"Like a P-38"

For years Robber John Giles (37, 5 ft. 11, 160 lbs., dark complexion, brown hair, tough-looking) and Robber Edgar Cook (31, 5 ft. 4, 154 lbs., light complexion, hazel eyes, talks incessantly) were just dull names on Midwest police circulars. But in the tarnished democracy of crime a man can always emerge from mediocrity by that feat of supermechanics, a successful prison break.

Last week Giles and Cook had improved their social standing. They not only took it on the Arthur Duffy* from the Council Bluffs, Iowa, "escape-proof" jail, but they called the play first, like Babe Ruth pointing at the center-field fence.

Giles and Cook began to practice up last November by knocking a hole in the wall at the Nebraska State Penitentiary, and escaping. Rearrested and lodged in the county jail at Council Bluffs, the pair produced a hacksaw, apparently from thin air, and began sawing a hole in the floor. They were searched and moved to separate cells in the escape-proof city jail across the street.

Then they were stripped and searched again. Cook had somehow picked up $145 in currency and a steel pick. After that jailers took away their shoes, underwear, furniture, and left them in bare cells with nothing but coveralls, woolen socks, and a blanket and toothbrush apiece. Their meals were served on paper plates, eaten with wooden spoons.

Statement of Intention. One evening Cook told the policemen who brought his food: "We're getting out of here. We're going to leave in that blue police car down there. We'll take off like a P-38." The policemen chuckled. The third-floor cells had tool-proof bars, and six steel doors barred the only possible route of escape. But in the hours before dawn the shoeless prisoners began unlocking doors--with keys made from a wooden spoon and a toothbrush. They walked downstairs to the basement, crawled through a window, climbed into the blue police car and "took off like a P-38," while a startled cop banged away with his revolver.

The baffled jailers guessed that they had made a lock impression for their keys with wet cigaret papers, had formed them with a hidden sliver of nail file. Recalling the accuracy of Cook's prediction, they thought uneasily of another of his announcements:

"We're coming back after a month and blow up the whole damned town. I'd like to have two guns and be in a room with 18 policemen. I'd blow all their heads off."

* A minor but revered West Coast cop dodger.

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