by Paul Buck
The intention was to depart their cells on 14 December 1980, but Moody was too large for the hole that led through to Thompson’s cell. They had to postpone whilst they worked another day to widen it. The next night, after leaving dummies in their beds, they moved out. Moody managed to get his seventeen-stone body through the first two holes, but then became wedged in the outside wall. He offered to stay, but the others refused and finally pulled him through from the outside. “We literally tore him through the hole. I could hear the muscles tearing right off his back. He left a lot of flesh behind but we got him through,” Tuite later recalled.
On the roof they avoided the camera as it automatically swivelled and responded to a light that came on in another cell, as prearranged by the escapees. By the time it reverted to routine they had passed along. They moved around the roof, crossing razor-sharp barbed wire before descending to the ground, using some planks and scaffolding that were lying around before fixing the grapnel and dropping a rope. With the escape postponed by a day, there was no waiting car. However, as they were dressed in their civilian clothes (all three were still awaiting trial, none of them convicted prisoners), they walked away down Lyham Road and found a minicab to take them to Herne Hill. There they were dropped off at one of Moody’s friends in order to organise transport to take them out of London, to a bolthole near Canterbury. This was where they were to stay for a short while.
Thompson was the first to leave, after seeing the TV news. He gave himself up because, although he had been in custody for seventeen months, he was due to appear in court the day after his escape. The trial had continued regardless and he had been acquitted in his absence. All he now faced was the charge of escaping custody.
Moody was never recaptured. He lived on for thirteen years, working variously as a hitman or armed robber. Though he supposedly had his freedom, there are times when his life was far from easy. One time, when he was hiding out in a small flat, his family visited him. His son Jason thought, “This was going to be his prison. In some ways it was worse than being in a real prison. Dad felt all the pressure on his shoulders, but he was powerless to help us. It must have driven him crazy. He looked so manic that day. He was so pleased to see us, but I could see in his eyes that he was close to the edge.” Moody died in June 1993, when a gunman walked into a bar where he was having a drink and pumped four bullets from a .38 Webley into his chest.
Tuite was later arrested in Ireland. Today he is a businessman, living quietly with his family.
When Jose Espinosa and Otis Blunt made their exit from the high-security cells of Union County jail, Elizabeth, New Jersey, in December 2007, they left behind a handwritten note (later described as ‘sarcastic’) that read: “Thank you Officer Zurick for the tools needed. You’re a real pal! Happy Holidays.” It was accompanied by the smiley face image with which prisoners traditionally embellish their letters. Subsequently, Zurick buckled under the media attention and committed suicide. Both men were arrested a month later, in January; Blunt in a hotel room in Mexico City; Espinosa barely a mile away, in a basement flat. Both may now live to regret the writing of that note.
Their escape had elements of Hollywood about it. They were in adjacent cells, and made a hole to connect them by scraping away the cement around the cinderblock with a thick piece of wire, and then crushing the block with a steel water shut-off wheel, hiding the debris in plastic food containers amongst their possessions in a foot locker. They also made a hole of twenty by forty centimetres and then scraped away in a similar fashion at the outside wall of Espinosa’s cell, removing a cinderblock in the same manner. As it took a few days, they concealed their workmanship with pin-ups of bikini-clad girls.
On the night of 15 December, leaving pillows to give the appearance that they were asleep in bed, they wriggled through the hole onto a roof and made a fifteen-foot jump with a thirty-foot drop to get over the razor-wired perimeter fence, landing in a railway easement. After their escape, they went off in different directions according to the tracks left in the snow. No blood was found, and conjecture remains as to whether they took a running jump to make the fifteen feet, or if it was from a standing position. It all sounds like a superhero comic or Hollywood action-adventure – or, at best, a talent for ‘parkour’, the urban activity that includes extreme acts like leaping from one building to another.
(As might be expected, The Shawshank Redemption was the other film referenced in the reports, because of the pin-ups used to cover the holes – though as someone glibly remarked, the pin-ups in the film were better as they included Raquel Welch.)
