This took place in Walla Walla, where I was born and lived for the first 20 years of my life. At the time this took place, 1935, I was about six years old. We lived on a small farm about one mile west of town on state Highway 12. The Washington State Penitentiary was located on the other side of Highway 12 and was somewhat closer to town.
The penitentiary had a practice at that time of using some of the convicts to work as trustees in jobs where they had limited freedom. Occasionally, the trustees would take advantage of the situation and stretch their limited freedom to full freedom. When their absence was discovered, the penitentiary whistle would blow several times to let neighbors know that they should be careful of any strangers they might see.
In the early days of my life on the farm, the guards would use bloodhounds to find and capture the escaped prisoners. The baying of a bloodhound on the scent was enough to scare any escapee into giving himself up.
Mill Creek flowed west along our property line and was a favored route for the freedom-loving convicts. They could walk in the water for a while and the bloodhounds would not be able to follow their scent. As a result, the use of bloodhounds was discontinued.
One cold winter when we had a few inches of snow on the ground, two convicts escaped. The off-duty guards were hunting on foot to find the escapees, without success. One guard riding a horse stopped by our house to warm up and complain about the other guards, who made so many footprints that it ruined his chances of tracking the prisoners.
We had a shed that my mother used for a garage. It was behind our house and was open so that we could see the back of her car from our living area. Mill Creek was about 200 yards farther behind our house. The second day after the convicts escaped, we were looking out our back window and saw two sets of footprints coming from the trees along Mill Creek and entering the garage where my mother’s car was parked. There was a layer of ice in the back window of the car and it was pretty obvious where the convicts had found refuge for the night.
My mother called the penitentiary and reported the tracks and the frosted back window of the car. The penitentiary sent out two vans with guards and they surrounded the garage with rifles at the ready. Then they sent one of the guards to check out the car. He found the two escapees sitting in the car with a tire iron ready to bash anyone who might come along. When they saw the guard with his handgun at the ready, they quickly gave up. In fact, they were happy to be captured. They had gotten wet in Mill Creek and had taken off some of their clothes because they had frozen. I believe they wanted to be found.
We had to loan the guards clothing for the convicts so they could be transported back to the penitentiary. We later heard they had lost a toe or two to frostbite.
My mother received a $25 reward for helping with the capture of the escaped convicts. In those days, that was a pretty handsome reward.
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