by Paul Buck
Taking Their Leave
John Straffen was a child murderer who escaped from Broadmoor. Within four hours he had killed again, strangling a five year-old whose body was found in a wood not ten miles away. Straffen’s mental age was low. Some termed him as ‘feebleminded’, others as suffering from ‘mental deficiency’, both terms with specific legal definitions. At his original trial in 1951, the judge noted, “You might just as well try a babe in arms.”
When Straffen was sent to Broadmoor, a hospital for the criminally insane, his intelligence was regarded as so low that it was deemed impossible to teach him a trade. But he was quiet and timid, not violent. He was only there six months before his escape, having discussed his intent with other inmates. The opportunity arose on 29 April 1952, when he was sent to clean some outbuildings on the Broadmoor estate. These buildings led to a small backyard bounded by the ten-foot outer wall of the institution. To aid his escape there were some large empty disinfectant cans standing around, which he used to climb onto the roof of the lean-to shed against the perimeter wall. He had only stepped out into the yard to shake his duster, his attendant later stated.
Over the wall, he ran towards the woods. It was 2:25pm. Four hours later, at 6:30pm, he was recaptured. During that time he had killed five-year-old Linda Bowyer. She had been strangled but not sexually interfered with. Straffen had planned the escape because he wore his own clothes under his work jeans, discarding them once free.
The locals had no way of knowing that anyone had escaped, as there was no public alarm signal. Straffen had knocked at one house and asked for a drink of water, then walked steadily towards Farley Hill, seven miles away, where he hung around. He was seen there, as was the child; both vanished at about the same time, just after 5:30pm. Fifteen minutes later Straffen appeared again, knocking at a door for a glass of water. He had come from the woods. He asked another woman for a lift to a bus stop, but asked her to halt and let him out when he saw uniformed men. Suspicious, the woman approached them when he had gone. They were male nurses from Broadmoor. Though he offered resistance, Straffen was easily caught.
The police went to Broadmoor the day after, once the missing girl was found, to ask Straffen what he had done during his liberty. He answered, “I did not kill her. I did not kill the little girl on the bicycle.” Whereas before he had been regarded as unfit to plead, this time Straffen was made to stand trial. (It is highly unusual for the inmate of a criminal lunatic asylum to be tried as a sane man.) He remained locked up until he died in 2007, by which time he was Britain’s longest serving prisoner, having spent fifty-five years inside.
Charles Bronson (the adopted name of Michael Gordon Peterson) wrote in one of many books penned within the walls of how he tried to cut his way out of Broadmoor, with an ‘angel wire’ (wire embedded with sharp diamond cutting edges). Though he worked through the night on the shutter, so that it was only hanging on by a thin piece of metal that he could snap, with a blanket held against it by his head to deaden the noise, he realised at 5am that he wouldn’t be able to saw through the bar in the two and a half hours still left. So he postponed his escape until the following night, only to have his cell searched that day. Bronson, who was originally jailed in 1974 for robbery, has lived almost permanently inside prison since then, spending twenty-eight years in solitary confinement as a result of protests, hostage-taking and attacks on staff and inmates.
When James Lang, who had been sent to Broadmoor in the early 1970s for the rape and murder of a sixteen-year-old, escaped in 1981 and broke his ankle in the process, he knew that no one would shelter a sex killer. He limped off, but gave himself up a few hours later. When he was eventually released in 1985, he raped and murdered two women.
Alan Reeve also managed to get over Broadmoor’s walls, in 1981. This time local people were alarmed. Straffen has not been forgotten. Reeve had been there since 1964, when he was fifteen years old, after murdering a friend. Around 1974, he began studying political theory. He obtained his Open University degree in 1980, and intended to continue with a PhD. However, though recommended for release since 1977, he was continually refused by the Home Office. And so Reeve decided he needed to release himself.
