Our next mugshot is a real find. Lorraine Gordon was a legend! Her story is fast-paced and chaotic. I’ve done my best to piece it together but there are some gaps.

We’re introduced to Lorraine via a short article in a March 1928 edition of the Oakland Tribune about a car theft. According to the paper, this 18-year-old could play the sweet and innocent girl, but she was no such thing.

“A leader in such escapades as car thefts, rather than a follower who knew not where she was going, a girl with a criminal record, although but 18 years old, rather than a sweet unsophisticated girl driven out into the world by the cruelties of a step-father. This is the picture painted yesterday afternoon of Lorraine Gordon Booth, an inmate of the county jail who recently told a sob-story that for a time completely fooled officers and detention home authorities.”

But once the authorities grew suspicious, it didn’t take long to dig up the dirt on Lorraine. The girl herself was open about her exploits. She grew up in Lakeport and first found herself on the wrong side of the law in 1924, when she was committed to the Ventura Girls’ Home for larceny and general incorrigibility. “She escaped twice from this institution, being returned each time.”

The excitement really got started when she was paroled April 13, 1926. Within a month of being on parole, she met a man named Jack W. Cassida. They got married on June 12. By July 10, she decided they had been together quite long enough and filed for divorce, alleging that Cassida was “profligate, idle, and unwilling to work.” However the divorce action went nowhere because within days of filing, Loraine violated her parole and was sent back to Ventura Girls’ Home.

In May 1927, Lorraine was transferred to the Sonoma State Home. She escaped in September of the same year by stealing a car that happened to be parked in front of the institution. When she ran out of gas, she abandoned that vehicle and stole another. She made her way down to San Francisco and Oakland, “wearing masculine attire and passing herself off as a debonair youth.”

The Oakland Post Enquirer wrote that Lorraine’s debonair youth disguise worked well enough to fool a 14-year-old boy named Leonard Mervin. Lorraine struck up a conversation with him and the two decided “to follow the call of the open road. The pair told a story of having traveled together by automobile and afoot for 11 days, the girl dressed in boy’s attire and the boy innocent of the sex of his young companion.”

Unfortunately, this adventure on the open road took place partly in a stolen car. The duo were arrested for car theft in Grant’s Pass, Oregon and brought back to Oakland in February 1928. This brings us back to the point when the Oakland Tribune surmised that Lorraine was not the innocent girl she pretended to be.

The matrons at the jail wanted Lorraine to be placed in a home, and the girl said she was the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. John Gordon of Lakeport. But Lorraine’s parents were not having any of it. “Mrs. Gordon was notified of the girl’s detention here and refused to take her back home.”

In the end, Lorraine got 30 days in the Alameda jail for “borrowing a stranger’s car.” It isn’t clear which car theft she was being punished for. She had stolen three, by my count. The Santa Rosa Republican added optimistically that “after the sentence is completed, Pauline Walker, woman deputy sheriff, will find the girl a home where she can work her way through business college and got a new start in life.”

Thirty days in the county jail is a light sentence but that was due to two factors. The first was that Elgin C. Erickson, whose automobile was stolen, refused to sign a complaint against Lorraine. The second was that Judge Wood deferred to Deputy Sheriff Walker. “Mrs. Walker stated she thought Lorraine was a victim of circumstances.”

What Lorraine did after her sentence in Alameda is not clear, but I’m reasonably certain she did not go to business college. According to one article: “For several months she posed as a boy, wearing male apparel and driving a truck at San Jose, it is said.”

More surprises to come! Click here to read the conclusion of Lorraine’s story!