by Paul Buck
With the help of a rope of bedclothes held by another steel bed bar as a hook, he lowered himself down the outside wall, pausing to scrawl with his grimy fingers an endearing “fuck you” to his jailers. He was still wearing leg irons and handcuffs. Though he stole a car in Johannesburg, it was fitted with a tracking device (as are many cars because of the high level of theft) and he abandoned it to continue on foot. Two weeks after his escape, he was caught – not by the police, but by the private security firm who installed the device. They shot him in the buttocks and legs.
There are some escapes which do not succeed in the sense that the escapees are caught inside the prison, rather than a few hours or days later after a bout of temporary freedom. Nevertheless, the description of the escape, its preparations and its setting in motion until that dreaded point when it fails, is part of what we are exploring here. Norman Parker has written volumes on his experience of incarceration, one of which details an escape that almost worked. He describes the formidable barriers that have to be overcome, particularly in high-security prisons. The location was Albany Prison on the Isle of Wight. Though undated, the era was probably the 1970’s or 1980’s.
As Albany is a relatively modern prison, the materials used in the walls were specially-hardened German bricks that are difficult to work through, and the window bars are of tough manganese steel. The drop to the ground from Parker’s cell was about thirty-five feet. The first fence was twenty-four-feet-high, topped with a barbed-wire roll and razor-wire halfway up, with a trembler bell every twenty feet or so. Other obstacles included detectors buried on the path alongside the fence that were sensitive to anyone walking close by, bright lights and CCTV cameras. Then there was the outer fence, with razor-wire halfway up but no wire on top. And even if one made it to the outside world, there was the close proximity of two other prisons – Camp Hill and Parkhurst – which more or less forced one to travel south to escape the island, which would have to be done by boat or by swimming four miles through dangerous currents or a busy shipping lane. It was a formidable set of obstacles.
Parker explains that he could not escape alone; the right partner had to be found, as the twenty-four-foot ladder had to be lifted over the fences, which took two. His idea for making and storing the ladder was novel. Various inmates had made large aviaries in their cells. Not only could a false bottom be built to store sections of a ladder, but the removal of bits of wood would not be too noticeable, as inmates regularly smuggled materials from the workshops for their hobbies and the guards turned a blind eye. Parker’s cage, which was over six feet in length, was designed to take six-foot sections of a ladder with three pairs of sleeves to fit the lengths together. As a cover, he acquired a cockatoo that was particularly bad-tempered and would bite any hand that came near it. To keep it company, and to prevent anyone opening the cage, he added a handful of zebra finches that would escape smartly, given the chance.
Parker and his accomplice had a lifeboat station in mind as the place to obtain the transport to take them off the island, or, failing that, they would steal another craft along the coast.
When all was ready, the last act was to remove the bars – which were cut with a carborundum block, a slow process, then filled with Polyfilla and painted for daytime concealment. As a prisoner had recently been discovered cutting his bars, Parker’s accomplice decided that it would be easier to attack the steel frames of his cell door and cut them where the locks slid in, concealing it temporarily with painted cardboard. And so, at 2am one morning, when activities and patrols were at their most minimal, his accomplice broke from his cell by pulling his door inwards, then slipped along to Parker’s cell, withdrew the bolt and entered.
Parker had prepared the ladder, much to the disgust of the cockatoo – who was not happy to be disturbed at night. Webbing that had been stolen earlier was attached to the bars that were not cut, and they squeezed through with difficulty. The webbing was elastic, and the downward journey was more hair-raising than Parker had imagined.
When both were down, the ladder lengths were joined and they set off for the fence. What amazed them was that, despite the glare of lights and cameras trained on them, none of the guards noticed. They were undoubtedly dozing. “A brass band could have marched along the fence and they would have missed it.”
