The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks

by Paul Simpson

  Fact vs fiction

  The Charles Bronson film Breakout plays fast and loose with the facts of the Kaplan case. It doesn’t pretend to be a biopic: its tagline was “Sentenced to 28 years in prison for a crime he never committed. Only two things can get him out – a lot of money and Charles Bronson!” Bronson plays a character who both plans and carries out the raid on the prison; he’s hired by the prisoner’s wife, rather than his sister, and considerably more difficulties are thrown in their way (including the prisoner’s cellmate being the real killer, rather than an accountant!). With a disturbing marital rape scene, it’s not particularly pleasant viewing – and they don’t even get the make of helicopter right.

  Sources:

  Time magazine, 30 August 1971: “MEXICO: Whirlaway”

  United States Court of Appeals Second Circuit, 30 December 1963: “UNITED STATES of America ex rel. Evsey S. PETRUSHANSKY, a/k/a Peter Green, a fugitive from Justice of the United Mexican States, Relator-Appellant, v. Anthony R. Marasco, United States Marshal for the Southern District of NewYork, Respondent-Appellee.”

  New York Times, 31 December 2007: “In Prison, Toddlers Serve Time With Mom”

  US Department of State Telegram, 20 August 1971: “Resignation of Attorney General Sanchez Vargas”

  Houston Chronicle, 8 September 1991: “A Smuggler’s Tale”

  Asinof, Eliot, Warren Hinckle and William Turner: The 10-Second Jailbreak (Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1973)

  The Longest Hunt

  Watch interviews with members of the US Marshals office after they’ve caught a fugitive, and you can be pretty sure that at some point they will trot out a line warning any other escapees who are watching that the Marshals service never gives up looking for them, and that they will be caught eventually. Even if it takes decades. Linda Darby is living proof that this isn’t a trite cliché: they mean every word of it. She escaped from the Indiana Women’s Prison in 1972, and she was recaptured thirty-five years later, after making a completely new life for herself. And now, following the dismissal of her attempt to appeal against her sentence in April 2012, she could well be in prison for the rest of her life, serving a sentence that would otherwise have left her eligible for parole some years ago – under the Indiana code, because her offence took place before 1977, she has to serve ten years of her sentence before clemency can be considered.

  Linda Darby was convicted of the murder of her second husband in 1970. She has steadfastly maintained her innocence, but the jury in Lake County, Indiana, didn’t believe her. Her husband Charles, from whom she was estranged at the time, was hit with a shotgun blast, and then their Hammond home was set on fire. At the trial, her nine-year-old daughter, from her first marriage, said that her mother had left the motel room in Valparaiso on the night of the murder. A similar gun to the murder weapon was found at the motel; a gas station attendant said he sold her fuel that night. There were no witnesses to the killing. The defence tried the risky strategy of not presenting any witnesses on her behalf at the trial, but simply attacked the state’s case. It was a gamble that didn’t pay off.

  The mother of five (four from her first marriage; a son from her second) lost her children and her liberty in one fell swoop. She was sentenced to life imprisonment on 1 October 1970, and immediately tried to appeal on technical grounds. This was turned down in August 1971. She applied to the court for a “pauper” attorney to be brought in to help with an appeal; counsel was appointed on 14 March 1972. However no appeal was ever filed during the twentieth century, because the day before the court gave Linda Darby the chance to rectify what she saw as the wrong done to her, she escaped from prison.

  In 1972, the Indiana Women’s Prison was a year away from celebrating its centenary. It was the first prison specifically for women in the country, and the first maximum-security female correctional facility. It didn’t just house murderers and other maximum-security prisoners – within its walls were many convicted of lesser offences, such as drunkenness and prostitution. Darby, who by all accounts was an obedient and docile prisoner, was not regarded as a particularly high escape risk, and was allowed to move around the prison confines on her own.

