When James Robert Ringrose stepped off an international flight at Honolulu’s airport in 1967, he found two FBI agents waiting for him.

He wasn’t surprised. The 25-year-old said “he had been saving an item for several years and now he needed it,” the bureau later stated.

Ringrose handed over a “Get Out of Jail Free” card from the board game Monopoly.

The gambit may have elicited a chuckle from the G-men, but they didn’t let him go. Ringrose, an inveterate peddler of counterfeit checks and a long-time fugitive, was on the federal law-enforcement agency’s “10 Most Wanted List.”

He would be convicted of various charges and hauled off to Terminal Island Federal Corrections Institution in Southern California.

James Robert Ringrose (FBI)

Ringrose served only a couple years in prison, and he moved to Oregon after his release. A skilled tinkerer, he became fascinated by “wave power” and dreamed of a million buoys in the ocean producing the energy of “20 nuclear power plants.”

Which led to a strange, and ultimately disturbing, second disappearing act.

On Nov. 10, 1979, Ringrose set off from Depoe Bay in a hand-built vessel to look for a wayward buoy he’d been using in an experiment. When he didn’t return that day, Coast Guard air and sea crews launched a search for him, but they came up with nothing.

Three weeks later, a gypsum-loaded Panamanian freighter about 35 miles off Washington’s coast found Ringrose bobbing in what The Associated Press described as “a homemade, 15-foot yellow submarine.” The 4,000-pound craft, designed to ride under the water’s surface except for a 1½-by-3-foot hatch, was on the verge of sinking.

The biggest surprise for the rescuers: Ringrose had a 7-year-old girl with him.

The girl, Nicole, turned out to be the daughter of a Gresham woman who was involved with Ringrose. The mother had reported the girl missing on Nov. 12 but apparently had no idea she’d gone out to sea on Ringrose’s “submarine.”

James Ringrose, left, in 1976 with his original "yellow submarine." (Oregonian archive)

When a Coast Guard utility boat brought Ringrose and Nicole to Seattle’s Pier 36, the girl’s sobbing mother rushed to her daughter and pulled her into an embrace. Ringrose, munching an apple, strolled past them.

Nicole’s mother refused to speak with the press, offering simply: “I thank God my daughter is alive today.”

The bearded Ringrose, however, headed straight for the cameras.

“The water was still and calm and she said she wanted to go out,” he said of his decision to take the 7-year-old onto the yellow vessel he had built. “It was very calm, like it was going to be a cakewalk.”

He paused, smiling. He was enjoying his sudden celebrity. “A 21-day cakewalk,” he said.

He said they’d been hit by a “fierce storm” that sent water gushing through the open hatch, which fried the craft’s electronics, cutting power to the motor and radio. He laughed at his bad luck.

A reporter for The Oregonian broke the jovial mood by asking if Ringrose had been on the FBI’s most-wanted list in the late 1960s. Ringrose denied it.

News organizations and even the FBI couldn’t immediately pin down whether James Robert Ringrose of newfound yellow-submarine fame was the same James Robert Ringrose who had left a trail of bad checks behind him and once wielded a “Get Out of Jail Free” card.

(al.com)

A bureau spokesman said its James Robert Ringrose had a criminal career that made up a “voluminous” file. They estimated he had traveled some 7,000 miles as a fugitive in the 1960s, spending time in Japan and various other distant locales.

The FBI’s description of Ringrose sounded like a personals ad: He was 6 feet tall, weighed 150 pounds, spoke fluent Spanish and enjoyed stockcar races, sailing and motorcycles.

Agent Bill Williams of the FBI’s Portland office said it appeared that the Ringrose in the bureau’s records had “used a number of identities and may have several Social Security numbers. The only way it could be determined positively if the two men were the same person would be through comparison of fingerprints.”

But since the yellow submarine’s captain wasn’t facing any criminal charges, there were no fingerprints to compare.

That led Ringrose’s brother, Michael, who lived in Burbank, Calif., to step forward and confirm that the Oregon James Ringrose, now 37, was indeed the man once hunted by J. Edgar Hoover’s boys.

Michael expressed befuddlement over his brother’s choices in life, insisting James could have accomplished anything. Their father, he pointed out, was a professor of medicine at the University of California.

“My brother has distinct talents,” Michael said. “He can charm virtually anyone.”

He added: “He has a knack for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.”

Even with his criminal past exposed, James Ringrose remained close with Nicole’s mother, including living with her and her three children for a time. The woman told The Oregonian in 1980 that she had hired a Hollywood agent in an attempt to sell the story rights to the yellow submarine’s misadventure at sea.

But there would be no happily ever after, in a Hollywood story or the real one.

James Ringrose in 1979 (The Oregonian)Oregonian

In March 1984, Ringrose fled Oregon after being accused of abducting two 11-year-old girls, one of whom was Nicole. A day after they had disappeared, the girls were found in a motel room on 82nd Avenue in Northeast Portland.

“They were just leaving when I opened the door,” Sgt. Noble H. Keist told reporters at a press conference. “They were surprised, kind of scared.” The girls told Keist they were going to walk to the airport, where they planned to meet Ringrose. He had told them he was taking them to Hawaii, but first they had to dye their hair.

Nicole sometimes referred to Ringrose as her father, sometimes as her uncle.

Local law enforcement began an intensive search for Ringrose, including of a “yellow submarine” docked in Sauvie Island’s marina. Ringrose had built the vessel to replace the one abandoned at sea five years earlier.

Oregonians who knew Ringrose expressed shock at the accusations. He was eccentric, perhaps, but seemed like an upstanding citizen.

He had continued his clean-energy efforts into the Reagan years, and he even appeared to be on the verge of success. Frank Coates, a San Diego energy executive, said his company was about to test a 100-kilowatt wind-turbine generator Ringrose had developed. Coates described him as a “very competent engineer. We have a great deal of respect for him.”

The news that Ringrose was wanted for abducting two girls, Coates said, was “incomprehensible to us.” He said the man he had worked with was a “very kind, generous individual. He’s very loving and very responsible. Let’s hope this is a big nightmare.”

It was a big nightmare -- a waking one. But this time, the fugitive didn’t travel thousands of miles before law enforcement caught up with him.

Ringrose was arrested in San Diego in May 1984 and charged with kidnapping and 13 other crimes. The charges ended up involving five girls, all around 11-12 years old. The following year he was convicted of sexual abuse and delivering a controlled substance to a minor. A judge sentenced him to two years in the Multnomah County Jail.

The former FBI Most Wanted man remained in Oregon after serving his time -- and spent years continuing his quest for a clean-energy breakthrough. A decade after his release from jail, he faced new charges: criminal trespass and aggravated theft for stealing a Portland company’s “wind-generator components.”

-- Douglas Perry

@douglasmperry

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