As the first line of defence against an escape, it is prison warders who are the most vulnerable. In October 1958 gate officer William Alan Cooper was bashed to death with a claw hammer and a bar during an aborted escape attempt at Bathurst Gaol in central west New South Wales. Despite a Sydney Macquarie Street psychiatrist telling the jury that 22-year-old Robert Barclay ‘Bulla’ Moodie, charged with Cooper’s murder, was certifiably insane and had lost the ability to differentiate right from wrong, the jury found him guilty in April the next year. Moodie was given life imprisonment.
A second man charged with the murder, John Edward Walford, had been found hanged in his cell before the trial. It seems there had been a suicide pact between the two men but Moodie’s nerve had failed. He then claimed that it was warders who had hanged Walford. After an inquiry the warders were duly cleared.
The men had been caught in what could only be described as unusual circumstances After they had bashed Cooper, who was the only officer on duty at the main gate, they ran to a utility that had been parked outside a residence and drove off, backing onto the highway and crashing into the hearse carrying a Donald Robards, who had shot himself after strangling Phyllis Hedges. In the cortege was Constable Stanley Smith, who chased and caught one of the men in a nearby garden. Prison warders later cornered the other man.1
Twenty years later, shortly before his breakout from Parramatta in western Sydney, repeat escapee Ray Denning had said he was going to kill a guard. He bashed Willy Karl Faber, leaving his brains oozing. Faber underwent emergency surgery and survived but suffered from epileptic fits until he died four years later. Back in 1959 in the NSW Southern Highlands, Berrima Gaol officer Albert Hedges had been bashed so badly and locked in a shed during another escape attempt that he was obliged to retire.
Kevin John Simmonds, a man who posthumously became escapee Darcy Dugan’s brother-in-law, ended his days in Grafton Gaol in northern New South Wales. Starting his criminal career as a petty thief at the age of fourteen when he stole money from his father and was sent to Boys’ Town in Engadine in Sydney’s south, he soon graduated. Two years at a prison school at Gosford to the north merely taught him fitness and survival. In May 1953 he received three years for burglary and went to Goulburn Gaol, south of Sydney. It was there he met Frank Foley and after his release on 16 February 1959 they robbed the North Rose Bay branch of the Commonwealth Bank in Sydney, firing a shotgun blast into the ceiling. This time Simmonds received fifteen years.
Within six months of his sentence beginning Simmonds escaped from Long Bay Gaol in Malabar, along with housebreaker Leslie Alan Newcombe who was serving three and a half years. On Friday 9 October they broke into the prison chapel, crawled through a ventilator duct onto a roof, jumped down into the outer yard and, using a water tank to lever themselves up, climbed over the seven-metre wall. In Randwick’s Prince Henry Hospital car park they carjacked a woman as she was getting into the driving seat and drove to La Perouse, where they abandoned the car and ran towards Botany cemetery. Despite the fact that police in their dozens were sent to the area and a helicopter was used along with searchlights, the pair, huddled in a newly dug grave, were not spotted and disappeared.
Then began one of the greatest manhunts in New South Wales in modern times. By the Sunday morning the pair had managed to get as far as Emu Plains, a well-run highly productive prison farm with around 115 inmates, 56 kilometres away at the foot of the Blue Mountains. It was here that Simmonds and Newcombe killed Cecil Mills, a warder at the prison farm, beating him over the head with a baseball bat and stealing shirts, suits and shoes along with his car and gun. It was not difficult for the police to work out who had killed Mills; at one time Newcombe had served part of a sentence at Emu Plains.
The pair then doubled back to Sydney Showground where they rearranged corn bags to provide a hiding place, in which they stayed while a military tattoo took place. They had hopes of heading to Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park but became separated when they set out to search for food. It was thought they might be headed for Victoria and there were hundreds of reported sightings around Sydney, including one when a milkman at Avalon Beach reported he had been held up and some of his bottles stolen.
Two weeks to the day of their breakout Newcombe was captured after he stole a car in Oxford Street, Paddington, in inner-city Sydney and was charged with a series of car thefts, prison escape and the murder of Warder Mills. Of Simmonds there was no sign and, just as the public had embraced Ned Kelly and Squizzy Taylor, throughout the spring of 1959 Kevin Simmonds, murderer or not, became a transient folk hero. His escape was, however, a classic example of the problems faced by an escapee who lacks a good support system.
