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

by Paul Buck

  Joe Wilkins forced the issue in an entirely different way. There are suggestions that the state had a hand in his escape in order to serve its own ends. Wilkins was a serious criminal with a long record. He was serving ten years for drug smuggling when he walked from Highpoint low-security prison in Suffolk, in 1992. Some claim he was ‘sprung’ by the British authorities. What is known is that he initially walked from Ford Open Prison in West Sussex, in 1991, was rearrested and moved to Highpoint. In January 1992 he was let out on day release, to travel unaccompanied to London to see his dentist. He never returned.

  Wilkins departed for Spain and took up residence on the ‘Costa del Crime’, living in a villa in Estepona. Many believed that, for someone on the run to be living so openly, with no extradition proceedings or deportation attempted, a deal must have been struck. At the very least, the rumours ran, a blind eye had been turned in return for his help. The theory that has unravelled since, during a London money-laundering trial, is that Wilkins was employed in 1993 to introduce undercover British police into the criminal fraternities of drug and tobacco smugglers in Spain and Gibraltar, to break a laundering gang. The whole operation cost the Metropolitan Police (and thus the British taxpayer) a fortune, in the region of £25 million. After years of legal arguments the case collapsed, with the judge labelling the whole enterprise as an “illegal sting” and a “state-created crime”.

  Wilkins is believed to have been an MI6 and police informant on many other high-profile cases, latterly earning himself the distinction of ‘supergrass’ and ostracism by the British criminal fraternity in Spain.

  Carrying the strong credentials of a so-called ‘public enemy’, Charlie Richardson, one half of an infamous crime partnership with his brother Eddie, walked from Spring Hill near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, in 1980. That year marked fourteen years served of his twenty-five-year sentence for fraud, extortion, assault and grievous bodily harm. He had been up for parole for the last seven, but was turned down each year. Once he had been moved to the open prison at Spring Hill, “I did what any self-respecting ‘gang boss’ would do when trusted to be moved to an open prison – I planned my escape.”

  Being in Spring Hill meant that Richardson was a big step closer to parole. But he no longer had the patience to wait for another year, or perhaps a further two years. Richardson had been trying to deter the guards from looking into his cell at night by screaming abuse at them. It was part of his preparations to casually leave the building under cover of darkness. He had instructed friends to meet him in the car park of a local pub at a specific time, and not to wait if he was late.

  The first night, as Richardson crossed the fields, he could see the car. Time was running out, and he was just arriving when he saw the car pull away. He was obliged to retrace his steps to prison. The next night he set off earlier. Richardson arrived first this time, and was waiting as the car swept into the parking area.

  He was driven straight to London, directly to Soho, as he wanted to wander around and get a feel for the place he had not seen for more than a decade – a place he now barely recognised. Then he briefly returned to his friends and family in Camberwell, before moving on to Jersey to visit a daughter in hospital, then sailing by ferry to St Malo, and from there to Paris, Nice, Majorca … where, prompted by seeing the English newspapers at this popular destination for British tourists, he thought it a better idea to move down to the Spanish mainland (even if he did eventually gravitate to Benidorm to be amongst his fellow countrymen). At one point he wrote to The Sunday Times about his campaign for release, and they published the letter. When he did slip back into Britain, he was quickly discovered and returned to prison. After serving another four years, Richardson was finally released in August 1984.

  Whilst most prisoners know they will be released sooner or later, for Harry Roberts the prospect does not seem to be on the cards. Now that child-killer John Straffen has died in prison, Roberts is today the UK’s longest serving prisoner. It may seem unreasonable that he should still be in prison, having been sentenced in 1966 to a minimum of thirty years for killing three policemen at Braybrook Street, Acton. It seems he was heading towards release in 1999, and was moved to Sudbury Prison in Derbyshire, perhaps in preparation. He worked unsupervised at an animal sanctuary some thirty miles from the prison, though he didn’t always turn up each day. On those days he was reported to have journeyed to London, and was seen with “some very unsavoury people”. When he was given five days’ leave, he was also seen celebrating his sixty-fifth birthday in Sheffield with Kate Kray. He was moved back into a closed prison, accused of dealings in drugs, and it seems fairly certain he will stay in prison until he dies.

