The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks

by Paul Simpson

  The riots in spring 2012 focused attention on the conditions at Kerobokan, and it seems new prisons will be built in Indonesia to alleviate the stress, with the authorities hoping that these will prove to be successful in keeping the inmates on the correct side of the fence.

  Sources:

  Bonella, Kathryn: Hotel K: The Shocking Inside Story of Bali’s Most Notorious Jail (Quercus, London 2012)

  Rogerio Pecanz Paez’s blogspot (not updated since 2005): http://rogeriopaez.blogspot.co.uk/2005/07/hell-on-bali-island-of-gods-real-drama.html

  Prisoner details from: http://www.phaseloop.com/foreignprisoners/prison-indonesia02.html

  and http://beatmag.com/daily/tag/prison/page/3/

  Sealed with a Kiss

  The creators of the police detective series CSI: Miami emulated the popular use of a theme song by The Who in the original CSI: Crime Scene Investigation show, and chose the British rock band’s 1971 track “Won’t Get Fooled Again”. It’s a song that might well have been adopted by the Quincy County sheriff’s department in 2008, when they realized that one of the convicts in their charge was about to try to escape using a trick that had worked very successfully for Christopher Glover, aka the Phantom, and his girlfriend, Shannon Rideout, in 1995. Passing over a handcuff key during a loving kiss was not going to happen twice!

  Twenty-year-old Christopher Glover was being held at the Norfolk County Correctional Center in Dedham, Massachusetts in November 1995. The centre was comparatively new: it had only been opened three years previously, with its 501-bed capacity costing $33 million, replacing the large stone Dedham Jail in which murderers George Hershey, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti had been incarcerated. While not as imposing as its predecessor, the Correctional Center still posed a considerable deterrent to those wishing to escape from its confines – not least the fact that it was built between the north and south carriageways of Interstate 95, the only prison in North America constructed between the lanes.

  The old jail had seen its own escape attempts, the most notable taking place on 26 January 1975. Four inmates – alleged armed robbers James Mamey, Robert Perotta, and Thomas Carden and alleged murderer Louis Goforth Jnr – managed to get hold of a gun, which had been thrown over the jail wall by an accomplice outside, and tried to order Norfolk County Correction Officer Joseph Stroy to open the jail’s main door. Carden had used the gun to hold up Joseph Colligan, one of Stroy’s colleagues, telling him not to move or he would blow the guard’s head off, then used his keys to open up the cells containing Mamey, Perotta and Goforth before locking Colligan up. However, the main door was controlled from the “cage”, which Stroy was manning. Despite looking down the barrel of a gun a mere six feet away, Stroy refused to open the door; when he reached for the alarm, he was shot for his pains with a bullet that damaged his spinal cord but lodged too close to his aorta to be removable safely. The prisoners used a broom handle to trigger the mechanism and escaped, carjacking a vehicle to flee the jurisdiction. Based on tip-offs, three of the quartet were recaptured within a day in Boston; the fourth surrendered to authorities two days later in New York’s Bronx. Stroy eventually lost his leg as a result of the bullet wound and died prematurely aged sixty-four.

  Christopher Glover had finally been captured after some months of criminal activity in the Quincy area, carjacking vehicles and taking them for dangerous drives around the local roads. On many occasions, the police were simply unable to keep up with him, and he earned the nickname “the Phantom” as a result. He was arrested in April 1995 after a week-long crime spree, and one stunt which pushed the police too far: he allegedly stole a police car, and tried to run the officer down. Arrested in Florida, he was sent back to Massachusetts for trial.

  Since he didn’ t particularly fancy serving the sentence for car theft and assault that was coming his way, Glover decided that he would make a break for it. Rather than try to find a way around the various security measures that surrounded the Correctional Center, he decided that the ideal time to flee was during one of his court appearances. If he could evade his guards and get to a vehicle then he could make good his escape: he was expert enough to be able to hotwire any vehicle and once behind the wheel, he knew there was a fair chance that he could outrun any pursuit.

