With regard to the past, I’ve always believed we might as well take our skeletons out of the closet and dance with them. But for Centralia’s Shawn Murphy, the bones could yank apart in the whirling dervish doing a pounding polka on steroids.
After I wrote about Roy Gardner, the smiling train bandit and king of escape artists arrested in Centralia on June 17, 1921, Shawn contacted me about his grandfather, a wily horse thief who escaped from jail in Indiana, changed his name and worked as a prison guard and sheriff’s deputy here in Washington.
Shawn’s father died never knowing his dad wasn’t his biological father. Or that he was a thrice-escaped criminal. Even his grandmother never learned about her husband’s nefarious past until seeking a widow’s pension in August 1963 for his military service. In response, Ruby Murphy received a letter from the Federal Bureau of Investigation signed by Director John Edgar Hoover.
“In an effort to be of assistance to you, a search was conducted of our identification files. Fingerprints, possibly those of your husband, were located for Patrick Michel Murphy, also known as Patrick Mickle Murphy, who was reportedly born December 31, 1884, at Louisville, Kentucky,” the letter states. “He was fingerprinted on January 8, 1941, for the position of guard with the Seattle-Tacoma Shipbuilding Company, Seattle, Washington, and again on October 1, 1943, by the Captain of the Port, United States Coast Guard, San Francisco, California. This same individual, as Arthur Samuel Gasaway, enlisted in the United States Navy at Indianapolis, Indiana, on April 5, 1907; however, the Navy service number is not given. His date of birth at that time was listed as May 12, 1884.”
Piecing together his family’s checkered past has kept Shawn busy in retirement. His duplicitous grandfather died in 1952, the year Shawn was born, so they never met.
“My late father was the oldest of ten, living and dying not knowing the man [his dad] wasn’t his blood father and that all nine of his siblings were half-siblings, proven by DNA,” Shawn said.
Gasaway joined the Navy in April 1907, took a leave in September, and never returned. That’s when Gasaway family trees list him as deceased, when in fact he simply assumed new names as he engaged in criminal activity and faced incarceration.
“I’m in the dark as to the reasons for his being held before escapes other than the last one,” Shawn said. “He definitely used different names, but how many is a question. He was definitely a schemer.”
Gasaway could rival Gardner in his talent for escaping. He snuck away from jails and prisons at least three times, and his November 1913 escape in Crawfordsville, Ind., was cited in W.C. Madden’s 2017 book called “The Rotary Jail: Escape-Proof Cells on a Carousel, 1882-1966.”
“A horse thief escaped from the Montgomery County Jail in November 1913,” the book states. “Arthur Gasaway was arrested for stealing a horse and buggy from a livery barn in Crawfordsville and put in the jail. However, he soon escaped somehow. His case came before the grand jury who returned a verdict of horse stealing and larceny against him. He would have likely been convicted and sent to the penitentiary. Gasaway had served time in the Kansas State Prison and a prison in Pennsylvania where he was serving for deserting from the army.”
After this third escape, he fled west and changed his name several times, using both Miller and Green, and perhaps other aliases. Rather than living behind bars, the gutsy guy applied for jobs in law enforcement. He worked as a deputy sheriff in Skagit and King counties in Washington. As a campaign manager who helped Washington Gov. Roland Hartley win election in the 1920s, he received a governor appointment as a traveling guard at the Monroe State Penitentiary. At one point, he traveled to South Dakota to retrieve two prisoners, but they jumped him in Butte, Mont., according to an article in the Monroe (Wash.,) Monitor. One fled, but he captured the other.
“The paper said he arrived with one prisoner and a black eye,” Shawn said.
After the governor’s term ended in 1933, Murphy sold cars in Mount Vernon, opened the Murphy Reidiger car dealership in Seattle, and ran the Everett Gun Club. He worked as a detective at the Seattle and Tacoma shipyards during World War II and later at Todd Shipyard in San Francisco.
It turns out Gasaway was born to Smith Logan and Sarah (Liggins) Gasaway. When he took the name of Patrick Michel Murphy, he listed his parents as Logan and Sarah (Liggins) Murphy, Shawn said, “which obviously made it easier for him to remember his lies.”
When he met Ruby Matilda Robinson in Tacoma, he introduced himself as Patrick Michel Murphy who lived in the Bostwick Hotel. Ruby, a native of Sutter Creek in California, was six months pregnant at the time. The California town of Martell is named for her family.
It wasn’t her first baby.
Ruby’s mother, Sarah (Martell) Robinson, was a French Catholic who married several times, including to Ruby’s father, James Robinson, an Englishman whom she later divorced. After marrying a third time in Victoria, B.C., in 1902, she settled in Skagit County. She’s buried at Bow, Wash.
Ruby was only 15 when her mother died in 1907, so she lived with a Martell aunt and her husband. But when she became pregnant, her aunt sent her to Tacoma to stay with the Sisters of the Visitation, a convent and girls’ boarding school. She had a beautiful singing voice and often performed for the nuns.
When Ruby gave birth to a son, he was adopted privately by one of a relative, perhaps a half-brother and his wife who lived in Concrete, Wash., where he mined, farmed, and did blacksmithing while his wife ran a bordello.
While still living in Tacoma, working at Dewey’s Candy and then for the Scandinavian National Bank, Ruby became pregnant again. That’s when she met Patrick Murphy, the former Arthur Gasaway, a military deserter who was driving a city bus between Tacoma and Camp Lewis, an Army post.
