A lost soul runs into trouble with the law

Published 9:00 pm Sunday, February 15, 2004

The world awoke one day in November 1957 to discover that the Soviets had blasted a dog into space.

Just weeks after launching Sputnik, Earth’s first artificial satellite, scientists in the Soviet Union were at it again. They sealed the dog, Laika, into Sputnik 2 and sent the spacecraft hurtling around the planet at nearly 18,000 miles an hour.

The launch triggered a serious case of Cold War jitters. People listened to the “beep-beep-beep” of Sputnik 2’s radio signal. They stared toward the heavens, grappling with the significance of a dog floating nearly 900 miles above the planet.

A few hours before the launch, Ralph Lowery was focused on a different type of space. He was stretched out in an escape tunnel beneath a Washington state prison, chipping away at the few yards of dirt that separated him from freedom.

Today, Ralph is 69, a grandfather and the keeper of a beautiful garden behind his home on the western edge of Snohomish. He is loved and respected. But in 1957, he was disconnected and desperate, a 22-year-old convict who was dying just a little each day.

Ralph spent his teens and early 20s in near constant trouble with the law. At the time, he blamed his problems on a lousy childhood and his bread truck-driving father, who had made it clear he didn’t want Ralph or his sister.

Ralph’s mother had disappeared from his life years before. Ralph thought it was all a big mistake. His dad must have done something to drive her away. Ralph grew up dreaming about her love, how she’d enfold him in her arms – if only he could find her.

The search for his mom was an odyssey that began for Ralph at age 15, when he hit the road alone, resolved to track her down. It ended just before Ralph’s 17th birthday after he was tossed into an Oklahoma prison to serve three years for auto theft.

Ralph finally caught up to his mother in Seattle after his 1954 release from prison. He learned she had been just blocks away from his boyhood home all along.

Ralph was nervous the day his sister took him to Rose Lowery’s small apartment on Queen Anne Hill. He hadn’t seen his mother in nearly a decade. Would she still welcome him into her arms?

A short, sharp-featured woman opened the door. Her dark hair was streaked with gray.

“It’s good to see my brats,” Rose said.

She offered no explanation or apology for abandoning her children. At 19, Ralph knew better than to be surprised.

There was war raging in Korea, and the United States was looking for young men to do the fighting. Ralph decided to join the Army. He kept his fingers crossed that his convict past, which would have disqualified him from service, would remain undiscovered.

That didn’t happen. An officer recognized a jailhouse tattoo on Ralph’s left hand. All of the marching and saluting at boot camp earned him a one-way ticket to the brig.

Ralph bolted the instant he saw a route to escape. But the freedom didn’t last long. He stole a car. The crime earned him a year in federal prison after he was caught driving the vehicle from Washington into Oregon.

Ralph was sent to the federal prison in El Reno, Okla., and was released just before Christmas 1955. He left with a new jailhouse tattoo on his right shoulder, a cross entwined in a banner that read “Born to Lose.”

Now 21, Ralph drifted back to Seattle. He landed a job setting pins at a bowling alley. His free time was spent on Yesler Way, Seattle’s infamous Skid Road, rubbing elbows with ex-cons, drunks and others who, like him, considered doing good boring.

Within a month, Ralph was arrested in Snohomish County for burglary. Released on bail, he hooked up with another crook and started forging thousands of dollars in bad checks. Ralph used his own driver’s license to pass the bogus drafts. It wasn’t a sophisticated scheme, just a means to get a lot of cash quickly.

“I knew I was going to the joint for the burglary beef in Everett, so I had to get some money to split on,” he later told police.

He bought a nice red convertible and headed south, swinging through Los Angeles. He met a bar girl there who suggested they hit Las Vegas.

Security at the casinos almost immediately ended the pair’s plan to pay for the trip by passing bad checks. The last Ralph saw of the girl, she was surrounded by a couple of goons in suits.

Ralph figured police would soon be on his trail, so he turned his car toward Mexico. He was arrested after his car broke down in the California desert.

Seattle detectives retrieved Ralph. They snapped handcuffs on his wrists and shackles on his ankles. When the police stopped at roadside restaurants, the prisoner was led, chains clinking, into the restroom. Ralph remembers parents shielding their children as he was led past, as if his criminal ways were contagious.

He was different. The evidence was in his written confession.

“Right now, I do not feel anything,” he told police. “I can’t say I’m glad I did it or I can’t say I’m sorry I did it.”

In October 1956, a King County jury convicted Ralph of two counts of forgery. He was sentenced to not more than 20 years in the Washington State Penitentiary at Walla Walla. The judge recommended Ralph serve at least a decade. If the parole board agreed, he wouldn’t see the streets again until he was in his early 30s.