  However, of course, there was one major problem: for all transport between the jail and the court, he would be handcuffed. Somehow he would have to remove the handcuffs before he got out of the prison van so that his hands were free to manipulate the wires. To do that, he would need a key.

  You might think that getting hold of a key to police handcuffs would be difficult, that perhaps those wishing to purchase them need some form of official identification. Nowadays you can simply Google names of suppliers. In 1995, there were plenty of places where they could be obtained – perhaps not totally legitimately, but certainly very easily. Glover’s nineteen-year-old girlfriend, Shannon Rideout, didn’t have a problem in finding one that would fit the cuffs, but she still needed to get it to him without setting off the metal detectors which swept visitors to the jail.

  On 9 November 1995, Rideout came to visit Glover at Dedham. Before she entered the jail, she wrapped the key in a piece of duct tape which masked the metal from the detectors; once inside the prison, she slipped the key into her mouth. Nobody was at all surprised when the attractive young couple exchanged a long, lingering kiss when she was due to leave.

  A week later, Glover made his move, surreptitiously removing the handcuffs while in the back of the van. The moment that the prison officers opened the rear doors to escort him into the courthouse in Quincy, Glover legged it and as quickly as was practicable, he stole a car. By chance he was spotted, and the police were on his tail far more rapidly than he would have liked.

  Glover abandoned the car, and tried to flee on foot, but again, luck wasn’t with him. He was identified by one of the Quincy police officers, who followed him to a gas station. Glover attempted to carjack another vehicle but this belonged to a handicapped senior citizen who found it difficult to follow Glover’s orders. Glover claimed that he had a gun, which turned out to be a can of Mace, and after a stand-off, Glover was arrested. He was sentenced to six and a half years for the escape and carjacking charges. Shannon Rideout was given two suspended two-year terms, and two years’ probation.

  A decade later, Sean Ciulla, who was being charged with third-offence shoplifting and giving police a false name, also managed to escape from guards at the Quincy Courthouse on 5 November 2007, although he made his move after his hearing rather than before. Ciulla was shackled with wrist irons and leg irons when he slipped away from the prisoners who were being loaded into a transport van back to the correctional centre. According to one account, Ciulla’s absence wasn’t noticed until the van arrived back in Dedham. All that the manhunt could find was his discarded shoes.

  He was recaptured two weeks later, after investigators used cell-phone records to track him down to a North Quincy apartment where his girlfriend and another woman tried to prevent police from entering the property while Ciulla made an escape through a back window. They spotted him, barged in and arrested him. Ciulla faced charges of escaping from custody, and his case turned on whether he had jumped out of the van – as described by one of the other prisoners, and which was regarded as more serious by the law – or simply not boarded in the first place.

  On 10 December 2007, around the same time as Ciulla was being arraigned, James N. Miller was arrested by Quincy police officers on drugs charges after being involved in a car chase which finished with him slamming his SUV into a house on an intersection. He was sent to the Norfolk Correction Center, and started plotting his escape, assisted by his girlfriend on the outside, Theresa Fougere. The mistake the pair made was discussing their plans on the phone from the prison: although, as Sheriff Michael Belotti pointed out, it wasn’t possible for the authorities to monitor every call that went in and out of the prison, their policy was to “aggressively monitor all inmate communica
tions that we are entitled to monitor under the law to ensure that the public remains safe”.

  From what the sheriff described as “intelligence” gathered by jail officials, the sheriff’s department listened in on the conversation and learned that Fougere was intending to pass Miller a key under cover of a kiss and a hug when he made his next appearance at the Norfolk Courthouse on 11 January. “This goes beyond just the stage of planning. This was close to execution,” the sheriff told the Boston Herald. “Anytime you have these types of escape events, it undermines public safety.” Fougere was questioned and a set of handcuff keys was found in her possession. She was therefore charged with attempting to aid a felon to escape, conspiracy, and attempting to commit a crime. Miller ended up facing charges of attempted escape as well as drugs possession. The Quincy Department certainly weren’t going to get fooled again.

