Dive into the fascinating story of Roy Gardner, a notorious American outlaw known, among many things, as the last great American Train Robber in the Roaring Twenties. From his gunrunning days during the Mexican Revolution to his famous escape from the McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary near Steilacoom in 1921, Gardner is widely regarded as “King of the Escape Artists.”

Content Warning: This episode contains descriptions of violence, incarceration, or suicide and may be alarming to some listeners.

This episode is hosted by Tony Williams and features guest Casey McNerthney.

Curated HistoryLink article set for this episode includes:

• Roy Gardner, king of escape artists, flees McNeil Island Penitentiary on September 5, 1921.
• by Duane Colt Denfeld, Ph.D.
• McNeil Island and the Federal Penitentiary, 1841-1981 by Daryl C. McClary
• McNeil Island Corrections Center, 1981-present by Daryl C. McClary

For more information about Roy Gardner, check out Casey’s Post-Intelligencer article:

• Roy Gardner's great McNeil Island escape

For more Field Notes episodes and other HistoryLink podcasts, visit the:

• HistoryLink.org Podcast Page

Casey, tell me about the Labor Day escape from McNeil Island Penitentiary.

Casey: Hmm. This is a great story. So it's, of course it involves baseball. Fifth inning of a prison baseball game at McNeil Island, there's three guys. There's a, a ball that gets hit to center field. Everyone's distracted watching the ball.

I, I'm not sure if he actually said that, but he basically drops him and, uh, takes off running. He gets hit in the leg and keeps on going. I mean, there's just a ton of gunfire. They're trying to kill him running away. One of the prisoners who escapes with Roy Gardner, he says, at least according to the newspaper accounts, "You know, Gardner told us that these fellows couldn't hit the broad side of a barn," and then he dies.

Tony: I'm Tony Williams, and you're listening to HistoryLink Field Notes, the podcast where we explore the history of Washington State one place at a time. This week, I'm in Centralia at the lovely Olympic Club Hotel. It's a historic landmark where you can still get a nice dinner and spend the night. It's owned by McMenamins, a company that operates hotels, bars, and restaurants across the Pacific Northwest, many of them in historic buildings, and it's been lovingly maintained.

Casey: It's so fascinating to look at and think that the view is the same. You know? The buildings are the same, the lath and plaster on the walls are the same, and yeah, it's just, to, to think of, that it's, it's unchanged after 105 years.

Tony: My guest this week is former reporter and current history geek, Casey McNertney.

He was working for the Seattle PI when he came here to the Olympic Club for the first time.

Tony: The Olympic Club is pretty cool. When we rolled up, the staff started telling us about all kinds of stuff, like the tunnels they used to use for bootlegging liquor here back in the 1920s.

Manager: There's a pickle barrel in the restaurant here. I'll show you. Um, and they would bring booze over in pickle barrels, and, like, the tunnels from, like, the train and stuff so that it would be

Tony: discreet.

They have a resident ghost, too.

Manager: There's this in-house ghost that we call Elmer, um, that he is just kind of mischievous. Like, he'll, you know, move chairs around, turn lights off, lights on. Like, just, like, imagine, like, an old man, you know, get off my lawn type person.

It's got these green velvet curtains and period furniture and these gorgeous vintage lamps. At one point or another, McMenamins had people paint quotes onto some of the walls, and my favorite quote is about the subject of our episode today, the smiling bandit himself, king of the escape artists, Roy Gardner.

"Roy Gardner, mail bandit, train robber, king of desperados, who out-Houdini'd Houdini himself at slipping out of locked bracelets, worked his outlaw trade and defied the best in federal, state, and railroad men." That was by a detective, Daniel O'Connor. A detective- A detective ... a police officer said that.

Casey: He's like, "Well, we lost that round."

Tony: The room we're here to record in is actually called the Roy Gardner Room. It's called that because Roy was captured here just before that daring escape during the baseball game we talked about in the intro. But that wasn't even his first prison escape. It was his fourth.

Casey: First one was in Mexico, uh, when he was, by some accounts, gonna face a firing squad.

Tony: Two escapes from trains?

Casey: Yeah.

Tony: So this guy is, like, the consummate escape artist.

Casey: He is, yeah.

Tony: So tell me about this first article that we're gonna talk about today.

Casey: Duane Cole Denfeld wrote this

As always, you can find a link to the article, and all of the articles we talk about today, in the show notes. There's even an audio version.

His name in the fight, Young Fitzsimmons.

Tony: Okay, wait. How did he end up in a Mexican jail in the first place?

Casey: Well, so he's, he, he's just running guns, you know, the, as you do.