  His only ‘time out’ has been from open prisons, but it is believed that he attempted twenty-two escapes over the years. Amongst these are a few that should be noted. Reggie Kray recalled how Roberts tunnelled deep beneath his cell in Parkhurst, going through a three-foot-thick wall, and was almost as far as the outer wall before he was discovered. They found miniature arc-lights, torches and chisels. Kray stated that Roberts used to dispose of the dirt in the garden, tucking it down his trousers and releasing it in the vegetable plot, where he had been working on a goldfish pond.

  Whilst his mother was alive, so the story goes, she would bring in escape equipment for him baked into cakes, directing him not to eat a specific fairy cake because it contained a compass or a file. Another time she brought in bolt cutters stashed in her bra, intending to leave them in the toilets for him to retrieve later. It seems the haul of his accumulated equipment included a masonry drill, a metal bar, pliers, sunglasses, wire cutters, a knife, a gas lighter, maps of the Isle of Wight and £20 cash.

  When he was in Leicester Prison, Roberts became friends with an IRA prisoner. They concocted a plan together to make a crossbow to fire into a nearby park, where IRA associates would attach explosives to the rope for them to haul back and blast their way out. Of course they had no elastic, so a relative of the Irishman came up with the idea of knitting a number of tank-top jumpers for Roberts and other inmates, the bottom rows made of strong elastic for them to unpick. They were discovered when their diagram of the prison and the park with the arrow’s proposed trajectory, fixed behind a painting, fell from his homemade frame during security checks as it was being sent out of the prison.

  Walter Probyn, undoubtedly one of the greatest escapees from the British penal system, had plans to escape with Roberts, but came to the conclusion that he “was living in a world of fantasy … the only way he could survive is the thought of escaping … He was pitting his wits against the screws to find ways, but it was only in theory – he didn’t want to do it in practice.”

  IX

  Beyond the Bounds

  There have always been circumstances when prisoners are taken outside the prison to work, usually watched over by guards. One celebrated case from the late nineteenth century occurred in Scotland. John Watson Laurie had been imprisoned for the murder of Edwin Rose, whom he had robbed and murdered on Goatfell, the highest peak on the Isle of Arran, in July 1889. Imprisoned in Peterhead, he showed an exemplary character, was given a key role in the choir and found himself working as a prison carpenter. On 24 July 1893, he made his bid for freedom.

  Laurie was working alongside other convicts on additions to the warders’ houses outside the prison walls, under the eyes of a civil guard. It was early in the morning and there was a dense sea fog. Laurie grabbed the opportunity and leapt a fence, heading for the public highway. By the time the guards had spotted him and prepared to fire, he was vanishing into the fog. The alarm was raised, and it was a warder on a bicycle who first caught up with the fugitive on the road. As they struggled, other warders arrived to overpower him. When Laurie’s prison sentence was completed, in 1909, he was moved to Perth Criminal Asylum, was regarded as ‘of unsound mind’. There he remained until his death in 1930, though he was allowed the freedom of the town during the day.

  The imagery of chain gangs in
the United States is engrained within the popular consciousness. Escapes from the gangs were probably commonplace, but the risk of being shot or pursued by dogs, and thus killed or injured, makes such a brazen attempt into an act of pure bravery rather than strategy. But when Robert Elliott Burns escaped, it was with the specific purpose of standing up for his civil rights. It is partly due to his fight that Georgia’s severe chain-gang system was eventually abolished.

  Burns was a veteran of World War One, where he served as a medic. On his return to the States he found work hard to come by, eventually drifting into small-time robbery with some accomplices. He was given six-to-ten-years’ hard labour for his part in a $5.80 grocery store robbery, in 1922.

