Prison Break - True Stories of the World's Greatest Escapes

by Paul Buck

  The next day council workers came to clean the septic tank, as Sarah’s mother drove alone to fetch a newspaper and cigarettes for Hughes. No outsider had any inkling that something was wrong and she gave no sign that Hughes was in her home. Later that day, Hughes went out with Gill on errands. Each time nothing untoward occurred. The following day, Richard and Gill went shopping and filled the car with petrol. A while later, Hughes and the husband went to the plastics company where Moran worked and stole £200 from the safe.

  That evening the grandmother, Amy, tried to escape through a window. Hughes caught her, slit her throat, and left her in the garden covered in snow. It was time for him to depart. The only two members of the family still alive were the husband and wife, though they remained in the dark as to the fate of their loved ones.

  Hughes decided to take only Gill with him, and tied up her husband back at the house. However, the tyres of the family’s Chrysler car would not grip in the snow, so they knocked on a neighbour’s door and asked to be towed out. Ready to depart, Hughes returned to the house and stabbed the husband to death.

  What he did not know was that Gill had whispered to the neighbour about her predicament, and the police were about to join their trail. Soon in attendance at the cottage, they would realise the gravity of the situation.

  Having chosen such bad weather for his escape, any form of car chase was doomed to end in a further crash. When this happened Hughes kept Gill Moran as his hostage, his knife at her throat. Switching to one of the police cars, a fresh chase got underway that led into Cheshire and a further crash into a bus that was used as a roadblock. With the woman as his hostage, he demanded another car.

  In the meantime, police marksmen had arrived. When an outside light at a nearby house came on suddenly, it triggered a dramatic mêlée as Hughes started swinging an axe he had brought along, both at his hostage and the police, who were trying to get into the car. One marksman shot him in the head from twelve feet through the windscreen, with a Smith & Wesson .38. Another shot forced Hughes to try to clamber from the car, at which point he was shot in the chest. In the first such incident in modern times, the British police had shot dead a prison escapee.

  Some people leave it right to the last minute until their bid to escape is put into operation. The escape of Clifford Hobbs and Noel Cunningham took place in June 2003. As the Securicor van taking ten remand prisoners from Brixton Prison to the Inner London Crown Court turned into Avonmouth Street, just along from the Elephant and Castle, it halted outside the gate to the court’s yard and waited to be admitted. It was just after 9am. Two men who had been seen loitering earlier in the nearby park stepped in front of the van. One was dressed as a postman and carried a Royal Mail bag. Both were armed with handguns.

  The ‘postman’ demanded that the driver open the hatches. The driver wasn’t successful so he was told to open the side door. He was then shot in the knee. The second gunman ordered the emergency hatches (used in the event of a serious accident) to be released. Then the two men entered the van, and the prison escort was made to unlock the door to the separate cells after being pistol-whipped. The rear doors were then opened for the prisoners to escape, none of whom were handcuffed. All ten were given the opportunity to run, but only three escaped – though one, Tony Peters, surrendered later that same day.

  The breakout had been organised for Hobbs and Cunningham. They were due in court to face charges of conspiracy to steal £1.25 million from a Securicor van in Effra Road, Brixton, a robbery that failed when they were ambushed by the Flying Squad. Once out of the van, they and their liberators ran across the nearby park, Newington Gardens, before going their separate ways, one in a getaway car from Bath Terrace, the other on the back of a motorbike from Brockham Street.

  Four years later in court, Hobbs denied that the breakout was planned and claimed he had simply taken advantage of the opportunity when it presented itself. Conflictingly, the court was told how he indicated his whereabouts in the van by tapping on the window. Hobbs is known to have lain low for a few days in south London before obtaining a false passport and fleeing to Spain. He was tracked down and arrested at Puerto Banus, near Malaga, in August 2007. For some while it had been bandied about that he was a prime suspect in the £53 million Securitas heist in Tonbridge, in February 2006, but this seems to be unfounded. Noel Cunningham has not been recaptured, but is believed by some to be on the ‘Costa del Crime’.

