Editor's note: To ready part one of this two-part installment, visit https://tinyurl.com/kth99h8u.
At McMenamins Olympic Club in Centralia earlier this month, Seattle speaker Casey McNerthney presented “Roy Gardner’s Great Escapes” as part of the History Pub program.
He described the early 20th century train robber’s colorful yet tragic life and death, accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation showing historic photos and newspaper headlines about the so-called “king of the escape artists.”
Roy George Gardner was born in early January 1884 in Trenton, Missouri, to George W. and Harriet (Moberly) Gardner, who already had a daughter, Vera, and later added another child. His father was listed as a hotel keeper and later a mining broker, according to a biography.
As a teenager, Roy enlisted in the Army at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas but was discharged a month later, likely because he was only 15. He later lived in a boarding school for troubled youth in Colorado before going to work in the mines.
At 24, during a mining accident in Bisbee, Arizona, he suffered a severe head injury when a rock struck him. It left him in a coma for several days and hospitalized for weeks. Surgeons performed an operation to remove crushed bones.
“I don’t really want to have brain surgery anytime,” McNerthney said. “I definitely don’t want to have it in about 1910, but he did. He didn’t have a choice, and he had a pretty significant chunk of the back of his brain removed.”
People said the injury and operation changed his personality. McNerthney also noted that Louis Sonney, the Centralia police officer who arrested Gardner at the Hotel Oxford in 1921 and later befriended him, wrote that the train robber’s mother was institutionalized near the end of her life.
“You wonder what made him kind of veer off,” McNerthney said. “Was it severe mental illness that was inherited, or was it that rock that crushed part of his head? We don’t really know, but it was something.”
As a soldier of fortune, Gardner tried to smuggle guns across the border to rebels, but Mexican soldiers captured him. He was sentenced to death, but inside the Mexico City jail, he sawed through a wooden door in his cell with a knife and escaped with three others. Only he survived.
“One thing that you’ll know about Roy Gardner is that he was an incredible athlete,” McNerthney said, noting that he boxed in Colorado as “Young Fitzsimmons” and lost only one bout.
Gardner moved to California and, after dark on Christmas Eve in 1910, he passed a jewelry store on Market Street in San Francisco, McNerthney said. Although he had money in his pocket and no plans for committing a crime, he felt an uncontrollable impulse to break into the store and steal the jewelry, prompted by “disembodied spirits” that told him to do it.
Gardner excelled at “escaping from capable officers in a most desperate manner, and he frequently took his life in his hands when committing crimes,” according to Sonney.
“He developed an exaggerated idea of himself, and was vain and loved notoriety, and sought excitement,” Sonney said. “But his real character and purposes are little understood.”
After his capture, the 27-year-old Gardner was sent to San Quentin State Prison on Feb. 16, 1911. When prisoners rioted, he saved the life of a guard and received early parole in 1913. He returned to mining in California, then sold appliances and later worked as a welder at the Mare Island Navy Yard at Vallejo.
While at a candy store there, he met and fell in love with Florence Irene “Dolly” Nelson, whom he married in May 1916 in Solano County. She remained loyal to him for years.
Their daughter, Jean, was born in 1918, the same year he registered for the draft. On that paperwork, Gardner listed his middle name as George and gave his birth date as June 5, 1886.
Gardner also became close to his brother-in-law, Dolly’s brother Bob Nelson. They opened a welding shop together, although he often complained of dreadful pains in his head and unseen spirits telling him to do things. He saved money and bought a house but then sold the business without consulting his wife and gambled away the money at a racetrack in Tijuana.
Broke, he robbed a mail truck in San Diego and netted $131,000 from the registered mail, which McNerthney said would be more than $1 million today. After wandering around in a reckless manner, he aroused the suspicion of officers who arrested him. He was sentenced to 25 years in McNeil Island, a federal penitentiary in Washington.
As the train passed through San Francisco, he asked to see his daughter. While police officers agreed, they never sent a telegram to his wife. According to Sonney, who later wrote about the notorious robber he arrested, “He felt terribly hurt. He says that was the first time he ever felt bitter against the law or officers.”
On the train north, Gardner noticed an officer’s pistol within reach and motioned out the window, saying he saw a deer ahead. As the officers looked, he grabbed the gun and, when the train slowed near Portland, he escaped.
