“teeth intact too” 3 x 3 inches, acrylic on photopaper.

Part four: “They kid themselves into a belief that they can come back, but they can’t.”

Having escaped from jail and the fate of Evert Impyn and Lawardius G. Borgart (portrait above), Roy Gardner eluded the police for a while. Gardner continued his crime spree, moved to Mexico and eventually wound up in Phoenix, Arizona. An attempt to rob a mail clerk there was thwarted by the clerk himself. “I’d just as soon be caught in a one-horse town,” were Gardner’s sentiments about Phoenix.

While in prison he was the subject of much debate on the tendencies of criminals and their mental states. Gardner was studied by alienists and doctors alike. He was shipped to Atlanta and then Alcatraz, then back to Leavenworth where he was released in 1938. “He tried to build his life in the world outside bars and wrote ‘All men who serve more than five years in prison are doomed, but they don’t realize it. They kid themselves into a belief that they can come back, but they can’t.’ “

Those were Gardner’s last notes before he concocted a mixture of poison gas and killed himself in the bathroom of a San Francisco hotel.

Quotes taken from the Monitor Index and Democrat, January 11, 1940.