by Paul Simpson
As a reward for keeping their cells clean, inmates at Boyd County were allowed special privileges, including movie nights, and during a screening of the Mel Gibson historical epic Braveheart on 29 April 1997, Artrip and his accomplices made their move. As Gibson’s William Wallace was noisily telling the Scottish army that the English might take their lives, but they’d never take their freedom, Artrip, Williams and Tipton kicked the ceiling panel out of the way, pulled themselves up into the space above, snapped the welding around a grating beneath an air-conditioning unit, pushed that aside, and went out onto the roof. They then leaped the twenty feet over the fence, and ran into the night.
Tipton and Williams split away from Artrip, heading to Arizona, where they were eventually arrested after they carried out a hold-up in the city of Winslow. They served their sentences for that, and the escape, in an Arizona prison. Williams was later sentenced to life imprisonment for the armed robbery of the Citizens National Bank branch in Ashland on Christmas Eve 2009: because of his record he was tried as a persistent felony offender, and the jury recommended the maximum term.
Artrip headed back to his home town of Ashland, six miles north of Boyd County Jail, where he had family and friends. Although the police received various tips regarding his whereabouts, he always seemed to be aware when they were coming for him, and he managed to remain out of the law’s clutches for nearly six weeks. His luck deserted him on 3 June when he was caught in a routine traffic stop in Ironton, Ohio, a few miles on the other side of the Ohio river. He was sentenced to fifteen years for the escape, but after remission for good behaviour, and despite reports that he attempted to escape from the federal facility in which he was being held in 2000, he was released in 2002.
He didn’t stay out of jail for long. In 2005, he was arrested for three armed robberies and in the early summer of 2007 was being held at Grant County Detention Center at Williamstown, Kentucky, awaiting sentence after pleading guilty. Contemporary reports indicate that he had been there for about two and a half months, held in solitary confinement for all but one hour a day, when he made another daring escape, once again going up into the ceiling to get to an air vent, the roof and freedom. This time, rather than go from his cell, Artrip was more brazen: around 11.30 p.m. on the night of 24 June 2007, he scaled a basketball backboard in the prison gym recreation area, leaped to the wire mesh behind it all the way to the ceiling, then wormed through the ductwork to reach the vent. By the time the guards had reacted, he had jumped the eighteen feet off the roof and escaped into the woods surrounding the prison, evading a cordon of guards that was quickly set up.
The US Marshals, Kentucky state police and local police agencies all began another manhunt anticipating that he would repeat his pattern from before, and return to Ashland, in part so he could visit his daughter Cierra. John Schickel, US Marshal for the Eastern District of Kentucky told reporters that Artrip had “a history of escapes and bank robberies, and we consider him dangerous”.
However Artrip went straight back to work – his kind of work, robbing banks, and brought his cousin Chris along to help. On 30 June, he entered a bank in Princeton, West Virginia (three hundred miles south-east of his last confirmed location at the prison), handing the teller a note reading, “Give me all the money or I’ll start shooting”. He shoved the $1,600 into a McDonald’s bag, and drove off, later abandoning the car. Two days later, continuing to travel south-east, he hit a bank in Raleigh, North Carolina, using a gun to gain access to the tellers’ drawers, emptying them of cash. He then spent around $57,000 on a vacation to Panama City, where it was reported he and Chris (called a nephew in some reports at the time) partied.
On the night of 27 July Chris and Tony were spotted in a red van, along with a female passenger. The girl was arrested on drugs charges but Chris and Tony fled into a nearby wood (something Tony Artrip was very good at doing). The Kentucky State Police, along with the US Marshal’s Office, the Kentucky State Police Response Team, the K-9 unit from the Enforcement Special Investigation, the Boyd County and Greenup County Sheriff’s Departments, and the Ashland Police Department all scoured the woods for some hours but to no avail. The next morning at 11 a.m., Chris was arrested at a roadblock on Route 5. There was no sign of Tony. (Chris continued a life of crime: he and his cousin Randall Artrip were fought off by a machete-wielding home owner Grant Lambert when they tried to rob him on 13 May 2010 using a toy gun. They were charged with first-degree robbery, as was their driver Amy D. Sturgill. Chris, who was seriously injured in the attack, was sentenced to twelve years, Randall to ten. Sturgill got a five year term.)