Newspaper accounts listed him as fleeing to Hawaii, Australia and other destinations, but he stole a motorboat, a motorcycle and a car to travel east, where he took a welding inspection job and traveled through Minnesota, North Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa and Illinois. Wanted posters described him as standing 5-feet-9 with brown hair mixed with gray, gray-blue eyes, a 200-pound muscular build, and ruddy complexion with freckles, hairy arms and six gold teeth on his upper right front bridge covered with porcelain. Some posters even offered a $5,000 reward for his arrest.
But, McNerthney said, he grew homesick for his wife and daughter, so he called and arranged to meet Dolly on a farm in Napa. Telephone operators listening in on the conversation tipped off the police, but he avoided sheriff’s deputies. “Dolly begged him not to kill under any circumstance,” McNerthney said.
Gardner escaped but robbed another rail car in Roseville and, while playing cards at the Porter House hotel in town, was captured and sentenced again to McNeil Island to serve two 25-year sentences. This time, aboard the Northern Pacific train, he wore an Oregon boot — a band of heavy iron locked around his ankle — and handcuffs. However, he persuaded officers to free him while he used the restroom about 2 in the morning on June 11, 1921. He retrieved a hidden .32-caliber gun, handcuffed the U.S. marshals to the train, and robbed them of all but $5 (so they could pay for food when they returned to town).
“Now, a great question is, how did he get a gun, and how did they not notice that?” McNerthney asked. “That’s a question that I’m not sure will exactly get answered.”
Gardner disembarked at Castle Rock and fled into the brush.
“So eventually these officers show up with no Roy Gardner, and they’re the ones without their money who are handcuffed,” McNerthney said. “It must have been a pretty tough day. Probably didn’t get their Christmas bonus on that one, but it’s just a great story.”
Headlines blared news of his escape. A massive manhunt ensued. His wife wrote a column published in a San Francisco newspaper, saying, “I know in my heart that Roy is just a great reckless boy. He has always been crazy about adventure.”
Gardner evaded pursuers, riding into Centralia on a cowcatcher mounted on the front of a locomotive. He registered at the Dale Hotel, enjoyed dinner and took in a three-day annual City-Home Products Educational Exhibit at the Maple Street auditorium, which today is the Rollerdrome.
Fearing discovery, he moved to the Hotel Oxford in the 1913 Robinson Block.
After seeing his picture posted near the train depot, he decided a hat and overcoat wouldn’t conceal his identity well, so he purchased cotton and bandages at a drug store. Inside his room, he wrapped his hands and head, leaving only one eye and his nose exposed. He ventured next door for breakfast at the Olympic Club, where he told a waiter he had suffered gasoline burns in Tacoma, McNerthney said.
That’s when Sonney spied the man covered in gauze and covertly trailed him as he visited St. Mary’s Catholic Church and Washington Lawn Cemetery. He followed him to the Hotel Oxford (now part of the Olympic Club), knocked on his door, and saw a gun in the room. He arrested him, and a doctor removed the bandages.
Headlines in The Seattle Post-Intelligencer noted, “Desperado cheerful in jail and jests with callers.”
In honor of his making the arrest, McNerthey said, Sonney, who was four years older than Gardner, received a new Buick but gave half of his reward money to Gardner’s wife and daughter, according to a 2011 Historylink.org article.
Even after his incarceration at McNeil Island, he didn’t stay long. On Sept. 5, 1921, during a Holiday Ball Game in the prison yard, he and two others cut a hole in the fence and dashed for freedom during the fifth inning while guards watched a hit toward centerfield.
Guards fired at least 75 rounds, shooting both of Gardner’s companions. One died immediately and another lay dying while an injured Gardner with bullet wounds in each leg slipped away.
McNerthney quoted the last words of one of the men, acknowledging they may be true or perhaps simply an effort to sell newspapers: “Gardner told us those fellows couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn.”
“It ended very poorly for the other two guys,” McNerthney said. “The manhunt continued for quite a long time. … I think it really pissed off a lot of federal officials, because this guy kept on escaping over and over, and they figured nobody could really make it off of McNeil at that time.”
In his third great escape from federal authorities in two years, Gardner hid for a few hours under a log then three days in the prison barn’s hayloft, drinking milk from a cow and eating grain. After concealing himself in brush, he swam several miles to nearby Fox Island and stole food from farms. He escaped to Raymond, bleached his hair with peroxide, and bought tinted glasses before fleeing to Portland.
