On April 18, 1941, young St. Peter was seventeen years old. His first fall was for petty larceny; he got two weeks in the Sunnyside, Washington, jail. Sent home to his parents, he kept his nose clean, presumably, for five whole months. At least, he didn’t get caught.
On September 26, the novice crook was in Salt Lake City, Utah. Again, he dabbled in petty larceny. His time behind bars doubled. He got sixty days this time, thirty of them suspended. He served his thirty days. The idea of getting out—that is, without permission—had not occurred to St. Peter yet. Or if it had, he didn’t know how to go about it. But it wouldn’t be long.
By October 28, young Arthur had made his way up into Idaho. In Twin Falls, he was arrested for car theft and burglary. Six months in the county jail. He stayed in just short of four months, and he sure didn’t stop to shake the sheriff’s hand as he broke out on February 24, 1942. He didn’t go back to that jail this time. He got two to five years in the Idaho State Penitentiary.
St. Peter played it cool while he was inside the walls, and he was out on parole and back in Seattle by the summer of 1943. But then he repeated himself and went to the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla after conviction of auto theft and burglary on August 29, 1943.
St. Peter didn’t like it much at Walla Walla, but he’d discovered a “hobby” that suited his talents amazingly well—the study of prison breakouts.
His first successful effort took place on May 9, 1944, but he was caught in one day. He tried it again on October 4 of the same year and upped his free time to five days. King County sheriff Don Sprinkle and Seattle Police detective Austin Seth found the wily St. Peter in a skid row restaurant in Seattle and escorted him to the county jail. The con-wise escapee smiled slightly as they locked him up; nobody had noticed the hacksaw blade he had hidden in the sole of his shoe. Alert guards, however, did notice him a day or so later as he was industriously cutting through the bars of his cell.
Back he went to the Washington State Pen.
Needless to say, Arthur St. Peter was fast falling far down on the list of favorites of the prison staff. Assistant Warden Chick Hardesty commented: “He’s one of the toughest convicts at Walla Walla.”
He probably should have said “in or out” of Walla Walla. St. Peter took off again on July 20, 1949. His escape this time was given a special boost by his homemade nitroglycerine bomb—a bomb so effective it cost a prison guard an arm.
The crafty little con was free until May 19, 1950, when he was caught and sent back to Walla Walla. For more than seven years St. Peter and the Washington State public were separated by steel bars. The next time he got out, he walked out the main gate of the pen, paroled on October 25, 1957.
On February 11, 1958, he became a parole violator and fugitive when he committed a rather clumsy burglary. He was back inside in March. Paroled again in February, 1961, Arthur St. Peter was thirty-seven years old. He had little to show for his adult life but twenty years of crime and a lot of time behind bars, time marred by escape after escape. As Chick Hardesty commented, “Once he made it over. Once he was shot off the wall. Once he made a nitroglycerine bomb, and once he tied up two officers in an escape attempt.”
Even the most optimistic rehabilitation expert would have hesitated to predict that St. Peter intended to tread the straight and narrow. St. Peter obviously had no intention of finding out what life was like for the working stiff. He was soon wanted in three counties for auto theft, robbery, and carrying a concealed weapon. By the early fall of 1961, the diminutive lawbreaker was once again a reluctant resident of the King County Jail.
The King County Jail was—and is—quite a challenge to inmates who would rather be elsewhere. It occupies the tenth floor of the courthouse and, even if a prisoner should get out of his cell and seek escape, he still finds himself ten floors from freedom.
But fate had placed St. Peter in the King County Jail at the same time as another prisoner: Thomas R. Fasenmeyer. Although Fasenmeyer had a lot more class than the little French Canadian, the two of them were as alike as Tweedledum and Tweedledee when it came to philosophy of escape. They both wanted out badly.
Fasenmeyer had been dubbed “the society burglar” by Seattle newsmen, and speculation was that his jewelry thefts in only eighteen months might total more than a million dollars. Arrested in Seattle on July 11, 1962, he had been charged with four counts involving gem thefts from some of the Queen City’s wealthiest citizens. The brilliant scion of a wealthy Kansas City family, Fasenmeyer was wanted in eleven states when Seattle cops caught up with him. He told reporters that his criminal career began when he served a short hitch in the air force and looted a tavern. Since March 1960, he had escaped from a Florida road gang, a St. Louis jail hospital ward, and the Los Angeles County Jail.