The previous escape was carried out as quietly as possible, but not so with Peter Gibb, helped out of prison by his lover, Heather Parker, who had earlier been one of his guards. Their relationship started in 1988, after she began working in the Melbourne Remand Centre. Their trysts occurred in the honeymoon cells and various cupboards around the building. Gibb was a career criminal, on remand awaiting trial for robbery. Parker stopped working there nine months before his escape.
In March 1993, Parker provided Gibb and another robber, Archie Butterly, with plastic explosives needed to blast the window out of their cell, so that they could climb down to the pavement with a rope made from bed-sheets. Parker had arranged for a stolen car to be waiting outside, with a .32 Beretta pistol in the glove compartment. During their escape they crashed the car. Butterly shot and wounded a policeman who tried to intervene. Switching to the police car, they met up with Parker in south Melbourne and all three took to the road. They were found six days later, near the Jamieson River, after a motel at Gaffney’s Creek where they had stayed was burned down. There was an exchange of fire between the fleeing group and the police. Gibb and Parker were arrested, but Butterly was shot dead. Conjecture remains as to whether he was killed by the police, by his own hand, or by one of the other two. It has been said that Butterly bore no powder traces from firing guns in that final battle.
Ruby Sparks was semi-legendary in being both the first man to escape from Strangeways, and the first to escape from Dartmoor. When he was imprisoned in Strangeways in 1927, he remarked to his visiting girlfriend that he found neither the jail nor the Manchester air conducive to good health, and that he would have to leave within a fortnight. He was overheard by a guard who told him that no one had ever escaped.
Sparks was true to his word. Within two weeks he had vacated his cell, leaving behind a dummy shape in his bed made from a stool, a chamber pot and a blanket. He had to fashion a suit from another blanket, as his clothes were taken from him each night and left outside his cell, his escape record from borstal preceding him. He had to pay bribes to purchase as much mailbag thread as possible, in order to plait a rope, and also to obtain a knife to saw through the window bars of his cell. His next-door cellmate had pleaded to go with him, and Sparks agreed – though in the event he turned out to be a hindrance, as he was nervous at each step and slowed down the escape.
They had broken into the workshop to make a T-shape from wood as a hook to catch on the spikes. But, as a result of the accompanying escapee’s hesitance, Sparks missed his girlfriend, Lily Goldstein (‘the Bobbed-Haired Bandit’), who was parked outside the prison with instructions to depart at a certain time. She left only seconds before they came over the wall. Though Sparks and his friend managed to thumb lifts, they became trapped in an orchard where the workers suspected them of stealing the apples, setting about them with stones and pitchforks. The farmhands were so hostile that Sparks was pleased when the police came to their rescue.
After his next conviction for robbery, Sparks had hoped to escape from the truck taking him from the Old Bailey to Wandsworth, as he had secreted a razor blade he intended to use to slash the canvas sides. Goldstein was following in her open-topped Bentley to pick him up, but the warders sat too close to enable him any chance to switch transport.
A subsequent escape attempt from Wandsworth failed, and he was taken to Dartmoor, another prison with no record of successful escapes
. Sparks was the first to succeed, remaining out for a hundred and seventy days. But it didn’t happen on his first stay, which coincided with the 1932 jail mutiny – which Sparks participated in, receiving a bullet wound in the process.
His escape happened on his next term of residence, which began in 1939. His aim was to acquire five keys to get him through a series of doors. Each time he returned as part of a working party in the quarry, Sparks made sure he was close enough to the officer opening the gates to study and memorise the keys, so that he could scrape away at the metal bits his friend Alex Marsh obtained from the machine shop. It took a year of slow work to fashion the keys and test them whenever the chance could be found.
Meanwhile, Paddy Nolan was plaiting a rope from mailbag thread. To obtain finance, Sparks carved some dice – loaded dice, to be specific. It was a risky business cheating his fellow inmates, but, when £3 was accumulated, he felt they were ready for the escape. He chose a Wednesday, when a choral class was held in the prison chapel. Sparks had also arranged for some other inmates to cause a disturbance, and whilst it was being quelled he set off with his two friends through the gates, taking three warders’ raincoats in the process and collecting the rope for the wall from under a pile of rubble in the yard.
