On this day, Sept. 5, 1921, Roy “The Smiling Bandit” Gardner escaped from McNeil Island in Washington state during an inmate baseball game, earning himself another nickname: “King of the Escape Artists.”
During a fly ball, with all eyes on the play in the field, Gardner made a dash for freedom. He slipped through a hole in the fence, took a bullet from a prison guard, ducked behind a group of cows and swam off the island.
Gardner was caught months later.
After an Atlanta prison warden dubbed Gardner “the most dangerous inmate,” he became one of the first criminals to enter Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary.
After his release, Gardner penned an autobiography, “Hellcatraz,” and an escape re-enactment with the man who captured him.
He committed suicide in 1940.
— Scott McCabe