  Burns served on the chain gang in Campbell County (later called Fulton County), Georgia. One method of preventing escape was to feed the prisoners so little that they barely had any energy left after work, maintaining their focus on survival. Burns determined that Monday would be the best day to make a break for it, as his energy would have been conserved from the Sunday rest. He asked another inmate to sledgehammer his restraints, at the risk of seriously injuring his foot, in the hope it would distort them enough for him to wriggle out. As the guards dozed in the midday sun, his friend hit it three times. It contorted, and that evening he wriggled out of the chain on his ankle. In the middle of the night of 21 June 1922, Burns slipped out of the camp.

  He made for a river and drifted downstream for a few miles, knowing that the dogs would soon be in pursuit. His escape was greatly aided by meeting a hotel owner who had also suffered on a chain gang, and was therefore sympathetic to his plight. Burns made his way to Chicago where he worked hard at a new life, becoming the editor and publisher of Greater Chicago Magazine. He married, but, when he wished to separate seven years later, his wife turned him in to the authorities. His standing in the community was so high that people supported him in his legal battle.

  Nevertheless, he agreed to go to Georgia to finish his sentence when the authorities agreed to let him serve a month or two of easy time. But when he returned their promise was not kept, and he found himself with at least twelve months of hard labour in Troup County. (If he had brought $500 to pay off the parole board, all would have been well.) After just over a year of imprisonment Burns escaped again, exploiting the trust he had built up with the guards who left him unchained as he worked. He managed to bribe a farmer to leave a car in the woods.

  On his return to his hometown in New Jersey, Burns had difficulty finding work because of the Depression. But he was determined to do something about the injustice of his former situation and set about writing his autobiography, which was serialised in True Detective Mysteries magazine. It was a success. When he was rearrested in 1932, the Governor of New Jersey refused to extradite him since his book, I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang, and the film version – directed by Mervyn LeRoy, who had previously made the celebrated gangster movie Little Caesar – had turned public opinion against chain gangs.

  The escape of Frank Mitchell, as ‘masterminded’ by the Kray twins, was something of a non-event. Put simply, Mitchell walked away from the working party on Dartmoor, met up with two of the Krays’ boys from ‘the Firm’, and drove off to London a free man.

  Frank ‘the Mad Axeman’ Mitchell was so-called because he threatened an elderly couple with an axe when he was on the run earlier. He had found the axe in a shed and forced them to watch television with him, whilst he drank tea with the chopper balanced on his knees. Or so the story goes. Another says that he was helping an old guy to chop wood when the police appeared and apprehended him. He had already escaped from two secure mental hospitals, Rampton and Broadmoor, and vowed to do likewise from any others he was committed to. As everyone noted, he was not insane but had the mind of a child.

  In 1962 he was sent to Dartmoor. He settled immediately, and in a few years was off the escape list and allowed out to work in the quarry. Once he had served his time, he reckoned, he would be released. But in actual fact he had no fixed sentence, so it was up to the Home Office to determine his release date. By now his early days of violence in custody were over. He gave no one any trouble in Dartmoor and was liked by both the warders and the governor, all of whom knew how to handle him. Over six feet tall and very strong, he had gone from being a prisoner brutalised by the system to a trusty who wore a blue armband to indicate his status. The governor sought a release date for him, but the Home Office was not forthcoming.

  In September 1966, Mitchell worked fixing fences outside the walls. These working parties on the moor often only had a single warder with them. Mitchell was regarded as such a safe bet that he freely left the work party and wandered away, spending time with the wild ponies that he tamed and rode, going for a drink in quiet country pubs and sometimes bringing back a bottle of Scotch for the night. For a while, he also had a relationship with a village schoolteacher. Another time he took a taxi to Plymouth, to buy a budgerigar that he kept in his cell. But no matter what Mitchell’s day entailed, he would always be back by 4pm for collection by the prison van to return to his cell for the night.