On that freezing January night in 1940, they escaped onto the moor. They made for the railway track and intended setting off towards London, but went in the wrong direction and almost got caught by the search party. They took refuge in a train wagon and woke up in Plymouth, where they bought some clothes from a pawnbroker. By taking buses until their finances ran low, then slipping on and off trains, avoiding the ticket inspectors, two days later they arrived in London. Sparks remained free for six months before he was recaptured. It would be his last escape.
A most extraordinary escape through the bars occurred in early twentieth-century Germany. Karl Schaarschmidt was a repeat escapee, for whom they had to prepare a special cell in Gera Prison, one with thicker masonry and a thicker wooden door, and locks that could not be touched from inside. They also replaced the iron bars on the cell with two wooden bars in the form of a cross, comprising nine-inch and seven-inch-thick oak beams and sunk deep into the masonry. No implements were allowed in the cell. Schaarschmidt was allowed only a pewter spoon to eat with, which was removed after each meal. And yet in 1907, five months after his latest term of imprisonment began, he escaped again, through the window. It wasn’t until his recapture two years later that they discovered his method, when they saw his front teeth were worn to the gums. Like a trapped rat, he had gnawed his way through the beams on the window.
There are times when the escape is more mundane than the high adventure of criminal activity, or the desolation of custody. One such case was that of Oliver Curtis Perry, who raided trains in such spectacular ways, taking high risks as he hung from the outside or hijacking the train when he was in a corner. After he was sentenced, he was moved from Auburn Prison, New York, to the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. He also received much female attention. In a bible sent in 1895 by an admirer was a concealed hacksaw blade, which he used to cut through the bars. After releasing other prisoners, he made his escape by sliding down an eighty-foot drainpipe. He was soon recaptured. Imprisonment took its toll, and, in 1920, he made a device with a block of wood and two nails to pierce both his eyes. Blind, he later tried to starve himself to death, but he was force-fed until he died in 1930, not having spoken to either guards or inmates for the previous few years.
Robert Cole used laxatives to escape from his Long Bay prison hospital cell in Sydney, on 18 January 2006. By reducing dramatically by fourteen kilograms from his full bodyweight of seventy within a fortnight, he was able to squeeze his way through the fifteen-centimetre gap between the steel bar of his cell window and the brick wall, which he had widened a little by scraping away with a butter knife over the previous three weeks. No one had noticed how he had shed twenty per cent of his weight in such a short time. Cole had been found not guilty of stealing and assault in November 2003 by reason of mental illness. But he had a string of offences including armed robbery that went back over seventeen years, and there was no date set for his release.
Once he was out of the cell, he still had to scale one fence, then climb another that took him three quarters of the way up a perimeter wall, then walk atop the wall before going over. Blood was found on the ground from a cut sustained from the rolled razor-wire, though he used a blanket to limit the damage. For some reason motion detectors and security cameras did not pick him up. Eleven years before, these measures had been put in place at night to replace guards in the watchtowers. Cole was only out for three days; he was discovered in a shopping mall at Bondi Junction’s Oxford Street, accompanied by a woman.
Whilst some escapees have dieted to get through small holes, those who were more bulky often pointed out how their size impeded the escape. The Marquis de Sade, imprisoned in the Fort Miolans Prison for sodomy and poisoning four young prostitutes with Spanish Fly during an orgy in June 1772, noted how he discovered a window without bars in a closet adjoining a private dining area he had been allowed to use for his meals. On the evening of 30 April 1773, around 8:30pm, he squeezed through it with two others. Despite his large size, he lowered himself thirteen feet with a sheet, or possibly a small ladder provided by a local farmer who met them and guided them to the French border, and freedom for a year or so. Sade’s candle had been left to burn in his cell to delay discovery, along with a letter apologising for his departure, and asking for his effects and other items to be forwarded to his wife.
