Worth More Dead

choreographed plan to carry out what newspapers of that era termed “the last great train robbery in America.”
    Ray D’Autremont had already served time in a Washington state prison for his union activity. He said later, “Thousands of women and children were starving and dying. Thousands more—honest working men—were receiving less than half of what they should.”
    Though the charismatic twin brothers bragged about their goal of outwitting the boss barons who were living high on the hog, they didn’t actually want to help the poor. For them, charity began at home. Seeking adventure and wealth, they went to Chicago, where they figured they could become gangsters and enjoy the perks of the Roaring Twenties.
    But the brothers from Southern Oregon weren’t exactly welcomed into the gangsters’ world. They were viewed as country hicks who didn’t fit into the big city. They came back west, and it was then that Ray came up with his idea to rob a Southern Pacific train.
    He believed he had the perfect plan to make them all rich: one of the trains that roared south through the Rogue River Valley in Oregon to cross the Siskiyou Mountains into California was called the Gold Special because it was said to carry huge cargoes of both gold and cash.
    Ray heard that there would be half a million dollars in gold on the train on October 11. He assured Roy and Hugh that money could be theirs.
    With stolen dynamite, Ray waited at the south end of Tunnel Number 13 while Roy and Hugh jumped on the train. That was easy to do because the train slowed to a crawl as it entered the three-thousand-foot-long tunnel and chugged up to the summit of the mountain. Roy and Hugh leapt down into the engine and ordered the engineer to stop the train. Then the brothers packed the dynamite against one end of the mail car. Their plan was to set it off, grab as much gold and cash as they could, and escape into the forest.
    But as Sturholm described it in his book, they used far too much dynamite. It ripped up the steel mail car like a can opener, killed the mail clerk, and set fire to the train. The D’Autremonts could see nothing at all through the black smoke and flames that filled the tunnel, much less steal anything. Much of the cash in the mail car had literally been shredded, and the gold was buried in the wreckage. The train itself was jammed in the tunnel by the mangled mail car, and could move neither forward nor backward. When the brakeman came back to see what had happened, he spooked Ray and Roy, and they shot him dead. Then they shot the engineer and the fireman. They were now not only train robbers but also cold-blooded murderers.
    Without so much as a bar of gold, the three D’Autremonts scrambled into the woods, which they knew well. Somehow, despite a huge manhunt, they managed to stay free—if virtually penniless—for four years. Hugh was caught first, turned in by an army buddy who recognized his photo from a wanted poster. Roy and Ray were caught shortly after that in Ohio.
    The story of the D’Autremonts had enthralled Larry Sturholm from the first time he heard about them. They had become media celebrities on a par with Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, Al Capone, Bruno Hauptman or—today’s counterparts—O. J. Simpson and Michael Jackson. The public wanted to believe that they were basically good men who were striking back for the underdogs and working stiffs in America. And the D’Autremont twins were as good-looking as movie stars, happy to pose for newspaper cameramen.
    Sturholm set out to re-create the story that had been lost in time. He discovered that Roy had gone insane in prison and been forced to undergo an experimental frontal lobotomy, which didn’t work. He died in the Oregon State Mental Hospital. Hugh was paroled in 1958 and died soon after of cancer. Ray, the instigator of the botched train robbery fifty years earlier, had his sentence commuted in 1972. Once he sued the railroad that ran trains past the Oregon Penitentiary in Salem, claiming that the sound of the whistles disturbed his sleep and gave him nightmares. His suits were thrown out as frivolous.
    The onetime glamour boy of train robberies lived to be eighty-four and was a formidable reSource for Larry Sturholm’s book. Sturholm interviewed the surviving D’Autremont in his old age, and he also obtained amazing photographs taken at the time of the disaster. All for Nothing, his book, told the true story to readers who had never heard