  On 13 March, she decided to leave. Whether she wasn’t aware that the wheels of justice were slowly turning, and believed that all her avenues of appeal were now closed, or she simply had had enough of life without her children, is open to question. After her eventual recapture, she maintained that she had fled the prison because she didn’t want to serve time for another person’s crime – and certainly since then, she has tried her hardest to prove her innocence.

  Around 7.30 in the evening of 13 March 1972, Linda Darby didn’t follow the guard’s instructions to go to recreational time; instead, she ran to the fence, climbed over it and took off into Indianapolis. Not knowing the area, and fully aware that she had taken an irretrievable step by escaping, she first thought of trying to locate her children. However, she quickly realized that the police would immediately check there, so, instead, she turned for help to a stranger.

  Knocking on the door of a local house, she told the woman who answered that she was on the run from her boyfriend, who had knocked her about – explaining the cuts and bruises she had sustained during her escape. It was there that she met Willie McElroy, with whom she fell in love. Although they never officially married, she took his last name, becoming known as Linda Joe McElroy, and moved with him back to his home town of Pulaski, Tennessee, around seventy-five miles south of Nashville.

  They had two children, and eight grandchildren, and she became a respected member of the local community, running an antiques shop with her husband, and later working as a cleaning lady. No one there could quite believe it when the marshals knocked on her door: this was someone they had known their whole lives; she had babysat for their children. She could not possibly be a murderer. As former FBI agent Brad Garrett, consulting for ABC News on the case, pointed out, “It’s actually quite easy [for fugitives] to be absorbed if they cut all ties from their previous life, which appears the case in this situation.”

  Darby hadn’t quite cut all her ties. She didn’t go “off the grid” as some escapees do, not using credit cards, or anything else that might identify them. She was registered in various databases, but with her date of birth and social security number slightly altered – sufficiently changed that a quick check wouldn’t correlate with her original information, but similar enough that if she slipped and gave the original by mistake, it could be excused as a silly slip. And that was her downfall.

  In 2007, the Indiana State Police started up the Indiana Intelligence Fusion Center, a new taskforce whose mission is to “collect, integrate, evaluate, analyze and disseminate information and intelligence to support local, state and federal agencies in detecting, preventing, and responding to criminal and terrorist activity.” Working with the Indiana Department of Corrections, its Fugitive Apprehension Unit’s aim was to recapture long-term fugitives. Using a new computer system set up by the Department of Homeland Security, which used fuzzy logic (i.e. a computer’s equivalent of a best guess rather than absolute strict yes/no answers) as well as correlating data from every American’s contacts with the police over the years, they were able to match Darby with McElroy. Photos and fingerprints from her time in the Indiana correctional system were sent to Pulaski police; they confirmed that the two were one and the same. On 12 October, police cars were sent to Darby’s home in Pulaski, and she was brought out in handcuffs.

  Asked by a reporter for the local Eyewitness News if she felt as if she had been living a lie, Darby replied, “Uh huh. But when do you stop? Where do you go back to?” The answer was simple: you stop when you’re caught. And you go back to jail.

  Sources:

  Valparaiso Vidette-Messenger, 6 March 1970

  Valparaiso Vidette-Messenger, 7 March 1970

  Court of Appeals of Indiana, 19 April 2012: “Opinion – for Publication: APPEAL FROM THE LAKE SUPERIOR COURT The Honorable Salvador Vas
quez, Judge Cause No. 45G01-7003-MR-41743”

  WHTR.com, 24 October 2007: “Female fugitive back in Indiana after 35 years”

  The Indy Channel, 17 October, 2007: “Woman Caught 35 Years After Escape Speaks Out”

  USA Today, 20 October 2007: “Fugitive has support of longtime friends”

  Daily Independent (Ashland), 24 October 2007: “Woman’s arrest brings relief to victim’s family”

  New York Times, 22 October 2007: “Neighbor’s Hidden Criminal Past Stuns a Tennessee City”

  Indiana Intelligence Fusion Center website: http://www.in.gov/iifc/

  IIRC annual report 2007: http://www.in.gov/dhs/files/07_Annual_Report.pdf

  WHTR.com, 24 October 2007: “New technology was key to arrest of fugitive for 35 years”

