Prison Break - True Stories of the World's Greatest Escapes

by Paul Buck

  A similar operation, though on a smaller scale, occurred in the United States. The escape of the ‘Texas Seven’ – Joseph Garcia, Randy Halprin, Larry Harper, Donald Newbury, Patrick Murphy Jr., George Rivas and Michael Rodriguez – in December 2000 has been likened to a commando escape in the best war-movie tradition, because the planning was meticulous and came to fruition over almost two hours without detection. It happened in the John Connally Unit near the city of Kenedy. Six were captured a month later; the seventh killed himself rather than be arrested. All had been convicted on various charges of armed robbery and murder.

  13 December was an ice-cold day. A number of those bent on escape, led by Rivas, asked if they could stay back and take their lunchbreak in the maintenance department, where they were waxing the floor. One of the supervisors said he would stay with them, whilst the others went for lunch. Rodriguez, who had been in the law library, managed to convince the guards to let him into that area on the pretence of collecting rubbish. He remained seated outside the department as a lookout.

  Rivas came to fetch the supervisor in his office at 11:30am, and took him into the warehouse on the pretext of asking a question about the machinery, whereupon he attacked the supervisor with an axe handle. They took his clothes, sunglasses, keys and wallet with credit cards and cash, then bound and gagged him and put him in the electrical room. With the keys they obtained access to pliers, hacksaw blades and bolt cutters. When two others came back from lunch they were engaged in conversation and then grabbed. Gathering more clothes, keys and identification cards, they bound them and took them to the electrical room, then did the same with two others returning from lunch – drawn into the warehouse, captured, their clothes removed, locked up – and then three others.

  At 12:40am another supervisor returned, this time with two inmates who were not in on the escape. Nevertheless, they were added to the growing numbers who were bound and gagged. This happened two more times with returning supervisors. Once the escape team were satisfied that everyone had returned, they secured the electrical room door. By then a maintenance truck had been brought into the shop area, and a cardboard and plywood shelter that had been made earlier was placed in the back of the truck to hide the escapees for the ride into town.

  At 1:05pm they received a phone call from a supervisor for a headcount. With one of their number impersonating an officer, they kept their cool and responded correctly. This was an operation that had to work systematically, relying on accurate planning. They were not surprised when they could hear noise from the electrical room, as those inside were managing to free themselves. But it was too risky to go in to silence them, so they bound the door tighter with cable. An alarm was eventually triggered from inside the electrical room, but the control room believed it to be a fault and silenced it. All in all, nine civilian maintenance supervisors, four prison officers and three non-participating inmates were held in the electrical room.

  The next stage was to phone and inform the back gate that maintenance men would be coming into the area that led to the back gate and perimeter road to install video monitors. It sounded authentic, for similar work had been carried out elsewhere.

  A gator – similar to a golf cart – bearing two of the men in civilian clothes and two disguised as workers went to the back gate. They entered the gatehouse and received a call from the maintenance department to ask if they had arrived yet. As a result, no identification was sought. Caught unaware, the guard was captured, bound, gagged and placed in the adjoining restroom. This procedure was repeated at the exterior gate by entering the tower and disarming the guard, first with a call from the maintenance department to lull him into laxity. After showing them where the guns were stored, he too was bound and gagged.

  With their position secured, Randy Halprin phoned the maintenance department and told the others to leave. When the white truck arrived, they climbed in with their armoury and all seven drove out of the prison. One of the notes they left behind quoted a line from the Kris Kristofferson song, ‘Me & Bobby McGee’: “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” It wasn’t long before one guard broke free and raised the alarm, but it was too late. The abandoned truck was found at 4pm at a Wal-Mart store in Kenedy. The seven staged a handful of robberies, killing a policeman during one, before eventually being recaptured. All are now on death row awaiting execution.