He made one bid to escape from the King County Jail on October 7, 1961, but he was discovered trying to saw his way through a steel plate. Admittedly an expert on such things, the society burglar told his jailers that “except for the soft steel on your window bars, the county jail is the toughest, best, or worst jail—depending on how you look at it” to escape from. Despite the compliment, Fasenmeyer spent several days in solitary confinement.
The jewel thief summed up his philosophy on escape to his jailers, an outlook that St. Peter no doubt echoed: “I try to get out and you try to keep me from it. No hard feelings.”
If there is a patron saint of jailbreakers, she must have arranged the meeting of Arthur St. Peter and Thomas Fasenmeyer, two kindred spirits among the jail’s burgeoning inmate population of 650. Their mutual interest in escape drew them together at once. St. Peter was particularly interested in breaking out; he’d been convicted on September 1 of the robbery charge and of being a “habitual criminal,” and he was sentenced to Walla Walla for the rest of his natural life. Fasenmeyer had fifteen years hanging over him.
October 22, 1961, was a Sunday. Fasenmeyer and St. Peter had a special project planned for that day, a project involving the use of hacksaw blades they’d had smuggled in to them. They were joined by seven fellow prisoners who had nothing but admiration for the masters.
The men began in the morning by sawing away at the bars of their cell. But the bars were of case-hardened steel and they made no progress. Next, they tried the ceiling. That didn’t work, either. Then they tried tying the hacksaws to a broomstick and reaching across the corridor to saw at the outside window bars. The bars began to give, but it was tediously slow and they feared they’d be discovered before they made a big enough opening.
Later in the evening, after the 6:30 recreation period, a wad of cardboard skillfully placed in the cell’s locking device kept it from clicking completely closed. Cooperative prisoners in a cell some distance away called to guards that a window was broken in their cell. As the guards left, St. Peter and Fasenmeyer dashed to the window and finished sawing through the soft steel.
It was 9:00 on a pitch-black, rainy Seattle evening. One by one, the seven prisoners eyed the skimpy rope made out of sheets that was supposed to support their weight and get them to the comparative safety of the ninth floor.
St. Peter was first, swinging out from the rough cement of the courthouse ten floors above the pavement. Then he was down and in a window on the floor below. Two more men followed safely. The fourth man, a twenty-five-year-old charged with burglary and rape, started down. He got halfway between floors and froze. He began to holler that he was slipping. Suddenly, he lost his tenuous grip and plunged, screaming, to his death.
Nobody but his fellow escapees heard him above the wind; they didn’t stop to mourn him, but moved methodically down the sheet-rope.
Once the eight surviving escapees had climbed in through the unlocked window on the ninth floor, they broke up into smaller groups and sought a way out of the courthouse. St. Peter’s group surprised a sheriff’s elevator operator and forced him to take them to the second floor. There, they gagged and bound the man and two other courthouse employees and left them in a restroom. The elevator operator
managed to free himself and sound the alarm.
Two of the prisoners were caught almost at once by Seattle policemen Steve Brozovich and Bernard Mayhle, who spotted them outside the courthouse. Two more didn’t make it any farther than the railroad yard, where they were apprehended by railroad security officers.
Not surprisingly, none of the four caught right away was St. Peter or Fasenmeyer.
Sheriff’s deputies found the broken body of the inmate who fell nine floors to the hard cement. Virtually every bone in his body had been broken in the impact.
On Monday, at 3:00 in the morning, units of the Washington State Patrol, King County Sheriff’s Office, and Bellevue Police engaged in the high-speed chase of a vehicle racing east of Seattle in Factoria, Washington. The fleeing car suddenly went out of control and veered off the highway to crash into a bridge abutment. For a moment there was silence; then two figures crawled from the wreckage and started to run. The officers quickly seized the fugitives.
