by Paul Buck
In 1244, the Welsh prince Gruffydd ap Llywelyn Fawr tried to escape from the White Tower after King Henry III reneged on a deal and held him hostage. Impatient for diplomacy to free him, he tried to escape from the top floor of the tower using a rope improvised from bed sheets and cloths. But it broke under his heavy weight, and he was discovered the next day by the yeomen, having fallen ninety feet to his death.
In 1597, John Gerard, a Jesuit priest and writer, escaped with John Arden, a fellow priest and fellow prisoner, from the Salt Tower where he was held as a practicing priest during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I – a time when Catholics were persecuted and priests found guilty of treason. Gerard hacked at the stones around the door to his cell, sneaked past the guards and met up with Arden as arranged. They found their way onto the high wall overlooking the moat. Below, waiting for them, were supporters who threw a rope attached to a small iron ball. Tying it to a cannon, they inched down to the moat and into the waiting boat.
Politics played its part in Ian Fraser making his escape from Al-Ould Prison in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in December 1980. Fraser had been caught up in the repercussions of a diplomatic dispute after a British television film, The Death of a Princess, depicted the Saudi justice system as barbaric, resulting in a crackdown by the authorities on British workers in the country. Fraser was one of those jailed for violating the country’s alcohol laws. His long jail sentence made him a political prisoner in the Saudis’ tussle with the British government.
The high-security prison seemed possible to escape from, even though it had never been done before. Fraser found a partner, Eric Price, and in the dead of night they went from their cells to the bathhouse, working loose the bars on a window. Once in the yard, they tried to break the padlock to a gate. It took them forty-five minutes, during which time the guards had stayed indoors in the watchtower because it was raining. Nevertheless, the area was still brightly floodlit, and they were lucky not to be seen. Outside the prison they had arranged for a car to be left along the road, paid for by relatives back home, containing keys and fresh identity papers. They drove fast because they expected early discovery, as Muslims in the prison awoke before 4am for prayers. There were no problems at any of the barrier points on the roads as the guards were asleep. Arriving at the coast, they obtained a boat and sailed for Bahrain, making three efforts to land before they successfully found themselves outside Saudi territory. In the event, when they were discovered missing they were assumed to have gone in the opposite direction, to Jeddah. All efforts to catch them were focused on the road that led across the desert.
The image of a prisoner scooping dirt with a makeshift trowel from the floor of his cell is hard to dislodge. Instead of going over the wall, some escapees have found it possible to go under. There is more potential for this approach in prisons built on sand beds or other manageable soil. In August 2003, eighty-four Brazilian prisoners made the largest escape in their country’s history at the top-security Silvio Porto Prison, in the state of Paraiba, by excavating a tunnel that was one metre wide and ran for fifty metres. It was even lined with lighting. The total could have been higher, but forty-one had declined the offer to join the escapees. After the fact, the prison admitted that the inmates had seemed a little restless in recent times, but that guards had refrained from searching their cells, either out of fear for their own safety or because many of those working in the prison were in the pay of criminal networks.
Long Kesh (later known as the Maze), outside Belfast, had a history of tunnelling because it stood on sandy soil. It has been estimated that over two hundred tunnels existed beneath the prison, and it wasn’t unusual for those trying to escape to come across other abandoned tunnels. Not all went towards the perimeters and some have been found that burrowed backwards, further into the heart of the camp. Few tunnels seemed to be actually finished. In November 1974, thirty-three IRA prisoners made their way along a sixty-five yard tunnel that came out just beyond the perimeter wire. Most were recaptured immediately, whilst Hugh Coney was shot dead by a sentry. The three who escaped were captured within the day.
Before the ‘Great Escape’ of 1983, the most successful mass escape from Long Kesh took place in 1976, when twelve IRA men went down a trapdoor in a compound hut and along a forty-foot tunnel, negotiating five old tunnels and seams of concrete that had been poured into them. They were expecting to surface outside the boundaries but found themselves faced with a high wire fence and, beyond that, an army watchtower, floodlights and a twenty-foot wall. The tunnel was too short. Remarkably, they were equipped to deal with such obstacles, going through the fence with bolt cutters and climbing the wall with the aid of a grappling hook. Nine got away. Let down by their backup people, they had to walk to the motorway. It was not until two were picked up by the Royal Ulster Constabulary, eight miles from the prison, that the authorities found out anyone had escaped.
Willie Sutton, also known as ‘the Actor’ for his disguises, was a bank robber who was looked upon kindly by the people – not because he was a Robin Hood character, like most others he kept the money for himself, his high living and immaculate dress sense. But Sutton was not violent. Indeed, he was seen as overly polite, like an usher at the cinema, as someone noted – though he did point the way with a gun rather than a torch, even if he never fired it in all his years of robbery.
He also found fame as a habitual escapee. Sutton was proud of his escape from Philadelphia County Prison in Homesburg, Pennsylvania, for it followed the same application of his law of the obvious as his robberies. The idea had come “when I saw an armoured truck stop in front of a business establishment after closing hours. Two of the uniformed guards approached the door, rang the bell, and were admitted. In a few moments they marched from the store, climbed into their truck and drove off … I doubted very much if the clerk who admitted them to the store looked at their faces. He saw the uniforms and waved them in. The right uniform was an open sesame … that would unlock any door.”