It lasted until the middle of November. Early in the month at Ku-ring-gai Chase two park rangers came across a naked man who told them he was Simmonds and at gunpoint ordered one to tie the other up. He had apparently been digging a hole in which to hide a caravan he intended to steal. He took their ute and the next morning smashed his way through a road block outside Wyong. A patrolman chased him for some 16 kilometres before Simmonds crashed the car and made off into the bush.
The police mustered around five hundred men, Aboriginal trackers, helicopters and dogs to conduct the search. Still he eluded them. It was a wet spring and this helped kill off his scent. The fact that it was one man against the might of the New South Wales police force built up his popularity. Commissioner CJ Delaney took personal supervision of the hunt only to be replaced after a few days.
It ended in the early hours of 15 November when Simmonds was seen stealing a car at Kurri Kurri in the Hunter region. The driver of a milk wagon chased him and finally the car Simmonds was in ran out of petrol. Now it was only a matter of hours before the talented if corrupt Detective Sergeant Ray Kelly was on hand to accept the surrender when Simmonds emerged from a nearby paddock. The whole town turned out to watch Kelly walk him to the local police station. After Simmonds appeared at Wyong court on the Central Coast, the car driving him back to the police station was mobbed. It was the same when he appeared at Sydney Central Court. While he was on the run, a schoolgirl had started a fan club for him and there had been amazing support.
At the March 1960 trial for the murder of Cecil Mills, Newcombe, as far as he could without being labelled a complete dog, implicitly blamed Simmonds for the actual killing. He maintained that they were surprised by the warder and beat him with a cricket stump and baseball bat in a panic. Mills was bleeding badly when they left him and Simmonds put a handkerchief under his head. If they hadn’t beaten him ‘he would have shot us both dead’.
Perhaps it was a measure of Simmonds’ popularity that, much to the fury of the trial judge, the jury returned verdicts of manslaughter. ‘This is the worst case of manslaughter I have ever known,’ said Mr Justice McClemens when he sentenced the pair to life imprisonment. Newcombe’s was later reduced to fifteen years.
They were taken to the intractable section of Grafton Gaol. At best the discipline in this unit was brutal and the recaptured Simmonds could expect no favours from warders. There is always a tribal loyalty among screws and given that one of their number, albeit in another prison, had been killed it was not surprising that Simmonds was in for a particularly hard time from them. Indeed one way or another Simmonds’ long-term survival was by no means guaranteed and so it proved. It was at Grafton his slow death began.
There is little doubt he was bashed on a regular basis and one prisoner who was with him said he took a beating every day during the last four months of his life. His testicles, said one prisoner known as ‘CA’, were the size of oranges and purple coloured. ‘His mental condition began to deteriorate. He could hardly sew because his hands were trembling and his speech began to ramble and became incoherent. As this progressed officers seemed to pick on him even more.’
The six years Simmonds spent there reduced him to a shambling wreck, taking to burning his arms with cigarettes—or someone was stubbing cigarettes out on him. He was found hanged in his cell early on the morning of 4 November 1966. Simmonds had died anything up to two and a half hours before he was found. During the previous afternoon he had sustained yet another bad beating.
