Imagine being a young married couple traveling in northeastern Oklahoma in 1982 and you stop by the roadside where a older gentleman is displaying hand-painted license plates and other decorated items on a table beside the highway.
Your wife decides she'd like to have a personalized license plate with her name on it and the occupant of the roadside stand painstakingly writes her name with silver paint on a glossy black license plate.
Years later, you discover that that license plate was handcrafted for your wife by one of the most infamous outlaws of the Cookson Hills era.
While other desperados like Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd, Ford Bradshaw, Kye Carllile, and Estes Perkins made names for themselves while using the rugged Hills of Sequoyah and Cherokee counties as a base for the criminal enterprises, an Arkansas born outlaw who went straight after getting out of prison in 1944 may have lived the most colorful life of them all.
Carl Lee Janaway was born to Joseph and Mamie Janeway on November 29, 1902 in a cabin on the edge of Dardanelle in Yell County.
By 1930, Janaway, who stood 5'2 and weighed under 100 pounds for most of his outlaw years, had made his way to the Cookson Hills where he was working as a trapper on the Illinois River. He also worked as a truck driver for the ate of Arkansas while the "road from Fort Smith to Little Rock was being built".
In his later years, Carl always claimed that it was Dossie who led him into a hardcore life of crime, declaring that he was "into the petty stuff"" before he met and married the vivacious blonde.
Carl was 27 and Dossie was 21 when the couple married. Carl inherited a 5-year-old stepson named Roy when the couple said their nuptials.
Dossie would be tagged with the moniker of "Blonde Bandit of the Ozarks" but after five years of marriage she and Roy moved to Inglewood, California.
Dossie went on to earn some distinction as a criminal when she helped Ted Cole and Ralph Roe escape Alcatraz by meeting them in the thick fog of San Francisco in a motorized sailboat in one of only two successful escapes from the island prison.
You can read more about Dossie Lynch by clicking this link Jesse Lynch & Family - ESCAPING ALCATRAZ (google.com) which also includes a 1:35 minute interview with Carl Janaway.
Ironically, years later Dossie's son Roy served in the military and became, of all things. a police officer.
Carl said "marrying that woman" was the worst mistake he made in his life" but in1930's Carl dealt with his wife leaving him by becoming one of the most wanted men in a four-state region.
During that period, Carl was involved with numerous shootouts with law enforcement officials. At least two were wounded, including a Sequoyah County deputy by the name of Drake.
Deputy Drake was shot while he and others scoured the hills looking for Janaway after his break from the Tucker prison farm in Arkansas where he was serving time for breaking and entering, bank robbery, and kidnapping.
He had escaped from the Arkansas prison farm two times previously, alluding captors for a month the first time and for a few days the second time.
At one point, over 125 deputies and residents of the Cookson Hills searched the forests and valleys looking for Janaway after the shooting of the Sequoyah County deputy. Janaway lived like a wild man on the run and on at least one occasion ambushed fishermen along the Illinois River and took all their food.
Carl finally made his way to St Louis where, when stopped by a policeman, shot him in the leg and tried to make another getaway. This time he was captured and he refused extradition to Arkansas. Carl said he had worked in blackberry fields at the Tucker farm "where the bodies were buried".
Faced with a choice of being extradited to Arkansas, going back to Tucker, and then being sent back to Oklahoma after he had served his Arkansas time, Janaway took his chances with federal officials in Missouri and wound up being sentenced to Alcatraz for ten years for transporting a stolen car across state border lines.
While at Alcatraz, Carl was assigned the dubious task of being put in charge of the day-to-day activities of another inmate, who was riddled with syphilis.
Al Capone, before he died, gave Janaway a dictionary in appreciation for everything he had done for the notorious mobster.
After being released from Alcatraz, Carl still had charges he had to face in Oklahoma. He did a two-year stint at Big Mac in McAlester and was released in 1944.
Carl swore to his mother that he was going straight. He moved to Tulsa where for the next 18 years he worked in construction and as a security guard. He finally returned to Tahlequah in the early 1960's a few years after his mother died in 1959.
An avid motorcyclist, Carl lost his right leg in a 1974 cycle accident. Although disabled, he was still able to ride his motorcycle and became what was described as a model citizen in his later life.
In a later interview with an Oklahoma newspaper, Carl said he had been shot at a thousand times and had never been hit. Although he had shot and shot at numerous law enforcement officials, he was grateful for the fact that he had never killed anyone during his life of crime..
"I was never like those doped up punks who kill people today", Janeway told the newspaper.
By the early 1980s, Carl, somewhat eccentric, was living in an airstream trailer a few miles north of Tahlequah.
He never tried to hide from his past and in his later years he would tell young people to avoid a life of crime.
He also became involved with Mothers Against Drunk Drivers and would hand out bumper stickers for that organization from his roadside booth where he also hand painted personalized license plates for anyone with a little patience...and a $5 bill.
Carl Janaway died March 10, 1997 at the age of 94 and was buried next to his beloved mother "Mamie" Hovis Janaway in the Tahlequah Cemetary.