He appealed to the president for a pardon, caught a freight train to San Diego, and then traveled to Mexico. When he crept into a mail car in Phoenix, the clerk, Herbert Inderlied, fought back and pinned him until police arrived. Although Gardner could have shot the clerk, he didn’t.
When a U.S. commissioner visited his cell, the train robber said, “I always get caught like this. But I’d just as soon be caught in a one-horse town as in San Francisco.”
Eleven of 12 jurors declared Gardner insane before he was sentenced to another 25 years in the U.S. penitentiary at Leavenworth, bringing his total sentence to 75 years. In 1925, he was transferred to the federal prison in Atlanta, where he tried unsuccessfully to escape by tunneling under a wall and later by taking a guard hostage, which landed him 20 months in solitary confinement, according to a 2011 Historylink.org article by Duane Colt Denfeld. After returning to Leavenworth, Gardner requested transfer to Alcatraz so he could be closer to his wife and daughter and arrived there on Sept. 4, 1934, incarcerated for two counts of robbing the mail. But after Dolly divorced him and remarried in 1936, he returned to Leavenworth.
He was released in June 1938 following an appeal for clemency. Sonney offered him a job and drove him to California. He wanted Gardner to lecture on how crime doesn’t pay.
On Jan. 1, 1939, Gardner published a book about his experiences in Alcatraz — “Hellcatraz: The Rock of Despair” — and signed each copy. He traveled to promote the book about Alcatraz, which he nicknamed “The Tomb of the Living Dead.” He and Sonney produced a 1939 film that failed.
“I didn’t kill or shoot or kidnap anyone,” Gardner wrote. “I am definitely not a hero. I am a man who made some serious mistakes, broke the federal law, and went to prison. I paid what the law felt was a just penalty. As a free man for the first time in 18 years, I have started life all over again. I am trying to be a useful citizen. I know I can; I hope I may.”
But the former train robber and the cop who caught him had a falling out. In October 1939, a judge sided with Sonney who sought a $726 judgment compensating him for a promissory note offered on Gardner’s behalf. For his part, Gardner sued Sonney for $2,900, saying the film promoter and director failed to provide the promised $50-a-week job.
Only months later, in early January 1940, Gardner checked into the Hotel Governor in San Francisco and posted a “do not disturb” sign. Days later, on Jan. 10, a maid checked the room and found a warning note on the bathroom: “Do not open this door. Poison gas. Call the police.”
He had dissolved cyanide pellets in water, breathed in the toxic fumes, and crumpled to the floor. He left a note for the newspapers, one for his daughter, and a third for his former brother-in-law. He left two suitcases with the addresses of relatives and a 50-cent piece atop each to cover luggage fees.
In the public note, he described himself as too old and tired to keep fighting and said he’s sorry he hadn’t checked out in 1920 to save his loved ones disgrace and shame.
“Please let me down as light as possible, boys,” he wrote. “I have played ball with you all the way, and now you should pitch me a slow one and let me hit it.”
He asked that reporters refrain from mentioning his daughter’s married name as her new family didn’t know about her connection to him.
He was 56.
Headlines again shouted the news: “Roy Gardner, Mail Robber, Kills Self” and “Mail Robber Turns Room into Lethal Cell, ‘Executes’ Self.”
So ends the saga of Roy Gardner.
“It’s a sad end to a really fascinating story,” McNerthney said. “But when you think about the Smiling Bandit, as he was known, and the escapades in Centralia, and everything that happened in this building, that’s pretty joyful, I think, as joyful as you can be for a train bandit. It would be a lot different if he shot people or physically hurt people.”
Gardner loved grabbing headlines, and he’d likely enjoy his ongoing notoriety painted on the walls inside McMenamins Olympic Club.
“What McMenamins has done here to really capture all of that joy and that excitement … it feels very separate from what happened in San Francisco,” McNerthney said. “It’s a real treasure to have this building look the same way it does, as I mentioned before, with the same wood on the floor and the same sink in that room where he was captured, and it’s the same plaster on the walls, and to be so carefully kept up.”
Sonney died June 25, 1949, in Portland. He and his wife, Rosa, had four children.
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