They married in December 1918 in Seattle before a justice of the peace. They had moved to Portland by the time she gave birth to Shawn’s father, William Patrick Murphy, on March 15, 1919. He died at Edmonds in 2007 at 88, two years after the death of his wife, Shawn’s mom, Mahala (Tiffin) Murphy.
The birth certificate lists his father’s name as John Murphy, not Patrick.
“There are five John Murphys in the Tacoma directory at that time,” Shawn said, noting three were married, while two lived near her residence.
“My eldest brother who’s 81 can remember the argument between my dad and Grandma when he realized [his birth certificate] said John Murphy,” Shawn said. “He wanted her to change the birth certificate, but she refused.”
The paperwork lists his father’s birth place as Louisville, Kentucky, which may be why Patrick listed his birthplace as Roswell, Kentucky.
“Was he a friend of these Murphys?” Shawn asked. “We don’t know.”
Patrick and Ruby baptized their eldest son William Patrick at St. James Cathedral in Seattle but lived in San Francisco for a time, running a boardinghouse before moving to Skagit County in Washington.
“I think the marriage to begin with was a ruse for him,” Shawn said. “The family man made it easier. He never could stay at one spot.”
Ruby and Patrick had nine other children. So while his father may in fact be descended from the Murphys—John—his aunts and uncles by blood are Gasaways.
“I’m glad my dad and his siblings are all deceased,” he said. “So they don’t know.”
Shawn’s father worked 44 years as a locomotive engineer for Great Northern, Northern Pacific, and finally Burlington Northern, retiring in 1985. Shawn graduated from Ballard High School in 1970, studied U.S. history at the University of Washington, and worked as a gandy dancer on a railroad track gang in Seattle.
“I grew up in the Scandinavian area,” Shawn said. “My late father used to say us Irish had to get written permission to move in.”
He researched his family tree while living in Arizona and returned to Centralia about a decade ago to live closer to his daughter, son-in-law and 14-year-old granddaughter. “I was our granddaughter’s babysitter since the day she was born,” he said.
He had no indication at first that anything was amiss with his grandfather’s past.
“We had grown up knowing he had been in the Navy and the National Guard,” he said. But then he had trouble tracking down the Navy records for Patrick Murphy.
His mother wrote in his baby book what she knew about different family members — his great-grandfather was Logan Murphy from Dublin, his great-grandmother Sarah Liggins, also from Dublin, and his grandfather Patrick was born in Louisville.
“All right, I can’t find a thing,” Shawn said.
But after discovering the letter from the FBI director identifying his grandfather as Arthur Gasaway from fingerprints, he realized even using aliases his grandfather kept enough of the real information to avoid confusion.
A librarian who researched the family for him in Crawfordsville, Ind., asked him over the phone if he was sitting down, then revealed the story of his grandfather’s criminal past and escapes.
Shawn’s father served two years in the Navy during World War II at Saipan. Another uncle served in the Merchant Marine at Leyte Gulf. But an uncle in the Navy, his father’s namesake—Patrick Michael Murphy Jr.—contracted dysentery at 19 and died. Although he was married, he listed his parents as his beneficiaries, and they used his life insurance to buy a house in San Francisco.
Shawn said his grandmother who liked to drink a bit of alcohol was “fun to be around.”
“One time she was imbibing a bit too much, I guess, and was getting a little mouthy, and one of her sons said, ‘Shut up, Mom!’ And she smacked him with her cane and said, ‘Don't you ever tell me to shut up.’ So he got the cane after she died.”
Shawn and his sister did DNA tests that show they’re Irish, English, and French. He’s one of four children—three boys and a girl.
“So far, I’ve got the most Irish,” he said. “I’d tell my siblings, I’m the real Murphy.”
Shawn served in the Army during the Vietnam War era. He was married for five years the first time. They had a son, Sean, whom he raised after their divorce. Three years later, he wed again, and he and Susan have been married four decades.
He and his wife ran an apartment complex in Tacoma, then bought a place in Buckley but wanted more land for horses. They moved to Nevada when their daughter was 12, then moved back to Buckley 15 months later. After he was injured on the job driving trucks as a Teamster in the shipyards, he retired early in 2008. He required fusions in his neck and back. They moved to Arizona, but after the birth of their granddaughter, he drove to El Paso on Sundays to babysit her until Fridays while his wife worked. When his son-in-law was stationed with the Army in Bahrain, their daughter and granddaughter moved in with them for a year. After they left the military, they settled in Lacey and then Centralia. She works in mental health for the Chehalis tribe and his son-in-law is an electrician.
Shawn has also immersed himself in maritime projects, such as researching a sunken tugboat constructed by Moran Brothers Shipyard in Seattle in which nine men died, with only one body ever recovered. His great-aunt, Ruby’s sister, married the eldest son in the family that owned Gilkey Bros., a tugboat company with offices in Anacortes, Bellingham, and Victoria.
He also volunteers to help research missing military men and women.
But it’s his colorful family history and the genealogical research that keeps him hopping. Patrick Murphy died July 29, 1952, in San Francisco at the age of 67, and his wife, Ruby M. (Robison) Murphy, died on April 30, 1973, at the age of 80.
Shawn’s mother had described her father-in-law — his grandfather — as reserved.
“My late mother who could ask the same question 20 different ways said he was the most secretive man she ever knew!” Shawn said. “Now it’s easy to understand his secretiveness.”
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