Tony’s next reported robbery came at the start of August, when he headed north, and visited a bank in Monroe, Michigan, making an unauthorized withdrawal at gunpoint. On 21 August he went to another Monroe bank, but was nearly caught by police, who had tracked him down to the place in Frenchtown Township where he had been staying, apparently trying to establish a new life for himself, furnishing the house and buying a new television. Slipping out of a window, he managed to elude them in a stolen red pickup truck. He returned to North Carolina, where marshals received a tip that he was in the Asheville area, and started distributing posters there on 10 September. Once again, luck was with Artrip: although he was spotted by a marshal the next day, he was able to lose his pursuers in nearby woodland. Three days later, he was caught on camera during a raid on a bank in Mount Airy, North Carolina. By this point, law enforcement officials reckoned, he had stolen around $93,000 since escaping from prison.
At this point, the US Marshals put Artrip on their “15 Most Wanted” list. “Anthony Ray Artrip is exceptionally dangerous. He is a federal fugitive who is not laying low, but continuing to commit violent crimes while on the run,” said United States Marshals Service Director John Clark in the press release announcing this. “By placing him on our 15 Most Wanted list, I have directed our investigators to use all resources to find and apprehend this dangerous criminal. From what we’ve seen since his escape, there is no indication that Artrip’s criminal activities are going to end. We need to put a stop to his crime spree.” The publicity from this – which included a feature on the TV programme America’s Most Wanted – brought Artrip’s latest escape attempt to a moderately swift close.
A robbery in Calhoun, Georgia, netting $20,000 was the last one that police believed he carried out before he was recaptured. That wasn’t easy: it came after a major stand-off at the Knights Inn motel in South Fayette, Pennsylvania, on the south side of Pittsbugh on 8 October, during which, as US Marshal John Schickel pointed out when announcing his arrest, Artrip tried to “pull off one more vanishing act”. Acting on a tip-off, the marshals had tracked him down to room 106 at the motel. Alongside the Allegheny County SWAT team, as well as police from sixteen local departments, they surrounded the building and broke down the door at 9.30 a.m. – only to find no apparent sign of Artrip. No sign, that is, until someone remembered his usual method of escape and looked up – and there, in the ceiling of the bathroom, a tile had been removed. Artrip continually moved around in the crawlspace for the next four hours, as attempts were made to negotiate with him, which he ignored.
Around 1.45 p.m., the marshals began to lose patience, and fired a concussion grenade into the area, but this still failed to dislodge Artrip. Eventually, about an hour later, they started to pump pepper spray into the confined space. That was enough, even for Artrip. Screaming, “Shoot me! Shoot me!” he tried to escape from the pepper spray, but it filled the area, and after fifteen minutes, he broke through the ceiling of room 123, and was promptly arrested.
“It is great news that we have finally managed to bring Tony Artrip in,” Marshal Shickel said. “This was likely one of the most brazen and elusive criminals we have ever pursued and all of us are relived [sic] that his crime spree has come to an end without further violence or injury.”
He would only remain behind bars for eighteen months. In April 2009, he was up to his old tricks once more, this time maki
ng his escape from the Edgecombe County Detention Center in Tarboro, North Carolina. It would be the shortest of his times on the run – within twelve hours he was back in custody. He still found time to rob another bank!
After his robbery spree in 2007, Artrip was sentenced to seven years at the Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, with the judge in charge warning that Artrip was likely to take advantage of laxer security if he was taken around the country to stand trial for the various offences he committed in different jurisdictions. During his trial in Kentucky, he was held in shackles, with marshals all around to ensure that he didn’t escape. The problem was that the North Carolina detention centre (described as a “podunk jail” by Artrip’s lawyer) wasn’t anywhere near as secure as it needed to be to hold someone as determined as Artrip.