They fully expected to find that one of them was Arthur St. Peter, since the site of the crash was only two miles from the residence of the cunning breakout artist. The men captured were members of the escape party all right, but neither was St. Peter. If he had been in the car, he had once again made a clean getaway.
With every passing hour, detectives knew that St. Peter and Fasenmeyer were probably putting more miles between themselves and jail. On Tuesday, the FBI joined the search for the missing duo. The men were reported to be here, there, and everywhere in the Northwest. But when officers arrived to check out tips, they were always gone.
And then, on Thursday, October 26, Thomas Fasenmeyer—a thoroughly chilled, sodden, and disheartened Fasenmeyer—was flushed out of the rain-soaked brush at the Canadian border near Blaine, Washington, by border patrolmen. The frozen fugitive seemed almost glad to be captured and complained that he’d never seen anything as disheartening as Washington’s continuous rain.
Fasenmeyer had split from St. Peter immediately after the jailbreak. He’d stolen a Cadillac belonging to Ruby Chow, one of Seattle’s most successful restaurateurs, and he intended to head south to Portland. But he became confused and headed north instead. He abandoned the Cadillac in Marysville when he figured it would be spotted. He continued to head north along back roads, looted a safe for thirteen dollars, bought a bus ticket to Bellingham, where he stole another car and drove to Blaine. He said he had planned to get a job and go straight if he made it into Canada.
“But I’d probably have stolen. The harder they look for you, the harder it is to go straight.”
Fasenmeyer refused to say where the hacksaw blades had come from: “I can’t tell you that. You know I can’t.”
Fasenmeyer may have been surprised by the unrelenting Washington weather, but St. Peter had known what to expect in his home state, and he obviously was faring better than his fellow escapee.
Just what St. Peter was planning came to light the next night.
King County deputies Frank Chase and Jim Harris were working a special detail in the north part of the county that Friday night. Shortly after 11:30 P.M., they headed toward home. They were just three blocks from Harris’s house in Richmond Beach when the patrol car’s radio blared an alert: “Closest patrol. Check Seattle Trust and Savings Bank, Aurora and 175th. Armored car noticed water on bank floor.” Chase and Harris heard a reserve unit respond, “We are six blocks from bank. Will check it out.”
The deputies decided to back up the reserves. As Harris recalled the events to this reporter, he said, “We were north of the bank. There’s a two-block road behind the bank and we headed for that. We could hear that patrol car in front. As we cut down a side street, we spotted a reserve patrolman running toward us, and sensed there was something wrong.”
Harris jumped from the car and quickly identified himself because the deputies’ car was unmarked. The reserve officer called, “I just ‘spooked’ someone and he ran back behind the bank!”
Harris grabbed a shotgun and instructed, “Go around on Aurora. I’ll cut between the buildings.”
Harris had a slight advantage because he was a longtime resident of the area and knew his way around the buildings, even in the black of night. He heard a dog barking near the Brayton Food Lockers next to the bank and he crept around north of the locker building. Suddenly, a shot rang out. Harris felt it whistle inches from his ear and spotted a suspect crouching beneath the food locker where the building was supported by pilings. The man fired again and then ran up an embankment behind the locker and disappeared into the brush beyond.
Chase ran to the car and radioed, “Subject shooting—in the brush now.” Then Chase placed his car in position so that his headlights would illuminate the brushy area where the suspect was hiding. Another unit arrived and flooded the field with light from the other end. Within minutes, eight sheriff’s cars sped to the officers’ aid.
Lieutenant Richard Christie, head of the patrol unit, came from the south end of the county. With a bullhorn, he commanded, “Come out or we’ll come in—you’re surrounded.”
There was only silence in response.
Jim Harris had had only a glimpse of the fleeing figure. “I thought it was a kid. He was so short.”
Christie, Harris, and Chase volunteered to undertake a foot-by-foot search of the brush. In the glare of floodlights, they inched, three abreast, across the field. At one point they prepared to step across a drainage ditch, which was almost hidden with blackberry vines. Chase felt an eerie chill as he looked down. Someone was crouched there, holding a .45!