So why not apply that principle to an escape? If inmates were walking across the yard at night, carrying a ladder and dressed in prison officers’ uniforms, they might not be challenged. “I had to make them think I had a right to be out there doing something with a ladder.” And what better time to do it than when the weather changed? Winter was upon them. Sutton waited for a snowstorm, as it might entail sudden emergency repairs. That is exactly what happened on 10 February 1947. When the prison searchlight pinned him and his four accomplices down, Sutton waved and said it was okay. They were left to proceed with their escape.
Sutton – who spent a lot of time in prison reading philosophy, economics, geography and political science, claiming, “I would never allow them to imprison my mind” – made a relevant comment: “Planning to escape from prison takes infinite patience. Precision work spaced over a long period of time. A plan which can be described in a paragraph may have taken two years to put together.”
3 April 1945 is a classic example, when he and others tunnelled out of Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. Though Sutton is credited with the escape plan, it was a plaster worker, Clarence Klinedinst, and his cellmate, William Russell, who planned it and dug into the wall of Cell 68 in Block Seven. They went fifteen feet down, and ninety-seven feet out to Fairmount Avenue, then a further fifteen feet up to the street. The tunnel was shored with wood and equipped with lights. On the way to breakfast that morning ten inmates joined the escape, including Sutton, emerging near the corner of 22nd Street and Fairmount. Sutton’s freedom was short-lived, a matter of mere minutes. All the others were recaptured too, some quickly. One even rang the prison doorbell early one morning a week later and asked to be let in, as he was famished. Klinedinst, who had just a few months left before his parole, was given twenty-five years for the escape bid.
This way of escape is largely a thing of the past in Britain. The materials from which today’s prisons are made are more formidable, and to excavate the ground itself is possible in only a limited n
umber of places, as noted. Roy Webb, known as ‘Rubberbones’, escaped from Dartmoor Prison in November 1951 by tunnelling out. He started in his cell, digging nightly with a needle, washing away the concrete debris each morning when he slopped out. He did not have to tunnel the whole way, for he came across an old disused tunnel that came out close to the wall.
In those days there were not regular security patrols like today, thus getting a rope and hooking it over the wall was more feasible. And yet, like so many escapes, unless it was organised on the outside then the escapee could fall foul of the most unexpected glitch. In Webb’s case, once he was back in London he was reported to the police by a barrow boy to whom he tried to sell clothes. But Webb was a regular escapee. At Wandsworth Prison at the beginning of the 1960s, the staff baited him by suggesting that Dartmoor was too easy to escape from, unlike their prison. Webb proved them wrong, even if his freedom only lasted a few days.
As has been noted, some prisoners have escaped through the roof. But using a can opener is not something that happens every day. Ralph Phillips did just that, cutting his way through the corrugated metal roof of the kitchen unit in the Erie County Correctional Facility, Alden, New York, in April 2006. Attention was focused not so much on the escape as on the crimes he committed on the run, and the subsequent shooting of a state trooper on a stakeout, waiting for him to show at the home of a former girlfriend. For a while it was not believed that Phillips had committed the murder, as he had a history of non-violence, his crimes being mainly burglary. He was caught the following September.
Timothy Vail and Timothy Morgan, one a rapist and murderer, the other a career criminal jailed for murder, made their way from Elmira State Penitentiary, New York, in early July 2003, by gouging their way through a five-inch thick, steel-reinforced, concrete ceiling in their cell.
Once they had squeezed through the ceiling, using plastic bags to line the opening and protect themselves, they crawled across the electric wires and plumbing until they reached the ventilation shaft. After removing the covering they rubbed themselves with Vaseline and baby oil to ease their bodies through the shaft. It was fifteen feet long. Once they emerged through the screen they jumped five feet down onto the roof and then used knotted sheets to lower themselves down a sixty-foot outer wall, the end tied to a short ladder between two roof levels.
Vail, however, got tangled in the sheets and fell the last thirty feet, fractured his collarbone and tore ligaments in his leg. He was unconscious for two hours. Morgan stayed put, undecided whether to climb down or not, expecting the guards to arrive at any time. Eventually, when Vail regained consciousness Morgan went down to him. The headlights of a truck pulling into the parking lot froze them both, yet the driver, a prison officer, had not seen them. Again they didn’t move, expecting guards to appear at any moment. When the driver returned, he drove away without even noticing the dangling bed-sheet rope. They departed for the woods.
A chart discovered later showed they had started to work towards their escape in early March, just after they moved into a new cell at the top of their four-storey block. They had stolen a broken sledgehammer, a four-inch drywall screw, blades and other bits from the prison workshop. Rather than paint their walls, or pin up glamour images, they painted their ceiling black. Whilst lying on the top bunk, Vail chipped away at the ceiling in the corner near the bars, flushing the pieces down the toilet. Guards rarely entered the cells, and from outside they could not see the hole that was developing.