At the inquest, prison guard Vivian O’Connor said that at about 12.25 am he was making his rounds when he saw a dark mark on the bars of Simmonds’ cell and he believed it was from a blanket. He called Chief Officer Campbell. In death Simmonds was seen to be just as dangerous as he had been in life. Campbell told the coroner, ‘With the thought of maintaining absolute security and not making myself or the staff vulnerable to attack I called the prison governor.’ Twenty-five minutes later ‘we opened the cell door and saw Simmonds hanging by the neck from a piece of blanket’. It was a clear case of suicide, the coroner was told. Simmonds had tied his hands, put his feet through his hands and tied his feet. The police, in the form of Detective Sergeant Alan Dahl, were in complete agreement: ‘This was the most determined [suicide] I have ever investigated.’ And he had investigated many.2
Dr John McGeorge, once a consulting psychiatrist to the New South Wales Attorney General’s Department, who had seen Simmonds on a number of occasions after his capture, told the Sydney Morning Herald that Simmonds was not the sort of man he initially thought would have committed suicide but:
A man of Simmonds’ type would probably go into jail still expecting to be a big shot. He would want to run the whole thing. But Grafton is a very strict prison. It is likely when he found this could not happen he eventually became depressed and hopeless.3
Whatever the coroner and Dr McGeorge may have decided, many thought Simmonds had been helped on his way. After Simmonds’ apparent suicide the rules were changed so that a prisoner had to be transferred after five years. After serving ten out of his fifteen-year sentence, Newcombe was released from Parramatta, to where he had been sent after Simmonds’ death. At first he struggled to adapt to life on the outside. He was arrested on a vagrancy charge, which was dropped, and then later had his parole revoked and was sentenced to two years over stolen goods. In time, however, he settled down. He changed his name and within five years had worked his way up to management level in the motor industry. He later wrote a book about the escape and his prison experiences.4
The most celebrated and bitterly controversial case in which a warder was killed in an escape has been that of Ronald Joseph Ryan in 1965, something that led to the abolition of capital punishment in Australia. Born on 21 February 1925, and at one time an offsider of the robber and escapee Jockey Smith, he had grown up in very poor circumstances. After the death of his mother’s first husband George Thompson, who fell from a tram, he adopted the name of Ryan, the man then living with his mother. His first brush with the law came in 1936 when he stole a watch from a neighbour and was sent to a school for wayward and neglected boys, Salesian in Sunbury to the west of Melbourne, from which he absconded. Along with his half-brother he adopted an itinerant lifestyle but saved enough money to rent a house in Balranald in the New South Wales Riverina district, where he lived for a time with his mother and sisters. On 4 February 1950 he married the privately educated Dorothy George, whose father had been Mayor of Hawthorn in Melbourne. They had three daughters.
Ryan’s troubles really started when his rented house burned down in 1953 and the arsonist claimed Ryan had paid him to do it for the insurance money. Ryan was acquitted but in 1956 he was put on a bond for passing bad cheques and a string of minor offences followed. On 23 June 1959 he was arrested again but broke away from the detectives escorting him to the lavatory at Flinders Street Station. He managed to reach Sydney where he was arrested and served a short sentence before being sent back to Victoria where he faced break and enter charges for, inter alia, stealing lawnmowers and selling them in pubs.
Ronald Ryan was not the only one with this name to escape around this time. On 9 August 1960 a Ronald Keith Ryan absconded from the Law Courts in Melbourne after being convicted of housebreaking. As he was being taken to the cells he broke away and dashed into Lonsdale Street, still in handcuffs, where he disappeared into the crowd. He was only out a few hours before he was found in Geelong. He had approached a man near the Barwon Bridge asking if he would exchange coats with him. The man agreed but when Ryan was out of sight he went to the police. Somehow this Ryan had managed to have his handcuffs sawn off. Now he received nine months for the housebreaking and a further six for the escape.
Along with five others, our Ronald Ryan escaped after a committal hearing on 21 April 1960, the first breakout from the city watch house in a hundred years. The men scattered and one of them blabbed, leading to Ryan, who was hiding out in an Elwood flat, being arrested when nineteen police raided the flat on 24 April. In the August he was sentenced to eight and a half years for eight charges of breaking and entering and for the escape. Sent to Pentridge in Melbourne’s Coburg he worked a year in the woollen mill before being transferred to the less strict Bendigo Training Prison in country Victoria, where Ian Grindlay was a progressive, compassionate prison governor. Ryan’s wife and daughters, visited every month and he showed promise of rehabilitation, studying high school courses by correspondence.
In 1962 Ryan performed in a prison theatre group, ironically playing the role of Dan the jailer who leads a prisoner to his execution in The Valiant.5 Paroled in August 1963 after being considered a model prisoner, Ryan worked as a clerk at Mobil for two months and then left the office at lunchtime and never returned, beginning his career as a safebreaker and robber. On 22 July he received six months at St Kilda petty sessions court and then on 13 November 1964 he received eight years for breaking and entering. He was also ordered to serve the remaining five years of his 1960 sentence for breaching parole. Ryan saw it as a crushing sentence.