Unfortunately, another inmate, a ‘nonce’, had seen them and raised the alarm. Parker slammed the ladder against the first fence “with an impact that must have sent every trembler bell ringing,” he admits. The attempt was already spiralling into disaster. Though he was up the rungs as the guards and dogs finally emerged, making it to the top, his pal was brought to ground. Parker hung and kicked out, hoping to fall to the grass safely. It didn’t break his ankles, but the jarring landing sprained them. Any attempt at the second fence was doomed. The bid was over.
David McMillan was far from the first to take to a life of crime out of a sense of adventure. Jacques Mesrine, whom we met earlier, had been trained by the French military and fought in the Algerian war. Commended for his bravery, he found that any form of ordinary life afterwards just did not have the appeal or the panache that he craved. The first escape that the French gangster – or ‘international criminal’, a label he relished – made was in Canada, from the small Percé Prison where he was being held for murder with his lover, Jeanne Schneider. What is remarkable is the ease with which he moved around the place, checking out details before going to collect Schneider who was in a cell in the women’s block, its only prisoner.
At night there were only three guards in the whole place. Mesrine made himself a knife from the handle of an aluminium mug by sharpening it against the concrete in his cell. On 17 August 1969, when the guard made his rounds, Mesrine jumped up from reading and grabbed the warder, holding a knife to his throat whilst he removed his keys. Locked in the cell, the guard was so afraid that he did not shout for help.
Mesrine could find no other guards around, so he quickly ran through the keys to make sure he had all that were needed for an escape. The first two doors were easy, as was the one into the yard, but he was unsure whether he could open the main door. Once he discovered he had the full set of keys, he went to the women’s wing where Schneider had overpowered her guard and was waiting. On the way out they stopped at the kitchen and stocked up with provisions. By the time they were beyond the walls, they heard the alarm sounding. With only two roads out of town, the escapees went up into the wooded mountain slopes around the fishing port. Escape from these surroundings would prove too difficult, and, after going around and around in circles, they were caught.
Mesrine escaped again on 21 August 1972 from the ‘escape-proof’ maximum-security wing of the Saint Vincent de Paul Prison in Laval, outside Montréal. He took five others with him, crawling through the grass below the fence as they cut through it with pliers. Despite the audacity of such an escape in broad daylight, with guards supposedly watching from the towers, Mesrine wished to further enhance his reputation by returning two weeks later. After three bank jobs to finance his scheme, he intended to free the other fifty-seven people in the maximum-security wing, a number of whom he would provide with rented flats, along with guns for virtually all the others. What Mesrine had not accounted for was the additional security since his own recent escape. The attempted mass breakout, with the support of his accomplice Jean-Paul Mercier, would result in a gun battle with the police and their return to the city empty-handed – even if their insolence had been duly noted, and their credentials moved up the scale a few notches. As a result, the police were given instructions to shoot them on sight in future.
In May 1978, Mesrine was incarcerated back in France and planning to escape from La Santé Prison in Paris, which no prisoner had ever achieved before. To make things even more embarrassing for the authorities, he intended to escape from a top-security wing that had been constructed specifically for him.
In fact the prison knew of his plan. They had received word that Mesrine was going out on 5 May
1978. Nothing happened on that day because it was raining, so the plan was postponed. Then, on 8 May, three of the four prisoners housed in the top-security wing were exercising in the courtyards beside their quarters: Carman Rives, a robber and murderer, was in courtyard number nine, whilst François Besse, the bank robber, was in number five with Mesrine.
At 9:55am Mesrine had a visit from his lawyer. She waited in an interview room for him to be brought to her, then two guards sat outside watching them through the glass window. At 10am Besse asked to go back to his cell as he was cold. Rives thought something was wrong and asked to go back too.
Mesrine had been discussing with his lawyer one of the Canadian murders that he was to be tried for, now that the French and Canadian authorities had started to cooperate mutally on law enforcement, and asked the guard if he could retrieve the relevant papers from a box in Besse’s cell. (What Mesrine’s papers should be doing in Besse’s cell is a question the guard seems not to have asked.) The guard went to Besse and asked for the papers. Besse tried to hand the box through the bars, but it was too big. The guard had to open the cell door, at which point Besse threw the box and squirted soapy water into his eyes, bringing his knee up into the warder’s groin for good measure. The second warder came running and Besse turned to face him.