  In Wandsworth, ten years earlier, he had also befriended Ronnie Kray. Somewhere down the line, the Krays had given him their word that they would help him get out of prison, hopefully through their influence in high places. But as a potential member of the Firm, someone on the run and officially labelled a dangerous criminal was probably not the best idea. And a man of his size could not hide for long. The best bet was to urge the authorities to set him a release date.

  Then the Krays changed their mind. Their other arrangements at the time were not going favourably. Ronnie’s murder of George Cornell had backfired; everyone, friend or foe, was getting nervous. They needed some good PR. This, it seems, is why they decided to intervene.

  For whatever reason, on Monday 12 December 1966, Frank walked away from the working party on Dartmoor for a rendezvous at midday with Teddy Smith and Albert Donoghue, at a phone box just off the road to Exeter in Horndon. It seems they were as surprised as anyone to see him casually walking towards them, hardly a furtive fugitive.

  They had brought a change of clothing, including an old suit provided by Tommy ‘the Bear’ Brown, who was about the same size as Mitchell. They bundled all of his prison clothes together (along with his knife, explaining that it wouldn’t be smart to get caught with it) and dropped it all behind a hedge.

  Before the alarm could be raised, Mitchell was back in the London area, safely housed in a Barking flat owned by Lennie Dunn, who had a bookstall on Whitechapel Waste. The police had no idea where he was, and extensive searches of Dartmoor checked cars and combed the moors. The public were made to feel frightened.

  The Krays’ idea was to get the authorities to give Mitchell a release date. Teddy Smith penned his letter to send to The Times, directed at the Home Secretary, pointing out the injustice of being indefinitely incarcerated when he was not a murderer. Nothing resulted from it.

  Mitchell was looked after at the flat by Donoghue, Smith and Billy Exley as his minders, along with ‘Scotch’ Jack Dickson and Dunn. They talked and played cards. But Mitchell was restless. He was not used to being cooped up in a small room for twenty-four hours a day. Now he couldn’t even step outside the front door. And he wanted to see Ronnie Kray, but the twins kept putting it off. Reggie had problems of his own and tried to defer the issue. Ronnie was in hiding in Finchley, due to a complication whereby he was required to give evidence against a crooked police inspector.

  Mitchell had a fearsome reputation if he became agitated. He was particularly strong, as his minders witnessed when he lifted a piano from the floor. They all thought he might turn up at the Krays’ family home and cause a fracas.

  The Krays hired a hostess from Winston’s nightclub in the West End, Lisa Prescott, to calm his ardour. She got on well with Frank, who immediately fell in love with her.

  In the meantime the PR plan for Mitchell’s release wasn’t working. The Krays
had a man who was stir-crazy trapped in a basement flat. Mitchell had relieved Exley of his gun and was nursing it, feeling more secure with it in his possession. Reggie felt as if he was being threatened, and told what to do by Mitchell, in the messages that were sent out from the flat.

  Ronnie got word to Freddie Foreman, to ask if Mitchell could be killed and disposed of. Foreman owed them a favour and, whilst not relishing the job, promised he would do it. (It wasn’t until more than thirty years later that the full story appeared. As Foreman had already been tried for the crime and acquitted, at that point he felt he could freely divulge the details.)

  In the belief that he was being taken to spend Christmas with Ronnie in the Kent countryside, Mitchell left his safe house on Christmas Eve at 8:30pm and was led to a waiting Ford Thames van in Ladysmith Avenue, with four men waiting in it. He was not pleased to be leaving Lisa behind, even if it was on the promise that she would follow. He must have sensed that something was wrong, for his murder took place more rapidly than anticipated. They had barely pulled away when Foreman and Alfie Gerrard set about him. Something in the region of sixteen bullets was unleashed before Mitchell was considered safely dead.

  Mitchell’s life of freedom had lasted for around two weeks. His body was never found. Perhaps he was buried at sea, his body taken by fishing trawler from Newhaven, weighted and dropped overboard. Others think he was cut up and cremated. As he was never caught, officially he is recorded as having made a successful escape from Dartmoor.

  X