  Sources:

  History of Dedham Jail: http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WM61F6_Dedham_Jail_Dedham_MA

  http://norfolksheriff.com/history/

  The Boston Globe, 27 July 1989: “Joseph Stroy, 64; Correction Officer Shot In ’75 Dedham Prison Escape”

  The Day, 27 January 1975: “Four flee Mass jail”

  Bangor Daily News, 27 January 1975: “Prison guard shot”

  The Day, 12 November 1976: “‘Phantom’ gets four years”

  Associated Press, 26 January 1996: “Girlfriend’s kiss helps man escape”

  Real Prison Breaks, Cineflix Productions, 2011

  The Patriot Ledger, 6 November 2007: “Prisoner escapes sheriff’s deputies at Quincy court, remains at large”

  GateHouse News Service, 14 May 2010: “Hingham Police: Hull man faces larceny, drug charges”

  The Patriot Ledger, 23 November 2007: “Escaped prisoner captured in North Quincy”

  Boston Herald, 1 January 2008: “Jailers make sure magic kiss doesn’t free con”

  Hide and Seek

  The best escape and evasion plans can fall victim to any number of unforeseen circumstances. As Prussian Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke the Elder pointed out, no battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy. And as prison escaper Daniel Mitchem discovered to his cost in the spring of 1995, that enemy might even be someone within your own family.

  Mitchem and fellow escaper Sebastian Eccleston were inmates at Bernalillo Detention Center, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Known as the Downtown jail and situated in the heart of Albuquerque, the facility was replaced by the modern Bernalillo Metropolitan Detention Center in 2004; it now houses the Regional Correction Center. Both men were being held for murder – Eccleston was accused of murdering a former Manzano High School football star Ricky Comingo on 13 December 1994, in what was either a drive-by shooting or a confrontation following a near collision in traffic (Eccleston and his co-defendants gave different versions of events). Mitchem had been convicted of killing a forty-four-year-old man in 1993 who refused to get out of his vehicle when Mitchem tried to carjack it; he had begun a thirty-six-year sentence earlier in March 1995.

  At the time of his offence, Eccleston was officially already on the run. In October 1994, he escaped from a juvenile jail by going over the top of a ten-feet-high fence that was topped with double-edged barbed wire. Eight days after the shooting of Comingo, Eccleston was recaptured after he led police on a 115 mph chase, during which he wrecked a van he had stolen which was filled with guns. He then made a dash for the mountains, but a helicopter stopped him from getting away from the SWAT team that took him down.

  Although some sources suggest that Eccleston and Mitchem used their membership of a “God pod” religious studies group at the prison as a cover for exploring escape routes, it seems as if that program wasn’t officially set up until 2003. More likely, during their work time, they noticed that there was an air shaft to which they could gain access in the utility room on the same floor as their cells. The two men braided their sheets together to form a rope, and, on the evening of 27 March 1995, the cellmates filled their beds with makeshift dummies, made from clothes and socks stuffed with paper, before heading for the utility room. There they abseiled down the sixty-five feet to the first floor, and then headed for a maintenance area. Breaking into one of the employee lockers, they found a propane torch, wire-cutters, a hacksaw and a wrench. These they used to break out of the prison.

  Guards went round the cells as usual during the night but didn’t notice that anything was wrong. The next morning, one of the maintenance workers discovered the home-made rope and raised the alarm. A headcount revealed that the two had disappeared – and they were long gone.

  Mitchem didn’t survive on the outside for long. He headed for the home of his former girlfriend, twenty-two-year-old Ernestina Rodriguez, the mother of his two-year-old daughter, some thirty-five miles from the prison. Suspecting that she might be involved, the police came round to question her for a third time on the morning of 29 March. Rodriguez was still not willing to cooperate, but the same couldn’t be said of her little girl. The child, who had obviously been primed by her parents not to say anything, couldn’t control herself and had to tell the policemen her great secret. Pointing at the refrigerator, she said, “Daddy’s in there!” And he was: somehow Mitchem had been able to curl his six-foot frame inside the fridge. Wearing only his gym shorts, Mitchem surrendered to police. He returned to prison to serve out his sentence; Rodriguez was charged with harbouring and aiding a felon. The story even made the supermarket tabloid favourite, The Weekly World News, for their Halloween edition later that year.