David McMillan, a drug smuggler from a wealthy background, had entered the drug world for a life of adventure. Today he works as a packer in Surrey, as part of his parole conditions after a heroin bust at Heathrow Airport. He hopes that the extradition laws remain the same, otherwise he will be taken back to Thailand, to the infamous Klong Prem Prison in Bangkok, from whence he escaped in August 1996. He had been waiting for three years for his trial, and an almost certain death sentence for drug smuggling.
Klong Prem is known as a hellhole, or by its ironic nickname, the ‘Bangkok Hilton’. Though for McMillan, money had allowed him to live better than most of the others in Building Six, with his own chef, servants and food brought in from the local supermarket, while others rotted away in a world of vermin, worms, tuberculosis and AIDS, barely surviving on soup and the odd fish-head. “I had access to television and radio and my own office, and instead of seventy to a cell we just had five.” He was paying for it all, of course. “I did not see it as bribery. The guards saw themselves as helping and I was just showing my gratitude. We wanted it to be a bit more like a hotel and we were willing to pay.”
McMillan’s way out was to work on the two window bars of his third-floor cell, cutting them with hacksaw blades brought in amongst a box of pornography as a distracting gift for his guards. One night in August 1996, he went through the window and descended forty feet using webbing belts. Once he reached the prison factory, he collected gaffer tape, picture frames, clothes and water. Using the frames and tape to make a ladder with bamboo poles, he scaled two walls and dropped over a further electrified wall before reaching ‘Mars Bar Creek’, an eight-foot wide moat of raw sewage that he had to wade through. He washed himself with water and changed his clothes, departing concealed beneath an umbrella to shield himself from recognition as the morning guard shift was arriving. When he reached the main road he hailed a taxi. Four hours later he was flying to Singapore, with the new passport his contacts had left for him in Chinatown. He is the first Westerner to have escaped the prison that houses six hundred foreigners amongst its twelve thousand inmates.
Years earlier, in 1983, he had almost made history in Australia when a helicopter escape was prevented by the authorities who had been warned by Lord Tony Moynihan, who had fallen out with McMillan after failing to trap him in a gambling sting operation. McMillan had paid £250,000 for the escape bid from Pentridge Prison, Melbourne. The pla
n was to have him flown out and taken in a van to Sydney, where a yacht would have taken him to Manila.
Bank robber Brenden Abbott, along with four inmates serving life – Jason Nixon, Andrew Jeffery, Oliver Alincic and Peter Stirling – broke out of Sir David Longland Correctional Centre at Walcol, near Brisbane, in November 1997. This was a high-security prison that was supposed to be escape-proof. The group, led by Abbott, cut their way free using angel wire smuggled in by a female visitor who secreted it in her vagina. Once they had gone through their cell windows, they passed plastic chairs out to use as a ladder for climbing over the razor-wire that circled the B-block perimeter. From there they moved to the perimeter fences and cut their way through. They were watched by other inmates from their cells, though not one raised the alarm. When three guards arrived on the scene, they were forced to back off by an accomplice’s covering gunfire. The escapees left in a waiting getaway car. All were recaptured not long after, except for Abbott, who remained free for six months.
Abbott, dubbed ‘the Postcard Bandit’, became the subject of a personality cult. For the five and a half years he was on the run from an earlier escape, he supposedly sent the police postcards of himself to taunt them. This never actually happened; it was a propaganda ploy by the police, who came across some photos in a raid that showed Abbott in front of banks he had robbed, and thought it might be a good media device to galvanise the public against him. Instead, it backfired and gave him heroic status.
Annanias Mathe, a Mozambican gang leader (of about forty men) who was awaiting trial on fifty-one charges, including murder, rape and robbery of private houses, escaped from his cell at C-Max Prison Pretoria, South Africa, in November 2006. He was their first escapee in thirty-six years. Mathe had removed the bullet-proof window using a spoon, and had taken two bars from his bed to help lever himself through a gap of twenty by sixty centimetres. To aid his passage, he spread petroleum jelly on his body – though it’s still difficult to believe he managed to get his head through the tiny hole.