With no one outside the interview room, Mesrine jumped up on the table. Informing his lawyer that he would prove the room was bugged – thus, perhaps, giving her a cover story for when she was asked why she did not raise the alarm: to which, in fact, she said that it wasn’t her job to do so – he deftly removed the cover of a ventilation shaft with some nail scissors, and reached in to withdraw two guns and a length of mountaineering rope with a grappling iron at one end. (These were placed there by a corrupt guard, though it has never been resolved as to whom.)
Mesrine went out into the corridor and rammed his gun into the neck of the guard who was pinning Besse against the wall. Both guards were pushed into Besse’s cell and locked in, with their clothes removed. Mesrine and Besse, dressed as guards, made their way down the corridor. As they passed Rives’ cell he was invited to join them. In the staff office at the end they found two assistant governors, the chief warder and five others, all of whom they stripped of weapons, keys and any papers that they deemed useful. Rives took one of the uniforms for himself while Mesrine cut the telephone connections. When two nurses arrived unexpectedly, they were locked in a broom cupboard.
Outside the wing, in the yard, they confronted civilian workers and instructed them to bring their ladder through to another courtyard. When they encountered other guards with prisoners they instructed them to join the party, taking them through a door that happened to have been left unlocked. The guard who should have been in the protected sentry box was walking around, smoking. Mesrine took him by surprise, removed his rifle and instructed the guards to erect the ladder against the wall.
Unknown to Mesrine, two of the workers had run back into the main building and were raising the alarm. As armed guards and police rushed to the wall on either side, Besse was up the ladder, fixing the rope and grapple. He was first down. Rives was to go second, but lost his nerve and backed off. Mesrine shot up the ladder and sat on the top of the wall. Bullets started to fly at him. Rives changed his mind again at Mesrine’s insistence. Though he followed, he was slow and hesitant. Mesrine fired at the police, and shouted to a woman passing with her pram to move as there was an escape underway. Besse was away and running, whilst Rives was shaking and uncertain. He was still hanging on the rope when a policeman shot him dead. In the meantime, Besse had hijacked a Renault and Mesrine joined him.
By 10:25am, Besse and Mesrine were shooting across the boulevard St Jacques, jumping the red lights on their way. It transpired that, out of twenty prison employees, on that particular day sixteen had not come to work, either suffering from migraine, overwork or marital problems. Further, when they reached into the ventilation shaft that Mesrine had used as his store, they also produced two more revolvers, two knives, a hand-grenade and a fuse for a bomb.
While all of Paris panicked, Mesrine was having a bath in a safe-house apartment, asking its owner politely if he could use the Floris bath essence – and later returning his host’s courtesy by insisting it was his turn to do the washing-up after dinner. As he would have wanted it, media portrayals tended to glorify him. To quote his biographer, Carey Schofield, “To the end of his life he retained the vulnerability of an insecure young actress in fear of bad press reviews.”
The Biddle Brothers escaped from prison sixteen days prior to their execution. Their story was told in a theatrical piece that played for many years, and later became the basis of a film, Mrs Soffel, starring Mel Gibson and Diane Keaton, some of which was filmed in the original jail.
Ed and Jack Biddle escaped on 30 January 1902, from Allegheny County Jail in Pennsylvania, with the help of an insider, Katherine Soffel, the wife of the prison governor. Once it was announced they were to die, she had visited the brothers to bring them the consolation of religion, but had fallen in love with Ed Biddle. Then she brought them guns and hacksaw blades.
