DS: 52 Ancestors Prompt "Thief"

DS: Thief and Escape Artist

Note: DS is still living, as is his ex-wife, my cousin. Therefore I am not including their names in this blog post.

                It’s rather ironic that my Uncle J, the police officer for our tiny town, would have two criminals in his immediate family. The worst by far was his son-in-law DS. He not only had a long rap sheet, but was a repeated prison escapee!

                I’ve been unable to find any birth record for DS. His birth date according to the Kansas prison system is February 1-, 1937, and he seems to have spent some of his early years in Amboy, Minnesota. He first appears in the newspapers at 16, when he attempted to break out of the Blue Earth County Jail with another teen prisoner. The boys were in custody because they had broken out of the reform school in Red Wing, Minnesota and had been captured near DS’s home in Amboy. The pathetic thing was that DS attempted this escape just two days before his scheduled release date. What an idiot! He’d already broken out of the Red Wing facility four times over a two year period, so at 16 he'd broken out of jail five times already.

                                

During the jail break, the boys beat two other prisoners, leaving one with broken ribs and internal injuries, and took the second guy hostage using razor blades, threatening to slash his throat if the guards didn’t release them. The guards tackled the boys, stripped them, and locked them back up. Presumably they got some hard time after this incident.          

DS must have been out of jail by the beginning of 1967, as that is when he met my cousin JO, whose father was police officer J, and whose mother was my dad’s sister. JO and DS were married on May 25, 1967. Their only son, DGS, was born a year later on May 16, 1968.

Unfortunately, marriage didn’t reform DS. According to the stories I heard whispered as a child, DS dragged JO along in his car on a burglary spree, breaking into a brick ranch home outside Mankato—a house we always drove past on our way to visit our grandparents. He was caught and sent back to prison. I am not sure of the date of that arrest—I couldn’t find the newspaper article. However, there was an article dated July 17, 1969 reporting that DS, then 26, had broken out of the prison in Stillwater, Minnesota with another burglary convict, 44-year-old Jay Burnett. The state police had fifty officers searching the heavily wooded area where the pair were first sighted. Burnett was eventually recaptured in Dickenson North Dakota on July 20. I’m not sure when DS was recaptured.

                    Stillwater Prison, Stillwater MN

The next newspaper article featuring the break-out artist was dated February 13, 1980. DS, now 42, was recaptured in Garden City, Kansas following yet another escape from a minimum security facility in Minnesota. He was sent back to Minnesota to serve the rest of his sentence.

JO divorced DS after he was caught burglarizing the Mankato property. Their son, DGS, had developmental delays and died young, on November 29, 1998 at age thirty.

DS must have grown attached to Kansas during his days on the lam there, for now, in his 80s, he is living in Wichita. A website that provides info on convicts included this photo of him. I hope by now his burglary and prison break days are behind him. He apparently had the ability to charm women, as records indicate he remarried several times over the years.