WHEELER DEALER: Chapter 15

Well, you didn’t really think they’d get away, did you?

They catch Ferron Hawkins the next morning about a quarter of a mile away from Rocky Butte. In order to ditch his prison clothes, he strips down to his BVDs and knocks on the door of a neighborhood lady saying was the victim of a fraternity prank and could he please use her phone to call his folks to come pick him up. When she doesn’t buy it and calls 911 instead, he takes off running and they find him hiding in nearby home.

Gary Scott Anderson, the one who keistered the pistol into Rocky Butte, they find him two days later, hiding in a backyard woodpile in the same part of town.

Roger Allen was caught three days later, hiding in a closet in Northeast.

And Donnie Booth, who you may remember as the guy they nabbed walking down the sidewalk just minutes after the U.S National Bank robbery, they caught him five days later, hiding under a school bus outside the Fairview Elementary School.

Booth, Kessler and James Gardner, who ran off together after the break-out, tripped a silent alarm when they broke into the school very early that morning. When the cops arrived Booth was too out of shape to make a dash for it but Kessler and Gardner got away.

What they were doing there, we can’t know for sure. But a good guess is that they were making a phone call to Sandra, the ex-call girl who was now getting her chance to play gangster-in-chief. After Kessler and Gardner got away at the schoolhouse, she picked them up and drove them to the Coast, where they hid out for another week or so.

Then she arranged for them to be transported in the back of a camper to Kansas City – where, of course, Kessler was going to kill that dirty rat bastard Joel Levine who’d set him up in the first place. And if that seems a bit counter-productive at this juncture, you just don’t understand that’s what you’re supposed to do if you’re in the drug business.

By this time, as law enforcement agencies were aware, Sandra had moved her base of operations back to Portland. And while they didn’t know yet how instrumental she was to the entire escape, they obviously figured it might be a good idea, instead of picking her up right away on the drug conspiracy indictment, to give her a little rope and see where she took them.

And sure enough, she led them right to Kessler. As it happened, Sandra had moved in with a friend, Audrey Alo, who she’d met a couple of years ago in the women’s prison. Audrey had an apartment near Portland State, and about a block away from her apartment was a phone booth that, as the DEA agents on surveillance couldn’t help noticing, the two women used on a regular basis.

And when the DEA agents checked with the phone company, they  discovered that some of those calls were to a motel in Kansas City, Missouri – or more precisely to a Howard Johnson’ motel in Independence, just about ten miles outside the city – and that was all she wrote.

At about three in the morning, the phone rang in Kessler’s and Gardner’s motel room and a voice informed them the FBI was outside and they had thirty seconds to come out in their underwear or the FBI was going to come in shooting.

At which point Kessler – who had vowed to Roger while they were still back in Rocky Butte that one way or another he was never coming back – trooped out onto the motel parking lot and, along with Gardner, was taken into custody.

There were several trials. The first one being for that wonky  bank robbery and heroin conspiracy – you just don’t make money selling drugs to yourself – and then a couple more for the escape. Kessler, who ended up getting 90 years in all, died in prison five years ago at the age of 76.

Six years earlier he’d come up for parole, and Neil Van Horn, who had long since retired from the DEA, appeared at the  hearing to offer his two cents worth, which was: You just don’t shoot a sheriff’s deputy in the head, leaving him with brain damage for the rest of his life, and expect to get out of prison alive.

Kessler, for his part, said he regretted what happened to Burkett. But on the other hand, as he apparently couldn’t help from saying, he thought that in the end it was Burkett’s fault because he warned him three times not to reach for the alarm button.

Another witness at Kessler’s parole hearing was the former U.S. Attorney Charles Turner, whose principal argument seemed to be that Kessler’s refusal to tell how the gun got into Rocky Butte prison was just more proof that he was an un-rehabilitated criminal and therefore undeserving of parole.

To the end, Turner believed that Kessler bribed a guard to bring the gun in for him. And, who knows, perhaps it had something to do with the fact that when Gary Anderson, the escapee who actually did keister the tiny gun into Rocky Butte, was captured, he told the arresting officers that he saw Kessler buy the gun from a guard.

But why did Kessler persist for all those years in refusing to tell Turner how the gun was brought in?

One reason might have been to protect Anderson, who had been his cell mate back in Marion. In Roger’s opinion, though, Kessler was just taking this one last opportunity to mess with Turner’s mind. “He knew they’d never let him out so he was just fucking with him.” The sanctimonious Turner was a perfect foil for bad-boy-to-the-end Steve Kessler. And vice versa.

This is, by the way, the last episode of Wheeler Dealer, at least for a while. If I do return to it, there’s a rogue’s gallery worth of stories still to tell, one of them being this on-going spat between Kessler and Turner. And how could I have failed to mention the Wheeler Dealer’s bookkeeper, Leroy Earp, who had the unfortunate habit of strangling his girlfriends with his neckties and leaving them in the trunk of his car?

But for now this is it, and I want to thank Roger Shirley for taking the time to tell the tale as he lived it and saw it. As for Roger himself, he served his time. Eight years, and then ten more of special probation during which time he had to submit to regular drug tests. He finally gave up the drugs, too, and says he feels much better for it. “Getting one hundred percent out of life instead of just fifty before,” is how he puts it.

In case anyone’s worried about it, though, it's not like he went completely straight after he got out. For a while there he had a fairly sizable grow of about three hundred plants back in the bushes off I84, just a few miles east of Troutdale – which even with the newly relaxed attitudes toward marijuana in Multnomah County could have gotten him in a certain amount of trouble. Although perhaps not as much as the three skinny marijuana joints he provided to an undercover Portland cop at a party back in 1967, and for which he was awarded a three-year sentence.

All in all, Roger says, he’s not terribly proud of some of things he’s done. On the other hand, as he also says, “Facts are facts,” which is pretty much the way I see it too.