A ticket to the execution of convicts Ellsworth Kelley and James Willos after their recapture. This execution date was canceled, but the two were hanged the following year.

Editors note: This is the third in a series titled “Bloody 1925 prison break ended badly for everyone involved.” Read the piece in its entirety at redmondspokesman.com

The 1925 prison break had a big effect on the state prison. Warden Dalrymple, as mentioned before, had been given the job for political reasons, and he was paired up with J.V. Starrett as the state parole officer. Starrett was on the Ku Klux Klan’s payroll (he was a Kleagle or something like that) and had done a yeoman’s job getting out the “Klown vote” to elect Pierce as governor. The position of parole officer had been his reward.

But like a lot of people to whom membership in a gang of secret vigilante terrorists was appealing, Starrett was always hungry for more power and contemptuous of rules. By 1925 Starrett and Dalrymple were openly feuding and everyone at the prison, guards and prisoners alike, had learned how to play them off against each other.

That, of course, all came to a screeching halt after this bloody fiasco.

Both Dalrymple and Starrett were given their walking papers, along with five guards who “retired early,” and the prison was taken over by Warden J.W. Lillie, former sheriff of Gilliam County. Order was restored, and the next time a disturbance broke out — a food-fight in the dining hall that escalated into a 200-man riot — Warden Lillie himself ran to the scene with a gun and fired over a dozen shots into the crowd, critically wounding at least one man.

The Oregon State Penitentiary was always a pretty awful place. But under Lillie, it became, at least, a little more predictable and less dangerous to its neighbors.

A Cycle of Crisis and Violence: The Oregon State Penitentiary, 1866-1968, a master’s thesis by Joseph Willard Laythe published in 1992 by Portland State University; archives of Roseburg News-Review and Oregon Statesman: March 1924, August 1925, May 1926, April 1927, April 1928; correspondence with Peter Bellant of Portland