal and his accounts of the escape began its eastward migration from San Francisco to the other big city newspapers of the country, Dollie added her own appeal to Roy. With Roy’s fate unknown, Dollie canceled her plans to move to Tacoma. She remained in Napa and stressed that she knew nothing of his whereabouts.
Using reporters as her surrogate voice she pleaded to Roy, “In your letter to President Harding you said you had ended your criminal career. To show you really mean this, go back to McNeil Island. You can not be a hunted man and lead an honorable life. Show President Harding and everyone you are the man I have always said you were. Most anyone can be taken back, but it takes a Roy Gardner and a real thoroughbred to go back of his own accord and take his chances with the rest. Roy, do this one thing for my sake and little Jean’s.”
It is unclear if President Harding ever considered Roy’s appeal, but a wealthy citrus grower in Monrovia, California, named Hal Siemens added his own two cents to the discussion—or in this case, 200,000 cents—when he wired President Harding a proposal where he would employ Roy at two thousand dollars a year and give him a “clean start again” if Roy’s appeal were granted. Nothing ever came of this proposal.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Raymond, Washington
September 30, 1921
About sixty miles off the ragged Pacific coast of Washington lies the town of Chehalis, a convenient pivot point for those looking to make a straight-ahead journey south toward Portland and further still to California. In their own version of the expression, Why buy the cow if the milk is free? a motorist stole some gasoline from a Chehalis garage to put into their stolen car. While the thief wasn’t caught, witnesses took down the license number of the car as it sped off, and it was determined that the car belonged to George Peoples of Raymond, Washington, who had reported his car stolen to Raymond chief of police Shumway.
Shumway was already following up on a lead from the cook at the restaurant owned by George Wilbur. The cook said he saw a man who looked like Roy Gardner at the restaurant and that Wilbur instructed his staff that this man got to eat for free. Shumway wanted to talk to Wilbur about this, but Wilbur had abruptly left town along with the rest of his immediate family, who left separately a day before he did. He left behind a pile of unpaid bills, and a group of neighborhood men chuckling at his earlier tall tale that he knew the whereabouts of Roy Gardner’s California loot.
Chief Shumway also got a tip that a man who looked like Roy Gardner was seen at a rooming house upstairs from a local pool hall. Upon investigation, Shumway learned that one of the rooms had been recently vacated and the previous occupant left behind bandages and other medical supplies. In addition, a writing tablet was found in the room. At first glance the tablet appeared blank, but the indentation of the handwriting from the torn-off pages could be seen. The indentations could be read in places, and the words matched the sentences that appeared in Roy’s letters to the editors of The San Francisco Bulletin.
It all added up: Roy Gardner had been hiding in Raymond, sheltered by George Wilbur. Shumway made this announcement, and an arrest warrant was put out for Wilbur.
The car belonging to George Peoples was found abandoned at a Vancouver, Washington, auto camp. At the time of its discovery, it was surmised it had been ditched several days prior.
George Wilbur mailed a letter to Shumway from San Francisco, saying he hadn’t been aware that there was an arrest warrant for him until he read about it in the newspapers. Wilbur wrote that he would return to Raymond to settle things. San Francisco Marshal James Holohan and a group of his officers surrounded the San Francisco address where Wilbur mailed his letter, but Wilbur never made an appearance. It soon became apparent that Wilbur would do his part to contribute to the population decline of Raymond, Washington, as he never returned there, either.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
California
October 1921
Nighttime inched toward the domination of each individual day and crisp breezes punctuated the diminishing sunlight as the West Coast settled into autumn. Once authorities pieced together that Roy had stayed in Raymond for approximately four days, they made a credible assumption that he was back in the San Francisco Bay Area. The dragnet was already tight, especially around Dollie in Napa, where the authorities guessed Roy might try to return.
But then a group of teenagers from central California came forward to tell the police that a man calling himself Roy Gardner had taken them on a harrowing hell ride. The escapade started in Bakersfield, where the teenagers accepted a stranger’s offer to give them a ride to Los Angeles, a spontaneous idea the teenagers came up with in a fit of juvenile wanderlust. The ride would be an adventure, they thought, and they had an uncle in Los Angeles to give their impulsive plan a semblance of direction.
After the teenagers accepted the ride from the stranger, the driver hit the accelerator, stop signals be damned. The driver recklessly sped through washouts, and he flashed a pearl-handled pistol after declaring he was Roy Gardner. Despite the presence of the pistol, the man gave no indication he intended to shoot anyone. His driving style would be the weapon if they didn’t survive the trip.
The man mocked physics while taking curves too fast, and when darkness fell, he often turned off the headlights as other cars approached. The car was stolen, the man said. They stopped at a diner for food, and the teenagers noticed that the man had a pronounced limp, which he said was a result of getting shot in the legs during his McNeil escape.
Once within Los Angeles city limits, the man took a circuitous route, saying he was looking for a new car to steal before making his final sprint to Tijuana. Eventually, he dropped the boys off at Seventh and Spring Streets, in the heart of the business district, at 11:00 p.m.
