Over the years convicts worldwide who have tried to escape have been fair game for warders and public alike. For example, in 1909 in England, when Johannes Witer, a Belgian convicted of a series of housebreakings, escaped from Winchester prison, the local milord took out his hounds and hunt followers to chase him down. In South Australia at the end of the nineteenth century the warders at Adelaide’s Yatala prison were so trigger happy that they were depicted in a cartoon as the Yatala Gun Club.
One who died in the saddle while in police custody was seventeen-year-old bushranger John Cummings. In August 1863 Cummings was found hiding in a loft at Menangle Creek in the Macarthur region of New South Wales and was being taken on horseback to the lock-up by Sergeant Murphy when he was shot from behind and died instantly. His brother Lawrence was suspected of shooting him by mistake, intending the bullet for Murphy, but whoever was the marksman he vanished into the bush. On 3 September Lawrence Cummings surrendered after a shootout with the police when his offsider, Frederick Lowry, had been hit in the throat and killed. Cummings pleaded guilty to six charges of robbery and was then charged with the murder of his brother. Details are scarce, but there were no witnesses to identify Lawrence and later that month, with the coroner returning a verdict of murder ‘by person(s) unknown’, the charge was dropped for lack of evidence.
In 1866, along with an offsider named Gallaway, Lawrence Cummings escaped from Berrima in the Southern Highlands through the prison’s main sewer. He hid in a drain to avoid recapture and then went on to rob the Bathurst and Bullock Flat Mail, before being retaken in 1867. In March 1871, now sentenced to serve thirty years, Cummings managed a short-lived escape in a cart of straw and sweepings. He hurt his leg climbing into the cart and became sick from the fumes when a warder noticed he was outside the gates and recaptured him. Cummings was released in somewhat controversial circumstances in March 1877. Afterwards he changed his name to James Long and from then on worked as a drover. He died in 1909.1
Another who literally died with his boots on was Frederick Ward, who went under the more imposing soubriquet of ‘Captain Thunderbolt’. As bushrangers went he appears to have been one of the more gentlemanly. His worst crime seems to have been shooting a policeman in the hand but throughout his career he committed countless robberies and thefts, often of racehorses to help in his escapes. Much of the credit for his survival as a bushranger for a little over six years, when the average life expectancy in the profession was less than half that, has been attributed to the resourcefulness of his wife, the half-Aboriginal woman Mary Ann Bugg or Yellilong, whom he met in 1860.
Quite what part she played in his criminal activities is difficult to establish. She rode with him, fed their family, and many accounts have her helping him by swimming to Cockatoo Island in Sydney to supply him with a file (sometimes the story has it as a key) that enabled him and his offsider companion, Frederick Britten, to cut their chains in a rare escape from the island. It would, however, seem she was miles away at the time working in Dungog in the Hunter Valley throughout Ward’s second term on Cockatoo Island, and did not see him again until after his escape. What is certain is that on 11 September 1863 Captain Thunderbolt and Britten slipped away from their Cockatoo Island work gang and hid for two days before swimming from the north side of the island, almost certainly to Woolwich.
Ward’s career ended in May 1870. Following yet another theft he was chased into Kentucky Creek at Uralla on the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales, where he told police officer Alexander Walker that he would rather die than surrender. Walker replied, ‘It’s you and I for it’ and plunged into the water. Walker’s horse stumbled and when Ward tried to pull the bridle to unseat him Walker shot the good Captain. Ward is buried in Uralla cemetery. In the main street of Uralla is the plaque that commemorates Walker’s bravery and nearby is the statue of Captain Thunderbolt unveiled in 1988, amid some controversy.2
Another early escape took place when Peter Fagin led three others in an attack on first the sole warder and then Acting Governor French at the prison in Rockhampton, Queensland, on 8 May 1864. With French and the warder tied up, they looted the prison armoury and made off, holding up stores and properties throughout the neighbour-hood for the next six weeks. Thomas Howson was captured in June and when the rest brazenly returned to Rockhampton to attend a dance, Danie Webster was shot in the leg and recaptured. Fagin was the next to be caught, when men posing as diggers caught him. That left John Wright, who was caught and surrendered in Cooran, near Noosa. Unfortunately one of the pistols aimed at him was defective and discharged accidentally. Wright died saying, ‘My God, what is that for?’ Webster and Fagin received twenty years on the roads and Howson a more modest twelve.