At the time of Ryan’s last escape his prison offsider, London-born Peter John Walker, was serving a sentence for armed robbery. Walker’s upbringing had been a disastrous one. His mother gassed herself when he was seven and he became estranged from his father when he was just eight. As he grew older he began stealing cars, and when he reached his twenties he committed an unsuccessful armed robbery that had netted him twelve years.
The pair took advantage of a warders’ Christmas party to escape on 19 December with, it seems, the ultimate goal being South America. They used knotted bedspreads and a homemade grappling hook hidden for them to scale a wall to a catwalk and tower. They took a warder’s Armalite rifle from a gun rack and at gunpoint they forced the warder to open the prison so they could scale the wall. They then snatched the prison chaplain Salvation Army Brigadier James Hewitt as hostage, tried and failed to hijack a car and made for Sydney Road on foot with warders in pursuit. What exactly happened in the next minutes has long been a subject of conjecture. Certainly warder George Hodson was shot and killed. The brave Hodson had grabbed Walker and was hitting him over the head with a pipe when he was shot in the chest.
After the shooting, Ryan and Walker drove to Kensington, dumped their getaway car and stayed the night with friends. The next day, they went to a flat in Prahran belonging to Mrs Patricia Puccini, who arranged under duress for a friend of hers, Christina Aitken, to hide the two. Aitken took them to another friend’s flat in Elwood and asked her to put them up. She also bought dye so that Walker could bleach his hair and eyebrows. Aitken and her daughter Sharon stayed with the pair in the flat for two nights. She said later that Ryan threatened her and the child if she tried to turn them in.
Ryan wasted no time pushing ahead with his plan to fund his escape to Brazil, from where there was no extradition treaty with Australia. On 23 December they held up the Ormond branch of the ANZ Bank, where Ryan herded thirteen people into the bank’s strong room and stole £4500. A witness, June Crawford, told reporters that one of them—it is not clear if it was Ryan or Walker—indicated the carbine and said, ‘This gun shot a man a few days ago and I’ll use it again.’ Other witnesses said that the men referred to themselves as the Pentridge escapees.
By now, the Victorian Government had announced a £5000 reward for information leading to their capture. The next day, a Friday, Christine Aitken and Walker drove to a used car yard and traded in Aitken’s car for a panel van. They bought a shotgun on the way back to the flat. With part of the proceeds of the ANZ robbery they gave a Christmas Eve party at Christine’s home with Ryan playing the guitar. Christine’s tow-truck driver boyfriend Arthur Henderson recognised Ryan and mentioned this to Walker, whom he had not recognised. A little later Walker suggested he and Henderson should go to a sly-grog shop to buy some more alcohol but only Walker returned. He took Ryan aside and Aitken overheard their conversation.
‘Are you sure he’s dead?’ Ryan asked.
‘There was a pool of blood. His pulse had stopped,’ Walker replied.
Henderson’s body was discovered in a public lavatory in Middle Park that evening.
Walker later admitted killing Henderson, but said he did it in self-defence. As Walker told the story, he was worried that Henderson was going to turn them in and confronted him at the toilets while they were out getting the beer. There was a scuffle, and Walker drew his gun to fend Henderson off. They grappled with the gun and it fired, killing Henderson.
Ryan and Walker headed for Sydney on New Year’s Day in a Plymouth car obtained by Norman Harold Murray, who drove them there and rented a flat in Coogee for them. Ryan tried to contact a woman friend he had boarded with in 1964. Her daughter answered the door and, recognising them, arranged a rendezvous the following night at Sydney’s Concord Repatriation General Hospital where she worked as a nurse. She then dobbed them in. A decoy policewoman was used and when Ryan and Walker arrived at the hospital they were arrested by the notorious detectives Ray Kelly and Fred Krahe. Another version of the story is that they had contacted Lennie McPherson, a leading criminal in Sydney and also the personal fizz or informer of Kelly, who was in wait for them.
The question that divided Australia was whether it was Ryan who had fired the shot that killed Hodson or if the bullet had come from another warder’s gun. All witnesses at their trial agreed only one shot had been fired and a warder accepted that he had discharged his weapon. In the days when forensic testing does not seem to have overly troubled the courts, the jury found Ryan guilty and a string of appeals, including one in which Ryan’s barrister went to England to plead before the Privy Council, was rejected.
