by Paul Buck
On 26 September 1933 Pierpoint and nine others escaped from the prison, when they took hostage the assistant deputy superintendent and the shirt factory superintendent by luring them to the basement of the factory. With these two hostages, the men walked the entire length of the penitentiary with guns concealed beneath the shirts they carried in their arms. No guards or prisoners gave them more than a cursory glance, believing they were going about ordinary prison business. Only when they reached the fence gate did the hostages tell the guard quietly about the situation and request that the gate be opened. As they went through that gate and the next, each successive guard was made to join the entourage. At one point a guard refused to open the gate – with a few thrusts of a steel shaft the lock was shattered, and the guard knocked unconscious for his delaying tactics. Once they reached the administrative building, they had to herd all the clerks into a vault, break the telephone lines and raid the prison arsenal. The warden too stumbled into the breakout, and was detained. Outside they split up, with each group taking off in a number of hijacked cars.
On the night before their mass escape, Dillinger himself had been captured at the home of a new female infatuation. The Pierpoint gang understood immediately that they now had to break him free. They walked into the jail in Lima, Ohio, on 12 October and announced they were officers from Indiana, come to take Dillinger to Michigan City. The sheriff asked to see their credentials and, when their guns appeared, made for his holster on the wall, only to be shot down.
In May 1984, six men on death row escaped together from the Mecklenburg Correctional Center in Boydton, Virginia. James and Linwood Briley, Lem Tuggle, Earl Clanton, Derick Peterson and Willie Jones took advantage of the lax procedures of the prison officers. Clanton had hid unnoticed in an officer’s restroom on being returned from evening recreation. He charged out when another inmate signalled that the door was open and released the locks in the unit, allowing the inmates to start a takeover. As they captured each of the officers, they locked them up and stole their uniforms. Finding riot gear in a closet, they donned helmets and shields and draped gasmasks around their necks. A nurse who had been giving out medication was saved from rape and probable injury by one of the inmates, who chose to stay behind.
Their ruse to escape was a fake bomb – which was in fact the prisoners’ TV set with a blanket thrown over it, carried on a green canvas stretcher – which they sprayed with a fire extinguisher at a strategic moment as they marched out of the unit. Their decoy was then placed in a van with them and driven from the prison. It was all just implausible enough to catch the guards unawares. Once they were through the gates, they radioed back to the control tower: “Secure the sally port gates.” They had escaped.
But, as with so many breakouts, there were no further plans. All they had was some money, almost $800 removed from the pockets of the officers’ uniforms. The first to be caught were Clanton and Peterson, who were found the next day intoxicated in a Laundromat, still wearing the uniforms but with the badges torn off. Everyone was recaptured within eighteen days, and eventually executed.
Catching the guards off-guard by doing something unexpected was ably demonstrated by Coelius Secundus Curion, a cleric who made his escape from prison in Turin during the seventeenth century with a clever ploy. Chained to a large piece of wood by both feet, he asked his warder if one leg could be freed for a day as it was uncomfortable. The warder obliged. Curion then set about fashioning a dummy leg by stuffing his shirt into the legging whilst sitting on his good leg. It seems it was convincing enough, for the next day he asked the warder to re-chain one leg and release the other. After the warder had departed, Curion was able to stand free of the restraints. As no prisoner was expected to slip his chains there were not many guards in the prison, so Curion left through the window and over the wall.
Mark DeFriest has made a career out of escaping in the State of Florida. His initial term of imprisonment (which was a dubious charge in the first place) started in 1980, setting him on a course where he has accumulated so many years for his subsequent escapades that he now seems to be stuck inside for life – a life that might be shorter than anticipated, given that he (and others) witnessed the killing of another prisoner, Frank Valdez, allegedly by guards in 1999. Since then, with the guards on trial, DeFriest and the other witnesses have made allegations about beatings and death threats.
