The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks

by Paul Simpson

  Boquete applied to the Innocence Project, set up in 1992 as “a national litigation and public policy organization dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted people through DNA testing and reforming the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice”. On 23 May 2006, three years after his application, he was exonerated, his conviction fully vacated by the state of Florida. There was no way that Boquete could have produced the semen which was found on the victim’s underwear, and indeed the evidence that was available in 1983, which showed his blood type excluded him as a possible perpetrator, should have been made clearer to the original court. “No words spoken by this court today . . . would do justice to the penalty that you have been required to pay for offenses that now we know conclusively that you were not guilty of committing,” Judge Richard Payne said. “You are hereby ordered to be immediately released from the custody of Florida.”

  The only problem was that Boquete didn’t have permanent residency status in the United States, so was detained by the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Agency. Was he a danger to society? The crimes he had committed while escaping – and even the escape itself – were initially held against him, but eventually, after three months, he was released.

  Even then, Boquete’s story wasn’t over. He eventually was granted full American residency status on 16 November 2010, but while this lifted a threat from over his head, it didn’t help him with other problems. He should have been eligible for compensation for the time he spent wrongly incarcerated, but a loophole in the 2008 Victims of Wrongful Incarceration Compensation Act meant that a convicted felon can’t receive the $50,000 a year recompense. In February 2011, Boquete told the Orlando Sentinel, in broken English, “That’s a terrible law . . . The people who wrote it, they’re tricking. They’re bad people . . . I had a clean record before I went to prison.” As at the time of writing, this situation has not yet been resolved, and a man who only committed crimes after being found guilty of a much greater one that he was not responsible for, lives on the poverty line, ironically in a much worse situation than he would have been had he remained inside jail.

  Sources:

  Twitpic: 16 November 2010: http://twitpic.com/37fs14

  New York Times, 11 February 2007: “Fugitive”

  The Innocence Project: About Us: http://www.innocenceproject.org/about/Mission-Statement.php

  The Innocence Project of Florida: http://floridainnocence.org/

  The Innocence Project: http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/Orlando_Boquete.php

  Orlando Sentinel, 12 February 2011: “Only two of 12 Florida inmates cleared by DNA have collected money from state”

  The Innocence Project, Press Release 23 May 2006: “23 Years After Conviction Based on Eyewitness Misidentification, DNA Proves Orlando Boquete’s Innocence”

  Florida Sun Sentinel, 8 February 1985: “Police Lose Track of Escapees Who Fled Glades Correctional”

  Back to Badness

  At the end of his latest spree in Australia, which culminated in a siege that had officers fearing that he was planning “suicide by cop”, Christopher David Binse – who had given himself the nickname “Badness” some years earlier – had escaped, or tried to escape from Australian jails eight times. He had appeared in the Real Prison Breaks television series in interviews counterpointed with his nemesis in the police, making it clear that he didn’t regard escaping as anything other than something that he would do when the circumstances demanded it. At that point – in 2008 – the inference was that he had “gone straight”, and the leopard had changed his spots to a degree (a metaphor he used himself). Very obviously that wasn’t the case, and with Binse back inside, a close watch is being made to ensure that he doesn’t go for escape number nine.

  Binse’s first major escape came from HM Prison Pentridge, a maximum-security facility in Melbourne which had been built in 1850 – and from which the first escapes (a party of fifteen convicts) were recorded the following year. It was infamous for being the last resting place of famous Australian bushranger Ned Kelly, after his remains were moved there in 1929 from Melbourne Gaol, where he had been hanged in 1880. It was also the site of the last hanging in Australia: Ronald Ryan was executed in 1967 for shooting a prison officer during an escape from Pentridge two years earlier (see chapter 31). Pentridge was closed down in May 1997.