Tony: Okay, if you didn't catch that, Casey just said, "He's running guns, you know, as you do." But it's even better than that, actually. Roy's running guns for the army of Mexican revolutionary Venustiano Carranza, a guy who later becomes president of Mexico.

In any case-

Casey: He gets caught for that, gets busted for it, gets sentenced to death by a firing squad, but, but he escapes. That's the first of his escapes. Gets out of Dodge, crosses over the border, gets back to the US.

Tony: And then becomes a prizefighter?

Casey: Yeah.

Tony: But Roy's career as a prizefighter doesn't last long.

Of course, once he's out, the good behavior comes to an end.

Casey: He always goes back to his old ways.

Tony: He kind of can't help himself.

I mean, that's roughly a couple million bucks now.

Tony: Roy gets away with the mail pouch, but he doesn't exactly disappear off into the sunset.

Casey: He gets caught trying to bury it. Which is just like- Like a

Tony: pirate.

Casey: Yeah, I mean, that, that like, it's just like, oh man, that's gotta be so frustrating, 'cause you're so close.

Uh, he's on this train with the US marshals. He distracts them, grabs one of their guns, and says, "Hey, look, I'm gonna handcuff you together. This isn't gonna work out. I'm gonna take off." That's not a good day for the marshals.

Tony: No, it's a bad day for them. He stays on the run for almost a year, first in Canada and then back in the States.

Casey: And that was after another train robbery where he stole 175K in securities. What's interesting about this, they never found the money.

Tony: Oh, wow.

Casey: So I'm sure there's people that are still looking for it, but- Yeah

What I... It's interesting is, how did he get it? Who put it there for him? Like, how does this get on the marshals? You probably won't ever know definitively. Anyway, he pulls this revolver on the guards, says, "Look, there's a standpipe here. I'm gonna handcuff you to it." Uh, can you imagine, like, what those two guys- Being

Tony: the second group of guys- Yeah

to get a gun pulled on you- Yeah ... by the prisoner in a train after you just were told probably-

Casey: Yeah, told

Tony: nothing ... that, "Hey, you gotta watch out for this guy. He pulled a gun on these two guys on a train a while back."

Casey: Yep. I don't know who those guys are. I guarantee you they didn't get promoted that year.

Or the next year. Yeah. Like, they had... They didn't get the Christmas bonus that year.

Tony: They're like, "We told you guys." They're like, "He came out of the bathroom with a gun. We don't know how he got it."

Casey: It's a real shame that we never get the account of the people who saw them for the first time handcuffed to the standpipe, where they're like, "Hey, boss, what's up?"

He tells everyone that he's in Centralia recovering from an industrial accident, that his face is covered in burns, so he can't take the bandages off. There's just one problem, a local police officer named Lewis Sonny. He's heard about Roy's latest escape near Castle Rock, and when he sees this bandaged man around town, he gets suspicious.

So Sonny tracks down his hotel room. Again, this hotel room.

It was about 11:00 in the morning. Gardner says, "You got me all wrong. I ain't never been to Castle Rock in my life. I'm in pretty bad shape from my burns." And so Sonny still handcuffs him.

Tony: Sure enough, they take the bandages off, no burns. There's Roy Gardner in the flesh. Roy's capture is major news across the Northwest.

You gotta understand that by this point, Roy Gardner is a bonafide celebrity. Newspapers were covering his escape like it was the World Series. They call Roy debonair, spectacular, a super bandit. The Seattle PI leads with this massive picture of Roy and Lewis Sunney smiling together outside the hotel.

He gets sentenced to 50 years.

Casey: So when he gets to McNeil, actually gets there, they examine him, and they say, "He's, he's one of the most athletic guys we've ever seen," which has to be true, because how do you do what you've done so far?

Tony: Yeah.

Casey: You know, even you could argue j- just as a prizefighter, that's enough to be pretty athletic.

In good

Tony: shape,

Casey: yeah. Yeah, great shape.

Tony: Now, Roy is feeling himself so hard that he literally tells the judge who sentences him, "I'm gonna escape again." So everybody knew he was gonna try to get off the island, but nobody thought he could actually do it until that crazy Labor Day baseball game. McNeil was a fortress.

I wanna take a detour here into the history of the prison itself, 'cause it's pretty interesting, and that brings us to our second and third HistoryLink articles for the week.

Daryl McCleary did a good two-part story. The first one covers McNeil Island from 1841 to

Casey: in 1875. In 1889, Washington becomes a state, was basically the, the federal prison of, uh, the Washington Territory. It lasts as a federal prison for many, many decades. It was pretty costly to upkeep, and by the time they, they closed it in 1976, it was the, the last federal penitentiary that was accessible only by boat or helicopter.

Tony: Oh, wow.

Casey: It was still operating. Everyone thinks of Alcatraz, but there was McNeil after that.