DeFriest states that the best way to achieve an escape is to have money. Money was obtained at one point by producing a public newsletter, asking for funds to be paid into his bank accounts around the USA. Another method was by running an in-house drug business. With money you can buy anything and anyone, particularly guards who will supply you with whatever you need.
Thus, for many years, DeFriest acquired the tools he needed to get out of his cell. He became so adept at adapting and making things that he wasn’t even allowed a toothbrush, as he could fashion a key from one. He boasted that, no matter how much they stripped back his cell, he would always find a way to escape. In one search of his cell, when nothing was found, he boastfully pointed to a slight slit above the cell door and, using a piece of wire, fished out a key made from a toothbrush.
One of his regular methods was to conceal tools and implements within a ‘charger’, a six-inch aluminium tube secreted up the anus. One time it was noted that the charger DeFriest was using contained “thirty-four razor blades, seven hacksaws, six handcuff keys, solder, drill bits and padlock keys, twenty hundred-dollar bills, $19 in postage, gold jewellery and a set of keys with interchangeable teeth”. Consequently, he was regarded as able to escape from any institution. At one prison the restrictions were so tight that they built a special cell for him, reminding one of the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter.
At Bay County Prison, where DeFriest made half a dozen escape attempts and dismantled three cells with a toothbrush, they suggested that the guards might quit if he returned. As with other escapees, he has sawn through bars, climbed down knotted bed sheets and crawled over chain-link fences. But it is keys that are his forte, which he can seemingly fashion out of anything. And there seems little worth in handcuffing him, for he has been known to reduce them to scraps of metal within minutes. His first ever escape in prison was made by dismantling a cell door, and rolling it back with his hands: “The door was kind of like a can of sardines.”
Today, given his position as witness to the murder of an inmate, he seems to have stopped trying to escape. Indeed, his current prison conditions might make it easier than on many previous occasions. But he also knows that, if he is caught escaping, they may not hesitate to pull the trigger.
Robert Latimer was jailed in 1889 after bungling the murder of his mother. He then managed to fumble another crime, this time within prison walls. By 1893 he was a trusty in Michigan State Prison and put in charge of the prison pharmacy. One night in March he served sardines and lemonade to a couple of guards, to which he added liberal doses of prussic acid and opium. Within twenty minutes one guard was dead, the other unconscious.
Latimer escaped and turned up on the doorstep of relatives, but they turned him away. When he was recaptured he insisted it had all been a mistake, he had not intended to kill the guard but had added too much prussic acid.
Over the subsequent years, Latimer became institutionalised. When they wanted to abandon the old prison, he refused to move. His cell, with its desk, books and plants, was his home. As he was not considered a danger they let him stay, making him the watchman of the deserted prison. However, a few years later, in 1935, he was forced to leave after forty-six years of incarceration. He became a vagrant until housed in a state home, where he died in 1946, aged eighty.
The case of Joan Little is another that contains all manner of other issues besides escape. Little, an African-American woman, was in Beaufort County Jail in Washington, North Carolina, for breaking and entering, larceny and receiving stolen property, when she was accused of the murder of a white prison guard. Clarence Alligood’s body w
as found on her bunk in her cell, naked from the waist downwards. He had been stabbed eleven times with an ice-pick to his head and heart, and semen was discovered on his leg. Little had vanished from the cell. This was in August 1974, at a time when the issues of civil rights, feminism and opposition to capital punishment were all on the agenda. A defence fund and much publicity were forthcoming, and the best lawyers retained.
Little stated that Alligood came to her cell seeking sex three times, between 10pm and 3am. After the first refusal, he returned with cigarettes and sandwiches as bribes. She refused once more. Again he returned later. “I had changed into my nightgown. He was telling me I really looked nice in my gown, and he wanted to have sex with me.” He took off his trousers and shoes and left them in the corridor, entering the cell with a grin. “He said he had been nice to me, and it was time I was nice to him. I told him I didn’t feel like I should be nice to him that way.” She explained that he fondled her and removed her gown. “That’s when I noticed he had the ice-pick in his hand.”