  Christopher Binse was in “the College of Knowledge”, as it was known to its inmates, in August 1992 as just part of a long criminal career. He had been declared uncontrollable nine years earlier, at the age of fourteen, and he was sent to a boys’ home in Turana. He knew Pentridge wasn’t going to be an easy place to get out of: 1,500 prisoners guarded by 250 officers, six guard towers, surrounded by razor-wire covered fences. He was there on remand for armed robbery, something for which he admitted he had a passion: after one of his arrests, he told Melbourne police he carried out raids “for the excitement, the rush. Lifestyle, you’d have to know what it feels like. It’s like you on a raid, you’re in control, your blood starts rushing, you feel grouse, you’re hyped up. F--k the money. It’s more than excitement, it’s an addiction. I don’t know what it is.”

  He may not have seen it as such at the time, but Binse got lucky on the evening of 28 August. Taking a shower, he felt as if he had been punched a couple of times, but in fact he had been knifed with a shiv – an ordinary implement sharpened by prisoners to form a lethal weapon. He was rushed to the nearby St Vincent’s Hospital in a critical condition and kept in a locked ward under armed guard; even though there was a good chance that he wasn’t going to survive the incident, the Australian prison bosses weren’t taking any chances.

  Binse was in the locked-down ward on the seventh floor of the hospital for ten days, but at some point on the evening of 8 September, he received a female visitor, who apparently gave him a gun which she had smuggled onto the ward inside her boot. (It has never been proved that this was the case, but the alternative – that one of the guards provided him with the firearm – is not one that the Australian authorities cared to contemplate). Once she had left, Binse waited until the guard’s back was turned, then slid out of bed, and pointed the gun at his captor. After a brief discussion, the guard elected to be cooperative, and opened the first deadlocked door. The threat to his colleague persuaded the guard in charge of the control room to open the other door, allowing Binse access to an elevator. From there it was easy to get to the ground floor, and then exit the hospital through the emergency department – even if he was only dressed in a hospital gown! He stole a van from a nearby car park and made his getaway.

  While Victoria police searched for him, using dogs, helicopters, car and foot patrols, Binse had escaped to New South Wales, reaching Sydney the day after his flight from the hospital, despite still bleeding from his wounds. After a week of holing up, though, he turned to his only source of finance: armed robbery. He raided the Commonwealth Bank at Chatswood, firing his way out through a glass door, but he was betrayed by an informant, who tipped off the police. Binse was arrested and the process of extradition back to Victoria was begun. In the meantime, he was held at Parramatta Correctional Centre in Sydney, which had the distinction of being the longest-running and oldest jail in Australia, founded in 1798 (it closed in 2011 after some embarrassing escapes).

  Binse had no intention of waiting around to be sent back to Pentridge, and within a week of arriving at Parramatta, he had worked out a way of escaping from the prison. As with his flight from St Vincent’s Hospital, he used outside help, this time arranging for a hacksaw blade to be thrown over the wall at a specific point where he could collect it without being noticed. He created a rope out of his bedsheets and then he patiently sawed through the bars of his cell window. On 25 October 1992, he let himself out through the window, down the rope and onto a roof, which was covered with razor wire at its edges. He leaped over that and a further twenty feet to another roof which he just managed to grab (he claimed in 2008 that his imprints on the tin roof were still visibl
e at that point, over fifteen years later), then, despite being fired at by a prison guard, he swung his rope so that he could abseil over the inner perimeter fence. Unfortunately for him, his rope broke and he fell to the ground, breaking his wrist.

  That wasn’t going to deter Badness. He was caught in the sterile zone between the inner and outer walls. There were guard towers to either side of him. From the catwalk between them, he made an easy target. But he was determined that he was going to get out, and so, even though there were bullets whizzing past him (and one has to assume that the guards were shooting to try to persuade him to stop, rather than actually shooting to kill), he climbed over the perimeter fence. His accomplices were waiting for him, and he disappeared once more.

  He managed to stay hidden for six weeks, but on 5 December 1992, he was arrested in the aftermath of the shooting of notorious criminal Edward “Jockey” Smith. Disguised in a false moustache, sunglasses and a cap – clothing that he donned regularly during his bank raids – Binse had raided another branch of the Commonwealth Bank, this time in Doncaster, Victoria, on 23 November, stealing $160,000 and using his shotgun to blast open a glass door that prevented him from reaching the money, then escaping in a car driven, police believed, by his girlfriend, Laura Skellington. By 3 December, he and Skellington had teamed up with Jockey Smith – who was on the run once more, following various incidents in November in New South Wales. They rented a room in a farmhouse which was being looked after by Guiseppe Corso and were planning an armed robbery on an Armaguard security truck somewhere in the northern suburbs of Melbourne. The police tracked Binse to Corso’s farm, and they took up surveillance on the property.