The teens immediately went to the Los Angeles police and described their tale. The police showed the teenagers photos of Roy Gardner, and the boys said they matched the man who picked them up. The all-points bulletin went out, and authorities scrambled to create roadblocks at the border.
A day later, a man approached the police and confessed that he was the one who picked up the teenagers and claimed to be Roy Gardner as a joke. Despite Prohibition, the whole thing sounded like a bad idea hatched while drunk rather than a sober man’s idea of a prank.
Once again, the authorities had no idea where the real Roy Gardner was.
Mailing a letter wasn’t as severe a crime as robbing a mail train, but the act would get a doctor accused of aiding and abetting a fugitive. A doctor in Newport, Washington, a sparsely populated area near the Canadian border, wrote a letter to a colleague in Los Angeles reporting that a wounded and bedraggled Roy Gardner had approached his back door in the middle of the night. The doctor treated Roy’s wounds and gave him a sandwich, and Roy disappeared as quickly as he arrived. The recipient of this letter presented it to the authorities. Despite his adherence to the Hippocratic Oath, the doctor who wrote the letter had some explaining to do.
As it turns out, the Roy Gardner in question was a mentally ill local man also named Roy Gardner, who was affiliated with an Iowa insane asylum close to where the doctor lived about a dozen years prior. Although Roy Gardner the bandit spent some time in Iowa and was increasingly leaning on the story that his brain injury had caused his outburst of criminality, the whole thing was a coincidence of names where the timeline didn’t match up.
One month after Roy’s escape from McNeil, a writer for the Stockton Daily Evening Record wrote, “Seeing Roy Gardner is going to be popular from now on. We may as well be prepared to be told that he was seen at four points of the compass many miles apart on the same day.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Moose Jaw, Canada
October 1921
By mid-October, Canadian authorities became concerned that Roy Gardner, American train bandit and Harry Houdini doppelganger, had become an expatriate. A lone robber held up a Dominion Express Company train as it rolled through Saskatchewan en route to Moose Jaw and looted the safe. The job had the hallmarks of Roy Gardner: a train was involved, and the bandit worked alone.
Without hard evidence, however, this was speculation. The editors of the Saskatoon Daily Star opined, “We doubt that Roy Gardner the Oregon bandit had a hand in the Moose Jaw express robbery. You see, it is customary for Roy to report his activities to a San Francisco newspaper, which as yet has received no communication from him to that effect.”
The Moose Jaw robbery went unsolved, and Roy Gardner was yet to be found.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Islas de Todos Santos, Baja California
October 1921
While one theory had Roy Gardner robbing trains in Canada, others suspected he hijacked a boat and sailed into the waters of Mexico, the United States’ neighbor in the opposite direction. A fishing crew on the Colleen picked up a stranded boat, Spindrift, near Todos Santos in Baja California. Its lone occupant was a shaken Norwegian sailor named Anton Krugh.
The crew of the Colleen towed the Spindrift back to San Diego. Krugh reported he was hijacked on the Los Angeles docks, where the Spindrift maintained its primary port. The armed hijacker ordered Krugh to navigate the vessel to Honolulu. By the time the boat got out into the rough, open sea, it lost its course and an unsecured boom swung and hit the hijacker in the back of the head. He fell into the tumultuous ocean and drowned. Krugh said the man never revealed his name during this ordeal, but Krugh hypothesized that it was Roy Gardner.
Investigators searching for Roy Gardner added Davy Jones’s locker to their list of possible locations.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Napa, California
October 1921
For Dollie, there were no more cheerful letters from Roy once he escaped from McNeil Island. Instead she waited for phone calls that also never arrived. She waited for a postcard like the one she received from Vancouver, Canada, the first time Roy made his escape from the authorities. But now there was nothing.
Dollie felt like bait. All she wanted was to see Roy, or at least to know he was safe, but her presence was an enticement to lure her husband into the bear trap of police surrounding her Napa residence. She existed in a murky purgatory where she had a husband but felt like a widow. Jean, now four years old, had so many questions that Dollie could not answer.
More than anything was the all-encompassing hardness of it all. Some friends and family expressed support, but so many people mocked and criticized her for the actions of her husband. Then there were those who denounced Dollie’s efforts to portray Roy as a good man despite the off-script bad streak of the past year and a half. In Roy’s narrative published in the San Francisco Bulletin, Roy said he was staying with a friend. Which friend? Was it the police officer Louis Sonney from Centralia, who took a liking to Roy and mailed her fifty dollars for her own troubles? She didn’t know, and she didn’t know how to ask without possibly jeopardizing Roy. She looked for a job to have something to disappear into and started working at a department store in San Francisco.
On one of the evenings she was in San Francisco, Roy arrived unannounced at Dollie’s sister’s house in Napa’s Gordon Valley. According to Dollie’s sister, Martha, Roy arrived on a stolen motorcycle and stayed for only fifteen minutes. In this brief time period, he hugged Jean and most likely told Jean embellished stories of his life on the road, with certain chapters censored. And then he was gone, a human ghost story. This was to be Dollie’s life: her married last name a rumor, her spouse an apparition.