Since 1951 some thirty-five death sentences had been commuted in Victoria and many thought Ryan’s would and should have been also. The last execution in the state had been that year, of Jean Lee and two men who had tortured and killed an old-age pensioner for his savings. The one prior to that had been Edward Leonski, the so-called ‘Brownout Killer’, in 1942. In New South Wales the last execution had been that of John Kelly, hanged for the murder of Marjorie Sommerland in 1939. He had propositioned her and when she turned him down and called for her brother he took an axe and killed her.6
Ryan seems to have been more troubled by haemorrhoids than by his impending execution. That at least was the view of the prison psychiatrist. By the time all his appeals had been rejected there was a great deal of public support for him. But would there be a stay of execution or even a reprieve?
According to juryman Tom Gildea, the jury evidently thought that the death sentence would be commuted. Gildea believed not one member of the jury thought that Ryan would be executed:
Of the jury, two members held out the first vote we took, but ten of us were sure Ryan was guilty. He was a bit too sure of himself in the witness box but the thing that decided us was handling the rifle which had killed Hodson. We had been told the rifle had a hair trigger but when we examined it we found we had to pull it at least half an inch and used quite a bit of force.
When it was apparent that Premier Henry Bolte, whose government was running a law and order campaign, was intent on hanging Ryan, Gildea contacted the nine other jury members he could trace. Seven, including Gildea, signed separate petitions requesting Ryan’s death sentence be commuted to life in prison. Gildea said, ‘We didn’t want the rope. If we had known Ryan would hang, I think we would have gone for manslaughter.’
Meanwhile there was a plan seemingly organised by Jockey Smith to dynamite the walls of Pentridge and go in with machine guns to rescue Ryan. It came to nothing. The idea was that Ryan would know when the moment to go came based on a series of messages relating to winning horses but Ryan had found religion through Father Brosnan. He told Ian Grindlay, whom he knew and had respected at Bendigo Training Prison and was now the governor at Pentridge, that he wanted to call off the plan. Grindlay and Father Brosnan were instructed to contact a man to give him the message. They thought, though, that if they went in person they might be held hostage and so they sent an intermediary who Grindlay calls ‘Jocka Bell’. Bell reported back about the meeting place that he had never seen such a cache of weapons.
Ryan wrote a long letter on lavatory paper to his daughters, which was published in Truth: ‘Goodbye, my darlings, and may you get the love and luck you all deserve. I am not afraid, and I think the credit is largely yours. Lovingly yours, Dad.’ The night before the execution Father Brosnan said, ‘Ronald Ryan will be all right. He will go out on his feet. He is determined to die well.’ A crowd of some three thousand gathered outside the prison in the hours before his execution on 3 February 1967.
Truth’s Evan Whitton, who watched the execution, wrote a piece criticising the hangman’s technique and in reply the man, who had worn a large baggy green hat and sunglasses, wrote to the paper saying no one before had ever described his technique as ‘jerky’.7 According to Grindlay, Ryan had admitted he had shot the warder Hodgson but claimed it was an accident. He had intended to shoot him in the left shoulder because Hodgson was about to grab Walker. After his execution some of Pentridge’s warders urinated on his grave. It was not until 2007, after the murdered guard’s daughter Carole Hodson told the Herald Sun that she had jumped and danced on Ryan’s grave, that the Victorian Government gave permission for Ryan’s body to be exhumed and buried next to his deceased ex-wife in Portland cemetery, in the far south west of the state.
Walker was convicted of manslaughter and, in what was seen as a merciful finding by the jury, also of the manslaughter of Henderson who he claimed had attacked him. The Crown had alleged it was the reverse and that Walker thought Henderson was going to intervene in the ‘hostage’ situation. It may well be that, with Ryan about to hang, a jury did not want to convict another who might follow him to the gallows.
After Ryan’s death the state began a series of prosecutions of those who were thought to have helped Ryan or hindered his execution. Prime targets were the 22-year-old Aitken and Patricia Puccini. In the end seven went on trial. Both women were eventually acquitted. Two men received five years each.