  Eccleston was rather harder to find. He dropped off the map until July 1995 (the Real Prison Breaks episode suggests he went to South America, although no evidence of this is provided), when his story was featured on the TV programme America’s Most Wanted. The team searching for him received a call from the mother of Amy Custer, a girl who had got to know Eccleston some five years earlier. In mid-July, Eccleston had turned up at Custer’s home in Sherburne, New York, demanding her help, and when she realized who he was, threatened to kill her if she turned him in. Custer’s mother recognized Eccleston from the broadcast, and alerted the authorities.

  When they reached the apartment on 27 July, the team from the Chenango County Sheriff’s Department realized they had a struggle on their hands: Eccleston wasn’t going to go easily, and once they were able to confine him in the bathroom, put up a tremendous struggle. As Sheriff Thomas Loughren noted to the Norwich Evening Sun reporter, it took three of them to subdue the eighteen year old.

  Eccleston was found guilty of the shooting and, after a revised hearing, is serving a combined sentence of forty-six years, and will become eligible for parole somewhere around 2037.

  Fact vs. Fiction

  As noted above, the “God Pod” regime at Bernalillo began in 2003, according to its own records; the physical descriptions given of Mitchem by Real Prison Breaks’ “expert”, local lawyer Patrick V. Apocada, aren’t accurate either. They also make suppositions about Eccleston’s movements after the escape that aren’t backed up by any shown documentary evidence.

  Sources:

  Associated Press report, 29 March 1995: “Escape Artist: Inmate had broken out before”

  Albuquerque Journal, 4 February 2011: “Counties May Change Jail Agreement”

  New Mexico Supreme Court, 13 November 1997: “STATE OF NEW MEXICO, PLAINTIFF-APPELLEE, v. MARIO ARTHUR BACA, DEFENDANT-APPELLANT”

  KRQE, 25 January 2011: “Plea cuts sentence for athlete’s killer”

  Weekly World News, 31 October 1995: “Man breaks out of jail – and his daughter, 2, turns him in!”

  Gadsen Times, 27 July 1995: “New Mexico fugitive caught in New York”

  Buffalo News, 28 July 1995: “Fugitive Teen captured in Upstate N.Y.”

  Real Prison Breaks, Cineflix Productions, 2011

  A Trucking Great Escape

  Actions have consequences, often ones that simply cannot be foreseen at the time. Jay Junior Sigler’s escape from a prison in Florida’
s Everglades in April 1998, masterminded by his friend Christopher Michelson, may be best known for the use of a truck to break through the fences to allow them to get free, but during their time on the run they were pursued by police and were responsible for the death of an innocent civilian who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. They may not have thought for one moment that such an outcome was likely – or even possible – when they made their plans, but as the judge at their trial made abundantly clear, no matter what reasons they felt they had for escaping, it was irrelevant to the death that they caused – one which they apparently callously indicated they didn’t care about when they were arrested.

  Their escape took place from the Everglades Correctional Institution, twenty miles west of Miami, which had not long been in use as a prison; it was built in 1995 and was originally designed to be used as a mental health facility. However, it became part of Florida’s drive to build more prisons, and was described shortly before completion as a “south-west Dade County version of Devil’s Island”. At the outset, there was no air-conditioning, nor electrical sockets for prisoners to plug televisions or radios into. Weight-lifting equipment was banned in case it was used for prisoners to build up their strength to commit later crimes. There was even a charge of $3 levied for any non-emergency trip to the prison’s health centre. In response to a major break out at Glades Correctional Institution in Palm Beach County in January 1995 security was tightened: the butterfly-shaped cell blocks were mounted on concrete slabs to prevent prisoners from tunnelling out. Motion sensors were buried around the perimeter, and there were two chain-link fences, between which were seven rows of razor wire.