While awaiting trial, Artrip sought help from David Lee Cox, accused of felony conspiracy, and James Butler, held on firearms charges. This time, there were no devious plans involving air ducts or ceiling panels. On 16 April 2009, the three men simply broke open a fire door at the prison leading to the outside, ran across the open space to the fence, and then used a mattress to help get over the razor-wire-topped obstruction. Stealing a van from a nearby house, they sped off, heading 400 miles towards West Virginia.
The next morning at 9.15, Tony Artrip walked into the City National Bank in Marmet, West Virginia, just off the West Virginia Turnpike. Demanding money, he then vaulted over the counter, and grabbed $53,000. Cox and Butler were waiting in the stolen truck and the trio headed for Charleston. However, when the truck was spotted at a Shop N Go gas station, a chase ensued, at speeds of up to ninety miles per hour through the streets of Charleston. The men dumped the truck, and tried to escape on foot, jumping over a fence. It was too late – police officers apprehended them. When he was asked why he had robbed the bank by a local journalist, Artrip claimed it was for “gas money”; Cox claimed that he didn’t know a bank robbery was planned. They hadn’t even had time to change out of their jail outfits.
Another Edgecombe County inmate tried his luck the same weekend as Artrip made his abortive getaway. Seventeen-year-old Chamone Diggins, being held for breaking and entering, larceny, felony, conspiracy, robbery, assault on a female and assault with a deadly weapon, overpowered guards around 9.30 p.m. on 18 April and was able to escape from the jail annex. He was rearrested at lunchtime the following day in Farmville, twenty-five miles from Tarboro. With four escapes in the space of seventy-two hours, Sheriff James Knight noted that “procedures were not followed”.
On 4 August 2010, Tony Artrip was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences, and three twenty-year sentences to run concurrently with the forty-year sentence imposed in 2008. He will not be eligible for parole. “Today’s sentencing puts an end to the criminal career of a man who brazenly made his way across half of the United States robbing banks and terrorizing citizens, and brings justice and closure to the many victims of his crimes,” US Attorney Sally Quillian Yates said.
But when he was asked by a reporter in 2009 whether the break from Edgecombe would be his last, Tony Artrip said, “Probably not.” And even though he’s now an inmate of the Supermax at Terre Haute, Indiana, no one would be in the least surprised if Tony Artrip somehow finds a way out.
Fact vs. Fiction
Although the Real Prison Breaks series filmed a lot of its material at the sites of the various activities, note that the Grant County Jail footage was shot in 2011, and the reconstruction of the recapture of Artrip at the Knights Inn Motel suggests that the gas was thrown into the room, which brought him out – telescoping the events considerably.
Sources:
Boyd County jail design/history: http://www.cmwjustice.com/projects/BoydCountyDetentionCenter.html
The Independent (Ashland, KY), 26 June 2007: “Tony Artrip still at large”
The Independent, 27 September 2011: “Williams gets life for bank robbery”
US Marshals Service, 18 September 2007: “U.S. Marshals Add Convicted Bank Robber To ‘15 Most Wanted’ List”
The Kentucky Enquirer, 26 June 2007: “Man awaiting trial for bank robbery escapes from Ky. jail”
America’s Most Wanted Online Hotline’s Blog, 23 September 2007: “Dramatic Escape From County Jail”
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 9 October 2007: “‘Escape artist’ corralled”
US Marshals Service, 8 October 2007: “U.S. Marshals End Bank Robbing Spree Of ‘15 Most Wanted’ Fugitive”
The Independent, 28 July 2007: “Chris Artrip arrested; Tony still at large”
The Independent, 14 May 2010: “Boyd machete-wielding homeowner fights back”
The Independent, 22 January 2011: “Would-be home invader sentenced”
The Herald-Dispatch, 17 April 2009: “3 NC Fugitives caught near W. VA. capitol.”
