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1 @CN:CHAPTER ONE Macksville: The Escape from Lansing and the Shootout on Main Street The land on which it was to be built was purchased by the Kansas legislature in 1861, the same year Kansas became a state and the first year of the Civil War. It was built to hold the very worst of Kansas. It was opened in 1868 and it continues to hold some of the worst of Kansas today. In the beginning it was officially called the Kansas State Penitentiary at Lansing. Today it’s officially called the Lansing Correctional Facility. But, to Kansans, it was and is simply “Lansing.” In 1941, among the worst in Kansas, and in Lansing, were George Raymond Hight, Kansas State Prison (KSP) number 9847; Frank Wetherick, KSP 3499; Lloyd Swain, KSP 9146; George Swift, KSP 2096; and John Eldridge , KSP 2559. All white males. All career criminals. Hight, age forty-one, was a Kansas oil field worker from Dodge City serving ten to fifty years for a bank robbery in Byers, Kansas, in Pratt County. Imprisoned in Lansing since 1927, he was also a car thief and burglar. Wetherick , thirty-one years old, from Pottawatomie County, Kansas, had been sent to Lansing from Shawnee County in 1933 to serve ten to twenty-one years for a Topeka bank robbery. He had been a barber, but his heart had not been in it. Swain, age forty, a tall, thin chain-smoker, raped and murdered a woman in Marshall County in 1925 and was serving a life sentence. He appeared considerably older than his age. Swift, age thirty-six, was a habitual criminal from Rice County, Kansas, serving a life sentence, primarily due to multiple theft and robbery convictions. Eldridge, thirty-one years of age, an Oklahoma laborer, was serving ten to fifty years for having robbed the bank in Peru, Kansas, in Chautauqua County, in 1931, which took place while he was on parole after having robbed an Oklahoma bank in 1928. He was denied parole in 1936, 1939, and again on February 4, 1941, but with a parole violation detainer in his Lansing file he would be transported to Oklahoma to serve the remainder of his Oklahoma sentence when he completed his Kansas term. Like the others, he wasn’t going anywhere very soon. At least they were not scheduled to go anywhere very soon. The five had more in common than their criminal professions, their long tenures in Lansing, and the lengthy sentences still ahead of them. They also 2 Chapter One shared a common belief that they had served enough of their respective sentences and it was time to leave the ancient, gray, foreboding walls of Lansing, where they dug coal for the state of Kansas, as had Lansing inmates since a coal mine was opened beneath the prison in 1882. Accordingly, they had spent weeks, under Hight’s leadership, tunneling out of the Lansing coal mine into a large drainpipe that ran under the prison yard wall to freedom. During the early morning hours of May 27, 1941, Hight, Wetherick, Swain, Swift, and Eldridge crawled through the pipe and escaped into the countryside after stealing a guard’s automobile in the prison parking lot. As they had planned, they soon separated. Swift and Eldridge headed to California together. Swain, a loner, perhaps not by his own choice, went south, and Hight, the escape ringleader, and Wetherick spent a few days in northeastern Kansas committing robberies and car thefts before heading west. Kansas Attorney General Jay Parker gave the assignment to capture and return the five escapees to Lansing to the Kansas Bureau of Investigation (KBI). The small, elite, fledgling bureau was not yet two years old. Lloyd Swain, following the escape from Lansing, raped a young mother in Arkansas City and several women in Wichita before crossing the state line into Oklahoma. He was captured on August 9, 1941, near Bartlesville, Oklahoma , by Kansas Bureau of Investigation Director Lou Richter and three KBI special agents, Joe Anderson, Clarence Bulla, and Harry Neal, assisted by Oklahoma authorities. The capture followed weeks of tracking Swain out of Kansas into the Cookson Hills of Oklahoma and from one hideout to another . He was returned to Lansing by the KBI. This was the first apprehension of a major fugitive by the young agency. Swift and Eldridge were eventually trailed by the KBI to San Diego, California . With the assistance of local law enforcement, they were quietly taken into custody by...

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