by Paul Buck
After he had finally served his sentence, Wilson moved with his wife to a town near Marbella in Spain. He died bloodily in 1990, gunned down by a young visitor sent to assassinate him. Not long after, the drug dealer who is believed to have issued the contract was himself shot down, in a bar in Amsterdam.
The idea that others should come into a prison to collect an inmate resonates with earlier times, as we will note with the cases of Jack Sheppard and Bonnie and Clyde, both from different eras. Our notions of the American Wild West, as seen in countless films, include the associates of jailed men marching into the sheriff ’s office with guns drawn to rescue them from their cells. Even the John Dillinger story has an angle on this method.
In modern times, such approaches have to be a bit more sophisticated. With that said, going over a wall into a prison is not an unheard of event. There are stories of people going over to leave tools hidden in the prison yard for their friends inside to collect, or to deliver drugs. There are recent accounts of prisoners going out for a ‘pub crawl’ and then climbing back in to sleep it off, or, in one case, of a prisoner getting so drunk that he couldn’t manage to get his leg back over the wall. There are even stories of burglars scaling the wall into Brixton Prison to raid the staff officers’ club – more than once! A further twist will appear later, when we look at the notorious French criminal and escapee Pascal Payet …
II
Going Places
It is only to be expected that our gadget-laden world will provide ever more powerful and sophisticated surveillance cameras to maintain watch over those imprisoned – along with superior designs of locks and other fastening contrivances that make it difficult for duplicate keys to open them. And that’s not to forget sensors that can pick up slight vibrations, ideal for use at night.
The job of the escapee is rarely an easy one, particularly for those in the most secure prisons, or ‘prisons within prisons’, as some are now styled. But it has always been the case that a prisoner in transit is passing through the penal system’s weakest link, whether being taken to prison in the first instance, transferred from one prison to another, or transported to court for an appearance. The prison system itself inadvertently presents this enticement via its own policy of unsettling prisoners by continually shifting them from one prison to another, providing greater potential for escape than is perhaps necessary. Of course, there are also instances when prisoners themselves engineer a day out in court just to take advantage of that weakest link, making a bid for freedom in the most fundamental way.
Such an occasion attracted attention in May 1966, at the time of a spate of escapes. The government of the day ordered a report by Earl Mountbatten into what it saw as an intolerable situation, which recommended a mass of improvements to prison security. The escape in question was hatched in Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight by John McVicar, whom we will encounter again in his role in another major breakout. The Parkhurst inmates knew that if they caused an incident (in this case one prisoner stabbing another), it would require them being taken before Winchester Assizes on the mainland.
This is indeed what happened, and on return from their day out, thirteen convicts (nine of whom were involved in the plot) set about seven prison officers and escaped. The authorities had received a tip-off that an attempt would occur, but the likelihood pointed to it happening at Portsmouth, where they would take the ferry back to the island. Police had been deployed around the terminal for just such an eventuality but they had it wrong, for it happened as the coach passed through Bishop’s Waltham.
The prisoners had three improvised keys with them. Ten of the men who had been handcuffed in pairs freed themselves. The other three were joined to prison officers. On a signal, the freed men jumped up, most going for the guards whilst another went for the driver to take control of the steering wheel. As the coach ground to a halt, the door was opened and nine men took off.
The police escort behind them radioed for help, and two policemen quickly multiplied to one hundred and twenty personnel, along with dogs and an RAF helicopter. Seven prisoners were rounded up within a few hours, and another one a couple of days later. Only two got clean away, McVicar being one of them. He had all summer to stretch his legs before being recaptured.
And yet, despite such machinations, there will always be room for the opportunist to seize the moment. John Bindon, the villainturned-actor (Poor Cow, Get Carter, Performance), who helped give the ‘hardman’ archetype its cinematic image in 1970s Britain, recounted how, in his earlier days, he was being transferred by prison bus from one borstal to another, along with his friend Alan Stanton.
It appears that Stanton had small wrists and was able to slip out of his handcuffs, and from there to abscond out of the window. No other details are given, other than it was in “the middle of London”. All we know is that Stanton immediately stole a car, for he is reputed to have driven past the prison bus, catching the eye of Bindon, still seated at his window. When the officers asked where “the little one” had gone, Bindon informed them he had just waved at him from a passing car.
Stanton wasn’t the first to thumb his nose in such a humorous way. It is recorded that, two and a half centuries earlier, after escaping from Newgate Prison, Jack Sheppard rode past the gates of that same prison in a carriage with a woman on either side, all of them the worse for drink, only to end the night recaptured. He was subsequently hanged at Tyburn shortly after. (Things were not quite so drastic for Stanton, though he was caught within two weeks.)
In the century after Sheppard, that habitual prisoner, Charles Peace, the original ‘old lag’, having committed countless thefts, burglaries and two murders, thought to hurl himself out of the window of a moving train. He was being taken from London’s King’s Cross (starting the day at Pentonville Prison, where he was serving life for the attempted murder of a policeman) north to Sheffield, to stand trial for murder. He had originally been taken up on 17 January 1879, to be charged before the stipendiary magistrate, and was returned to London until the second hearing on the 22nd. Again they took the early morning train to Sheffield at 5:15am. We are not talking Eurostar or high-speed trains, but they still sped along at a fair rate, and the reality of clambering out must have been more hazardous than some James Bond fantasy. In fact, Peace hurt himself on landing and was recaptured.