  Martin Gurule managed to evade death row at Texas’ Huntsville Prison by deception. In December 1998, along with six other prisoners, he padded his bunk with pillows to make it appear as if he were asleep, whilst in reality he had stayed outside in the exercise yard. There they all cut through a fence and climbed onto a roof to wait until after midnight, when they could make their bid. They had planned this for some while, using felt pens to colour their prison overalls a camouflaged grey. But their move towards the perimeter fence was spotted as they came down from the chapel roof. Though the guard fired, freezing six of them in their tracks, Gurule kept going and managed to scale two ten-foot fences with razor-studded tops, escaping into the woods.

  The area was notorious for its snake-infested swamps. He was discovered a week later, drowned in a creek a mile from the prison, by two off-duty officers out fishing. Why he had not been found earlier in such an obvious place provoked questions, particularly as a massive hunt had drawn a blank. Gurule was the first person in sixty years to escape from a Texan death row, the previous case being that of Raymond Hamilton, an associate of Bonnie and Clyde in the 1930s.

  For many years the gallows was kept in storage for Terrible Tommy O’Connor, an armed robber and cop killer who gained his stay of execution by escaping from his Chicago prison cell just three days before he was scheduled to hang. This occurred in December 1921, when O’Connor feigned illness and was removed from his cell to the hospital. There he drew a gun on his warders that had been smuggled in and delivered to him by the prison’s cook. With four others he scaled the walls and hijacked a car. He was never seen again.

  When the mode of execution was changed in 1928 to the electric chair, as O’Connor had been sentenced to hang, the gallows was disassembled and stored – though not totally dismantled until 1977, by which time they determined he would probably not be coming back. He would have been in his early nineties by this time. At that point the gallows was placed in storage in the basement of the Chicago Criminal Courts Building, and later sold to a Wild West museum in Union, Illinois.

  So where did O’Connor go? Some say Ireland, whilst others were sure that he became a monk. A Broadway play that drew on his story, The Front Page, was staged in 1928, inspiring three films in turn – The Front Page (1931 and 1974), His Girl Friday (1940) and Switching Channels (1988) – showing how much his case held prominence with the public at the time.

  The famous Sing Sing Prison at Ossining, which is up the Hudson river, north of New York City, is a prison with a formidable record for failed escape attempts. But on 13 April 1941, Joseph Riordan, Charles McGale and John Waters started their escape bid from the hospital on the third floor. A year in the planning, Riordan had gained a bed in the hospital with symptoms for appendicitis and McGale with a sprained back, whilst Waters worked there as an orderly. All three had convictions for armed robbery.

  But no matter how well you plan the inside part, as we have seen, once outside one has to be equally rigorous.

  It all started a year earlier, when Waters had wondered about the milk truck that made daily deliveries. He asked a friend on the outside to track its course, and then devised a plot to package three guns and three sets of handcuffs and strap them to the underside of the truck at the loading platform in Newburgh. Thus, when the truck arrived in Sing Sing, McGale, who was a trusty, would remove the package. They had already prepared keys that unlocked doors from the cellar to a utility tunnel of steam pipes that led through to the central railroad tracks outside the prison. They had been down the tunnel and prepared the way by sawing through an iron plate and replacing it loosely.

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bsp; Thus, around 2am, as their guard made a tour of the hospital, he was ambushed and left with two bullets in his body. (The guard wasn’t the only one to die. Another inmate had a heart attack as he watched.) The shots did not awaken many, but they did find a trusty in the corridor and another guard, both taken hostage and marched down to the basement, where they were bound. After they had gone through the tunnel and the iron plate, they used a rope they had planted earlier to drop the thirty feet to the railway tracks, and then went to meet their accomplices a couple of hundred yards away in the station plaza.

  Their friends were supposed to be waiting with a car. However, things had gone too smoothly and they arrived earlier than expected, going off to a bar to kill time. All the escapees found was the getaway car, a 1939 Plymouth sedan, with a submachine gun sitting on its backseat, parked and waiting but without its driver.

