Busting out of the joint was job for a safecracker

By Finn J.D. John
July 22, 2012

ESCAPES FROM OREGON'S state prisons are very rare events today, and have been for years. But there was a time, not that long ago, when an average of one prisoner every month made a break for freedom, and one or two of them actually succeeded in staying gone for a good long time.

From safecracker to war hero

The criminal population in Oregon’s prisons has changed in several ways in the past 100 years, and one of the most noticeable ways is the type of criminal housed there. In 1912, there were a lot more of a particular sort of criminal professional who specialized in breaking into vaults — safecrackers, or in the terminology of the time, “yeggs.” Possibly because they made a living solving puzzles of this sort, yeggs seemed to make up a disproportionately high percentage of escapees.

One such professional was Charles Drocker, who was sent up the river in May 1915 to serve a 10-year term for burglary. After he’d served a year of this sentence, Drocker vanished one morning. He was there at breakfast, but at the noon count, he was gone.

Prison officials searched for him for two days, and found not a sign. Meanwhile, among the inmates the rumor grew that Drocker had crawled under a truck and pulled himself up into its chassis someplace, riding out through the front gates of the prison under the very noses of a half-dozen armed guards before dropping to the ground and slipping away.

And perhaps that’s what he did — but to this day, nobody knows for sure.

Nothing was heard until the following year, when word came back to the Beaver State that the intrepid Mr. Drocker was now a war hero. He had snuck out of the country and joined the military in France — perhaps the French Foreign Legion — in the middle of the First World War.

One assumes that a grateful French nation made him a citizen, and all that unpleasantness in Oregon was put behind him. On the other hand, it’s also possible that “Charley” went back to his old profession in his new country, or that — patched up and sent back to the front lines — he fell before a German Mauser like so many of his compatriots of both France and the U.S. In any case, as far as I’ve been able to learn, nothing more was heard from him.

 “Three-Minute Man” on the lam

Another yegg who proved hard to hang onto was Frank Wagner, whose first of two escapes offers a surprising echo of the Stephen King novella (and, later, movie) “The Shawshank Redemption.”

Wagner was a member of the safecracking elite, possibly the most skilled yegg on the West Coast. His nickname was “Three Minute Wagner,” and the moniker referred to his ability to get into any vault in under 180 seconds.

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Getting out of the “big vault” took a little longer than that. But Wagner figured out how to get the job done.

In the summer of 1914, he and his cell mate, a fellow German named Carl Weinegal, discovered that the thick brick walls of which their cell block was built were not as impenetrable as they seemed. The mortar was soft and crumbly.

So the two of them got to work on it. They bored a man-sized tunnel into the wall and down through the floor. This was the wall between their cell and the prison hallway, so it had to be a rather tight fit; when they were done with it, there was only one row of bricks between their hole and the hall. But it was big enough for them to slip through.

During the months of work on this project, the two crooks disposed of the extra bricks and mortar by hiding them in their pockets and in their “cell bucket,” or chamber pot; in 1914, the cells did not have toilets in them.

They hid their work in progress by setting their cell up with dozens of pennants and fancy doilies and other wall decorations, and keeping it neat as a pin. During cell inspection, nobody thought to check behind that one big girly doily that hung on the wall near the cell door. If the guards had, they would have discovered that, like Andy DuFresne’s poster of Rita Hayworth, it was hiding a very interesting secret.

On their big night, Wagner and Weinegal pushed through the last layer of bricks and burst through into the prison basement. Unfortunately, they were not able to do this under controlled conditions. The first of them fell through space and lit on the concrete basement floor, hitting his head hard enough to be knocked unconscious for some time. The other managed to land on his feet, but twisted one leg badly enough that walking was extremely painful.

But there was no turning back now; the hole in the ceiling they’d come out of was accessible only to birds and bats. Onward and outward the two cons hobbled, hoping for the best.

The two of them got most of the way off the prison grounds before a dog started barking, attracting the attention of one of the guards, who opened fire on them from a great distance. This had the chief effect of inspiring the two of them to hobble away at superhuman speed. They remained at large for two days before being recaptured.

Wagner served the rest of his sentence without incident, but as soon as he was released he got right back to work, and six months later was back in prison. This time, he simply slipped away from a guard while working in the brick yard. He was found three months later at a cabin in Clatsop County — ratted out, Prisoner No. 6435 hints in his book, by the woman he was living with there. When the posse tried to retrieve him, a firefight broke out, and Wagner was killed.

There are several more interesting stories of jailbreaks and jailbreakers from this era, but they’ll have to wait for a future article.

(Source: Prisoner No. 6435. Sensational Prison Escapes from the Oregon State Penitentiary. Salem: No publisher listed, 1922)

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