When they acquired the hammer by good fortune after a civilian supervisor had to leave early, Vail returned to his cell from the workshop early too, thus missing the metal detector scanning procedure. After that they worked more quickly, the noise of the television drowning out the sound of their work. Each night they covered it with painted cardboard held in position by chewing gum. Eventually, when the hole was big enough, Vail looked through and found it led to the roof space. The maximum hole-size they could risk was eight by eleven inches, so they dieted to be able to squeeze through.
Once into the space, they found a ventilation shaft that led onto the roof. The props needed for their escape were stored up there. Plastic bags filled with rags and paper were left as dummies in their bunks, their own hair clipped and stuck on at the last moment to round off the faces they had painted. They also collected bed sheets, holding back some of the soiled ones and buying others from mail-order catalogues, knotting them together and securing them every six inches with masking tape until they had a sixty-foot rope.
The alarm was not raised until 6:30am, six hours after they had left, when a guard entered to wake them after they did not respond to his orders. Though they holed up in an abandoned trailer camper whilst they took stock of Vail’s injuries, they vowed to press on, taking beer, food and clothes from a nearby house. Like many escapees, their plans extended as far as getting out of the prison, not to what they would do once outside its boundaries. Given Vail’s injuries, they took greater chances than they might otherwise have done, at one point stealing a Dodge van that still had its engine running. It was only a matter of time before they were apprehended.
The last escape at their maximum-security prison had been almost twenty years before, in 1984. Built as a juvenile-detention facility, it had no perimeter fencing. The administration had been intending to address some of the security issues for the previous twenty years, but budget cuts took precedence. The result was that there were no guards in the towers at night, no sweeping searchlights, no razor-wire, no cameras …
The fame of Giacomo Casanova lies in his seduction of women, the life of love which he wrote about. In 1755 he was arrested and denounced as a ‘magician’. He was imprisoned in the space under the roof of the Doge’s Palace, ‘the Leads’, as it was known because of the thick lead plates on the roof, which became unbearably hot at times. It was not easy to escape. He had been initially placed in another room, from which he was trying to dig out, but he was moved before completion of his plans – though he did manage to salvage the iron bar spike and transfer it with him.
In another cell was a monk, Father Balbi. Knowing he was to be closely watched, Casanova smuggled the spike to the monk, hiding it in a folio edition of the Bible that he sent round with a big dish of gnocchi as a present to celebrate St Michael’s Day, bringing Balbi in on the escape plan. The priest broke through a hole in his cell, and came down a corridor to break a hole into Casanova’s ceiling, so that he could climb through. They pried their way through the lead plates onto the sloping roof of the palace, but, finding the drop to the canal too great, they managed to pry open a dormer window. Moving a ladder they found on the roof, they lowered themselves into an office of the palace, making their escape in the morning, once they had rested, by moving through some galleries and chambers until they found an outside door. When it was unlocked by an official, they pushed past the man and rushed away to find a gondolier. Casanova left for Paris, where his escape granted him celebrity in ‘good society’. All this is described in a couple of paragraphs, but Casanova’s extraordinary memoirs are in great detail, with every move well-documented.
Gerard Tuite, the IRA bomber, started work on escaping the moment he arrived at Brixton Prison in December 1979. Boring into the cell wall, he halted when he struck the steel mesh and granite beneath the plaster. Later, when he was moved to the maximum-security D-Wing, it was to a cell on the bottom landing. He thought his best way out was through an end cell on the first floor, and manipulated matters to make a switch with its occupant. The cell next to him was occupied by Stan Thompson, who was on remand awaiting trial for armed robbery, and next to him James Moody, a notorious robber. But as far as the authorities were concerned, Tuite was the main catch and had to be watched.
Thompson already had a notable escape from Dartmoor under his belt some years before, breaking through the cell window, climbing the wall and fleeing onto the moor with two others. “To some of us, escaping is the only way we can keep our sanity. We gotta know there’s
a chance to get out otherwise we might as well give up on life.” Although Thompson had studied the Ordnance Survey map, they still came a cropper and were recaptured.
Tuite thought that if he went through his cell wall, he would get out onto a roof. Moody and Tuite resolved to work together, as Moody also had plans to vacate the premises. He had tungsten masonry bits, screwdriver bits, hacksaw blades and superglue tubes brought into prison via his brother and family, hidden in socks as the scanners did not go that far down the visitors’ legs.
Initially the men improvised a drill from a discarded pencil sharpener, but it was too slow. Moody suddenly developed a passion for large jigsaws that required him to bring a sizeable table into his cell, one that conveniently had a tubular bar ideal for the hole-boring process.
The first hole in the wall, made between Tuite’s and Thompson’s cells, was concealed behind a cupboard in Thompson’s room. Then Tuite set about his outside wall, covering it with cardboard, placing paintings and a cabinet in front of it. Moody’s was the last to be done, linking him through to Thompson. This process took eighteen weeks and involved others on the wing acting as lookouts, which always ran the risk of betrayal. But Moody and Tuite both had reputations that commanded fear. Tuite later said in an interview on Belfast radio, “I think the police did me a favour because they gave me so much bad publicity that the other prisoners really feared me.” Others suspected that Moody had a much greater reputation as a hardman.
