How 86-Year-Old Gert Boyle Foiled A Kidnapping Attempt

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^Gert Boyle, then an 86-year-old grandma living in a suburb outside Portland, Oregon, knew something was amiss when she came home in 2010 to find a stranger standing in her driveway. The man, dressed all in black, offered Boyle a fruit basket. When she refused, he took out a copy of her autobiography, One Tough Mother: Success in Life, Business, and Apple Pies, and asked Boyle to sign it. When she refused to do that, he pulled out a handgun, which police later determined was a nonworking replica, the Oregonian reported. 

Pointing the gun at the back of her neck, the man directed Boyle, then the well-known chairwoman of sportswear giant Columbia, inside the house. Thinking quickly, Boyle told him that she needed to turn off her home alarm system. But when he let her access the alarm, instead of disabling it she pressed the silent panic button.

Once inside, the intruder subjected Boyle to violence and terror, as he demanded jewelry and money. According to court documents, he shoved Boyle to the floor, stuffed a necktie in her mouth as a gag and tied her hands behind her back with rope. When he led Boyle to her room, he demanded that she take off her clothes and yelled, “I promise you, I’ll shoot you!”

The intruder, it turns out, had underestimated Boyle—who by then had been the subject of Columbia’s popular “One Tough Mother” ad campaign—but he was hardly the first one to do so.

A faux tattoo reading “Born to Nag.”

Remarkably for Boyle, who died Sunday in Portland at 95, the kidnapping was only one short chapter in a momentous life. In 1937, when Boyle was 13, her family, which was Jewish, fled Nazi Germany after “Jews live here” was painted on the side of their home. When Boyle and her parents arrived in Portland, all they had, according to a 2015 Forbes profile of Boyle’s son, Tim, was $20. Boyle’s father borrowed money and bought a small hat store, Rosenfeld Hat Co., which he promptly renamed Columbia. 

Boyle enrolled at the University of Arizona in Tucson and graduated with a degree in sociology. She never intended to get involved with Columbia or major in a degree involving business. At a fraternity party, she met Neal Boyle, who would later become her husband, according to the Wall Street Journal. 

Nearly 16 years after Gert and Neal married, Boyle’s father died. Neal ran the company for six more years after that, until he suddenly died of a heart attack in 1970, at the age of 47. Despite having no business experience, Boyle decided to run the company herself, along with her college-age son, Tim. And at the time, she didn’t have a choice. Before he died, Neal had taken out a $150,000 loan with the Small Business Administration, putting their home, life insurance, vacation home and Boyle’s mother’s home up as collateral. If they didn’t pay the loan back, they would lose everything.

The year Boyle and her son took over Columbia, they almost ran the company into the ground. Sales decreased 25% to $600,000, and the bank suggested they sell the company. A buyer offered a measly $1,400, but the Boyles rejected it and recommitted to building the business.

And it took a while. Columbia didn’t take off as the marquee sportswear brand it is today until the 1980s, when the company launched its iconic “One Tough Mother” ad campaign with Boyle as the star. The ads featured a gray-haired Boyle in Columbia outerwear braving the elements. In one, Boyle had a faux biceps tattoo reading “Born to Nag.” She served as CEO until 1988, when Tim took over, but she remained chairman until she died.

‘I want to apologize 1,000 times’

About seven minutes after Boyle hit the alert button, police came and rang the doorbell. The intruder told her to answer it but threatened to kill her if she revealed that he was there. Defying him once more, she ran to the front door and asked for help. The man then fled, leaping off the house’s second-story balcony and running into the woods.

Hours later, the man, identified as Nestor Gabriel Caballero Gutierrez, was found limping at a McDonald’s and was arrested. Five days later, Gutierrez’s two accomplices were also arrested, ending what would have been a plot to kidnap and ransom Boyle for $300,000. One of the accomplices, Jose Luis Arevalo, provided Gutierrez with a minivan while the other, Ramon Alberto Midence, was going to be the driver. They expected a $20,000 and a $30,000 cut, respectively, NBC News reported.

Gutierrez, a Honduran businessman whose advertising company had recently collapsed, masterminded the scheme because he was desperate for cash, according to police documents. He had no previous criminal history, per the Oregonian. He was convicted of kidnapping, burglary and robbery, according to the Oregon Department of Corrections database, and continues to serve a 14-and-a-half-year sentence. Arevalo was released after serving a six-year sentence for similar charges; Midence continues to serve time for a kidnapping, burglary and robbery conviction.

“I wish that this is like a deep sleep—a nightmare,” Gutierrez wrote Boyle in a note from prison, according to the Oregonian. “I guess it is real. I want to apologize 1,000 times … I’m sorry.”

As for Boyle, the trauma of the event didn’t seem to knock her off her game. When the West Linn chief of police came to her house the night of the attempted kidnapping to check on her,  Boyle reportedly responded: “Everything was okay until you came in with that North Face jacket.”

The quip became legend, underscoring her “One Tough Mother” persona. But Boyle later revealed she was deeply traumatized by the events, and in her victim impact statement, which was read aloud during the trial of the three men, she described the North Face crack as “a defense mechanism that leads me to use verbal sparring to shield me from dealing directly with difficult situations.”

But, she continued, “no words now are adequate to reverse the memories of that night or give me my treasured and ordinary life back,” she said

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