Alligood then dragged her to the floor, held the ice-pick to her face and forced her to perform oral sex. She didn’t know whether he would kill her or not. During the crucial moments of the sex act, as he loosened his grip on the pick, Little grabbed it and hit him. He lunged at her. “Each time he came, I struck at him. He grabbed me by the wrists, then he was behind me. I put my feet against the bunk to place my weight against him. I hit him over my right shoulder. He fell middleway on the bunk forward, his head facing the wall, his knees on the floor.”
Angela Davis, the black social activist, pointed out some questions relating to the case in a lengthy essay: Why was she the only female in the jail – whether prisoner or guard – and a black one at that? Why was a closed circuit television camera pointed at her cell, so that she had no privacy when she dressed or attended to her ablutions? What was the guard doing with an ice-pick in his desk drawer, let alone in her cell?
Little briefly made her escape after killing the guard. She handed herself in to the authorities a week or so later, stating that she had been defending herself against sexual assault. The prosecution at the trial claimed she had seduced Alligood to gain her freedom. She was acquitted, but still had further time to serve plus a further sentence for escaping. Later, with only a month left before being eligible for parole, she escaped again, fleeing to New York where she obtained work at the National Council for Black Lawyers. She was later extradited to North Carolina, and eventually paroled, enabling her to move back to New York to work in the office of a law firm.
When Hugo Grotius was sentenced to life imprisonment at Loevestein Castle in the Netherlands in 1619, for treason in connection with religious disagreements between Protestant factions, this political philosopher continued with his life of study and writing. But he is best remembered for escaping. With the flow of books in and out of his cell, his wife arranged for a large chest to be taken in to carry a large consignment out (her husband amongst it). He escaped in 1621, carried out by two soldiers who were supposed to be guarding him. To hinder the discovery his wife told them that he was infectiously ill, keeping them away from the room for some while. He was taken by boat to Gorkum, then by horseback to a friend’s home, where the chest was unlocked and he fled via Belgium to Paris. He remained in exile with his wife and daughter for ten years. The original chest can be seen in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and also in the museum Het Prinsenhof in Delft – though only one can be authentic, obviously.
There was a period extending from the late eighteenth into the nineteenth century when the dilapidated warships at Woolwich and Chatham, commonly called ‘the Hulks’, were used to house convicts, often awaiting transportation to Australia. It was not impossible to escape, although they could not swim to shore as they were clad in chains and leg irons. Instead, they had to escape onto boats that came up alongside them, overpowering the officers and stealing their weapons in case of an eventual fire-fight. There was a tendency to take the boats south of the river, rather than towards the north banks of the Thames, which were mainly desolate marshlands. If you were caught, you were more likely to be hanged.
During the Northern Irish Troubles, for a short period internment without trial took place on board HMS Maidstone, moored in Belfast Lough. Inevitably an escape occurred in the ice-cold waters, during January 1972. On that foggy night, seven IRA men – Tucker Kane, Tommy Toland, Tommy Gorman, Jim Bryson, Sean Convery, Peter Rodgers and Martin Taylor – escaped by covering their bodies in grease and swimming ashore. They went after the 4pm headcount, though, due to a miscount, and a recount, they left later than intended.
It was just getting dark. They had prepared for the freezing cold by taking cold showers. A porthole bar had been cut, and they were covered in Echo margarine and boot polish, stripped to their underpants with socks on their hands and feet. After wriggling through the hole, they slid down the hanging hawser till they reached the water. To avoid being seen, they tried to stay underwater as much as possible, swimming breaststroke to avoid splashing. It was five hundred yards across to the Harland and Wolff shipyard. The plan was that they would be met by an armed IRA unit from Andersonstown, but they were nowhere in sight.