Peace had not initially intended to leap when it was moving. At any station where the train stopped, he tried to find excuses to go down to the toilet. He had probably tried this on the earlier trip, for the two warders had provided bags for him to use – and then throw out of the window! Peace used the act of disposal as his excuse for opening the window, and made his bid for freedom by taking a flying leap through it. One warder caught his left foot just in time. Peace held onto the footboard and kicked furiously with his right to free himself. The other warder, unable to get to the window, pulled on the communication cord to urge the driver to stop. The train steamed on for a mile, with Peace desperate to liberate his foot. When he finally freed it from his shoe and tumbled down onto the line, it still took another mile before the driver halted the train, and only then due to encouragement from passengers in other carriages.
Though the warders ran back along the line ahead of the reversing train, they needn’t have worried. Peace was still lying beside the track, near Kiveton Park, unconscious and bleeding from a bad wound on his head. He was lifted back into the guard’s van of the train and taken to the police station at Sheffield, where he was attended by a surgeon. The case was adjourned for eight days.
The method works much better if one can get the means of transport to slow down considerably – particularly if it’s an airplane. This is supposedly the case with Frank Abagnale. For a few years, starting in his late teens, he led a busy and successful life as a confidence trickster, forger and impostor, details of which were recorded in a book that reads like a Steven Spielberg movie. (Which in fact is what it became. Called Catch Me If You Can, it starred Leonardo DiCaprio as Aba
gnale.)
Abagnale’s personal adventures offer an impressive escape from a plane, a British Viscount VC-10, flying him back to face trial and undoubted imprisonment in the United States in 1971. Excusing himself to go to the toilet, just before the pilot signalled to fasten seatbelts, Abagnale released the toilet fasteners from its apparatus, a self-contained unit, and climbed down into the space beneath, knowing there was a hatch used to remove the in-flight toilet waste at the end of each journey. After the plane landed on Runway 13 at JFK International Airport, he waited for the moment it slowed, and then virtually stopped, as it turned to the taxi strip. Then he dropped ten feet from the hatch to the ground and made his getaway, leaving the FBI agents on the plane staring at an empty toilet. It begs the question of how he managed to stay in the toilet once the crew knew he was not fastened in his seat, but no one seems to have checked out his disappearance at that point.
Abagnale scaled a cyclone fence under cover of darkness, took a cab to Grand Central Station, then a train to the Bronx to visit a girl who had stashed some clothes, money and a set of keys for a Montréal safe deposit box for him. Leaving her most of the money, he took a train for Montréal. There he collected $20,000 and proceeded to Dorval Airport to take a flight to São Paulo, knowing that the United States had no extradition treaty with Brazil. But he never made the flight, for a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman saw him in line at the ticket counter. He was later escorted to the Canadian border and handed over to the US Border Patrol. Today, Frank Abagnale runs a financial fraud consultancy company, and can be viewed on YouTube talking about his exploits.
It’s not impossible to escape from a moving plane (on the ground, anyway). It happened in California in December 1985, when Reginald Still was being taken to Sacramento to stand trial. No sooner had the plane landed, and slowed to around fifty miles per hour, than Still broke open the emergency door and leapt onto the wing, then the runway, leaving eight guards behind on the plane. And he was wearing leg irons and handcuffs at the time!
In much the same way, Mickey Green, a.k.a. ‘the Pimpernel’ (a name acquired by evading arrest for more than twenty years), a successful armed robber in the 1970s before moving on to the lucrative ventures of gold bullion and drug smuggling, took the opportunity to escape from the airport itself, en route from California to Paris. FBI agents had arrested him in 1993, at the former mansion home of Rod Stewart that he was renting in Beverly Hills. As he was wanted in Paris to serve seventeen years for a drug trafficking conviction, he was being flown back across the Atlantic. Though Green had British nationality, he also carried an Irish passport. When the plane made a stopover at Shannon Airport, he simply alighted from the plane and slipped through customs. As extradition terms between Ireland and France were weak at the time, he decided to stay in Dublin for a while, acquiring a luxurious property outside the capital. Later he moved on to Spain, when his presence came to the attention of the IRA and he was advised that he might do well to depart.
What is quite remarkable is how so-called dangerous men who are facing heavy sentences are sometimes moved around in such cavalier ways. School kids are used to the hired coach for their days out breaking down en route, as schools cut corners on the financial outlay. But it seems the prison authorities have no more foresight.