Tony: Over the years, it housed some pretty wild prisoners.

Casey: Charles Manson was on McNeil. Uh, the guy who was the Birdman of Alcatraz w- was on McNeil once.

Casey: It runs as a federal prison until 1976. It was pretty costly to keep up. By the '70s, they realized, "We need a major rebuild of this. We've gotta either pump a ton of money into it, millions of bucks into it, or say, 'Hey, we're gonna phase this out.'" Also in the 1970s, Washington State's Department of Corrections needs more prison space, or a- at the time, they said they did.

Tony: a state prison instead of a, of a federal one.

Tony: Casey was there for those closing ceremonies.

He actually reported on them for the PI.

Casey: I thought the closing of a prison would be people like, "Well, all right. This is all kind of cut and dry. It's a prison. There's not a lot of emotion to it." And there was so much emotion to it.

Tony: Really?

Casey: People who grew up on, on the island, who were s- sons and daughters of the prison staff, loved growing up there.

There was a woman who, who had her childhood there, and she said, "It was the safest place to be. We left our keys in the car all the time. We never locked our doors, and we never worried about walking anywhere. We, we had no worry about predators, 'cause they were all on the island with us, but they were all locked up."

Tony: He actually recorded the whole closing ceremony. He shared some of the tape with me.

Tony: The things that I remember most about being on McNeil Island are the things that make me smile. One of those being that you really never had a bad hair day until you come across on a speedboat.

Boy, this is miserable. Apologize. That's all I can do But no matter how many times McNeil gets shut down, it somehow stays open. The prison's closed, but people convicted of sex crimes still end up there today.

Casey: The Department of Social and Health Services has the Special Commitment Center, where if you're civilly committed as a sexually violent predator, which i- is a designation under the law for people who are very serious sex offenders, that's where you can be committed to.

It's actually pretty controversial. State law requires that people locked up there have annual evaluations to decide if they should be moved to a less restrictive facility. But there are decades of lawsuits and investigations alleging that a lot of residents don't have enough access to therapy to even have a shot at getting out.

On the other hand, there are people who think the law doesn't go far enough. Anyways, all of that to say McNeil Island had and has 150 years of history of being pretty much impossible to get off of. And this gets back to why it was such a big deal that Roy Gardner broke out and swam to shore.

Casey: Some authorities thought, well, he, he must have drowned.

Tony: ocean, across the Sound

Casey: Across the Sound, yeah.

Way farther, much colder, and already been shot once.

Tony: Yeah.

Casey: So like, this guy must have been such a physical specimen and, and he makes it

Tony: And after he gets to the mainland, Roy makes his way south toward California. He's not gonna get caught in Centralia again.

Casey: What Gardner said later, and there's no real way to verify this, but what he said was that he went to the town of Raymond, and he bleached his, his dark hair with a bottle of peroxide and make it kind of reddish so he wouldn't be super obvious, 'cause everybody and their brother was looking for him.

Tony: Yeah.

He says later that he caught a freight train to San Diego, and then after a few days went south to Mexico. He says... Oh, I love this quote. He said, "You know, I could have existed down there, but y- you know, then you can, you can exist in the penitentiary."

Tony: Yeah.

Casey: Like, like, like, yeah, like, like my life's for adventure.

Tony: Yeah, I'm not here to exist.

Casey: Right.

Tony: Yeah.

Casey: Yeah. Which, which is, which is, really tells you a lot about him.

Tony: Pretty soon Roy is back to his old tricks.

Casey: He goes through Arizona, he's in Phoenix. He has a mask a- and a handgun, which is unusual, but he holds up a mail car clerk. What's interesting is this clerk must have been a pretty big dude or a good fighter, 'cause he fights back and he pins him.

Tony: Yeah.

Casey: And he holds Roy Gardner, who's a big athletic dude, until the cops show up. And the clerk admitted, this is interesting, the clerk admitted that Gardner had multiple chances to shoot him, but he didn't.

Tony: Yeah.

I love this quote. Uh, he said, "I always get caught like this, but I'd just as soon be caught in a one horse town as in San Francisco."

Tony: But despite the bravado, this is where Roy's string of miraculous escapes comes to a close.

Casey: So he was sentenced to another 25 years in Leavenworth. He claimed, "You're not gonna hold me, that's not gonna work."

Tony: Roy serves 17 years. He gets paroled in 1938 And when he gets out, he gets greeted by a familiar face.

Casey: So the same cop from Centralia who busted him, he's the guy who goes to meet him when he gets out of prison.

Tony: Wild.

Lewis Sunny and Roy Gardner have stayed in touch. Lewis Sunny has gone from small town cop to Los Angeles impresario. He hires Roy to go around giving lectures on how crime never pays, and they start working on a film about Roy's life. Roy Gardner gets a kind of second life as a celebrity reformed criminal.

