‘Every now and then something will come up on TV, or in a newspaper, or even in conversation, and it will remind you of who they are and what they have done,’ the officer said. ‘It was about a week before I lashed out at [Garforth] that I saw a thing on him on a current affairs program. It was about the murder. Seeing that sticker and knowing he had murdered a beautiful little girl … How dare this putrid cunt have a sticker about life being short when he denied a little girl her entire life. It is not professional and I regret what I did, but sometimes you just snap.’
The child killer did not complain; sexual predators like this rarely do.
‘He didn’t make a complaint over what I did,’ the officer said. ‘They are just grubs, but you don’t want to lose your job over them.’
A Fistful of Filth
Inmates are reluctant to lodge complaints against officers. They are even more reticent when it comes to pressing charges against fellow inmates.
‘We had a couple of lock-in days back in 2009,’ said a Goulburn officer. ‘That’s when the inmates are locked in their cells because of an incident or staffing issue. We found an inmate in a cell with horrendous injuries to his backside and took him to the hospital.’
The inmate confessed to being attacked, at least to the guards.
‘He was in a two-out cell with a very infamous sexual offender. The guy told us that he had been tied to the sink and continually raped for the two days.’
But this was no normal rape.
‘The poor bloke had been fisted,’ the officer said. ‘And that is both rare and disgusting, even for prison. He had been damaged in a big way and required lots of stitches. He had lost a lot of blood in the attack and could have been killed.’
But the inmate refused to cooperate with police. He said he would deny the attack if detectives were called.
‘A lot of the time they won’t press charges,’ the prison officer continued. ‘It depends on the crook – who he is and how long he is in there for. If they are doing a long time in jail, well, they won’t press charges against another crim because they will get a reputation as a Dog. Their criminal career will be over if they are known as a Dog, and they will spend their time in jail in isolation. As crazy as it sounds, that is how it is.’
Officers often learn of sickening sexual attacks in jail but are powerless to seek justice on the behalf of the victim.
‘We know a lot because of the injuries they suffer during the attacks,’ the officer said. ‘They are injuries that can’t be hidden, and more often than not they would tell us how they got them.’
‘However, we can’t press charges on behalf of an inmate,’ the officer continued. ‘If an inmate comes to us with a busted arse, we can’t do shit about it unless they tell us they are willing to pursue the matter with police. We can pass information on, but unless they are willing to cooperate, we have nothing and can do nothing.
‘If they are ready to make the admission to the police, then it is escalated and their cell becomes a crime scene. DNA and evidence are taken from the cell.’
Who cares? They probably deserve it, right?
‘Well, that’s one way to look at it,’ the officer said, ‘but it really is an issue because the people that attack them never have a charge against them, and they can end up getting out of prison with everyone thinking they’re reformed and that they’re not going to be involved in another sex attack. That is clearly not the case if he has been raping men in prison.
‘And a lot of these guys that are attacked end up committing suicide. That is something none of us want to see.’
Rapists v. Murderers
The convicted rapist pointed to the bulge near his belly.
‘See that?’ he boasted. ‘See that? Yeah. You know what that is?’
The other inmates – all child killers, paedophiles and prison scum – shrugged.
The rapist’s brother, also convicted of a front-page sexual assault, butted in.
‘It’s a shiv,’ he said. ‘It’s a big fucking knife. And we will stab you cunts unless you hand over your food. Unless you give us whatever you bought. Did any of you blokes get smokes?’
Then came a grunt.
‘MmmmaAAH,’ said one of the men in the middle of the jail yard shakedown. ‘We will have to have a think about that.’
And think they did … for about an hour.
‘So you want our buy-ups,’ said the inmate who had approached the rapist turned shiv-wielding standover man. ‘Well, we have thought about that and –’
Whack!
The rapist fell to the ground after being blindsided in the head by a plastic kettle.
His brother reached towards his pants … towards the shiv.
He was picked up from behind and pile-driven into the concrete.
Crash!
‘Arghhh,’ the brother screamed, grabbing his arm. It was badly broken, the bone having burst through skin.
ATTENTION. Fight in 2 Yard. I repeat … Fight in 2 Yard. Could all available guards respond.
‘Two Yard?’ An officer, who was part of a highly trained emergency response team, giggled. ‘A fight in 2 Yard? What, has someone been hit with a handbag? Please. Haven’t we got better things to do?’
‘The radio call came over and everyone thought it was a gee-up,’ one officer said, recalling the incident. ‘Not because there aren’t serious fights in jail – of course there are – but there are not serious fights in 2 Yard. This is where all the paedophiles and rapists are kept. They are protection inmates, and they are a bunch of weak-as-piss cowards. They don’t fight. They can’t fight.’
But the officers reluctantly responded to the call and rushed in.
And they were confronted by shocking scenes.
Oh shit! We are going to need gas! Quick, someone fire!
‘It was on,’ recalled an officer. ‘We went in thinking an inmate was being cat slapped, and when we got there it was a full-on brutal bashing.’
‘We looked across the yard and there were inmates just going crazy,’ said another officer who witnessed the incident. ‘They were jumping off tables and onto heads. They were hitting them with jugs. They were stomping and kicking. One of the brothers in particular was copping it.’