  In September 1984, Terry Smith and John Kendall were moved to Maidstone Prison in Kent, ostensibly to further their educational studies, though they planned to go over the wall. Things changed, and the pair of them, both armed robbers, were marked for transfer back to Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight at the earliest opportunity. Smith was still determined to escape and informed his friend outside, Tommy Hole, that he was moving the following week, on 20 November. He told no one inside the prison, not even Kendall.

  Kendall undoubtedly sensed something was going down, because he asked Smith on the morning of the transfer and was told that something might happen. If they were cuffed together, he should just hold his arms out “and they will be bolt-cropped.” Kendall was cuffed to Smith, and the other prisoner on the ride, a Turkish inmate, was joined to an officer. The officer in charge sat in the front of a yellow Bedford minibus with bars on the windows, alongside the driver, whilst three other officers sat in the back with the prisoners.

  No sooner had they left the prison than the van stopped at a newsagent’s, for the senior officer to rush in to buy a paper. Smith noticed a BMW pull in front of them and one of its occupants go into the shop. As the man came out he looked directly at Smith in the van. Smith told me recently that he was thinking, “What’s he come in his own car for?”

  “I was worried that they had just come down to see if it was genuine I was leaving,” rather than to implement the escape. But, whatever was going to happen now, he had to wait. He was entirely in their hands.

  The prison van joined the M20 heading for the M25 link someway up the road. They were followed at a respectable distance by two BMW’s. As their occupants were all professional criminals, they knew how to tail a van without being spotted. (Don’t believe movies or TV crime programmes where everyone hangs so close together that only an idiot wouldn’t rumble it.) As Smith recalls, “It was a bright yellow van. When you’re doing the visuals you can hang back a good two miles and stay out of sight. On a motorway it’s perfect. And they want to get onto those motorways as soon as they can.”

  An hour after leaving Maidstone, when the van was turning off the M25 to go south on the A217 to Reigate at Junction 8, one of the BMW’s appeared, shot past the van and smashed into the driver’s side, forcing the vehicle off the road and onto the grass verge. At the same time the second BMW blocked the van from behind. Two masked men leapt from the first BMW; one, wielding a pickaxe handle, smashed the windscreen whilst the other, carrying bolt croppers, grabbed the van’s keys and headed for the rear doors.

  Smith leapt forward onto the officer in the passenger seat, thrashing to free himself as he was rugby-tackled from behind. Wary of the ‘outside help’, the senior officer instructed his staff to let them go. Smith dragged Kendall out with him through the passenger side and into the back of the waiting BMW, whilst the rescuer who had wrenched open the back door found Smith and Kendall were already going out the front way. Making a U-turn the BMW sped back past the van and the traffic building up at the scene, shot over the elevated roundabout and down a string of country lanes until it was time to split up and go their separate ways. Smith took one of his associates, his friend Tommy Hole, along with Kendall onto a commuter train at Coulsdon, bound for Victoria, whilst his other two friends found a different route home.

  It was close to twenty months before Smith and Kendall were recaptured, after a robbery that went disastrously wrong for Smith, who seriously injured his leg and was lucky not to lose it altogether.

  Sheer force was the method of armed robber Vic Dark in Septemb
er 1988, when he was being taken across London from Hackney police station to Wormwood Scrubs Prison. They had handcuffed him, daisy-chain fashion, with two sets of cuffs to the bars of the window. They had secured him so well that he wasn’t expected to be any trouble. But Dark wanted out and knew he would have “to Rambo it”, as he said later. There was no other way than to rip the whole window grille away from the bodywork of the Ford Transit van.

  The bars came away, leaving him handcuffed but able to manoeuvre. He kicked out the window itself and was halfway through before the officer in the front seat reacted and grabbed his legs. In the meantime, the other guard had pulled the van up in the Gray’s Inn Road and gone around the outside to prevent him coming out of the window. Extra help arrived, and the four-strong team moved into the back to watch over Dark, taking him back to Hackney to start the whole process of transfer over again. If he had levered himself out he would have landed on his head, like poor Charlie Peace. But at least his transport would have been brought to a halt.

