It is not difficult to escape from an open prison, or any other low-security custodial institution. If you are intent on leaving then you will, whether by the front gate or over a fence. Or perhaps by going for a day out, or a weekend’s home leave, and never returning.
Many more do this than might be imagined. At various times the media run scare stories on those who abscond so easily, particularly if they are regarded as ‘celebrity’ criminals. Others, having been imprisoned for a major crime such as murder, are often placed in low-security prisons after a relatively short time, the institution effectively dangling a carrot that may lead them to escape. There are certainly cases where escape from open prison is made for a seemingly valid reason – at least as far as the escapee is concerned.
Mary Bell joined the ranks of the infamous after killing two little boys in 1968, when she was only eleven years old. As her incarceration entered its less severe period, in 1977, she was moved to Moor Court, an open prison set among the hills of Staffordshire. She was being prepared for the parole process, and for becoming a member of society.
Bell was not pleased. She told the governor it wasn’t a “step forward”, and that a less secure facility “was like being sent to prison, because you see you are more in prison when it’s open.” She was convinced she was destined to remain in prison, and that making another life outside was beyond her. Bell was twenty at the time.
The pressure to run away was great. Moor Court was like a four-star hotel set in a beautiful landscape, a millionaire’s country home. It was too much for her, and for other inmates, she believed, who would have to be released eventually to high-rise flats and a more squalid way of life. “It leaves people with a feeling of discontentment, feeling they are better off in prison than outside.”
‘Open prison’ meant what it said. She could go outside, lie on the grass, be alone. She could do anything she wanted, except go beyond the prison perimeters. As the governor explained, “What we are doing is requiring you to make your own decisions.” Bell didn’t know whether she could withstand the pressure of so much trust being invested in her. She warned them she would run away, that she perceived herself to be a ‘lifer’, and that it was all too much for her. She also demanded knockout pills. “I wanted to be blitzed.”
Within three months, in September 1977, she fulfilled her own prophecy and jumped over the fence, heading off across the fields accompanied by one of her new friends, a short-timer. They went on a Sunday, once the visitors started arriving at 1:30pm. They knew that, with so many people walking around the grounds, no one would note they were missing until the next headcount at 6pm.
Once they reached the road, they hitched a lift. The first lift didn’t last long, as Bell suspected the driver had twigged where they came from, as he quickly dropped them off. The next lift was from three young men, though one got out soon after. (Bell suspected he too had guessed.) The remaining two young men were heading for Blackpool, an idea that appealed to Bell and her friend. She says it wasn’t long before both boys were informed where the women had absconded from, and that she was Mary Bell. One of the boys had actually read a book about her, though both swore that they would not alert anyone.
Bell later described her euphoria at riding on the big dipper, of getting roaring drunk easily, as she had no experience of drinking, and of dancing late into the night at a club. She also lost her virginity there, though she remembers little of the experience. By the second night she was back in Derby, at one of the lads’ family home.
The following day, she awoke to find herself plastered over the front pages of the newspapers. The boy went to see a social worker he knew, for advice on what he should do. He returned to Bell and offered her a river barge to stay on, but she said she would head for London. Before that could happen, a motorbike policeman recognised her when she was out in the car. When he asked her to wind down the passenger window and said her name to her, despite some evasive blustering she knew the game was up. He took her to the police station.
She hoped that the ‘dangerous’ tag assigned to her would not stick, and that no crimes committed locally in the last few days would be attributed to her. She told the police she had intended to go to London, to work for a few months and then to give herself up, just to prove that she could do it. Her story was untrue, as she really only wanted to have a good time. But the press reported that she had left to get pregnant; the boy had succumbed to the lure of chequebook journalism, and stated that Mary wanted his baby.
She knew what awaited her though. She would soon be in another prison, “and there wouldn’t be any smiling, understanding policemen, only the furious system I had kicked in the face.” Two officers came from Moor Court; they told her she had been stupid, and that she had blown her chance of freedom for some years. She was taken to the less than salubrious Risley Remand Centre.
A couple of years later Mary was allocated to another open prison, at Askham Grange. By then she no longer felt the need to escape. “I no longer imagined, as I had done before, that I was a kind of prisoner, like POWs you know, who have an obligation to escape. Nor did I feel the need to run that I’d had at Moor Court.” As she concluded, “I was ready … ready to be me again.”
Mary Bell was released in 1980, to be given a new name and a new life. Her daughter, who was born in 1984, knew nothing of her mother’s past until she was discovered by the media, some years later. They had to leave their home with bed-sheets over their heads. Though the daughter’s anonymity was legally protected until she became eighteen, Bell took the issue to the High Court and was granted lifelong anonymity for both herself and her child.
Joe Wilkins forced the issue in an entirely different way. There are suggestions that the state had a hand in his escape in order to serve its own ends. Wilkins was a serious criminal with a long record. He was serving ten years for drug smuggling when he walked from Highpoint low-security prison in Suffolk, in 1992. Some claim he was ‘sprung’ by the British authorities. What is known is that he initially walked from Ford Open Prison in West Sussex, in 1991, was rearrested and moved to Highpoint. In January 1992 he was let out on day release, to travel unaccompanied to London to see his dentist. He never returned.