On 9 August 1981, using an improvised rope and a grappling hook made from a TV aerial, he escaped – though not without injury, as he went over two walls and a fence, and fell down twenty feet at one point. He broke bones in his back and foot, and tore his hands badly on the barbed wire. He was spotted by an inmate, but, unusually (particularly for a mental institution), his escape was not reported for an hour.
There was also someone waiting for him with a car, and he was spirited away before he could be recaptured. The car, hired by a young woman he had befriended three months earlier, would be found at Dover. The girl’s parents lived in Spain, but Strasbourg was another feasible destination, as Reeve had discussed taking his case to the European Commission of Human Rights. In the event he went to Holland, where he and his partner believed they could find sympathetic political allies.
A year later, in Amsterdam, he became involved in an altercation over shoplifting a couple of bottles of spirits to celebrate his year of freedom, killing a policeman in the process. He was jailed for fifteen years. Inside, he studied for his doctorate in political psychology and later qualified as a lawyer. On his release in 1992, the Dutch judge refused to have Reeve extradited to Britain. For a while he worked in Holland, but later went to Ireland. When the British discovered he was in Cork, they asked for him to be returned to Broadmoor. Seventeen years after his escape, he returned – but only for five months, as he was now regarded as safe enough to integrate into society.
The ‘Mad Parson’ is how John Edward Allen was known after he walked out of Broadmoor in November 1947, wearing a parson’s collar and stock front, a stage prop he regularly wore as a performer at concert parties for the inmates. His opinion of his own escape was that it was, “incredibly simple, and about as risky as walking carefully across Piccadilly during the rush hour.” But he hadn’t just walked out. It seems that he went over the wall, fell into some telephone wires that broke his fall and made for the main road. He wore his slippers initially, throwing them into a pond to put the tracker dogs off his scent. Dressed as a vicar, he was offered lifts to London, making his way to Paddington where he took the train to Devon. Allen had been sent to Broadmoor ten years earlier, in 1937, after strangling a seventeen-month-old girl, the daughter of a family he had befriended when he was working at a hotel as an assistant chef. It seems he was annoyed and frustrated at not having been chosen to bake cakes for a banquet. Allen was recaptured after two years, whilst working at a bakery in London. He was finally released in September 1951.
The escape of Tom McCulloch and Robert Mone from Carstairs Mental Hospital, near Glasgow, a comparable institution to Broadmoor, resulted in a night of horror that resembled some slasher-movie fantasy. But this was all too real.
McCulloch, who was in Carstairs after shooting a chef in the face for not putting enough butter on his roll, had met and struck up a homosexual relationship with Mone, who was serving life for the murder of a schoolteacher, committed when he was nineteen (followed by the rape of one of the fourteen-year-old girls in her class and the sexual abuse of another, neither of which he was tried for).
That night, in November 1976, was to set a new benchmark in Scottish criminal history. The two inmates were equipped with knives, axes, garrottes, fake ID, uniforms, fake beards, a torch … and a rope ladder. They had managed to collect or make these weapons and tools themselves, hiding them in spaces between panels in the woodwork workshop, or in boxes. They had chosen a Tuesday evening because that was when the drama group met in the social club, away from the main wards. The drama group comprised McCulloch, Mone and one other patient. They were supervised by one male nurse, Neil MacLellan.
McCulloch and Mone were brought to the drama meeting, but not searched. McCulloch opened his box and strapped on a belt designed to hold knives and a
n axe. Both then went into the office where MacLellan was talking with the other patient. They pounced on both of them, throwing paint stripper in their faces, but the pair fought hard against their assailants. McCulloch had to chase the nurse into the corridor, wielding the axe to try to bring him down. When MacLellan disarmed him, McCulloch drew a knife instead.
Initially Mone was caught off-guard, not expecting this level of violence. But when McCulloch hit his accomplice for being feeble, Mone picked up the pitchfork and laid into the patient. Mone and McCulloch drew upon their arsenal, hacking both men to death with axes and cleavers. Mone finished the patient off by spearing him with a pitchfork, whilst McCulloch took an ear as a trophy.