The story goes that Fagin swore revenge on his captors, particularly a William Purcell, the champion runner who had led the foot chase in which he had initially been caught after trying to cash a stolen cheque. Twenty years later two men arrived at Purcell’s property and asked him if he recognised them. When he said he did not Fagin told him who they were. They said they had thought themselves so unlucky with the law any further crime was out of the question but would he give them a few pounds to see them on their way. He did.3
Jandamarra, known as ‘Pigeon’ by white settlers and latterly as ‘Black Ned Kelly’, led a Western Australian Aboriginal group from Bunuba in the southern West Kimberley region in a struggle against European pastoralists. Arrested for killing sheep during a drought, he worked with the police at Lillimilura post until on 1 November 1894, in an effort to rehabilitate himself with his people, he killed Police Officer William Richardson and released a group of Aboriginal prisoners. On 7 November the group attacked and killed two settlers in Windjana Gorge. Hunted for the next three years, Jandamarra was shot and killed by tracker Roebourne Micki near Tunnel Creek on 1 April 1897.4
SA’s Yatala warders in the nineteenth century may have been particularly keen on a spot of target practice but a century later it was Victorian warders who scored a double when in December 1986 Joseph Ditroia, a friend of Mark ‘Chopper’ Read, and Allan Connell made an unsuccessful bid to escape from Geelong prison. Connell was hit in the right buttock and Ditroia in the left elbow. Both survived.
Repeat escapee William McEntee, with convictions for theft and fraud in Victoria and England, escaped from Yatala on 19 October 1921 and was out and about for a week with his offsider, Londoner William Digby, before they were knocked off a stolen motorcycle by the pursuing police. McEntee surrendered immediately but Digby made off until he was brought down by a bullet in his thigh and recaptured. Over the next twenty years McEntee would go on to escape on a number of occasions, including once from Ararat in south-west Victoria when he stayed out nearly a year and, after being declared an habitual criminal, from Beechworth, 280 kilometres north of Melbourne, on 5 February 1940, when he lasted on the outside until shortly before Christmas 1942.5
His offsider was not so fortunate. In 1924, on his fifth escape attempt, Digby, who had broken out of Pentridge three years earlier before his escape with McEntee from Yatala, now broke out of Port Lincoln jail for a second time—he had broken out the previous evening only to be recaptured the same night. He had left his wife and child in England and in 1922 told journalist HO Balfe, ‘I don’t know what’s become of her. She may be dead. Perhaps it’s the best thing if she is. I don’t suppose I’ll ever see her again.’ This last time he had picked off the mortar near the door of his cell and smashed the lock with a piece of wood. Chased and ordered to surrender, he refused and was running away again when the officer fired three warning shots and then a fourth, hitting Digby in the back. He died half an hour later. The coroner ruled that Digby had been given plenty of warning to surrender and the shooting was justified. Digby’s escapes garnered some support and admiration, with Smith’s Weekly suggesting, ‘The spectacle of this boy of limited intelligence without a particle of violence to his credit being chased around the country by armed police and bush volunteers is ludicrous.’
Digby’s funeral was attended by a number of mourners who drove in twelve cars to the cemetery. A member of parliament raised the question as to why no action was taken against the officer but ‘Justice’, writing in the Observer, would have none of it: ‘I can understand the attitude of sentimental, half-hysterical women weeping maudlin tears over Digby. One would expect something better from the Hon T McCallum.’6 There was also a suggestion that, in the days long before the phrase was coined, this was a suicide by police, and that Digby, who had grassed up Shiner Ryan over an escape attempt of his own, could not face the problems he would consequently encounter back inside.
