Bananas! (1907)

The guards chatted about the upcoming “world’s championship” as they entered the yard of the Rhode Island State Prison at 5 a.m. on the morning of Saturday, October 5, 1912. In a few days, the series would begin in New York as Joe Wood, the Boston Red Sox fire-baller, would pitch against the Giants starter Joe Tesreau. The Giants pitcher was favored, but Boston backers hoped their speedy superstar outfielder Trist Speaker would make the difference.

The men gasped as they entered the yard to discover a thirty-foot, wooden ladder leaning against the twenty-four-foot wall. The positioning of the ladder could mean only one thing: one of the prisoners at work in the bakery around 4:55 a.m. had escaped.

Prison Deputy Warden Elmer Davis’ (Warden McCuskey, suffering from heart trouble, was on leave) heart sank when he received a report about the escape. Ernst Willhem Lorenz, a murderer and rapist, had gone over the wall and disappeared into the night.

The escape was deviously clever. The entire plan hinged on a few minutes.

Lorenz, who worked in the prison bakery, took advantage of a short period on Saturday when the yard remained unobserved. During these crucial minutes, he slipped out of the bakery, eluding the watchful eye of Guard Raymond Rathman, and crept undetected 200 yards to the corner of the yard, where he spied a thirty-foot wooden ladder hanging from a peg in an adjacent shed just beyond reach. Using a hoe and length of cord, he managed to pull the ladder through the bars. He then propped the ladder against the wall and climbed to freedom. He hit the ground and began his midnight run.

Of all the rotten eggs to let out of the basket, Lorenz was among the worst. “Had it been any other prisoner,” prison physician Jones lamented, “the case would not be so bad, for he would get out of the way and refrain from committing any crime until he knew he would not be caught, but in this case the animal being will be prominent.” No woman or girl, Dr. Jones warned, would be safe from the avowed rapist.

Prison officials worried how the public would react to the fact that they simply hadn’t watched the basket very carefully. The finger of blame had to point somewhere. Rathman, the guard in charge of the bakery, lost his job a few days after the escape. Deputy Warden Davis held Rathman personally responsible for the escape because he had issued a standing order that guards watch the dangerous Lorenz at all times.

Born in Germany in 1881, Lorenz grew up in an affluent family who pampered him with material things. He left Germany in 1903 to escape what he called a “girl scrape” and traveled to the United States. Deprived of his golden spoon, Lorenz began to contemplate ways to acquire easy money. In New York, a friend told him that he could make a good living in Rhode Island as a thief.

Lorenz left for Providence, where he began a string of robberies and assaults climaxing in at least one murder and possibly two.

By January 1910, Rhode Island was littered by the victims of Lorenz’ crimes. The one-time spoiled rich kid preferred “girl scrapes”; he later said he sought female victims, many of whom he may have raped as well as robbed (the number of rapes perpetrated by Lorenz is hard to gauge as his victims may have been too embarrassed to report this phase of their assault).

Lorenz, however, didn’t discriminate .When he couldn’t find a suitable female to mug, he later reported, he preyed on males instead.

On Saturday evening, January 8, 1910, Lorenz bush-wacked George Williams and Gilbert Mann as they traveled along the Hartford Pike in the area of Johnston. During the robbery, he shot Mann in the chest. Mann died a few days later of the wound.

Within a week of the crime, authorities had collared a suspect: William Luder, an alias used by Lorenz.

A search of Lorenz’ room turned up a pocket watch. Detectives used the serial number to trace the watch to a repair shop and from there to Gilbert Mann. Mann’s widow subsequently identified the piece. As the investigation unfurled, other victims came forward and fingered Lorenz as the highwayman that robbed them. Harry and Alice Bartlett swore that Lorenz accosted them in Waterman’s Woods in December.

At first, the suspect denied any wrongdoing, but eventually, he opened up about a long string of theft and assault. He admitted to shooting Mann and assaulting several women, but when police questioned him about the murder of Laura E. Register, whose body was found in the Jewish Cemetery in May 1909, he clammed up. He subsequently suffered from a convenient lapse of memory.

Lorenz, a perpetrator of sex crimes before the term was coined, became a curio to students of the human psyche.

“The prison has become to medical students a psychological study,” commented a writer for the (Providence) Evening News. “His excesses made him a bloodhound of licentiousness. However, no idea of insanity is entertained by any of the authorities, all believing the man responsible to the law.”

A Grand Jury charged Lorenz with five counts: one for murder, three for robbery, and one for assault, but he never saw trial. Students of the psyche robbed Lorenz’ victims of courtroom vengeance; they adjudged him “insane,” sending him to the mental ward.

He spent the next two years until the watchful eyes of doctors. In October 1912, with the prison’s new mental facility under construction, Lorenz spent his nights at the county jail and his days laboring in the kitchen.

At some point, Lorenz began scheming to escape. Some guards believed that he must have had a helping hand from help an outsider. Nevertheless, he went over the wall on October 5, triggering a full-scale manhunt.

Panic gripped Rhode Island as the dangerous criminal fled.

While a posse “thrashed” the brush in the vicinity of the prison, a team of detectives watched train depots and searched passengers embarking on ships. A native of Germany, Lorenz may have been headed back to Europe—too far for the long arm of Rhode Island law to nab him. If so, his life sentence would have amounted to just two and a half years.

Governor Aram Pothier agreed to offer a bounty for the escaped felon: $500. Local police produced a detailed description and sent 300 wanted cards, each containing a photograph and Lorenz’ Bertillon measurements, all over the United States. The same photograph of Lorenz in a bowler had adorned the front page of The (Providence) Sunday Tribune next to a detailed description, including the cryptic line “He is a German and looks like one.”

Almost a week later—on Friday, October 11—the searchers received a hot tip from Carolina (Rhode Island), a village near the border of Connecticut and not far from the sea shore.

A fruit peddler named Isaac Goldstein claimed to have seen Lorenz emerge from the woods. The fugitive, whom Goldstein knew, asked for a bunch of bananas and disappeared back into the brush.

Goldstein’s bananas offered the best chance to collar Lorenz.

A team of detectives descended on Carolina looking for banana peels. They hoped their fugitive would slip on a peel and fall into their arms. But after combing the vicinity, they came up empty-handed.

Lorenz never did slip-up. He managed to evade his hunters and simply vanished. If anyone slipped on the proverbial banana peel, it was Rhode Island State Prison guards who let the dangerous highwayman out of their sight.