They headed for the fifteen-foot security fence, for which they had prepared a rope ladder in order to get over the razor-wire. Once out, McCulloch, dressed as a male nurse, flagged down a car and explained there had been an accident. Fortunately, the driver’s life was spared as a police car arrived on the scene at that moment. Instead, the two policemen bore the brunt of their brutally wielded axes and cleavers, leaving one dead, the other in a critical state. Meanwhile, the car driver went straight to Carstairs to try to explain that two of its nurses were engaged in a bloody pitched battle with policemen.
With the panda car as their means of transport, it wasn’t long before icy conditions got the better of the two escapees and they crashed. Their next victims were a van driver and his passenger, who mistook McCulloch for a policeman and stopped to help – only to be savagely attacked and dumped in the back of the van.
Thinking they saw a roadblock, they detoured into a muddy field and got stuck. Raiding a nearby farm, they took a car and headed off southwards. They were finally apprehended when a police car rammed them on the A74 north of Carlisle. Both were given ‘natural life’ sentences and moved into the prison system.
In 2002 they sought to have their sentences overturned in the European Court, with the hope that one day they would be released. In 2007, the former schoolchildren from Dundee, where Mone had committed his initial crimes, went public forty years after the event to relate their stories of that horrific day – including the girl raped in a classroom, who had never spoken about it in detail even to the police. They were intent on keeping these men from ever being released, whilst Mone and McCulloch had open prisons already in their sights, even changing their names in preparation for freedom. However, in a further twist, Mone had a fight in prison that could result in his release being rescinded. Perhaps the adverse publicity relating to his crimes triggered the clash, but the authorities have refrained from comment. Today he is back in the maximum-security jail at Peterhead.
To add to a hellish saga, Mone’s father, a thief and a drunk, had decided he wanted to be more famous than his son. He made his bid by brutally murdering three women at a flat in Dundee. But his presence in Craiginches Prison in Aberdeen was not tolerated by the other inmates, and he was knifed to death in 1983.
XI
Room to Move
When one thinks of a prisoner escaping, one invariably has the image of a person in his cell searching for a way out. Classic images of the past predominantly consist of someone working away at a wall, or digging a tunnel to get out under the outside wall, or removing the bars from the window to squeeze through. Occasionally the door might be the way out, if one can get hold of a key, whilst attacking a guard necessitates the involvement of another. But our primary idea is of the person alone, battling against the insurmountable in order to achieve the goal of escape.
But nothing is quite so simple. Indeed, our ball is set rolling by Johnny Ramensky, who did not physically start his escape operation from the cell, but who epitomises the spirit of the escapee – to such a degree that the British government wanted him onboard for their efforts in World War Two, not only because he was useful with gelignite, but because he had the same spirit as those who worked for Special Services, even if his was channelled into criminal purposes.
Ramensky, a.k.a. ‘the Gentle Johnny’, for he never used violence, was famed as a safebreaker and escapee, having broken out five times in all from the bleak and isolated Peterhead Prison, near Aberdeen. His ability with explosives, which he learnt to use at fourteen when employed in the mines, made him an ideal candidate for war service. Whether he volunteered or was recruited, stories have been recorded of his formidable exploits with explosives. He is regarded as something of a hero on that front, though even as a criminal his reputation stands high, as he never robbed ordinary people, only businesses. It is said that, when he had money, he fed the poor (often without their knowledge), giving him a touch of Robin Hood. And whilst his escapes were always short-lived, they added to the reputation of a man who spent most of his adult life in prison.
To escape from Peterhead was perhaps more difficult than Dartmoor, because the conditions were more brutal, the landscape even bleaker. Ramensky’s first escape, on 4 November 1934, is often put down to the fact that his first wife had died unexpectedly from a heart attack, and he had been refused permission to attend her funeral. (Other reports say she didn’t die until 1937.)