  Bird in the Sky

  It may not have been the first time that a helicopter was used to assist prison inmates with an escape, but the incident at Mountjoy Prison in Dublin, Ireland, at Halloween 1973 was certainly the first one to inspire a song. Popular Irish rebel band, The Wolfe Tones, whose songs regularly include references to the struggle for freedom by the Irish against their oppressors, wrote and released “The Helicopter Song” (“Up like a bird and high over the city / ‘Three men are missing’ I heard the warder cry”) straight afterwards, and despite being banned (or perhaps because it had been) by the Irish government, it went straight to number one in the Irish charts and remained there for four weeks.

  It wasn’t the only song inspired by the events. According to Time magazine’s article from less than two weeks later, within hours “a new little ditty” was being sung in Catholic pubs all over Northern Ireland: “The length and breadth of Ireland / No finer sight to see, / The day the Provie birdie / Released the Mountjoy three.” It was an unmitigated disaster for the Irish government, and a stunning propaganda coup for the Irish Republican Army (IRA) – particularly since it may not even have actually cost them a penny to carry out.

  The situation in Ireland had deteriorated over the preceding five years. Although the IRA had abandoned its campaign to unite Northern Ireland and the Republic into one country in 1962, violence had flared once more in 1969, and the arrival of the British Army in Northern Ireland marked the start of a troubled period for the island which would last for most of the rest of the twentieth century. The Provisional wing of the IRA had begun an armed campaign, and as a result, a policy of internment without trial was introduced in the North, while the Republic’s coalition government, led by Fine Gael’s Liam Cosgrave, tried to keep a check on IRA activity. Membership was illegal under the Offences against the State Act, with a one-year-minimum mandatory sentence imposed on those found guilty at sessions of the Special Criminal Court (SCC).

  The IRA’s Chief of Staff Seamus Twomey was one of those brought before the SCC in 1973. He had helped to reorganize the IRA in Belfast after the creation of the Provisional IRA in December 1969, and had been part of the group negotiating with British Secretary of State Willie Whitelaw in 1972 during a brief truce. He became Chief of Staff in late 1972 after the arrest of Joe Cahill, and held the post until his arrest in September the following year. Refusing to recognize the authority of “this British-oriented quisling court”, Twomey was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. Senior IRA member gunrunner J.B. O’Hagan had been arrested in May 1973 and sent to Mountjoy for a year; he had been imprisoned on previous occasions, and had tried to escape twice from internment at the Curragh camp (see chapter 29). Kevin Mallon, another top man in the IRA, had been cleared of the murder of RUC Sergeant Arthur Ovens in 1957 but given fourteen years for arms and conspiracy charges. Now one of the commanders of the IRA units stationed on the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, he too had been sent to Mountjoy.

  Based on the design of Pentonville prison in London, Mountjoy opened its doors to inmates in 1850, and had the distinction of having its in-cell sanitation removed in 1939 when a civil servant decided that prisoners were using too much water! By the time that Twomey was sent there, the IRA had ensured that they had a great deal of control within the prison – when the authorities had tried to impose prison uniforms and to abolish segregation of the Official and Provisional IRA members, O’Hagan and seven other prisoners had gone on hunger strike. After three weeks, the governor backed down, allowing the IRA escape committee to carry on plotting without fear that they would be overheard or betrayed by non-political, ordinary criminals housed within the prison.

  The first priority was getting the senior IRA members out of Mountjoy and back on the outside where they could plan more campaigns against the hated Brits. Although in the end he didn’t participate in the helicopter escape (which, as it turned out, was probably for the best, given how precarious the situation became during the escape itself), Joe Cahill, Twomey’s predecessor as Chief of Staff, was originally going to be one of those sprung, and according to interviews with some of the prison warders subsequently, was annoyed that he hadn’t gone.

