Monday, January 25, 2016

Escape Artist: The Continuing Adventures of Jack Laird


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.
            “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.


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.


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.
    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.