Another of the prosecutions was against a former prisoner John Henry Tolmie, who was charged with perjury. Tolmie had played a major part in the efforts to gain a stay of execution, claiming that he had been in Pentridge at the time and saw a warder fire a shot during the escape. In fact Tolmie had not been in the prison. His defence team ran an ingenious argument: if he had not had his hand on the Bible at the time he swore his affidavit then he could not be convicted. The Commissioner for Oaths said he could not be certain. After a six-hour retirement the first jury disagreed and in August 1967 a second trial was ordered. This time, in October that year, Tolmie was convicted and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment with a minimum of two to be served.8
As for Walker, he did not settle down. On 23 June 1972 he and two other prisoners broke out of a prison van at Brunswick as it was returning to Pentridge, but they were immediately caught by prison officers. On 1 January 1974 Walker tried to cut through the bars of his cell in B Division and was immediately transferred to H Division. In all he served nineteen years before being released in 1984. He remained out of the public eye until, in April 2002, he was convicted of cultivating marijuana and was sentenced to a year in prison and fined $12,000. He claimed the six kilograms were for his own use to alleviate his asthma.
It was not, however, the end of his criminal career. In 2014 he was arrested at WA’s Perth airport in possession of $100,000 and a fake passport when he was attempting to flee the country. He was trying to escape Australia because he was the subject of a police investigation after a clandestine drug lab and guns had been found the previous year in Yaapeet in western Victoria. He was jailed for seven years and two months with a minimum of four years and four months.
It is not just warders who face personal danger during an escape; sometimes it is police officers in the line of fire. On 12 May 1940 nineteen-year-old Ronald George Francis was arrested by Constable Lawrence Buzza at his farm 40 kilometres from Nannup in Western Australia over a thirty-shilling theft. At the same time his twin brother, Albert Edward, was arrested for disorderly conduct. They were both taken to Nannup police station where Ronald asked to use a lavatory pan. When Buzza unlocked the cell Francis pushed him aside, grabbed Buzza’s service revolver and shot him. The constable died three weeks later.
In the July, the now-recaptured Francis was sentenced to life imprisonment. In March 1942 he escaped from Bartons Mill evacuee prison camp in Pickering Brook, Perth, along with twelve other prisoners, but was recaptured within days after being found asleep in Government House gardens. Released on parole in 1955 he breached the terms and was sent back to complete his sentence in 1958.9
On 11 August 1946 Detective Constable Victor Ahearn of the NSW Police drove with DC Bowie to a destination near the entrance to Long Bay Women’s Reformatory to arrest Sidney Grant, known to police for twenty years, and Keith George Hope, suspected of breaking and entering. On Anzac Parade while en route to Daceyville police station, Grant produced a gun and fired at Ahearn, who was sitting in the back seat between the two men. The first bullet missed and he fired again, killing him. Bowie stopped the car and tackled Grant, hitting him on the head with the gun, which had jammed. The pair then escaped. Later caught and charged with Ahearn’s murder, Grant wrote a letter to his de facto, ‘That’s how it is Mummy darling. He got in my way so I let him have it. As for the other fellow, well he’s lucky he’s not calling for the angels. Only for my rod jamming he would have been so he is a lucky pigeon. That’s all.’ Later he claimed the letter had been sent solely as bravado.
The first trial was abandoned when a juror was found sleepwalking outside the hotel where the jury were staying. At the second, Hope was acquitted and Grant was sentenced to death but reprieved.10
And sometimes it is helpers in the escape who have to be eliminated. It was the getaway of Barry Quinn, convicted of the murders of Drago Pucar, the manager of the Car-O-Tel Motel in St Kilda, Melbourne, and his friend Josip Slokar in a botched robbery on 25 March 1974 that led to a series of killings. On 16 November 1978, with the help of Robert Lindsay Wright, Paul Steven Haigh and Wayne Keith Smith, Quinn escaped from the Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital, where he had been taken for treatment for hepatitis. During and after the 69-day period while he was at large five people associated with him were killed, including prostitute Eve Karlson, said to be the love of his life.