An officer screamed, ‘Send in the gas. Fire!’ But he was stopped.
‘They couldn’t use gas to stop it,’ a guard revealed, ‘because an officer had run through the back yard and grabbed one of the brothers, the one with the broken arm, and pulled him out. They couldn’t fire while there was an officer in the yard.’
So the other officers went in, all ready for hand-to-hand.
‘It was under control very quickly,’ said an officer. ‘From the time the radio call was given, it was stopped in about 30 seconds. They dropped to the ground like the cowards they are as soon as the squads poured in.’
The infamous Pakistani brothers, who had been sentenced to 32 years for a string of gang rapes committed on girls as young as 13 across Sydney in 2002, were in a seriously bad way. The brother who had been hit with the jug – a prisoner who can only be called MAK because of a court order – was still unconscious with head trauma. The other brother – a fellow known as MSK and the ringleader of the gang rapists – was sobbing in a corner, his arm busted to bits. The officers, seeing the seriousness of MAK’s condition, immediately ran over to him.
‘Oh, he was fucked,’ said one of the responding officers. ‘There was blood everywhere. And this bloke had brains coming out of his ear. Seriously, there was grey matter on the ground. They had stomped the shit out of him. The officers got in quick, but it had been going on for about a minute or so before they arrived. And that is a lifetime when it comes to a jail attack. We worked on him for a good ten minutes before the ambulances came, but his brains were all over the floor. It was brutal, just putrid.’
The incident became headline news – ‘Rapists v. Killers’, one leading newspaper screamed.
‘Two notorious Pakistani gang rapist brothers ar
e in a critical condition in hospital after being bashed in a brawl involving seven of the state’s worst offenders at a high-security jail,’ reported Sydney’s Daily Telegraph. ‘It is understood MAK started the melee when he stabbed another inmate with a pen. MAK suffered severe head injuries and was transferred from Goulburn to Canberrra Hospital, where he was operated on just hours after the fight erupted at 12.30pm on Thursday.’
Seven men were charged with the 8 February 2007 bashing – among them were Matthew Wayne de Gruchy, who killed his mother and two siblings in 1996; Craig Andrew Merritt, serving 27 years for suffocating his three children; Jay William Short, who killed a teenager in Lithgow before burying her in a sandpit; and Shannon Daley. They were all convicted of charges including maliciously inflicting grievous bodily harm, assault occasioning actual bodily harm, and common assault.
‘The guys that attacked them weren’t a gang. They just banded together to fight a common cause. They didn’t belt these blokes because they were rapists, as some believe … They fought them because they were trying to stand over other inmates. It was yard politics. They claimed to have a shiv. We watched the CCTV afterwards and you can clearly see that they were motioning towards the front of their pants. And if you have a shiv in the yard, you are either a boss or you are bashed. These blokes bashed them because they didn’t want the brothers to have any power over them in the yard.’
The attack was described as the most brutal protection bashing in Goulburn’s history.
‘It was one of the worst violent attacks I have seen,’ said another officer. ‘The MAK guy, he is still bad. He was left with brain damage and he can’t even construct a sentence now.’
Read on for an extract from Australia’s Hardest Prison: Inside the Walls of Long Bay Jail
Not all escapes are successful, no matter how clever or original they are. Sometimes the most brilliant bids for freedom are foiled by complex investigations and crafty cunning. But most of the time, it’s just dumb luck.
Let’s take a look at Long Bay’s Best of the Busted.
Banging Boots
‘He’d come up with a pretty ingenious plan to escape.’
Long Bay guard
The guard at reception placed the jacket, the shirt and the tie on the counter.
The inmate looked at him. ‘What about me shoes?’ he asked.
‘Yeah, right. I forgot about them,’ said the guard. He picked up a pair of black boots from the locker and brought them to the prisoner. ‘Here they are,’ he said, slapping the soles of the boots together before putting them on the counter.
The inmate dived to the floor.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ said the guard, looking down at the prisoner, who was crouched with his hands over his head.
Eric Heuston, the inmate picking up his clothes for a morning court appearance, wiped the dumb look from his face and picked himself up from the ground.
‘Jeez, chief,’ he said. ‘I thought you were going to throw them at me.’
But Heuston didn’t think his boots were about to be thrown from the air. He thought they were going to explode …
Heuston went back to his cell. He dumped his clothes on the end of the bed and sat for a while, wondering if his plan would work.
So far so good, he thought.
He held a boot in each hand; his right was holding a bomb, his left a detonator.
‘Eric had his clothes brought in by a friend before his court appearance,’ said a former guard. ‘Part of the normal jail process is that you pick up your civilian clothes the night before your court appearance. The crims would shower before they went to bed and get up early and change so that they’d be ready for their escort.’
But Heuston was not planning on getting on a bus in the morning. He was going to get out tonight.
‘He’d come up with a pretty ingenious plan to escape,’ the guard said. ‘He’d got his friends to make some special boots for him. The big chunky heels were hollowed out, and gelignite was put in one and a detonator in the other.’
