Roy Gardner (bank robber)

He was said to be attractive and charming, standing just under six feet tall, with short, curly auburn hair and blue eyes.

He was good enough that he became a sparring partner for Heavyweight Champion J. J. Jeffries at Bennd Training Camp in Reno, Nevada, during the summer of 1910.

Eventually, Gardner ended up in San Francisco, where he gambled all of his boxing money away and then robbed a jewelry store on Market Street.

He was arrested and spent some time in San Quentin, but was paroled after he saved a prison guard's life during a riot.

He then landed a job as an acetylene welder at the Mare Island Navy Yard, married, fathered a daughter, and on Armistice Day in 1918 left and began his own welding company.

The lawmen looked, and Gardner grabbed Haig's gun from his holster, then disarmed Cavanaugh at gunpoint, handcuffed the two together, and stole $200.

He slipped back into the United States the next year, and started robbing banks and mail trains across the country as a lone bandit.

Gardner was recognized at the Porter House Hotel and while he was playing a game of cards in a pool hall, federal agents arrived and captured him.

He was heavily shackled, with the addition of an "Oregon Boot", and was once again transported on a train to McNeil Island, this time by U. S. Marshals Mulhall and Rinkell, both fast-shooting veterans.

Gardner plastered his face with bandages to hide his identity, leaving one eye slit, and told the hotel staff that he had been severely burned in an industrial accident near Tacoma.

After six weeks at the penitentiary, Gardner had convinced two other prisoners, Lawardus Bogart and Everett Impyn, that he had "paid off" the guards in the towers.

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."

[4] Gardner was now the "Most Wanted" criminal, and committed several crimes in Arizona before he was captured by a mail clerk during a train robbery in Phoenix in fall 1921.

Then in 1927, he led a prison break during which he held the captain and two guards hostage with two revolvers, but the escape failed and he was placed in solitary confinement for twenty months.

He worked and supervised at the mat shop with Ralph Roe and they planned an escape, but Gardner was paroled and released in 1938 after his appeal for clemency was approved.

[3] He attended crime lectures, and he and Louis Sonney made one of the first re-enactments, a short film called You Can't Beat the Rap.