Passport To Hell: How I Survived Sadistic Prison Guards and Hardened Criminals in Spain's Toughest Prisons

by Terry Daniels

  'You're going to have another little niece or nephew.'

  I had missed Kel's wedding but there was no chance that I was going to miss the birth of her child. It's a lot easier to get moved to an open prison in England than it is in Spain and non-violent offenders are often released early with a tag on their leg, so if Interpol hurried up with my transport then it was likely that I would get to witness a new member of the family being brought into the world.

  From that moment onwards, nothing seemed to bother me. I was no longer fazed by my headaches, the relentless noise or the threat of attack from other prisoners. It was as if I was floating around the prison in an impenetrable bubble. Topas was a horrible, morbid place but I would only be there for a little while longer. Soon I would be holding my sister's baby in my arms in good old Buckinghamshire.

  It took a good few months for my bubble to finally burst and send me crashing back to the ground. I was sitting on the wing writing my diary when it happened.

  'Perdone Teresa, I'm sorry but your boyfriend is leaving for Ireland tomorrow. I thought you might want to say goodbye to him. There is a room free for you both if you want time alone.'

  I didn't know what to say. I had known this day was coming at some point but still felt shocked by the suddenness of it. For all his faults, Aidan was the one person in the prison who I knew that I could rely upon when I needed someone. Life in Topas wouldn't be the same without him. We'd had our ups and downs but I was still going to miss him like crazy. It was nice of the guard to be so understanding. At the end of the day, prison guards can be bad or good, just like everybody else and this guy was definitely one of the nicer ones.

  My last moments with Aidan were spent hugging him and telling him I didn't want him to go.

  'It's OK,' he tried to comfort me. 'Being apart will only make us stronger. I'll write to you the minute I touch down in Dublin.'

  'Promise?' I asked him, drying my eyes and attempting to stop sniffling.

  'Of course,' he told me. 'I'm not big on writing letters but I definitely will.'

  I hugged him even tighter and buried my face in his top. Looking back though, things probably wouldn't have worked out between us even if we'd stayed in the same nick. He was an Irish Catholic from a rough, sectarian neighbourhood and I was an English girl who didn't give a monkey's about a person's politics or religion. Our relationship was doomed from the start.

  The next couple of days were very difficult but I soon got used to Aidan not being there. Prison is a stressful, draining environment and it had been nice to have somebody there to help me through it; but being on my own was a positive thing in a way because it forced me to learn more Spanish. I had started relying on Aidan to fill in for me whenever I had trouble making myself understood but now that he was no longer there, there was no safety net. It was a case of either trying hard to remember the words that I was looking for, or no one knowing what I was on about.

  The weeks flew by and before I knew it, it was my turn to say farewell to Topas. As usual, they left it until the evening before the transfer to tell me that I was moving so I only had a couple of hours to say goodbye to my friends. The other girls were sad to see me go and wished me the best of luck.

  My Spanish ordeal wasn't over yet. I would still have to stop off at Soto for a couple of weeks whilst Interpol got things ready for my flight. This was the final hurdle before my repatriation. I only had to last a few months tops in there and then I was off to sunny England.

  I was hugging Adriano and saying goodbye to him/her when two skinny, rough-looking Spanish girls staggered into the room, shouting their heads off and spilling homebrew everywhere.

  'Great,' I thought to myself, 'this is just what I need on my last day in here.'

  The guards usually turned a blind eye to inmates drinking alcohol because they had normally sold it to them in the first place, but this time they seemed to have had enough and dragged the culprits off the wing. Five minutes later, the two drunkards came back covered from head to toe in bruises and shaking uncontrollably. The screws had taken them to the medical wing, handcuffed them to a hospital bed and beaten them senseless.

  'God almighty,' I thought to myself. 'I'm glad I'm getting out of here.'

  Chapter 19

  RETURN TO THE ASYLUM

  'Somewhere out there looking out my window, daydreaming of how nice it could be to be free…'

  'Looking out my window' by the Rat Pack, a song that

  sums up to a tee how I felt during my sentence.

  'Teresa Daniels?'

  Was it that time already? I had got a terrible night's sleep. I spent the whole time wide-awake, buzzing about the transfer. Even the journey between prisons was something to look forward to. When you're locked up, every day is the same so any slight hint of variety is a welcome change. The guards' sadistic treatment of the alkies would have normally upset me but all that I could think about was stepping off the plane onto English soil. The incident only served to remind me what a sick and twisted place I was about to leave behind.

  There were a couple of other prisoners with me on the bus but I was too busy looking out of the window and picturing myself enjoying life in the free world to pay them much attention. We passed through a sleepy little Spanish town and I saw people sitting outside cafes, sipping their drinks and soaking up the sun. Soon that would be me if I got either let out with a leg tag on or moved to an open prison.

