Roy Gardner (bank Robber) - Escape From McNeil Island

Escape From McNeil Island

After six weeks at the penitentiary, Gardner had convinced two unlikeable prisoners, Lawardus Bogart and Everett Impyn, that he had "paid off" the guards in the towers. On Labor Day, September 5, 1921, at a prison baseball game, Gardner said, "Now" during the fifth inning when someone hit a fly ball into center field, as the guards in the towers had their eyes on the ball and the runners. Gardner, Bogart, and Impyn ran 300 yards to the high barbed wire fence where Gardner cut a hole, and the three men made it to the pasture as bullets whirled about their heads. Gardner was wounded in his left leg, but made it behind a herd of cattle near timber. About the same time, he saw Bogart fall, badly wounded. Impyn was shot dead; his dying words were, "Gardner told us those fellows in the towers couldn't hit the broad side of a barn". Bogart later stated that Gardner had deceived them and used his companions as decoys, to better his chances of escape.

Guards scoured the beaches and confiscated every boat on the shoreline, but no trace of the dangerous outlaw could be found. Gardner lived in the prison barn, getting nutrition from cow's milk, and then swam the choppy waters to Fox Island where he lived off fruit in the orchards. Warden Maloney claimed Gardner was still on McNeil Island, but the same day the statement was made, Gardner was already on the route to Oregon. Gardner taunted marshals and detectives on McNeil Island when he sent a letter to the Seattle newspaper stating, "Come and get me, you sleepy dicks." Two weeks later, the warden had to admit that Mr. Gardner, the notorious bloodless bandit and badman, had probably gotten off the island.