  One of the most notorious escapees in the United States through the 1920s was Roy Gardner. His exploits could have filled a book – which indeed he could have written, for he was an educated man, had taught in the English department at a Midwestern college and wasn’t slow to flaunt his knowledge, once making Shakespearian references to a judge in court. In his early days he had become a gunrunner during the Mexican Revolution, and, though he was arrested, he escaped the firing squad and returned to the States, where he became a prize-fighter and sparring partner to heavyweight champion J. J. Jeffries at his training camp in Reno, Nevada, during the summer of 1910.

  Though he had an extensive criminal record which included escapes, Gardner was stunned by what he saw as the inappropriateness of a twenty-five-year sentence at McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary, Washington, for robbing the US Mail. His response to the judge was, “You’ll never get me there.” He wasn’t joking. On the train journey to prison in June 1920, he distracted the two marshals escorting him by drawing their attention to something out of the window, and then reached for one of their guns, overpowered them, and fled near Portland, Oregon.

  It wasn’t long before he was caught again, being a basically unsuccessful criminal. After receiving another twenty-five years for armed train robbery, he was once more placed on a train bound for McNeil Island. And once again they failed to get him there, just as he had warned them. (The papers had printed his boast.) On board the train he asked to go to the toilet. The officers went with him, and took along another prisoner, Norris Pryor, handcuffing both men together. All four fitted into a toilet cubicle that was obviously built larger back in those days. After relieving himself, Gardner moved to the sink to complete his ablutions, but instead slipped his hand under and withdrew a gun – no one knows how it was placed there, as he was very much a lone criminal. Gardner and Pryor handcuffed the officers together, bound their mouths with the tape used to secure the gun beneath the sink, and alighted from the train in the Vancouver yards, disappearing into a misty rain. With the major press coverage his escape received, it was inevitable that Gardner was soon recaptured and transported in a more security-conscious manner to prison.

  To conclude his story, it wasn’t long before Gardner determined that prison was still not for him. After little more than six weeks, whilst watching a baseball game on the prison field, he slipped beneath the bleacher seats to the ground below with two others, when the attention of inmates and guards was absorbed by a big hit in the opposite direction. With wire cutters he had brought along from the machine shop, Gardner breached the fence.

  There was an expanse of open space ahead that had to be covered before undergrowth and trees would provide relative cover. Halfway across, the tower guards saw the escapees and opened fire. Both his friends were halted in their tracks, but Gardner, though hit in the leg, dragged himself onward to the bushes. Extensive searches were made and security craft circled the island, but he could not be found.

  They didn’t know he had returned to the prison and was hiding in the barn, nourishing himself by milking a cow, and tending to his wound. After forty-eight hours the search was called off, the guards suspecting he had reached the mainland. Few had managed it before, for the island was surrounded by ice-cold water and fast currents. But Gardner set off from the prison again, made it to the water and drifted two and a half miles to Fox Island, from whence he swam to the mainland. That was to be his last escape. When he was recaptured he served all of his sentence, all further attempts at tunnelling under the wall, sawing through bars or taking hostages ending in failure.

  If we return to earlier times for a perspective on today’s escapes in transit, we find that in 1831, Ikey Solomons (on whom Charles Dickens probably based Fagin in Oliver Twist), whilst in Newgate Prison facing a charge of receiving stolen goods, applied for a writ of habeas corpus so that he might be released on bail. He never expected it to be successful, but it would mean a visit to court.

  Solomons was taken there in a coach by two Newgate turnkeys. Whilst waiting to be called, he suggested he take the officers to a public house to ‘refresh’ them. When they returned to the court, Solomons’ application was dismissed and he was escorted back to the coach to return to Newgate. En route, he convinced his guards to stop off for more refreshments at another pub. Resuming their journey, they were joined by Mrs Solomons, who climbed into the carriage and promptly threw a fit. Solomons suggested they make a detour down Petticoat Lane and drop his wife off at a friend’s home. One guard was “stupidly drunk” and the other wanted shot of the woman, so the idea was agreed upon. Surprisingly, on arrival at the address, Mrs Solomons stepped down, quickly followed by her husband, dashed into the house and locked the door behind them.