  I was hoping that life in Soto would be easier now that I knew a bit of Spanish but the guards put me in with an Austrian who only spoke German, so my newfound language skills didn't make any difference whatsoever. She seemed nice enough but didn't understand a word I said to her. Some of the ETA girls were still in the prison but the mix of nationalities had changed and there were now a lot more Vietnamese and Jamaicans in there. The atmosphere was very different too. Tension between the different ethnic groups had increased dramatically and the wing was like a powder keg.

  The Yardies were all very tough girls but seemed OK to get on with. The Vietnamese came across as quite sly so I made a mental note to stay away from them. They were delicate, dainty little things, who didn't seem particularly aggressive or violent but gave the impression that they were not to be trusted. It was obvious from the outset that the two groups didn't get on well with one another so I kept myself to myself and tried to remain neutral. The last thing I wanted was to end up getting involved in a fight and have my trip back to England cancelled at the last minute because I was categorised as a security risk.

  Sure enough, a few days after I had arrived, the tension in the prison came to a head and there was a vicious brawl between the Vietnamese and the Yardies. Before seeing them going at it, I would have expected the Jamaicans to win without breaking a sweat, but the Vietnamese girls were actually surprisingly hard. They seemed to be highly skilled in martial arts and did all kinds of crazy flying kicks. The Yardies shunned the fancy stuff in favour of brute force and threw wild uppercuts into their tiny rivals' faces. Before long, chairs and tables were being chucked around the place and the wing had descended into a full-scale riot.

  The maddest part of the fight came when the smallest of the Vietnamese girls flew across the room and put a huge, muscle-bound Yardie on her backside with a kick that Bruce Lee would have been proud of. I thought, 'OK remind me not to piss off any of the Vietnamese lot whilst I'm in here.' They were getting the better of girls at least twice their size.

  The guards eventually managed to get the situation back under control and separated the two warring clans, much to the relief of the other inmates on the wing, who had been crapping themselves in case they got caught in the crossfire. There had been fights every other day in Topas but nothing that even remotely resembled this one. It was the talk of the wing for days to come and taught the Jamaicans a valuable lesson never to underestimate an opponent. The Vietnamese might have looked as if a strong breeze would blow them away but they were some of the toughest girls I've ever seen.

&nbs
p; That night I prayed that nothing else like that would happen whilst I was inside. I was paranoid that I would get dragged into something that might jeopardise my transfer. All that it would take for me to be marked down as a troublemaker would be for somebody to attack me and the guards to presume that I was the aggressor. Interpol would refuse to transport me overseas if they thought that I was likely to kick off so it was in my best interest to stay on everyone's good side.

  As I lay there trying to get the fight out of my head, I heard a loud banging noise coming from the cell next door followed by a blood-curdling scream. What on earth was going on? If our neighbours were having an argument then they needed to tone it down a bit because it was the middle of the night.

  The noise continued for a good ten minutes before suddenly stopping and plunging the wing back into silence. It was soon replaced by the sound of heavy footsteps and concerned voices. I got up to have a look through the food hatch and saw a group of screws crowded round our neighbours' open cell and our neighbour standing sobbing uncontrollably on the landing. This didn't look too good; they never opened anybody's door during the night unless there had been a serious incident. My return to Soto was turning out to be more eventful than the rest of my time inside put together.

  A couple of minutes later, a load of paramedics came rushing across the wing towards the cell and the guards motioned them inside. The screws didn't always call the medics in when someone had overdosed so I knew that something major must have taken place. My suspicions were confirmed when a guard came out of the cell pushing a newspaper trolley with a dead body wrapped in sheets on it. No wonder the girl from next door was so upset; her roomie had topped herself in front of her.

  I spent the rest of the night sitting wide-awake, feeling as if my heart was about to beat out of my chest. Why hadn't the guards taken the girl to hospital when they first discovered she wasn't breathing? For all they knew, she could have been unconscious and they could have saved her life. It took them long enough to get the paramedics on the wing as well. The way the bloke had wheeled her out of the room reminded me of somebody casually pushing a luggage trolley along at the airport. None of the screws seemed in the least bit bothered that a girl had lost her life. It was just part of the job to them.

  One of the ETA girls had heard the entire thing unfold and told me the full story when our cells were opened up next morning.

  'It is sad,' she said. 'The girl was caught smuggling cocaine and given a twenty-year sentence. She didn't even have a large amount either. I think they wanted to make an example of her. Her family disowned her and said they wouldn't visit her so she took some pills and put a plastic bag around her face. She was blue when they found her. It's such a shame. She was so young as well.'

  There were a lot of things that didn't add up about this story. Why would she have taken the pills and then suffocated herself before they took effect? And what was her cellmate doing whilst she was sitting there with her head in the bag? I would imagine that it takes a while to die from lack of oxygen.

  'It must be awful for the girl that she was sharing with as well,' the ETA girl went on. 'It's the fourth time this has happened to somebody who was in with her. I think she must be cursed or something.'