Six years later, on 9 April 1930, 35-year-old John Patrick Hayes, serving a sentence for false pretences, simply walked away from work in the Yatala quarry into a waiting car and managed to stay out for nine months. He was caught after he stole another car. Traced to a house in Upper Sturt in inner south Adelaide he survived being shot in the hip as he tried to escape once more.7
There was a much more serious incident three months later on 18 July and it was one that had grave repercussions for the Yatala staff. Around 9 am Joseph Dawson, serving an eight-year sentence for robbery under arms, ran up the side of the open quarry where he was working. When warder August Berg tried to stop him William Henry Hayes, also serving eight years for robbery, and Arthur Harold Harrison, two years for burglary, held him off with shotguns that had been smuggled into the prison earlier. Another guard Edwin Strawson was taken hostage and Harrison shielded him when the others, including repeat escaper John Eustace Newchurch, wanted to kill him. They then all escaped in a car that had been left for them in the quarry, taking Strawson with them, who jumped out of the car after threats to blow his brains out.
Cut off at Summertown south east of Adelaide, the men were obliged to return to the city where the car was seen that afternoon and chased through the suburbs of St Peters, Payneham and Walkerville into Main North Road, Enfield, where a gun battle took place between the four men, police and prison guards. The car tyres were shot and the men then commandeered a truck that Harrison was driving when a policeman shot him in the head. Newchurch was in the front seat and told to stop. He put his hands up saying, ‘I can’t stop it. I give in.’ Shots came from behind the vehicle and Newchurch died outside the Adelaide Meat Store. The coroner was unable to say which of five constables had fired this fatal shot. Not that it really mattered. In both cases, unsurprisingly, the coroner ruled that the police did not know Newchurch had surrendered and that both killings were justifiable homicide.8
Dawson, who had been wounded, was soon recaptured but it was not until later that evening that Hayes was caught, dressed as a woman, his face painted and powdered. He told a constable the reason he had escaped was to give some publicity to the dreadful way in which prisoners were treated. He would go back to prison a pleased man if this was a means of bringing about an inquiry. He received fifteen years for shooting at a Constable Delderfield with intent to resist arrest and Dawson received a similar sentence. The escape cost both men another two years, making seventeen in all. In 1936 Dawson unsuccessfully applied for leave to appeal out of time against his sentence.9
On 15 August 1931 the one-eyed Robert George Lewis was another who simply walked out of Yatala. Recaptured two days later, he told the police it had been easy. After he had walked around near the gate for a little while the guard took no notice of him. Clothes had been left out for him. ‘There are twenty different ways a prisoner can escape,’ he said. While out, he laid flowers on Arthur Harrison’s grave in West Terrace Cemetery.10
Armed robber Robert Sidney Jones escaped from high-security Maitland Gaol in the lower Hunter Valley on 7 November 1940 and, fourteen months later, under siege by the police, he shot himself in the mouth in Elswick Street in Sydney’s Leichhardt on 8 January 1942, using his last bullet. In 1938 he had bailed up and shot a pawnbroker, Nathan Segal, whom he vowed to kill after the man had picked him out on an identification parade. He and his offsider Eric Kelly had been sentenced to death, commuted to life imprisonment.
Jones had managed to construct a grappling hook and climbed the Maitland wall with rope. He had previously smuggled out a letter to a friend who had a car waiting. From the moment Jones escaped Segal was placed under a police guard. After his escape Jones had been put in a cabin trunk to be shipped to South Africa with an arrangement that a crewmember would look after him on the voyage. The plan was aborted when a detective was seen near the ship on the docks. On 6 January Jones went to a party and was dobbed in by a fellow criminal for the £300 reward money. The police gathered outside and in the early hours of the next day, with the front and back of the house covered, called on him to surrender. He ran to the kitchen and began to fire at them until he had only the one bullet left.