On 27 June 1979, Quinn shot Wayne Keith Smith because he feared Smith was talking too much. On 22 July Wright and Haigh killed Sheryle Ann Gardner, who had been charged with helping Quinn, and her nine-year-old son Danny Mitchell. Later Haigh maintained he had not initially intended to kill the boy but because Gardner had demanded that Danny went with them on a drive to Ripponlea his death was inevitable. Gardner had been involved in one murder and had to be killed to eliminate any possible chance she too might inform. Haigh went to their funerals and later commented that she had lived by the sword and died by it.
Haig’s next victim was his girlfriend Lisa Maude Brearley in August 1979. He had forced her at knifepoint to have sex with another man before stabbing her 157 times—he said he had lost count of the number of stabs and therefore had to begin again. Sentenced to life imprisonment, he helped in the death of an inmate, sex offender Donald George Hatherley, on 14 November 1991. He maintained he had simply held his legs to assist the man to commit suicide, but he was convicted of murder.11
In 1981 Quinn was given permission to marry while serving his time in prison but this did not settle him down. In June 1983, along with Peter Morgan who had escaped in the April and had held a family hostage, Quinn was caught trying to escape after cutting the metal steel grille that covered the ventilator into the cell. He did not live long after that. In the close confines of Jika Jika, Quinn, who appears to have been loathed in the unit and was seen as a ‘cat’, a passive homosexual, had been taunting Alex Tsakmakis over the rape of his girlfriend. On 5 July 1984 Quinn was pushed into his cell and covered with industrial glue. Tsakmakis stood in the doorway, flicking lit matches at the helpless Quinn until he caught fire, while at the same time keeping at bay prison officers who were trying to rescue him. At least Quinn kept to the underworld code, saying he did not know who had set him alight before he died. The subsequent death notice from his fellow prisoners posted in the Herald Sun read, ‘Barry, we always stuck together’.12
Killings usually come during escape attempts but sometimes it is absolutely innocent outsiders who are murdered. At the beginning of the twentieth century Kalgoorlie lock-up in Western Australia was by no means as secure as it might have been. One of a number who got away and out of the state was the safe-breaker Frank Flood, known as ‘The Hawk’, regarded by his contemporaries as quite reckless. After stealing one safe and as it was being loaded onto a cart he said he was cold and so he returned to the premises to steal the proprietor’s coat, facing the risk of being caught.
Flood’s career included a 1900 conviction for shooting with intent to maim. After learning a Coolgardie jury had been deliberately shown his previous convictions the trial judge reversed the verdict. A two-month sentence for possession followed, which was when Flood escaped and fled the state. He was something of a cyclist, said to be able to cover several hundred miles a day, and in Adelaide in South Australia, during a housebreaking that went wrong, he stole a bicycle and pedalled away from the pursuing constable.
It is doubtful that he pedalled as far as New South Wales but it was there that, now known as Frank Duggan, he robbed the well-known philanthropic Chinese businessman Quong Tart in August 1902. He had called at Quong’s office posing as a detective, warning him of a likely robbery, and had then attacked the unfortunate man with a lead pipe and taken £20. Duggan had been seen coming down the stairs from Quong’s office by a civil engineer who drew a sketch of him, which led to his arrest.
Duggan called an alibi witnesses and the first jury disagreed on the verdict. At the second trial he received twelve years, something the press thought heavy but well merited. The underworld thought he had gone down for someone else’s robbery but that was part of the luck of the game. Quong never fully recovered from the attack and died from pleurisy at his Ashfield home eleven months later. By the end of his sentence Flood, embittered by serving a sentence for a crime he claimed he had not committed, was a broken man. Friends took him to Gippsland where he worked on a dairy farm.13
As time goes by facts become embellished and one is that Roy ‘Red Rat’ Pollitt escaped from the Katingal facility in Long Bay Gaol, Sydney, and while on the run accepted a $10,000 contract that led to the death of an innocent man. Certainly Pollitt, a bank robber by trade, had been in the notorious Katingal but his escape in June 1984 was not from there but from the NSW country Wagga Wagga police station in much less dramatic circumstances. After serving eleven years of a 29-year sentence he had been transferred to Goulburn and then to a minimum-security forestation camp in the Riverina where, within weeks of release, he walked away. He was soon recaptured in Albury near the Victorian border riding a stolen motorcycle. While in Wagga Wagga and waiting to be returned to Goulburn he was mistaken for another prisoner, who was in custody for being drunk and disorderly, and released.
