Leavenworth Train: A Fugitive's Search for Justice in the Vanishing West

About this book

For twenty-four years Frank Grigware ran from the law. Convicted of a crime he didn’t commit and sentenced in 1909 to life in Leavenworth, America’s first federal penitentiary, Grigware joined five other inmates in a daring escape. The six men hijacked a supply train and rammed it through the prison’s west gate. Investigative journalist Joe Jackson, four-time Pulitzer Prize nominee and 2002 Edgar Award nominee for Best Fact Crime book, follows a young, guileless Grigware in a journey not to fabulous adventure in America’s legendary West but rather to an ill-fated association with train robbers—and to his arrest and soon, imprisonment. Five months later, Grigware would be journeying again, this time in desperate flight across the Canadian border to a new life as a husband, father, and mayor. Grigware’s story is also the story of the Pinkerton detective agency and of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which sought Grigware through the 1920s and ’30s. It culminates in a meticulously documented, revealing examination of criminal justice in two nations, when Grigware is apprehended by Canadian Mounties and the Canadian government refuses to extradite to the United States “the sort of man we want settling our land”—with results more surprising than fiction. Eight pages of photographs complete this tale of America's most elusive fugitive. “A journalistic meditation on frustrated fantasies, crime, punishment, justice and absolution.... Absorbing.... Meticulously documented.”—Washington Post “Gripping.”—The Economist