Two Boxers Escape County Jail With False Keys
Two incarcerated pugilists manage a clean getaway from the county jail after an apparent inside job with smuggled keys.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The pugilists, Carroll and Allen, wearied with their incarceration in the county jail, have left for other fields without even bidding the authorities good-bye. They were locked in the main room of the jail at 9 o'clock Tuesday night by Deputy Sheriff Lincoln Dilley, and in the morning, they were not to be found. It is supposed that by means of false keys, they let themselves out through the sheriff's office and then took to their heels. They had been given considerable freedom and were frequently seen about the courthouse yard and building doing odd jobs. The belief is that while thus employed, they arranged with friends on the outside for the necessary keys to effect their escape. They were considerate enough to lock the doors after them. Sheriff Simmons, who returned from Seattle Wednesday, believes that some outsider crawled over the transom of his office during the absence of Deputy Dilley, secured the jail keys that were hanging in the office, and then let the prisoners out.
“They were considerate enough to lock the doors after them.”
Jailbreaks are rare today, but the administrative chaos described here—inmates roaming the courthouse grounds to do 'odd jobs'—highlights the informal, often porous nature of frontier justice. It's a reminder of how small and unspecialized the machinery of law enforcement was in early Yakima.
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