And so the group hijacked a bus intended for collecting shipyard workers on overtime. The commotion of the hijack attracted the attention of security guards and precipitated a mad chase as the bus swayed back and forth across the road and the pursuing RUC van tried to overtake them. When they arrived in what was called the Markets area, where they had many supporters, they bunked out into a pub. Dirty and half-naked (or totally naked in some cases), the men were quickly clothed and taken to safe-houses. Some days later they were spirited across the border to reappear at a press conference as ‘the Magnificent Seven’.
Isolation surrounded by water was the basis of two other prison systems, the first being the infamous Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana in South America. Though Devil’s Island was, as the name suggests, a desolate outcrop, the name is usually applied to the whole of the French penal colony system. There was a group of islands offshore, as well as camps on the mainland, one beside Cayenne, the capital on the coast, another deep in the jungle and one more on the river that divided French and Dutch Guiana.
Devil’s Island itself was undoubtedly the worst place to be incarcerated. The colony was used by France as a way to rid itself of its worst criminals, in the hope that they would never appear on home territory again. For even when a prisoner had served his sentence he wasn’t allowed to return to France, but was released into the colony and given the chance to start a new life in terrain barely habitable for most Europeans. Of course, if a prisoner escaped then no one was going to stop him making his way back to France. But first, of course, he actually had to succeed in escaping. Few managed it, and those who did rarely arrived at a destination of safety. To perish in the process was the usual fate of the escapee.
There are three cases outlined here in chronological order, to chart how circumstances changed over the course of a few years. When the American bank robber Eddie Guerin was caught after a robbery at American Express in rue Scribe, Paris, in 1901, he had already served a French term of imprisonment. This time, his sentence was to be life on Devil’s Island.
A good proportion of those transported across the Atlantic never arrived, the ships being notoriously unhealthy, with little food or water to keep the prisoners alive. If you were fortunate enough to arrive, you could be assured that no one else would travel across to rescue you. You had to organise your own escape. Those who attempted it by boat mainly failed, and recapture only added years to a sentence, as well as the added burden of dragging a fourteen-pound chain riveted to their legs. Another hindrance was diseases like malaria or scurvy, or bites from the clouds of mosquitoes – let alone the generally overpowering heat and humidity. “Nobody had sufficient energy to lift a hand beyond what was absolutely necessary,” Guerin wrote later in his memoir, I Was a Bandit.
Guer
in had been on one of the islands for a year before being transferred to a camp on the mainland. He was determined to leave. Escape was a challenge he needed, even if he knew his chances of survival would be minimal. The people who lived in the mangrove swamps were likely to murder an escapee, and it was said that those who had escaped together had resorted to cannibalism to survive. None of which even took into account the alligators to be negotiated along the rivers – or indeed the bounty hunters in neighbouring Dutch Guiana, where escapees always headed.
Money could be helpful to bribe the guards, but it was jealously guarded within a ‘charger’ pushed into the anus. Guerin wrote to his connections back home in America and slowly accumulated some cash. His chance to escape came during the fifth year of his sentence. He was sewing prison clothes on the porch of a building in the camp of Maroni when his thimble fell off, as it did periodically, and the guards gave him permission to climb down and retrieve it from beneath the building. On this particular day, he failed to reappear.
His departure had been arranged with a Belgian who had lived in the countryside and had the skills necessary to handle the terrain, whether it was the undergrowth and swamps, or the excess of insects, rats and other vermin. Money now became essential, as they had to pay the ferryman who took them across the river to Dutch Guiana. For two weeks the pair fought their way through the marshes and creeks, their clothes in tatters. “Daily we got soaked from head to foot fording waterlogged wastes.” At night they constructed a bivouac and lay in fear, “while the wild animals of the forest came sniffing around.” Gigantic snakes struck at them. “Unkempt and unshaven, our feet a mass of blisters, starving but for the tropical fruit we could pick,” Guerin claimed it was a miracle that they found their way out.
