Robert T. Lenahan somehow got his hands on a hack-saw blade after being transferred from the state penitentiary to Portland’s Multnomah County courthouse jail.

Sixty years ago this week, the career criminal decided he didn’t want to go through the bother of sitting through his latest trial. So he attached the double-edged blade to a long pole and managed to saw his way to freedom. No one at the jail could say how Lenahan, who had been involved with Portland vice lord Jim Elkins’ gang before ratting out Elkins to save himself, obtained the hack-saw blades.

But in spite of his ingenious escape from the courthouse jail’s seventh floor, Lenahan apparently didn’t know what to do once he was back out in the world.

Six days after Lenahan’s disappearance, workers at the Multnomah County Poor Farm, now McMenamins Edgefield, spotted a bedraggled man wandering across a field. They offered him a cup of coffee. Sitting in the farm’s boiler room, shivering, Lenahan admitted he was an escaped convict.

Sheriff’s officers picked up the 33-year-old about an hour later and sent him to Rocky Butte Jail.

But the “Butte,” The Oregonian pointed out at the time, also was “far from escape-proof.” More than two-dozen inmates had taken “unofficial leave” in the five years before Lenahan’s arrival.

Rocky Butte Jail in 1957. (The Oregonian)Oregonian

Another breakout attempt, in fact, would soon follow -- one of the facility’s most brazen and violent ever.

On a Thursday evening in August of 1960, inmate Elmer Merrill, who was being held on armed-robbery charges, approached a guard with a letter and asked him to put it in the mail for him. When the guard reached for it, Merrill punched him in the mouth. Merrill and four other prisoners -- Lenahan was not one of them -- beat the jailer and locked him in a cell.

Guards at Rocky Butte Jail, which would be torn down in 1983, had been hearing rumors of an escape plan for about a week. The talk now had been proven true.

The five prisoners trying to escape made for the officers’ lounge and locker room, expecting to find guns there. Guards knocked out a window and hit the inmates with tear gas.

The escape attempt quickly degenerated into a riot in Cell Block A: Other prisoners, deputies later told reporters, “seemed to go wild. ... They ripped up benches for clubs, started fires, tore fire hoses off the walls, broke out windows and literally demolished the officers’ ready room.”

One of the prisoners trying to escape, Edwin Paquin, ended up with a gunshot wound before guards regained control of the jail.

At a court arraignment two days later, another of the wannabe escapees insisted he shouldn’t be returned to Rocky Butte Jail because guards were going to attack him.

“There’s guys had the whey beat out of them last night, and I’m scheduled for a head-beating tonight,” James H. Bello told the judge.

He said someone should be sent “out to the Butte” to check the conditions there.

“There are prisoners lying in the hole, with broken ribs and bleeding all over the floor of the cell,” he claimed.

Elmer A. Merrill became a "jailhouse lawyer." (The Oregonian)Oregonian

Jail superintendent Jake Mathews acknowledged that one of prisoners who attempted to escape, Darwin Wilson, was being held in solitary and did have broken ribs.

“I got nothing to hide,” Mathews said. “Some of those boys got roughed up. There is no question about it. One of the fellows was knocked out twice. You take men like [Bello and Wilson], they attack you. You got to defend yourself.”

As it turned out, while the riot was going on, two Rocky Butte inmates who had earlier walked away from a prisoner-work detail passed by the jail as they made their way toward a rail terminal where they hoped to jump on a freight train. The men, Bonnie Joseph Thideauz and Eugene Tatum, “wondered why all of the lights were burning on the jail premises at that hour,” but they marched on as quickly as they could. They were apprehended early the next day.

As for the five men who tried to break out of Rocky Butte Jail that August day: they all faced added charges because of the escape attempt. The ringleader, Merrill, would later gain some fame in the Oregon prison community by becoming a “jailhouse lawyer,” winning a new trial for himself in 1963 -- right around the time he originally would have been released if not for the jail-break attempt.

-- Douglas Perry

@douglasmperry

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