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The Outlaw Folk Hero

Over the years there have been many Australian outlaw folk heroes – bank robbers and murderers who captured the public’s imagination – such as Ned Kelly, Squizzy Taylor and Darcy Dugan. In more modern times there was Russell ‘Mad Dog’ Cox – the only man to escape from Long Bay Jail’s impenetrable fortress, Katingal, and stay on the run for 11 years. And then there was Brendan Abbott, who was chased all over Australia under the guise of the Postcard Bandit – which was all very romantic, but try telling that to someone who had looked down the barrel of Abbott’s shotgun while he was holding up a bank in a balaclava and screaming at them.

But for sheer bravado and defiance of authority, few come close to the bank robber and escapologist Raymond John Denning. Songs were written about Denning, his prison diaries were published and a tape of him telling of prison authority’s brutality in jail appeared on 60 Minutes. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s Denning was seen by some respected criminologists as a lone crusader in exposing to society the corruption and entrenched mutual hatred between authority and prisoners within the New South Wales prison system.

For his troubles, time and again Denning was savagely beaten by the guards and thrown into solitary confinement. But, though he probably never knew it at the time, his one-man campaign against a clandestine system of endemic violence within our prisons did society a favour in paving the way for the modern-day, violence-free approach. But along the way Denning made a bad mistake. He bashed a prison official almost to death in one of his escape attempts. And in the end his bravado didn’t count for zip and he went the way of most of his ilk, only in a much less dignified manner.

Ray Denning didn’t have much of a chance from the beginning. At age 10 and with his father in prison, he stood and watched as his mother committed suicide by pouring kerosene on herself and setting herself alight. ‘I went to my mother’s room and she was burning on the bed,’ Denning wrote later in his memoirs. ‘I got a saucepan full of water and threw it over her but it was no good. She died a day or two later.’

In and out of institutions and jail for a multitude of offences that ranged from drunken driving and vagrancy to malicious assault and carrying a gun, in 1973 Denning graduated into the big league when he was sentenced to prison for 13 years for a series of violent assaults and robberies. Denning first reached public notoriety in 1974 when he battered prison overseer Willy Karl Faber with a carpenter’s claw hammer during an abortive escape attempt from Parramatta Gaol.

Faber spent months in hospital where he was treated for brain damage and underwent several major operations, one to remove bone from the top of his skull. Subsequently he suffered epilepsy attacks and then heart attacks, and he died from his injuries four years later. Denning received a life sentence on top of the term he was already serving.

Denning next grabbed headlines in September 1977 when he escaped from Maitland Jail, but was recaptured a few hours later. At his Sydney Central Court appearance on escape charges, Denning’s head was shaved. ‘I object to being called Denning,’ he told the magistrate. ‘A Tibetan spirit has taken me over and I am now to be called Lob-sang Rampa.’ No doubt taking his new calling into consideration, the judge gave Lob-sang another five years on top of what he was already serving, to meditate his dilemma.

Denning’s next escape was from Grafton Jail on 2 April 1980 when he became the first prisoner to break out of there that century. His 19 months on the run were a media and crime circus. A videotaped interview with Denning, now Australia’s most wanted man, was shown on Channel Nine’s 60 Minutes, he was interviewed for the Australian edition of Playboy magazine and tape-recorded interviews were aired over the ABC’s 2JJJ. Denning had a 200-page book called the Ray Denning Diary published by the Prisoners Action Group, which outlined his philosophy on escapes: ‘The only people who escape or try to escape from jail are that sick of jail sadism that they are willing to die rather than suffer the tortures that go on in jail every day,’ he wrote. He made no mention of how they got there in the first place.

But while on the run making a martyr of himself, Denning also had to live. On 18 December 1980 he took part in an armed robbery of $9300 from Sydney Mechanical Services at Glebe, and on 21 April 1981 he was involved in the armed robbery of $20,260 from the Bank of New South Wales at Summer Hill. Denning teamed up with Australia’s other most wanted man, Russell ‘Mad Dog’ Cox. On 22 September 1981, in Queensland’s biggest payroll robbery, they held up Brisbane’s Transurety Ltd and stole $327,000. On 8 November 1981 Denning was recaptured and sentenced to a further 10 years’ jail to be served at the expiry of his life sentence and all of the other sentences on top of it.

On 15 July 1988 Denning escaped from Goulburn Jail with another convict, Les Carrion, and took part in the armed hold-up of the Zillmere branch of the Commonwealth Bank in Brisbane. After a wild shoot-out with police on 22 July 1988, Denning was recaptured in a Melbourne shopping centre car park in the company of Russell ‘Mad Dog’ Cox. On 10 February 1989 Denning was sentenced in the Melbourne Supreme Court to five years and two years on using firearms to prevent apprehension and ‘going equipped to steal’ charges.

Given that Denning was only given a concurrent two-and-a-half year sentence for escaping from Goulburn, sceptics claimed that he was deliberately allowed to escape so he would inadvertently lead them to Cox (which he did), who had been on the run for 11 years, but there was never any substance to the allegations.

Extradited to Sydney to serve out his original sentence, Denning found a way of getting his seemingly impossible sentence reduced and make a future release a possibility: he became a police informer. After dobbing in his mates from inside the prison, which saw him give evidence in such high-profile cases as the Sydney Hilton bombing and testify against his old mate ‘Mad Dog’ Cox, Ray Denning was finally released in 1993 after spending 20 years – less his escape time, that is – behind bars.

Two months after his release he was found dead in his rundown rented Darlinghurst semi from an apparently accidental self-inflicted overdose of heroin. It was no secret that Denning, sick of the low-grade heroin available in jail, had promised himself ‘the shot of a lifetime’ when he got out. Seems as though he got it. But from whom will always remain a mystery. Raymond John Denning’s funeral wasn’t a very big one.