  The dead girl's roomie was in for killing her husband and looked a nasty piece of work. She was a creepy French bird who hardly spoke to anyone. The thought entered my head that she might have drugged then killed the other girl but I held my tongue and kept it to myself in case it wasn't true. It doesn't pay to gossip about other people in a place like Soto. She had looked genuinely upset when I saw her outside the cell but then again it's easy to turn on the waterworks, especially if you've had a lot of practice.

  The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that the death was the result of murder rather than suicide. The cells were tiny so it would have been impossible for somebody not to hear their cellmate dying. What better place would there be for a killing to go undetected than Soto? The guards didn't even view the death as suspicious. They just got on with their jobs as if it hadn't happened. The other inmates didn't seem too fazed either. I was the only one who was at all bothered.

  The prospect of sharing a wing with a serial killer chilled me to the bone. I spent even more time than usual in the safety of my cell and started having trouble sleeping. The image of that poor girl's corpse being wheeled out will remain with me until my dying day. They could at least have used a hospital stretcher. A newspaper trolley is no place for a dead body. It was as if they were determined to deprive the girl of her dignity even after she had passed away.

  'Roll on England,' I thought to myself.

  Even Topas had been better than the nuthouse that was Soto. I just had to keep repeating to myself that it would all be over soon.

  Interpol took two full weeks to finalise the plans for my flight. One of the screws broke the news to me on the wing and I literally jumped for joy.

  'Make sure you have your bags packed for 8 a.m.,' the guard told me. 'You might not be called then but that's the earliest they could come for you.'

  The earlier the better. I like to have a lie-in as much as the next girl does but the less time I had to spend in that crazy place, the happier I would be.

  My final night in Soto was so cold that I had to sleep wearing a jacket. As I drifted off, I looked back on my time in Spanish prisons and reflected on everything that I had been forced to endure. Wherever they sent me to in England was going to be a walk in the park compared to what I had already been through.

  'Bye bye Spain,' I whispered to myself. 'Soon you will be ancient history.'

  Chapter 20

  BACK TO SUNNY ENGLAND

  So the day has come, the day I thought would never come. I've been here nineteen months and one week exactly. I'm a little nervous but I'm trying to be as calm as possible. It will be a long old day but it'll be worth it in the end. So my diary, I'll see you in England.

  Diary entry from 3 May 2007

  On the morning of my transfer, I put on my smartest clothes and made sure that I looked my best. It was going to be the first time since my extradition that I got to spend the day around people who weren't criminals and I didn't want them to see me looking scruffy.

  A Spanish copper drove me to Madrid Airport, where I was handed over to two English Interpol officers. The first thing that struck me about them was how different they were to the Spanish Interpol who had accompanied me on the plane to Spain. They were a lot more friendly and relaxed and talked to me as if I was their equal.

  'You must be the infamous Terry Daniels,' joked the male officer.

  He was a tubby little Londoner with a typical, good-natured, Cockney sense of humour.

  'I'm so glad to see you,' I told him. 'I've never been so pleased to see a copper in my life.'

  Being in the company of an authority figure who actually treated me as if I was a human being was a huge culture shock after a year and a half of seeing inmates getting dragged away and battered for saying a word out of turn. I had a good old chinwag with the Old Bill until my plane arrived and then boarded the flight with an officer on either side of me.

  'I have to warn you that there's still a chance we won't be flying today,' the female copper informed me as I made my way down the aisle.

  Was she being serious? We were on the plane, what could possibly stop us now?

  'The staff all have to agree that they're comfortable with transporting a convicted criminal. Most of them are OK with it, but one of the hostesses isn't all that sure. She thinks that you might be a psychopath.'

  Charming! If I had to go back to Soto with my tail between my legs because some stupid stewardess had got it into her head that I was Norman Bates then I wouldn't be too pleased.

  'Can't you have a word with her?' I implored the copper. 'Tell her what I'm like and that I'm not some violent lunatic!'

  'I'll see what I can do,' she told me. 'I'll be back in a sec.'

  Two minutes later, the coppe
r came bowling towards our seats with a big grin on her face as if to say, 'Don't worry, I've sorted it'.

  'She says she doesn't mind you being here just so long as she gets to stay at the other end of the plane. She doesn't want you gouging her eyes out with a plastic spoon because the airline food is crap.'

  I wiped a bead of sweat from off my head and fastened my seatbelt. The cabin crew talked us through the safety procedure and the plane began to taxi up the runway. I had made it. I could almost taste the rain and feel the icy chill of English weather on my skin.

  The flight back home was a world away from how the one to Spain had been. I excitedly chattered away to the officers for the entire journey, telling them all about my arrest and how I had ended up being extradited. They seemed fascinated by my case and listened intently as I described every last detail to them.

  'I feel scared being on a plane with somebody as unlucky as you,' the little Cockney bloke chortled. 'I hope it doesn't crash-land or get struck by lightning.'