With his ‘banging boots’, Heuston was ready to go. He walked out of his cell, across the landing and down the stairs to ground floor. He walked right up to the end of the remand centre, to the wall made of glass brick. Heuston assumed it was the weakest point of the building and was now ready to blast his way out. Taking the boot that held the explosive, he placed it at the bottom of the wall. Grabbing the other, he made his way down the hall until he was close enough to detonate the bomb, but far enough not to explode himself. He took one more look at the wall to make sure nobody was in harm’s way then –
Boom!
The shoe exploded. Glass, leather and wood flew into the air. The noise shattered the evening silence and the inmates roared. The smoke slowly cleared and Heuston was primed for his getaway. He was thinking about the snipers in the towers as he ran towards the smashed wall. Well, at least he thought it was smashed …
‘The blast was big,’ the guard said. ‘It made a hell of a noise and a huge mess, but it wasn’t powerful enough to blast through completely.’
So Heuston was left standing there, detonator in hand and nowhere to go. He ended up in court the next morning, presumably without shoes, and would have to go back again soon to face another charge – attempted escape.
Cutting Keys
‘You can never underestimate how crafty an inmate can be.’
Former PO Roy Foxwell
The prisoner thought he was a genius. The wood stolen from the workshop, the copper torn from a gutter and the lead chipped from the Long Bay boiler was about to get him, and whoever had the money, out. Yep, he was fucking Houdini. The best bit was they wouldn’t – they couldn’t – suspect a thing. How could they? The prison had just upgraded to a new state-of-the-art key. No one could cut a Lockwood.
Nobody except him.
‘The old handcuff key used to be like a hairpin,’ said former PO Foxwell. ‘It was just a round, straight bit of metal with a notch on the end. The crims could pick them faster than you can open them with the key. All the shifty buggers would escape as soon as they were taken off to a court appearance or moved from jail to jail. They would pick the lock, remove the handcuffs and bolt from the van.’
Thanks to the new Saf-lok handcuffs and keys introduced to the jail, picked locks, kicked out windows and prisoner absenteeism from court would be a thing of the past. Or so the authorities thought.
‘It was a smaller version of a regular Lockwood key, the type you would see today,’ said Foxwell. ‘And it was supposed to stop all the escort escapes. But you can never underestimate how crafty an inmate can be. They sit there all day thinking about getting out, and they often do what we reckon is impossible.’
Jingle!
The prisoner jumped to attention – this was the noise he’d been waiting to hear. The guard had pulled the keys from his belt, ready to open the gate. The inmate walked towards him and stopped when he was close enough to focus on the small key, which swung and sung as it slapped against other metal, a chorus line of copper dancing on the heavy chain.
The inmate wasn’t interested in the big one being turned into the lock by the guard. No, he was staring at the new, tiny one – the one that could get him out.
Width, breadth and height of each metal tooth stored in his head, he went back to his cell and pulled out the wood and the lead. The wood pushed and pressed the soft lead, chipped and cut. Soon he had a mirror image mould.
Later, when all was quiet, he broke the plastic covering the powerpoint and reefed the wire from the wall. He put the razor, which he’d pulled out earlier from his plastic shaver, on the floor and sat the copper on top of the steel. The twin cable, now separated, turned the razor into a hotplate when the electrical current met in the middle after being jammed into either end. The copper sparked and spat before turning into ooze, the molten metal pouring into the mould.
When the inmate woke up the next morning, he slapped the mould against the cell floor, releasing the
newly forged handcuff key on the ground.
In total, he had made and sold six. Soon he would escape, and so would the others, if the guard hadn’t discovered the forged key he had stuck in his shaving brush.
‘We found it,’ said Foxwell. ‘The key, the mould – everything. We couldn’t believe it because it was only months after the new keys and locks had been introduced. I took the gear straight down to Maroubra police station so I could warn the police. If the inmates were making copies inside, God knows what they were doing outside.’
Foxwell was the investigating prison officer. He rightfully suspected the mould had produced more than the one key they had found.
‘I eventually got this bloke’s confidence,’ he continued. ‘I pressed him and he told me he’d made six keys. He’d kept the original for himself and passed on another five. At first he wouldn’t tell me who they went to and where they were, but I eventually got it out of him.’
Stunningly, the keys had travelled all over the state.
‘There was one at a little prison on Milson Island,’ Foxwell said. ‘He told me I would find it in the edging of a cardboard box that contained a stereo player inside. I went up there and, sure enough, I found it exactly where he said it would be. There was another hidden in a brick at Long Bay. We ended up getting them all – except for one.’
Foxwell knew who had it. But he didn’t know where he was hiding it.
‘The crim who had it had just had a son,’ Foxwell said. ‘He was absolutely mad about his boy, and the visits were the only thing that got him through the rest of the week in jail. I found this out and called him into my office. I’d faked a letter from the Commissioner, forged the signature and everything, saying that if he didn’t give me the key he would be shipped off to Grafton the very next day. I told him he needed to give me the key or he’d be on a bus and on his way.’
The inmate was not fazed. He looked straight at Foxwell. ‘So what?’ he said.
Australia's Most Murderous Prison: Behind the Walls of Goulburn Jail Page 19