Eric Kelly continued to maintain his innocence. At an inquiry in 1942 Segal at first said he was sure Kelly was the second man in his shop but in the hearing accepted it might have been another man. However, a former prisoner, retracting his earlier evidence, refused to say who the second man had been. After a parliamentary debate in 1945 the minister for justice referred the case back to the full Court of Appeal and in March 1946 Kelly’s case was reheard. Once again he was refused leave to appeal with the judges unanimously saying there had been no miscarriage of justice.11
One man who was lucky not to die with his boots on and not to have killed a policeman was Ernest Coffey, who at the age of sixteen had been wounded on a bayonet charge at Gallipoli. On his return to Australia he had become an accomplished motorcar thief and in 1928, on bail for a series of vehicle thefts, disappeared at Bondi in Sydney. His friends thought he might have drowned while crabbing but the police were not convinced, no doubt in part because within an hour of Coffey’s beach expedition another motorcar had also disappeared. The police were quite correct in their belief and in August he was involved in a shootout with Detective Sergeant Lionel Bowie at Mascot. He was seen in yet another stolen car and, after he abandoned it, dropped to his knees and shot at Bowie, who in turn shot in Coffey’s direction. Another officer shot Coffey in the leg and as he fell he called out, ‘You have got me, I’ll give in.’ Bowie approached him saying, ‘Drop your gun, Ernie.’ Coffey replied, ‘Come on, Lionel, don’t be afraid, I won’t shoot,’ but when Bowie came near to him Coffey shot again and missed. Later in the evening Coffey said he was sorry and knew Bowie had deliberately shot wide. ‘Some men would have shot me like a dog,’ he said quite accurately. He received four years for shooting with intent to resist arrest and a further year for the car thefts. After his release from prison he joined the Alexandria Street Mission, where he preached and sang solos.12
In more recent times there have been allegations that some police officers have also been quick on the trigger, none faster than the disgraced NSW officer, the murderous Roger Rogerson. On 29 June 1976 Rogerson and fellow members of the Special Weapons and Operations Squad tracked bank robber and jail escapee Phillip Western to a fibro house near Avoca Beach on Sydney’s central coast. After the police sprayed the house with tear gas, they fired on Western when he tried to climb out of a window. Later Rogerson engagingly told the documentary filmmaker Neil Mercer, ‘And of course he saw us. You could see he was instantly trying to get the gun out of the window. We all fired and we blew his head off.’ But it appears Rogerson generally claimed the credit for the kill, joking that the only way Western’s mother would recognise her errant son was by his ingrown toenails. ‘He was an arsehole,’ said Rogerson.
Perhaps Lawrence ‘Butchy’ Byrne only just qualifies as an escapee but he was at least escaping from the boredom of his work release from Silverwater west of Sydney when Rogerson was able to claim his second kill. Instead of working as a panel beater Byrne went on an armed robbery at Kingsford, taking the proceeds of the South Sydney Juniors club from a van on its way to the bank on 15 February 1978. ‘By the time [the car] got to the Doncaster Avenue turn off … it looked like your mother’s colander,’ Rogerson told Neil Mercer. At one time it appears Rogerson and another dubious detective, Ray Denning’s apologist, the late Arnie Tees, both claimed the kill but, when it seemed their accounts differed from a videotape of the incident, they were happy to accept lesser roles.13 In August 1979 Rogerson was also there when Gordon Thomas, another bank robber, was shot and killed at Rose Bay.
Another to go down, this time not at Rogerson’s hands, was Robin Horn, known as ‘Riphau’. While on remand he escaped from Long Bay Gaol in Malabar, Sydney, on 19 October 1984 and was out and about supporting himself with lone bank robberies until the police received a tip off on 2 April 1985 that he could be found in Bankstown. They waited for his return and when he reached for a gun he was shot and killed.14
It was not only the New South Wales police who were alleged to be trigger-happy. On bail for robbery, if not actually on the run, in Victoria, Athanasios ‘Arthur’ Ganas was killed as he tried to rob a Solo Service Station in Beach Road, Sandringham in Melbourne, on 4 October 1987. Ganas grabbed the attendant and was rifling the till when he was shot by two police officers.