Harris put a shotgun next to the suspect’s head and barked, “One arm up at a time!”
The man was handcuffed and dragged from the ditch. The deputies checked the .45 and found a third round jammed in the chamber.
The suspect kept his face determinedly turned away from his captors until Jim Harris said, “I want to see who was shooting at me.”
The “kid” turned. It was Arthur St. Peter.
In the light of day the next morning, detectives discovered why the bank had “water on the floor.” St. Peter (and probably cohorts who were never captured) had been working nights to cut through the roof of the bank. A fused dynamite charge was found on the roof. When Harris found St. Peter beneath the food lockers, he had apparently been on his way to a nearby service station to steal a battery to set off the fuse!
The bank heist had been carefully planned. An electric drill was found between the ruptured roof and the top of the bank’s vault. Wires led from the fused dynamite into the bank itself. Several bags of sand had been strategically placed to muffle the sound of the blast. The would-be bank robbers had also made a hole in the ceiling of the men’s restroom so that they could use the bank’s own electric power to run their drill.
But their plans had gone awry when water standing on the bank’s flat roof had run down in the hole and caused the plaster ceiling first to bulge, and then to leak into the floor. Were it not for the alert armored truck drivers, who wondered about the puddle of water, St. Peter would have had a healthy stake to finance his getaway.
Back like a yo-yo to his home away from home—the King County Jail—St. Peter was asked if he thought he’d be caught.
He shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, eventually.”
Arthur St. Peter went back to Walla Walla, this time for life. Well, almost.
On November 22, 1964, St. Peter and a new crew of admirers who shared his penchant for wide-open spaces crawled to freedom through a tunnel they’d painstakingly dug beneath the prison. They kidnaped a Walla Walla couple and then appropriated their car and drove to Oregon. St. Peter couldn’t seem to stay away from Washington, however. A Whitman County deputy sheriff spotted a truck parked beside a road near Colfax seventeen miles from the Idaho border. Checking it out, he found a short, bewhiskered man asleep in the front seat. A loaded gun rested on the seat next to the sleeping man. The deputy picked up the gun before he shook the man awake.
It was a most tho
ughtful precaution; the man was Arthur St. Peter.
Before the start of St. Peter’s trial this time, U.S. District Court Judge William Goodwin learned that St. Peter would have a homemade handcuff key hidden under his tongue when he appeared in the courtroom! Goodwin arranged for St. Peter to be shackled throughout the trial with a special set of handcuffs.
This, then, was the man who had gunned to death pawnshop owner Bob Taylor and critically wounded his wife, Lori. The reader might ask, “How did St. Peter escape from prison the last time?”
He didn’t. Nor was he paroled. Arthur St. Peter left the walls of Walla Walla as a dinner guest! St. Peter was chosen to participate in a program designed to help convicts readjust to civilian life. The program’s name is self-explanatory: “Take a Lifer to Dinner!”
Lawmen who had spent the prior thirty years chasing St. Peter and returning him to prison felt that taking him home to dinner was akin to inviting Jack the Ripper to a sorority picnic.
Actually, you have to give him credit. St. Peter didn’t run away the first time he was taken to dinner at the home of a prison employee. He waited until the second invitation. He ate the meal, complimented the cook, and asked if he might use the bathroom. There, he kicked out the window and took off.
He escaped on April 21. It was eleven whole days before he killed anyone.
Arthur St. Peter was not eligible for parole consideration until March 1988. Even then, if he did win parole, he would have to be held on a detainer for the federal charge of kidnapping. Judge Goodwin had sentenced him to thirty-five years on that charge.
In point of fact, St. Peter was not eligible for the “Take a Lifer to Dinner” program at all, but fellow prisoners had gone to bat for him and persuaded prison authorities to “give Art a chance.”
It won’t help Bob Taylor much now, but the “Take a Lifer to Dinner” program has been canceled.
St. Peter’s latest crime has only served to heighten disputes between Washington law enforcement personnel and prison reform crusaders. In effect, both sides are losing. So are prisoners who sincerely hope to have a straight life on the outside.