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Jack Laird was serving a life sentence in the Oregon
State Prison for the 1918 murder of Frank Twombley in Portland when he escaped
in 1934. Oregon State Archive.
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“Haven’t you learned yet that crime doesn’t pay?” Kate
Michener asked her son Elliott, better known as Mickie, when he visited her
shabby Spokane apartment in fall 1934.
Mickie told his mother that he had learned the lesson, but he was
lying. He and his partner in crime,
Richard “Dick” Franseen, who had both been released from the Oregon State
Prison less than a year before, had never stopped committing crimes. Mrs. Michener didn’t believe her son and she
didn’t trust him. When Mickie and Dick were ready to leave for Everett, WA to
visit Mickie’s brother Ashley, they left his mother with a ten dollar bill to
cover expenses. The aging woman was
afraid to spend the bill because she was sure that her son had gone into
counterfeiting.
She was right not to trust him. Just weeks before
Mickie and Dick, who both had extensive printing experience from their time in
prison, had held a Duluth, MN engraver at gunpoint and forced him to create a
plate for printing ten dollar bills.
They most likely had a stack of fake tens in their luggage. The cash was
for financing a prison break and the crime spree they planned once they sprung
their friend Jack Laird from the prison in Salem.
Jack Laird (real name John Giles) was serving a life
sentence for the murder of Multnomah County Sheriff’s Deputy Frank Twombley
during a botched robbery on the Interstate Bridge in 1918. After seventeen
years Jack Laird was considered a “model prisoner.” Head of the prison print
shop and editor of the institution’s magazine, Laird was also a trusty allowed
to work unsupervised outside the prison grounds on survey jobs. He was a meticulous, almost obsessive,
planner and he had already agreed on an escape plan before Michener and
Franseen were released after serving eight years each for armed robbery.
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Elliott “Mickie” Michener and Jack Laird became
close friends while in prison at Salem.
Together they wrote two dozen adventure stories which were published in
pulp magazines. Federal Prison Archive.
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Richard “Dick” Franseen met Elliott Michener in the
Idaho State Reform school when they were teenagers. They became life-long friends and partners in
crime. Federal Prison Archive.
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To read more about Jack Laird you will have to wait for my new book JD Chandler's Portland Rogues Gallery coming in 2020.
If you enjoyed this story you might also enjoy my new book with Theresa Griffin Kennedy Murder & Scandal in Prohibition Portland.