  They also encountered two policemen on routine patrol, who saw the three men wandering around in search of their friends. They were challenged, and it quickly developed into a shootout with one policeman and one escapee, Waters, shot and killed. Riordan and McGale fled, and their two getaway accomplices, suddenly stranded, tried to take a cab but were themselves arrested. Riodan and McGale got away, forcing a shad fisherman to take them across the Hudson to the Rockland County side. Bloodhounds located them within a few hours in the woods, and they surrendered their guns without a fight.

  San Quentin, like many a state prison, has had its fair share of breakouts throughout its history. However, this particular prison has witnessed two mass escapes that are historically interesting in that they both involve taking the governor hostage.

  On 22 July 1862, ten inmates broke line and made a run for the main gate to reach the warden’s office. They grabbed the governor and, holding him hostage, made their way out of the camp. In the mêlée, upwards of three hundred inmates took advantage of the situation and grabbed whatever they could as weapons to escape from the compound. The main group found that the governor was a bulkier character than they had expected, and he soon became exhausted and collapsed. They had to abandon him, leaving themselves at the mercy of the guards on horseback in pursuit. Many were shot and killed that day. Few escaped for good.

  Just over seventy years later, on 16 January 1935, a meeting of the prison board was disturbed when four armed inmates entered the room (their guns smuggled in under the dashboard of an unknowing civilian employee) and took the governor and others hostage. They commandeered the warden’s car to make their escape, but were eventually halted when a police roadblock shot out their tyres. A gun battle followed in which the leader, Rudolf Straight, was killed, though none of the hostages were badly injured.

  There were strong suggestions following this escape that the police should not be afraid to shoot at escapees, even if the hostage was a prison governor – the argument being that it was a self-inflicted fate, since “the keeper who cannot keep himself out of their hands is no great shakes and ought not to be spared,” as the local Sacramento newspaper commented.

  Henry Williams went over the wall of London’s Newgate Prison in an almost impossible sense, in 1836. Condemned for burglary and waiting to be executed, his cell led to an adjoining courtyard where he could go freely to exercise, for it was surrounded by a fifty-foot granite wall. No one was expected to escape from there. It was much like a zoo cage with an outdoor airing space. But then no one appeared to have had a clue about Williams’ background. As a child he had been a sweep’s boy, his skill being to climb up inside a chimney. He had left that occupation one day when he climbed up inside a forty-foot sugar refinery chimney and went out over the top, climbing down to a new life outside.

  The airing yard at Newgate offered a problem to anyone who might think to escape, as the granite stone was smooth and cold. Williams chose a corner and, using his arms behind his back, worked his way upwards, moving his bare feet “like claws on the other side of the wall-angle”, as The Newgate Chronicles noted. If he had reduced his pressure he would have fallen to a certain death. He had chosen the corner where a water cistern had been built so that he could catch hold at the top, bracing himself in the same angle, managing to grab the tank and pull himself up.

  The next problem, just beneath the top of the wall, was a revolving chevaux de frise (iron spikes set in timber), which were razor-sharp and couldn’t be grabbed to reach the top. They were also close enough to make it impossible to get between them and the wall. There was an iron rail that ran beneath the chevaux de frise which supported it, but it contained sharpened spikes.

  Though the spikes cut into his hand, Williams held on and worked his way around the three sides of the yard, dangling from the rail until he came to a point nine feet above the flat roof of the condemned cells. Launching himself forwards into the air, he fell and clutched at the roof ’s ledge, clambering up onto it and working his way from building to building, jumping the gaps until he passed out of the gaol and was above the houses of Newgate Street. Wearing only his shirt and trousers, covered in blood, Williams came across a woman hanging out her washing. He hid behind a chimney, then followed her down the attic ladder, calmed her and explained his situation. She helped him on his way, for there was a mood among the people that hanging should be for murderers, not burglars.