  On the evening of 5 December, Binse and Skellington disappeared for a short time, but returned to the property by 6.20 p.m. After the three robbers had dinner with their landlord, Smith headed out around 8.20. As he was driving through the small town of Creswick, he was stopped by a police officer, and after a tense four-minute stand-off, there was an exchange of gunfire. At the end of it, Jockey Smith lay dead.

  Knowing that Binse was in possession of radio scanners which would within minutes pick up the many reports flying around from police officers describing the death of Smith, the Armed Robbery Squad moved on the farmhouse, arresting Binse and Skellington.

  Binse would spend the next thirteen years in jail, but not for want of trying to escape. The year following his double escape, he planned on getting out of Pentridge, along with thirty other convicts taken from the prison’s top-security H Division. Rather oddly, most of the information about the plan was derived from Binse’s own diary, seized shortly before the escape was due to take place – quite why he was keeping such detailed notes has never been explained.

  According to the reports, Binse was one of four inmates in charge of the escape plan. Double murderer John William Lindrea had already managed to get out of Pentridge; another of the plotters, Robert Chapman, had done a runner from an amusement park while on day leave; while convicted car thief and escapee Paul Alexander Anderson acted as a “consultant”. The idea was that one of the inmates would overpower the single guard on night duty, take his gun, and then open the cells of the thirty escapees. After that, they could either get hold of the keys for the separated-off area of H Division, get out into the main part of the jail, and then scale the outside wall behind the prison – or they could use the guard as a hostage, and use him to bargain their way out through the main gate. Along the way, a bit of revenge would be dealt out: Julian Knight, who had killed seven people and injured nineteen others during a killing spree in Hoddle Street, Clifton Hill, in 1987, was regarded as an informer by a number of the escapees, and he was going to be either seriously injured or killed as a by-product of the escape.

  Whereas good luck aided Binse to get away from Pentridge in 1992, he suffered from the reverse the following year. On 25 October, a day before the escape was going to occur, Pentridge prison officer Les Attard was stabbed seventeen times with a pair of tailor’s shears. Unsurprisingly, the prison authorities cracked down and carried out an intensive sweep of the entire jail. To their annoyance, the guards discovered that Binse’s cell door had been compromised: the lock had been neatly cut with a hacksaw blade. They also found a home-made prison officer’s uniform, which had been completed using Binse’s civilian shirt. As well as confiscating Binse’s diary – and discovering the details for the plan – they got hold of two home-made daggers, six ersatz Office of Correction shirt insignias, and a hacksaw blade.

  A blade also featured in Binse’s next attempt, two years later. Rather than getting involved with a large group, Badness worked solo on the bars in his cell. After carefully removing them, he made his move, but was recaptured in the prison grounds; according to some reports, John William Lindrea was with him when he was found.

  The following year, by which point he was spending all but one hour a day in leg irons and handcuffs, he was sent to New South Wales to face the charges arising from his crimes in autumn 1992. A further six and a half years were added to his sentence, and the judge advised him to change his lifestyle, or he would rot in jail. He tried to bring legal action against the state for the restraints, but the Court of Appeal threw out the action.

  In 2001, Binse was one of the first prisoners sent to the new Supermax facility at the Goulburn Correctional Centre, marking him as one of the elite one per cent of offenders within the Victorian prison system – the psychopaths and the ingenious escapers. Nicknamed the HARM-U by the inmates (from its original name, the High Risk Management Unit), it has all the lack of pleasant facilities and the high presence of security of the American Supermax. Prisoners are rarely let out of their cells; they get little time with other inmates. If they are moved around, they are in leg irons and handcuffs. And Christopher David Binse did not get out of there until he was permitted to do so in 2005.