Ralph rolled up to the penitentiary gates on Jan. 10, 1957. The prison looked like a factory amid the stark beauty of Walla Walla’s rolling grasslands, a bulky collection of high-intensity lights, barbed wire and concrete walls. Inside, crime was transformed into punishment.

Prison officials had no doubt Ralph belonged there. The report filed on his arrival painted a bleak picture of inmate 026268:

“This young man got off to an extremely poor start in life in that he was rejected by both parents, was very poorly supervised, and fell so far behind in school that it was necessary to place him in a special class for slow learners. He has been a general disciplinary problem all his life and has been involved in innumerable lawless escapades.”

Barely into his 20s, Ralph already considered himself a career criminal and posed “a very definite and probable” escape risk.

“He has no concept of what he wants to do or what he could do,” a prison psychiatrist wrote. “As he points out himself, he hasn’t lived in a way that allows him to know how people do live.”

Ralph was assigned a cell with two other older inmates. One was William Jesse James. In 1955, James had been among a group of convicts who burrowed their way out of the prison by tunnel. The other was Everett Thomas “Bob” Rennick, an armed robber who had grown up near Bothell.

Like Ralph, Rennick had first gone to prison while just 16. Rennick robbed a jeweler along Everett’s Hewitt Avenue and was tossed into the state reformatory at Monroe. Other crimes followed. Then 35, Rennick had spent all but three months of the previous 19 years locked up in state and federal prisons.

When somebody gave him trouble, the square-jawed con rarely had to do more than just narrow his eyes and squint in their direction, his left eyebrow curled up in challenge. Rennick was the jailhouse dentist, capable of fashioning bridges and dentures. He’d learned that skill, and others, while serving time in the federal prison at Leavenworth, Kan.

Rennick squinted at Ralph when the guards dropped him at his new home.

“Boy, you are young and sweet-looking,” Rennick said.

Ralph had faced similar harassment while imprisoned as a teen in Oklahoma. He was now older and stronger. He wasn’t going to be Rennick’s punk, and he told him so.

The older con nodded approval. He later invited Ralph to sit at his table during chow. He said he’d just been trying to see if Ralph had any sand. He also told Ralph to ask the guards’ permission to move into another “house.” Rennick said he didn’t want to get to know anybody who might be going home soon.

That was a lie.

When the parole board notified Ralph he’d have to serve a minimum eight-year sentence, Rennick shared the real reason he didn’t want a new cellmate.

“He already had a tunnel going,” Ralph said.

Back then, inmates weren’t regularly scanned through metal detectors. The prison had stood since Washington’s territorial days, but officials hadn’t yet paved over, or otherwise sealed off, nearly every place where tunnels could be dug.

The inmates had found a dirt-covered space behind some unfinished cellblocks. They dug into the ground using spades fashioned from scrap metal smuggled out of the prison’s license-plate factory. Dirt was hauled on bedsheets used like sleds, and sprinkled on the ground.

No more than two prisoners ever went into the tunnel to dig. There was no ventilation, and more than once the guy carving underground passed out from lack of oxygen and had to be pulled out by his ankles.

Ralph took his turns digging. He thrived underground, his nose filled with the smell of earth, his world reduced to just the few feet illuminated in front of him.

The tunnel was carefully positioned to pass under the wall, but the inmates had given little thought about what to do once they broke into the open. They planned to pop up like gophers and scatter.

Ralph was fearful that he would be shot. When he confided in Rennick, the older con ran a hand across the deep wrinkles on his forehead, flashed a lopsided grin and told him not to worry.

“Let me tell you, Ralph. If you hear the shots, keep going. If you don’t, (expletive), you are dead.”

The final push to escape came on Nov. 2, 1957, the same night the Soviet Union shot a dog into space.

The tunnel was discovered by a guard who was patrolling near the wall and noticed an unusual vibration under his feet. He called for help. Reporters were later told the sounds coming from below ground were “like a horse kicking on a barn door.”

The tunnel opening was found. Ralph, Rennick, James and three other inmates were taken at gunpoint to maximum-security cells.

Word of the aborted escape appeared in newspapers two days later. The front page of The Herald was still filled with news about the space dog. Deep inside was a four-paragraph Associated Press article.

Ralph’s name was misspelled. So was Rennick’s. The story ran next to an advertisement for the midnight premiere of Elvis Presley’s new movie, “Jail House Rock.”

The Snohomish man’s memory of the escape attempt more than 46 years ago doesn’t mesh perfectly with the official record. He recalls digging past the wall, crawling out of the dirt and making a mad dash for freedom.

Whatever happened, recollections of that day still set Ralph’s hands trembling and trigger nervous puffs on a cigarette.

There was a guard. There was a gun. There was the glare of a flashlight beam.

Somebody shouted: “Get on your stomach! Put your hands out so I can see them!”

There were no shots. Ralph dropped to the ground. He wasn’t going anywhere.