WSAZ.com, 18 April 2009: “3 NC Escapees, Including Tony Artrip, Caught After Robbery”
WSAZ.com, 5 August 2010: “Tony Artrip Gets Two Life Sentences for Bank Robberies”
Real Prison Breaks, Cineflix Productions, 2011
The King of Escapers Takes Off
“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” So goes the Chinese proverb. It doesn’t say how you should feel if you’re fooled a third time – but that’s what the so-called King of Escapers, Pascal Payet did to French authorities when he used a helicopter to escape from jail in both 2001 and 2007, and to add insult to injury, organized for others to get out using the same method in 2003.
Luynes prison in the south of France was the target on two occasions; the jail was only opened in 1990, and its 600 inmates included many who were classified as DPS (détenus particuliérement surveillés – prisoners under particular watch). Payet, a habitual criminal who had convictions for aggravated assault and conspiracy, had been sent there following his arrest for murder during an armed robbery on a security van in November 1997, during which he had used his favourite weapon, a Kalashnikov AK47 automatic rifle, to shoot a guard who subsequently died. He had been on the run for fourteen months before being arrested in Paris in January 1999.
Helicopters had been used in a number of escapes in France during the 1990s – at least ten had been successful – so it’s a little surprising that somewhere as new as Luynes wasn’t better equipped to deal with the possibility. (After the escape, the governor pointed out that the unions had been calling for better security ever since the prison had been opened but had been ignored because of the cost implications.) Payet, who at the time was being held under the name Paillet, could see the obvious possibilities, since there wasn’t anything to prevent a chopper from landing in an open part of the prison yard which couldn’t be monitored properly from the guard towers. He therefore arranged with an accomplice on the outside to hire a helicopter from a local airfield.
As soon as the chopper was in the air, shortly after 4 p.m. on 12 October 2001, Payet’s friend drew a weapon and threatened the pilot and co-pilot. He ordered them to head towards the prison, and as they flew over the prison yard, he threw a bag of tools out of the door to Payet, who was wearing a distinctive fluorescent-yellow T-shirt for easy identification. He and another prisoner, Frédéric Impocco, who was serving a life sentence for murder, then used wire-cutters and pliers to get through the mesh fence that separated the yard from the open area. The helicopter landed, and the two jumped on board.
Their destination was the small town of Bouc-bel-Air, about ten miles north of Marseilles, where they returned control of the helicopter to the pilots. A Peugeot car was waiting for them; they abandoned that a few miles away and stole a Volkswagen Golf before vanishing apparently without trace – they evaded the special police cordon, codenamed Sparrowhawk, that was thrown up around the prison without difficulty.
Payet successfully avoided arrest for two years, although not without some run-ins with the police along the way during various armed robberies that he carried out to keep himself financed. Impocco wasn’t so fortunate. He was picked up by police
in Paris less than a week after the escape. The authorities at Luynes learned their lesson, and made sure that there were security lines across the whole yard.
That didn’t stop Payet, when he decided to get two of his friends, accused of running an international drug ring, out from the prison. As far as he was concerned, that’s what friends did for one another. On 14 April 2003, he put his plan into action.
Once again, a helicopter was hijacked, but instead of bringing the chopper in to land, the pilot was ordered to hover over the prison yard, taking advantage of exactly the same blind spot as before. While one of the hijackers kept the pilot at gunpoint, the other dropped down on a rope ladder, and used a power saw to cut through the steel security netting. All that Michel Valero and Eric Alboreo had to do was grab hold of the rope ladder, and they were flown to safety. This time someone else came along for the ride: another drug trafficker, Franck Perletto, known as Lucky Luke, who later told a court that he was playing Scrabble when he saw the rope descending from the helicopter, and took advantage of the situation. Once again, the pilot was released unharmed.
The escape prompted outrage from the newspapers, with Le Parisien running the banner headline, “Yet Another Escape”. Future French president Nicholas Sarkozy, then the Interior Minister, promised that “Teams are mobilized to find them and put them back where they belong – in prison.” He was able to live up to his promise: three weeks later, all three were back under lock and key – as well as Payet, who was acknowledged to have masterminded their escape.