Wilkins departed for Spain and took up residence on the ‘Costa del Crime’, living in a villa in Estepona. Many believed that, for someone on the run to be living so openly, with no extradition proceedings or deportation attempted, a deal must have been struck. At the very least, the rumours ran, a blind eye had been turned in return for his help. The theory that has unravelled since, during a London money-laundering trial, is that Wilkins was employed in 1993 to introduce undercover British police into the criminal fraternities of drug and tobacco smugglers in Spain and Gibraltar, to break a laundering gang. The whole operation cost the Metropolitan Police (and thus the British taxpayer) a fortune, in the region of £25 million. After years of legal arguments the case collapsed, with the judge labelling the whole enterprise as an “illegal sting” and a “state-created crime”.
Wilkins is believed to have been an MI6 and police informant on many other high-profile cases, latterly earning himself the distinction of ‘supergrass’ and ostracism by the British criminal fraternity in Spain.
Carrying the strong credentials of a so-called ‘public enemy’, Charlie Richardson, one half of an infamous crime partnership with his brother Eddie, walked from Spring Hill near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, in 1980. That year marked fourteen years served of his twenty-five-year sentence for fraud, extortion, assault and grievous bodily harm. He had been up for parole for the last seven, but was turned down each year. Once he had been moved to the open prison at Spring Hill, “I did what any self-respecting ‘gang boss’ would do when trusted to be moved to an open prison – I planned my escape.”
Being in Spring Hill meant that Richardson was a big step closer to parole. But he no longer had the patience to wait for another year, or perhaps a further two years. Richardson had been trying to deter the guards from looking into his cell at night by screaming abuse at them. It was part of his preparations to casually leave the building under cover of darkness. He had instructed friends to meet him in the car park of a local pub at a specific time, and not to wait if he was late.
The first night, as Richardson crossed the fields, he could see the car. Time was running out, and he was just arriving when he saw the car pull away. He was obliged to retrace his steps to prison. The next night he set off earlier. Richardson arrived first this time, and was waiting as the car swept into the parking area.
He was driven straight to London, directly to Soho, as he wanted to wander around and get a feel for the place he had not seen for more than a decade – a place he now barely recognised. Then he briefly returned to his friends and family in Camberwell, before moving on to Jersey to visit a daughter in hospital, then sailing by ferry to St Malo, and from there to Paris, Nice, Majorca … where, prompted by seeing the English newspapers at this popular destination for British tourists, he thought it a better idea to move down to the Spanish mainland (even if he did eventually gravitate to Benidorm to be amongst his fellow countrymen). At one point he wrote to The Sunday Times about his campaign for release, and they published the letter. When he did slip back into Britain, he was quickly discovered and returned to prison. After serving another four years, Richardson was finally released in August 1984.
Whilst most prisoners know they will be released sooner or later, for Harry Roberts the prospect does not seem to be on the cards. Now that child-killer John Straffen has died in prison, Roberts is today the UK’s longest serving prisoner. It may seem unreasonable that he should still be in prison, having been sentenced in 1966 to a minimum of thirty years for killing three policemen at Braybrook Street, Acton. It seems he was heading towards release in 1999, and was moved to Sudbury Prison in Derbyshire, perhaps in preparation. He worked unsupervised at an animal sanctuary some thirty miles from the prison, though he didn’t always turn up each day. On those days he was reported to have journeyed to London, and was seen with “some very unsavoury people”. When he was given five days’ leave, he was also seen celebrating his sixty-fifth birthday in Sheffield with Kate Kray. He was moved back into a closed prison, accused of dealings in drugs, and it seems fairly certain he will stay in prison until he dies.
His only ‘time out’ has been from open prisons, but it is believed that he attempted twenty-two escapes over the years. Amongst these are a few that should be noted. Reggie Kray recalled how Roberts tunnelled deep beneath his cell in Parkhurst, going through a three-foot-thick wall, and was almost as far as the outer wall before he was discovered. They found miniature arc-lights, torches and chisels. Kray stated that Roberts used to dispose of the dirt in the garden, tucking it down his trousers and releasing it in the vegetable plot, where he had been working on a goldfish pond.
Whilst his mother was alive, so the story goes, she would bring in escape equipment for him baked into cakes, directing him not to eat a specific fairy cake because it contained a compass or a file. Another time she brought in bolt cutters stashed in her bra, intending to leave them in the toilets for him to retrieve later. It seems the haul of his accumulated equipment included a masonry drill, a metal bar, pliers, sunglasses, wire cutters, a knife, a gas lighter, maps of the Isle of Wight and £20 cash.
When he was in Leicester Prison, Roberts became friends with an IRA prisoner. They concocted a plan together to make a crossbow to fire into a nearby park, where IRA associates would attach explosives to the rope for them to haul back and blast their way out. Of course they had no elastic, so a relative of the Irishman came up with the idea of knitting a number of tank-top jumpers for Roberts and other inmates, the bottom rows made of strong elastic for them to unpick. They were discovered when their diagram of the prison and the park with the arrow’s proposed trajectory, fixed behind a painting, fell from his homemade frame during security checks as it was being sent out of the prison.
Walter Probyn, undoubtedly one of the greatest escapees from the British penal system, had plans to escape with Roberts, but came to the conclusion that he “was living in a world of fantasy … the only way he could survive is the thought of escaping … He was pitting his wits against the screws to find ways, but it was only in theory – he didn’t want to do it in practice.”