  Ikey Solomons was not recaptured until many years later … in Australia.

  III

  Under Your Noses

  Films and television series like to show the criminal leaping spectacularly to freedom through the courtroom window, no sooner than sentence has been pronounced. Right before the judge and jury, with two fingers in the air to all and sundry; it looks thrilling. Yet open windows do not necessarily equate with an easy escape. Who’s to know where the police or other guards happen to be situated around the premises? For the escapee it’s a calculated gamble. Nevertheless, it still happens.

  It seems that Albert Spaggiari had it all worked out for his appearance before the examining magistrate in Nice, where he was accused of masterminding the famous robbery of the safe deposit boxes at the Société Générale bank. His team had tunnelled into the vaults from the sewer system and had spent the weekend systematically rifling the boxes, taking cash, gold, gems and jewellery estimated at sixty million francs – according to the insurance claims made afterwards, though many believe that was only a fraction of the undeclared items such boxes contain. And even then they only opened three hundred and seventeen out of four thousand boxes, their haul curtailed by a storm that triggered the sewer system back into action.

  Given that Spaggiari was a photographer and had been arrested on his return from a visit to the Far East as official photographer of the Mayor of Nice, Jacques Médecin, perhaps it’s not surprising that he left behind in the plundered vault an exhibition of sexually compromising photos discovered in the boxes of wealthy local dignitaries. Presumably he hoped to give the scene-of-crime team and local media something to get their teeth into. Out of the twenty-six-strong gang, only Spaggiari and six others were rounded up, thanks to a tip-off from someone’s ex-girlfriend.

  On 10 March 1977, Spaggiari created a distraction to cover his escape from the magistrate’s office. He presented a document to the magistrate to examine before turning to the window, complaining of the heat, opening it and leaping through, falling nine feet onto the roof of a parked car and escaping on the back of a waiting motorcycle. The car owner later claimed he had received a cheque in the post to pay for the damage. This seemed consistent with the man who had scrawled on a wall in the bank vau
lt, “Without hatred, without violence, without guns.”

  Spaggiari was never caught. He probably spent most of the next twelve years until his death in Argentina, though it was believed he slipped in and out of France regularly. He could certainly afford to.

  Jacques Mesrine was France’s most famous robber through the 1960’s and 70’s, a reputation enhanced by the nature of his escapes. His first on home soil was from a court in 1973, when he took the judge hostage. Mesrine had earlier visited the court with his associates to show them around, and to determine where guns should be planted if he were brought to trial. He was carrying out so many robberies by then that it was inevitable. But he knew that, once they started to draw up charges against him, they would have to take them in chronological order, which would mean commencing with the relatively minor crime of passing dud cheques some years earlier. Any trial would be held at Compiègne, the nearest town with a court.

  He was right. On 6 June 1973 he was taken by train from Paris to Compiègne, fifty miles away. The carriage had been reserved for Mesrine and his entourage of armed guards. Mesrine was to maintain a theme throughout the day of having a bad stomach, “attacks of dysentery” as he called them. He regularly requested the toilet and on each visit a guard would check out the cubicle first, in case anyone had hidden a weapon there. He went three times on the hour-long train journey. On arrival at the station, the local police joined the escort as he was loaded into a police van – though not before he noticed one of his accomplices in the forecourt flick a cigarette to the ground, the sign that all was going as planned.

  Mesrine was taken to the police station and placed in a cell, though regular visits to the toilet were carried out to maintain his ruse. The court session was scheduled for after lunch and he relaxed with his escort on the drive there, lulling them into a false sense of security. As they pulled into the Palais de Justice courtyard, Mesrine saw his accomplice outside in the street, behind the wheel of a white Alfa Romeo.