In November 1996, Blundeston Prison in Suffolk needed to transfer ten prisoners to Wandsworth Prison in London. But they had no vehicle available, so they hired a private coach with its driver. It barely moved two miles down the road before it broke down, and a replacement had to be sent along so that six of the ten could continue on their journey. The six, five of whom were robbers – Lee Mitty, Warren Edwards, Gary Staggs, Christopher Ward and David Currey – and the other, Stewart Warwick, jailed for possession of firearms, were only accompanied by five officers, whereas it would be usual to have a dozen for six prisoners in transit, particularly as they were regarded as dangerous, and three of them (Mitty, Edwards and Staggs) had impressive records for escape. Not that the prison officers knew of their records; perhaps they did not even know they were being moved because they had formed a gang inside the prison, and had been involved in a fight resulting in some unpleasant injuries. As was noted by a perplexed Prison Officers Association representative, “It is very strange that they [the prison service] were trying to split up the gang by taking them from a secure environment on to a standard coach.” And all together, at the same time too.
When they were going down the M25 it appeared that the prisoners slipped their handcuffs, one of them showing the others how to dislocate the thumb to achieve this. Around the Waltham Abbey area of Essex, they took over the coach and viciously set about the officers, inflicting quite extensive bodily damage with the captured truncheons. They also destroyed all their personal files, which were travelling with them, hurling the ripped documents out of the window, and changed into their civilian clothes which were also on board. In the meantime, the coach driver was forced to press on with his journey towards the capital. When they reached Duncombe Road in Archway, their ride over, they all climbed down and escaped.
Similarly, in February 1992, John McFayden, who was two years into a life sentence for murder, in addition to forty-seven years for drug offences, was being taken by taxi from Full Sutton, near York, down to Wormwood Scrubs in London, apparently to see relatives, when he pulled a blade on the two-man escort and ordered the female taxi driver to drive him to Euston. Though he was caught before the year was out, it still seems remarkable that pre-travel body searches can be so sloppily carried out, particularly for such a vulnerable transportation system which, as the Home Office pointed out, was used dozens of times each day.
In the course of his reminiscences, the late Reggie Kray mentions the escapes of a few men he met inside. One can’t fail to notice the role that ‘pulling a blade’ plays in these actions. He notes how Steve McFadden escaped in transit from one prison to another, producing a knife and injuring one of his four escorts in his bid for freedom. Another friend of his, Micky Fenlon, pulled one of these prison-crafted knives on his way to Exeter Prison, hijacking the coach with all its occupants, convicts and officers. The vehicle was driven someway towards London before he parted company and made his own way.
A nightmare situation presents itself in the case of Billy Hughes, who was to all appearances a petty criminal who had served five sentences for housebreaking, before being charged with rape and grievous bodily harm. He was held on remand in Leicester Prison, where it appears that his criminal record was slow in catching up with him. In fact, it was at the prison but not delivered to the appropriate department until the day after he escaped. The man the warders thought was a pleasant character had a history of violence against the police that included killing two police dogs with his bare hands. He was not really the ideal person to place in the prison kitchen, where he spirited away a seven-inch boning knife six weeks before using it. (No search was made by the authorities despite the knife going missing.)
And if they had been more competent, they might have thought better of taking him to Chesterfield Magistrates’ Court for his weekly remand appearances by taxi, accompanied by two not particularly tough officers. Or indeed, they might have searched him thoroughly and not casually frisked him. Hughes managed to prolong the court procedures for ten trips by giving contradictory instructions to his solicitors, requiring further days out. All the time he was preparing for his escape.
Hughes struck on 12 January 1977, as the hire car turned off the M1 at Junction 29. There he leaned forward and dealt the warder in the front-passenger seat a blow to his head. Then he turned to the officer he was handcuffed to in the backseat, produced the boning knife and slashed him across the neck, causing a deep five-inch wound. As the warder in front recovered and turned, Hughes lunged at him with the knife, making two vicious strokes, one slashing his hand, the other exposing his jawbone.
Hughes ordered the car to go straight through Chesterfield and out onto the moors. At Stonedge he stopped
the car, had his handcuffs unlocked and pushed everyone out to the side of the road, cuffed them together and collected whatever money they had between them. Then he jumped back in the car and fled. It was a cold, snowy January and the roads were bleak. He lost control on the ice within two miles and crashed into a wall at Beeley, near Chatsworth, home of the Duke of Devonshire. Once the alarm was raised by the warders, warnings were issued quickly to all within the area and roadblocks were set up.
An extensive search of farmhouses and local properties was made. Police guards were placed on his most recent lover in Chesterfield, as she had told him they were finished whilst he was on remand. Police also expected he might return to Blackpool, where his estranged wife had earlier received death threats from him.
For some reason, Billy Hughes was missed by all those searching for him. He had gone to ground less than a mile from the place where he was last sighted, not long after he hijacked the taxi – Pottery Cottage in the hamlet of Eastmoor, close to the headquarters set up by the police at the local pub, the Highwayman.
Pottery Cottage was to become a scene of carnage. On his arrival Hughes had taken hostage an elderly couple he found there, Arthur and Amy Minton. Later, as other members of the family arrived home, Gill and Richard Moran, and their ten-year-old daughter Sarah, were also taken and locked in separate rooms. Though he killed Sarah and her grandfather, Arthur, immediately, he still kept the survivors separate and maintained the pretence that each was alive by taking food into their rooms at mealtimes.