  Binse didn’t stay out of jail for long. He was rearrested for threatening a security guard and a receptionist at a strip club in November 2005, and other firearms and drugs offences, returning to prison until April 2008. At that point, he was interviewed for the Real Prison Breaks series, and intimated that he was gradually learning the error of his ways. The former prison guards and police officers interviewed evidently didn’t believe it for one moment – with good cause. Binse was apprehended just before Christmas 2008 with a loaded pen pistol, a Taser stun gun and a spray canister by members of the Special Operations Group.

  Around now, it seemed as if Binse was losing the easy charm that had characterized his actions. He had pulled a gun on three officers in May 2012 when they were checking the registration of his motorbike, and had raced to his girlfriend’s house where he barricaded himself inside. By the end of the two-day siege, even his girlfriend had walked away from him, worried about his state of mind; officers involved in the situation were seriously concerned when he exited the house still carrying a gun. Would Binse’s story end with “suicide by cop”? In the end a gun that fires small beanbags was used to bring him down – and Christopher David Binse was arrested to face trial yet again . . .

  Fact vs. Fiction

  The account of Binse’s arrest following Jockey Smith’s death is highly misleading in the Real Prison Breaks instalment, implying that police had no idea that Binse was involved with Smith. In fact, as discussed, they were simply biding their time to ensure that they had sufficient evidence to arrest all three perpetrators.

  Sources:

  Sydney Daily Telegraph, 9 May 2009: “Inside the walls of Super-Max prison, Goulburn”

  Real Prison Breaks, Discovery Channel, 2008: Christopher David Binse interview

  Melbourne Herald-Sun, 24 May 2012: “Christopher Dean Binse charged with multiple offences”

  The Age (Victoria), 22 May 2012: “Born to be Badness: the criminal behind the East Keilor siege”

  Silvester, John and Andrew Rule: Tough. 101 Australian Gangsters Floradale Productions & Sly Ink, 2010

  The Age (Victoria), 23 May 2012: �
�Meet Badness, the man behind the siege”

  Melbourne Herald-Sun, 19 December 2008: “Armed bandit Christopher Dean Binse arrested”

  Haddow, Peter “Jockey Smith’s Last Stand” contained in: On Murder 2 (BlackInk, 2002, edited by Kerry Greenwood)

  The Lucky Escaper

  As he was being handcuffed and leg irons applied, leaning up against a police cruiser, a tired-looking Tony Artrip was pressed by reporters who were keen for answers from the man who had just led their local cops on a merry chase through the town of Marmet, West Virginia, after robbing a bank. When he finally gave his name, one reporter recognized it, and asked him what the secret of his regular escapes was. “I don’t know, man. Just luck, I guess,” Artrip drawled before asking a cameraman if he could pass his love on to his daughter, Cierra.

  This incident in 2009 marked the end of Artrip’s third escape from custody, twelve years after he first made a daring bid for freedom from the Boyd County Detention Center in Cattletsburg, in the north-east part of Kentucky. In April 1997, Artrip was being held in Boyd County, awaiting transfer to a state prison to serve a ten-year stretch for a burglary in Scioto County, Ohio, as well as being a persistent felony offender. The prison was comparatively new at that point, completed in 1991, and the ninety-three-bed facility was built in a podular style, with the cells circling a centralized control room. The theory was that the inmates would be visible at all times to the guards – as long as the guards were paying attention, of course. Like so many institutions constructed around that time, the prison authorities believed it was escape-proof. To the average offender this was probably true, but Tony Artrip had no intention of remaining in the Kentucky lock-up.

  Alongside Artrip in Boyd County were Alan Scott Williams and Donald Tipton, who were awaiting a retrial for the armed robbery of a supermarket in Westwood, Kentucky. They decided to use a different mode of exit from the prison than the usual jail breakers: a tunnel wasn’t practical, so rather than go down, they went up – into the ceiling of the prison itself. The men noticed that the panels in the false ceilings in their cells weren’t welded together particularly well, and if a sufficient degree of pressure was applied, they could be loosened. Lying on the top bunk in Artrip’s cell, they were able to push at the panel until it came free.