In any case, he was in the prison hospital at the time. On that cold November morning, before anyone was awake, Ramensky picked the lock of the hospital block with a piece of wire. He escaped barefoot, creeping across the courtyard and scaling the outer wall, gaining toeholds in the mortar before hanging by his fingertips and dropping down. He set off on the hundred-and-seventy-mile trek to Glasgow, but was caught. The road south crossed two fast-flowing rivers, one at Ellon, the other at Bridge of Don. Roadblocks were always set up at both bridges whenever there was an escape and, though escapees might make it across the first in time, they never managed to arrive at Bridge of Don quick enough. Ramensky was caught in the back of a lorry at the first bridge, without any warm clothes, his feet bare and swollen.
He was taken to Craiginches Prison in Aberdeen to have his feet treated, before being returned to Peterhead, where he was shackled to the wall. Though the cuts turned septic, no medical attention was administered. Leather anklets were also fixed and the blacksmith welded rings of iron over them, to which chains were attached and joined to a leather belt around his waist. He was the last man ever to be shackled in a Scottish cell, wearing them for weeks without removal, even temporarily.
After he was released in 1938 he returned to safe blowing, which led to his speedy return to prison. In 1942, just prior to release, he was approached by British Intelligence and taken to the War Office in London, where he was asked if he would put his skills with explosives to use for the Special Services. They wanted him to parachute behind enemy lines to steal secret documents.
Ramensky’s sentence was set aside, and he was sent for training at Achnacarry Castle in Inverness-shire to become a top-flight commando. Before he saw action, he served as an instructor, showing Allied Forces from America, France and Norway (as well as a contingent of former policemen) how to use explosives. It appears his achievements were many, though details of all the missions have never been made public. But it is known that he blew open countless safes in Germany, including at Goering’s headquarters in the Schorfhleide. He also blew safes in Rommel’s HQ, and in Rome he is said to have opened fourteen safes in one day when the Allies took the city. His discharge certificate read: “Military conduct exemplary. Honest, reliable man who possesses initiative and sense of responsibility.”
Though his praises were sung from the top level, no sooner was he discharged in York than he heard there was a robber-proof safe in the city. Naturally, he proved the claim was false, and was caught and jailed for his pains. And so the cycle of his prison life restarted. Whilst inside this time, he thought to write his memoirs – which he did in secret, as it was forbidden at the time. He spent four years on the work. The day before his release, the manuscript was impounded and he was told it would be destroyed after three months. It was never seen again.
Ramensky had tried to escape again during that stretch from the h
ospital block, going over the wall and stealing a bike to get away. When he had escaped the previous time, albeit only for a few days, he had met a woman with whom he’d kept in touch. This time he was on his way to see her, but his efforts were thwarted – at the very same bridge, by the very same policeman.
On his release in 1955, he married the woman and was determined to go straight. And yet he was soon blowing a bank, his gains going either to the bookmakers or, more generously, to people living through hard times. He received ten years on capture. After a further three years’ imprisonment, he knew he had to escape. Three such attempts are listed against his name in 1958: the first happened when he left the breakfast queue, forced a skylight and took a ladder to go over the wall; the next time he was found, tired and hungry, making his way across the fields.
His third attempt was more eventful, occurring during exercise period, which was held in the prison hall due to heavy rain outside. Ramensky slipped away and, using a copy of a master key, hid under the floorboards in the doctor’s office. No one could find him. The policeman at the bridge believed he had finally found his way past. (It was said that the policeman’s wife had already prepared a meal for Ramensky.) Instead, the escapee remained under the doctor’s office, with an accomplice bringing him food.
After a few days, on Boxing Day, Ramensky came out from his cover and went over the wall. As the hue and cry had diminished, he made it as far as Persley Bridge at Aberdeen. At that point, the lorry driver who picked him up recognised him and called the police. Though he continued to commit crimes, and to be caught, he never escaped again and would die in prison. Towards the end, he had lost his touch with safes; one time he used too much gelignite and two passing policemen were blown off their feet, recalling that much-loved line from The Italian Job, when Michael Caine quips, “You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!”