Casey: There's also a lot of news photos at the time where he's hawking his book, Helcatraz, and talking to people about how crime doesn't pay, and he's always signing the books, "Sincerely yours, Roy Gardner." Here's a copy of one of them. Look at this.

Tony: Whoa. Helcatraz: The Rock of Despair, the Tomb of the Living Dead by Roy Gardner.

Yeah. Oh my God, it's signed.

Casey: Yeah. "

Casey: 1939." Yeah.

Tony: Where did you get this?

Casey: Oh, off of eBay. There's somebody that put it up one day. I mean, I mean, you could buy, like, you know, somebody's old socks on eBay if you wanted to.

Tony: Unfortunately, this era of Roy's life, the celebrity reformed criminal, doesn't last long, and this is where his story goes from an adventure to a tragedy.

Tony: Yeah. Roy's wife had divorced him while he was at Alcatraz. The film that he and Lewis Sunny had been working on flops at the box office. They end up having a pretty bad falling out. They both sue each other, saying the other one's been cheating them out of money. And Roy, [00:23:00] well, Roy loses the will to go on.

And call the police." So, uh, officers open the door, and they find Rudy庭园 Gardner crumpled up on the floor, um, i- in his shirt sleeves and, and he dropped pellets in his water bowl that created this, the, these fumes, um, that were sometimes used to execute, uh, condemned criminals, and he wrote this note that's so sad.

He said-

Tony: Casey starts to choke up a little here

Tony: Yeah.

Casey: And he writes this note and it says, "Please let me down as light as possible, boys. Um, I've played ball with you all the way, and now you should pitch me a slow one and let me hit it."

Tony: Talking about the press coverage of his death?

Casey: Yep.

Tony: Yeah.

Casey: Yeah.

Tony: Ever the showman.

Casey: E- ever the showman, yeah. And that, um, his last request was that newsmen not mention his daughter's married name, because her in-laws didn't know that she was Gardner's daughter, and a separate sealed note was addressed to her.

Tony: Casey chokes up again.

Casey: Isn't that weird?

Tony: It's, I mean, it's understandable. It's, I feel like you have spent a lot of time learning about this dude. You've read his writing.

Casey: Yeah.

Tony: You know? Like, you've got a connection to him.

But it's just a little bit more emotional for this guy because it's so prominent. And there isn't that happy ending. Yeah. You know? B- and his last request of, "Please don't name my daughter," newsmen named her within two days, and-

Tony: Horrible ...

Casey: put her photo up everywhere and, you know, and that blindsided her, then she had to tell her relatives and, you know, it, it's...

Tony: There's something really beautiful to me about the ability to connect with someone across time and space, even someone like Roy Gardner, who had such a sad ending. And I'm really grateful that places like this room, here at the Olympic Club, have been preserved so that we can deepen those connections.

Like, you're still in the part of the story that's the front page news, where nobody's physically hurt yet. It's just a really good story. It's a good headline grabber, and it's a great read. So when you're in this room, it's really joyful. You know, there's this idea, I think, of like, "Yeah, I might get caught, [00:27:00] but you know what?

My life's still gonna be great, and I'm gonna have a lot of fun, and the press is gonna love it, and I'm gonna get my picture in the paper and, like, I'm gonna get out eventually, and they can't hold me." And for a while, he was right.

Tony: For a while, he was right.

Well, um, thank you so much, Casey. It's been lovely getting to talk to you about Roy Gardner, and, um, I'm so glad to have learned this story and, and gotten to visit this special, special room.

Casey: You too, Toni. Thanks for talking about it and, and for putting up with my, my very long-winded answers.

Tony: Oh, they were, they were absolutely perfect.

Jennifer: Initially, the prison operated with a staff of three guards appointed by the US Marshal.

Although prisoners were usually transported among Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia, and Port Townsend by steamboat, until 1882, most of the trips to and from McNeil Island were by rowboat, a slow, awkward, and sometimes dangerous trip. Marshal Charles Hopkins hired Neil O. Henley as a prison guard. He was a seasoned sailor and boat builder, and shortly after coming to the island, decided to design and build a sailboat for the prison.

With the help of two experienced prisoners, Henley built a 24-foot sloop that made mail and supply runs to Steilacoom much faster, easier, and safer.

If you like the show, please rate and review it on your favorite podcast app. It really helps us out. And share it with a friend. Special thanks this week to the ultimate Roy Gardner sympathizer, Casey McNertney, and to everyone over at McMenamins who helped get this one recorded, in particular Jon Smart, Rene Ignacio, and Cheryl Rumley.