  Subtlety wasn’t the order of the day for the first attempt. The plan was for the three senior men to flee up a rope ladder that would be waiting to help them get over the outer wall. Explosives would be sent into the prison which they could use to blow through a door into the exercise yard. All seemed to be working according to plan: the explosives were infiltrated to Mountjoy, and a group of volunteers – under strict instructions to sacrifice their lives if necessary to ensure the senior men escaped, but specifically banned from shooting any members of the Garda (the Irish police) – threw the rope ladder over from a house adjoining the prison. But for some reason, the plotters hadn’t managed to reach the exercise yard, and the rope ladder was spotted. The volunteers were lucky to escape without being arrested, and interned, themselves.

  Serendipity – the art of making discoveries by accident – often plays a key part in escape-planning. The guard dog who always needs to urinate at a particular point, thus slowing down the patrol by a vital fraction of a second, perhaps; or the vagaries of television scheduling. One Sunday in October, Irish television was airing a movie that included a particularly daring feat – a helicopter swooped into a prison compound and collected a group of inmates before disappearing into the middle distance. (It’s sometimes said that this was the movie Breakout, featuring Charles Bronson; this would be a little difficult since that film wasn’t released until 1975, although it was inspired by actual events, as shown in chapter 35.) One of those charged with coming up with an escape plan for Twomey and his colleagues was idly watching the film, and it occurred to him that this might be the right time to use this particular escape route.

  It wasn’t the first time that the IRA had considered using helicopters, but previous plans had been put on hold because of the superiority of the choppers used by the British armed forces. It was all very well breaking someone like Gerry Adams out of the Long Kesh internment camp, but pointless if the British could scramble faster machines and recapture him almost immediately. However, that wasn’t a consideration with Mountjoy, in the middle of Dublin. The plan was discussed by the IRA’s General Headquarters staff, and given the seal of approval. There was a certain aptness to the choice of exit route: the Irish Minister for Defence Paddy Donegan was well known for travelling by helicopter. As the leader of the opposition would point out the day after the escape, “It is poetic justice that a helicopter is now at the heart of the Government’s embarrassment and in the centre of their dilemma. Indeed, it was hard to blame the prison officer who observed that he thought it was the Minister for Defence paying an informal visit to Mountjoy Prison yesterday because, of course, we all know the Minister for Defence is wont to use helicopters, as somebody observed already, as other Ministers are wont to use State cars.”

  Halloween was chosen as the date for the raid, and eleven days earlier, on 20 October 1973, the IRA approached Irish Helicopters, a private hire firm based out of Dublin Airport. American businessman “Mr Leonard” wanted to charter a chopper for use by himself and his fri
ends to photograph locations in County Laois. He needed a helicopter that would be big enough to carry him, his driver, and all of their heavy photographic equipment. The obvious choice was the French-made Alouette 2 machine, which could seat five people, and it was agreed that Mr Leonard would hire the helicopter on the afternoon of 31 October at a rate of £80 per hour of flying time. Irish Helicopters didn’t normally ask for a deposit – leading to Time magazine’s claim that the escape didn’t cost the IRA anything – but the manager recalled that Mr Leonard insisted on paying upfront. No doubt the IRA middleman was worried in case something should go wrong on such an important operation, and he was held liable if Irish Helicopters double-booked!

  Word was passed to the men interned in Mountjoy, and although the plot was kept hidden from the majority of the prisoners, their help was needed to keep the guards distracted. A game of Gaelic Rules football was therefore set up for Halloween afternoon, which had the added advantage of presenting a nice circle in the middle of the yard as a guide for the pilot.

  It all nearly went wrong because of the weather – not because the conditions were so bad that the helicopter couldn’t fly, but because the manager of Irish Helicopters thought that there was no way that Mr Leonard would want to take his photographs on such a dull day. He therefore didn’t hurry his lunch, and was more than a little surprised to find Mr Leonard impatiently waiting for him at the airport when he returned. Leonard explained that his cameraman and the equipment was waiting at a rendezvous en route, and he needed to get going. He was introduced to Captain Thompson Boyes, and explained that not only were they picking up equipment, but they’d also be removing the doors from the chopper to allow better filming.