They occupied adjoining cells on the second floor. Just before 4am, one of them called the night guard and asked for some medicine for his brother, who was sick. When the guard arrived, Jack sprang through the opening in the cell door that he had cut away, seized the guard around the waist and hurled him over the railing to the stone floor some sixteen feet below. Ed joined him and they went down to the first floor where they met the second guard, whom they shot. The guard on the third floor was ordered down, and all three of them locked in the dungeon. The brothers took the keys, went to the locker room and changed into suits. It seems they then met up with Mrs Soffel, and went out through her home into a snowbound Ross Street. She went with them. She had drugged her husband to make sure he did not wake, and had arranged for their four children to be away that night.
When the morning guards came in at 6am, they discovered the escape and raised the alarm. It appears the escapees had taken a trolley to West View, according to some reports, but others state that a carriage had been organised by Mrs Soffel. Out of town, they walked along Route 19 for a mile until they found a farm where they could steal a horse and sleigh, as the snow there was more hazardous. As they headed north into Butler County, a posse soon caught up with them. In the resulting gun battle, Jack was killed and Ed injured. Soffel asked Ed to shoot her, rather than for her to be captured. He complied, before dying himself. Soffel survived and was later incarcerated in Allegheny County Jail. Her husband resigned and moved away with their children.
John Dillinger was the most famous gangster of his day, his fame resting on events within an eleven-month period from September 1933 to July 1934. One of these events was his escape on 3 March 1934 from the ‘escape-proof ’ Lake County jail in Crown Point, Indiana. In fact, the authorities were so confident that it was secure that any attempt to move him elsewhere because of a delay in his trial was thwarted. They would live to regret the decision.
What gained so much press attention was that Dillinger escaped using a fake gun, whittled out of wood and then blackened with shoe polish. Whether this was true or not is contentious. Perhaps it was a real gun, or a wooden gun smuggled in. It is also suspected that Dillinger’s lawyer, Louis Piquette, had bought off a judge who then smuggled a gun into the jail. This did not become public until after both Dillinger and the judge had died, but the fake gun story sounds better. Sometimes one has to take heed of the remark in John Ford’s film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
In any case, at 9am Dillinger started using the gun to methodically capture and lock up a series of trusties, a jail attendant, a deputy sheriff and a prison warden, each time obtaining further information vital to his escape. Needing to increase his arsenal, Dillinger took two Thompson submachine guns from the warden’s office. From there he returned to the cells and asked if anyone wished to make the es
cape with him. Herbert Youngblood, a black man on a murder charge, accepted the offer and was handed a submachine gun. Two others agreed and the group set off for the garage at the rear of the prison. Three vigilante farmers who were there to guard the prisoners were taken and locked in a washroom, along with the two other would-be escapees who suddenly got cold feet. Others were rounded up in the garage, including prison kitchen workers and various trusties. Whilst Youngblood stood guard over them, Dillinger looked for a suitable car for their getaway. The garage mechanic told him the sheriff ’s car was the fastest, so Dillinger decommissioned all the others, yanking out their ignition wires, and they took the sheriff ’s car, with the mechanic and the deputy as hostages.
Once out of town, without a shot ever being fired, the deputy and the mechanic were ushered out of the car and given their fare to return to town. Dillinger’s mistake was to take the sheriff ’s car across state lines into Illinois, violating a federal law that allowed the FBI to join in the manhunt.
Youngblood was killed thirteen days later in a shootout in Michigan. As he lay dying he indicated that Dillinger had been with him the day before, triggering a manhunt in that state and over the border in Canada. Dillinger was in fact a long way away, holed up in luxury in St Paul, Minnesota with his girlfriend, Billie Frechette.
Dillinger’s method of escaping with smuggled guns dates back to a breakout he organised in Michigan City State Prison for a group of bank robbers, led by Harry Pierpont, who he met there during an earlier sentence. As Dillinger was released first, in May 1933, he vowed to raise funds and organise their mass escape. A package of guns and bullets was thrown over the wall at a point where an arrow was painted on the prison shirt factory. It was retrieved early next morning by an inmate and hidden in shirt fabric in the warehouse. It was a month before either the weapons or ammunition were used. The escapees had intended to take the parole board hostage, but that visit occurred on a day when the prisoners were scattered around doing different jobs.