The death of council worker Lindsay Simpson came at the end of a long and complicated story. His brother-in-law Alan Williams had been involved in a drug deal with ‘Mr Death’, Dennis Allen, probably the most dangerous of the sons of ‘The Matriarch’ Kath Pettingill. The deal went awry and Williams thought he might avoid prison if he dobbed in Allen. Instead Allen organised a contract with $5000 upfront, to be paid in forged notes, for Pollitt to shoot Williams.
On the evening of 18 September 1984 Pollitt shot Simpson in the driveway of a house in Cheverton Road, Lower Plenty in Melbourne, as he was about to take the baby stroller from his car. His wife, still in the car, heard her husband say, ‘Hey what’s this, you have obviously got the wrong fellow; my name’s Lindsay Simpson. You’ve got the wrong man. I have got a wife and daughter in the car,’ and then heard, ‘Get down, sucker,’ before Simpson was shot. ‘I had to shoot the guy because he saw my face,’ Pollitt said. He was sentenced to life with a minimum of twenty years, later reduced to eighteen.
In prison Pollitt took up painting. His work was exhibited in a gallery in Manyung in the Gympie Region of Queensland and the owner, Sheryn Donald, who began visiting him in prison, married him in May 2004. Curiously Kath Pettingill, who often tried to exculpate her erring lamb Dennis Allen, claimed that it was her son and not Pollittt who had killed Simpson. Not too many have accepted her version of events.14 In 2017 Pollitt was one of over 3200 foreign criminals deported to their own countries. In his case it was to Britain.
Alexander MacDonald, known as ‘The Collie Bomber’, killed his victim long after his escape. He had acquired his nickname after he bombed a hotel in the town of Collie, some 250 kilometres from Perth, in an extortion attempt. During his career he had also acquired convictions for robbery and kidnapping. After his escape from Queensland’s Borallon Correctional Centre in the autumn of 1995, where he was serving a sentence of twenty-one years for armed robbery, he advertised in a Melbourne newspaper for applicants for a job as a ‘general hand geosurvey’ in an effort to change his identity and move to Vanuatu. The prize was the opportunity of earning a fortune prospecting gold and the unfortunate successful applicant was the loner Ronald Joseph Williams.
Pioneering identity theft, MacDonald borrowed the unsuspecting Williams’ birth certificate, Medicare and bankcards and opened an account with the Plenty Community Credit Union. Next he told Williams to prepare for a two-year trip to Western Australia. He would be paying him $500 a week. In February 1996 when the pair went fishing at Cheynes Beach, 400 kilometres south of Perth, MacDonald shot him and buried the body in the dunes. With the proceeds of his various crimes he bought a boat for $32,000 and spent another $40,000 doing it up. He obtained a passport in the name of Williams and prepared to leave for Vanuatu. He was caught while hitchhiking with his brother near Melbourne. He produced papers in Williams’ name but when his fingerprints were taken the game was over. Sentenced to life imprisonment with a non-parole period of twenty-five years he indicated that he did not think—one way or another—he would survive the sentence.15
Another infamous, and more recent, escape is that of Aboriginal man Brian William Edwards, who walked out of Karnet Prison Farm near Serpentine in Western Australia in 2005 while serving a life sentence for murder. He had been transferred from a maximum-security prison to Karnet despite having escaped on two previous occasions. While he had been on the run in 1979, he shot and killed a young picnicking couple in Dawesville in Mandurah. After his recapture he pleaded guilty to two counts of wilful murder, telling a judge he only shot them because he hated white people. Edwards was sentenced to death in 1980, which was later commuted to life imprisonment without parole. This time, after eleven days on the run, he was traced to a bush camp outside Perth where he was tasered and shackled.
Along with several other escapes by prisoners, Edwards’ escape was investigated as part of a 2005 inquiry into Western Australia’s justice system, which resulted in 148 recommendations and sweeping changes. One of the most significant was the splitting of the justice portfolio into two separate departments—those of Corrective Services and the Attorney General.
While numbers of warders, prison guards, police officers and members of the public have been caught in the crossfire or deliberately killed during escape attempts, there have been far more escapees who have died trying.