  In her autobiography, Zoe Progl – the ‘Queen of the Underworld’ as she liked to present herself – tells of Jumbo Parsons and his escape from Wormwood Scrubs on 18 September 1957, to “display his resentment” at being convicted of a robbery he claimed he had nothing to do with. On that day, he was part of a team repairing the roof of the main building. When the others returned to their cells they discovered he was missing. He had hidden behind a chimney and then clambered over rooftops and down a drainpipe, before taking hold of a rope with one end tied to a tree outside the prison and managing to haul himself up the thirty-foot wall. He was driven away by friends, leaving a letter for the governor: “Dear Sir, I have enjoyed my stay in your prison and have no complaints to make about my treatment. In fact, my only complaint is that I had to leave in such a hurry, I had no time to say ‘Goodbye’.” It would be a month before he was recaptured.

  For his next attempt, his friend Zoe, who had been asked to organise it, lined up a stolen Jaguar and waited outside the wall with three accomplices. On 15 March 1958 at 6.30am, a rope was tied to the tree for him to climb. However, when it came to it he couldn’t make the final few feet, as he couldn’t grip the rope near enough to the top. He admitted defeat and they returned home.

  On the morning radio news it was announced that Parsons was missing, but that he might still be in the prison grounds. That evening Progl and her friends returned to check the walls, to see if he was coming over. At one point, she and a female friend were approached by two policemen, and had to spin a yarn about escaping from two men who had assaulted them when taking them home. There was still no sign of Parsons. They went away and came back at 2:15am, and again at 4am. This time they saw him climbing down the scaffolding of the gateman’s lodge, and stealing a bicycle that was leaning against the wall. Progl followed, and Parsons exchanged the bike for a seat in her car. Parsons had spent much of his day hiding down a manhole in the grounds. He was motivated entirely by his case. The lawyer and the Member of Parliament he found to fight his corner convinced him to return to prison as the best way to serve his claim. Eighteen days later, he rang the bell at the gates and said, “Good evening, I’ve come back.” Though the Home Secretary did review his case, the conviction stood.

  Zoe Progl herself was the first woman to break out of Holloway Prison. Knowing that she was going to be convicted again for burglary, she set in motion plans for her escape even before the trial. Her friends thought she would do better to jump bail in the first place, and it seems strange that she did not take their advice.

  Progl made a reconnaissance of the prison walls late one night, accompanied by a boyfriend and a black poodle, decoys for her presence. She measured the wall with a metal tape and
found what looked like a little-used exit, a small green door. She went in search of a good locksmith and returned a few days later with a set of keys, one of which was almost certain to work. It was raining, so there was less chance of being seen whilst they went through the keys until the gate opened. To her dismay, one foot inside the gate was a double-locked door that would not relent.

  Deciding the wall was her only option, she chose a section that came down in a private road beside a bombsite, ideal for disposing of a ladder that would not be found for a few hours. From the way she writes about her escape, it seems that she was determined to be the first woman to break out for, as noted, she could have merely broken her bail and avoided any further dramatics. Once she was sentenced and incarcerated she played the goody – which surprised some of the officers, who had housed her at their particular ‘hotel’ three times before. Fortunately, she was held in the block nearest the point in the wall that she wanted to go over. Within a few weeks she was made a trusty and given the chore of cleaning the senior medical officer’s room, where she discovered by chance that one of the phones had a direct line out. Her first call made her boyfriend think she was already out, as it was in an age when a prisoner using telephones was not a standard occurrence. In the following days it became her means to communicate her plans.

  On 24 July 1964, just after 7:30am, she calculated that she had a five-minute slot after being let out of the hospital by the sister, her patient-feeding duties completed, in which to cross the quadrangle and be let back into her cellblock for breakfast. An unplanned event occurred when the sister asked her to take a pint of milk over for a pregnant girl. She recounts that she dashed across to the block, left the milk by the door and shot back to the wall, clambering up a five-foot pile of coke and grabbing the top of the seven-foot inner wall.