Similar allegations were made against some members of the Victorian force when Arthur Nelson, known as ‘Spiderman’ because of the tattooed webs around his eyes, and who was once said to have escaped from a police cell by picking a lock with a shoelace, escaped from Belconnen Remand Centre in the Australian Capital Territory on 18 July 1988. Along with him went Desmond Appelbee, later the first man to be convicted of rape in Australia on DNA evidence, eighteen-year-old Robert Lowe and a seventeen-year-old youth.15 The four escaped after filing through steel mesh covering a cell yard. Nelson telephoned his seventeen-year-old former girlfriend after he had escaped. She later told a Wollongong court that she had been held prisoner by three of the escapees, who had threatened to burn down her mother’s house if she did not go with them. Nelson, the girlfriend, and the two other escapees were spotted by police at Shellharbour on the NSW South Coast after allegedly stealing several cars since leaving Canberra. The men ran off, but the girlfriend stayed in the car.
Robert Lowe was caught by the Victoria Police at Lakes Entrance in the state’s east after a week on the run, when the stolen vehicle he was driving was involved in a minor accident. Nelson remained at large until 27 July. The police had been carrying out Operation Grasp, designed to halt a spate of burglaries in the St Kilda and Prahran areas of Melbourne that had been taking place over the previous month. They had been told to watch out for a NSW-registered white Ford panel van. It was spotted at 11.50 am and police took off in pursuit, chasing the van into Springfield Avenue, a dead-end street. According to police, two men and two women jumped from the car. The women were caught, but the men escaped, only to be spotted again later in the grounds of Caulfield Grammar School. Police gave chase, this time on foot over fences and down streets, until the two men stopped in the garden of a house in Glen Eira Road in St Kilda East.
One police officer walked by the side of the house towards the street frontage and according to police reports the two men jumped from a clump of bushes, one armed with a beach umbrella stake capped with a metal thread. A second police officer came through the side gate and a single shot was fired by a police constable. Nelson died from the gunshot wound to the head. The seventeen-year-old youth surrendered.
At the October 1991 inquest on Nelson, who had over 150 convictions recorded against him and had the tattoos ‘Death before Dishonour’ and ‘Death or Glory’ on his body, it was suggested the police had planted the stake which they said they had mistaken for a gun before shooting him. Later the coroner Hal Hallenstein found that while in Nelson’s case the individual officers had acted courageously and performed their duty and training to the best of their ability, he criticised police tactics and firearm procedures in general.16
The youngest-ever prisoner killed in an escape was in 1957, when fourteen-year-old James Robert Gribble tried to escape from Pentridge in Melbourne. He had been detained for life for the murder of his seventeen-year-old sister Margaret. Questioned by the police he had said, ‘I’m a bit sorry this has happened but I’ll do anything when I get wild.’ At the trial no explanation was given as to why he had stabbed her forty-eight times except that his reason had gone because he had become addicted to cheap thrillers and comic books. It was not a defence that appealed to the jury but the idea that violent books and comics should be banned did appeal to both the jury and the judge when he was convicted in the July.
Meanwhile Gribble was locked up in Pentridge while the authorities decided whether to transfer him to a training prison in the country. The family priest was allowed to visit him once after he was sentenced and his parents visited him every month for twenty minutes. On 19 September a warder saw him climbing the west wall, called on him to stop and, when the boy continued, fired two warning shots. Gribble still climbed and this time the warder shot him. The boy died half an hour later.17
Gribble’s effort may have been an impromptu one but five years earlier a good deal of planning had gone into the escape attempt by Kevin Albert ‘Jackie’ Joiner and his prison offsider, 23-year-old Maxwell Carl Skinner from Pentridge. A petty thief but a talented escapee, Skinner had already escaped from various institutions four times, lasting outside for only a short time on each occasion. He was one of many prisoners who saw ‘The Light’ on a regular basis. After a 1951 escape and recapture, he told the judge hypocritically, ‘There was no regret on my part when I was caught. The only way I can show my appreciation after my sentence of three years is by coming out a better man than I have been.’
He came out within ten days. On Sunday 18 November, dressed in civilian clothes ready for a court appearance the next day, Skinner scaled a six-metre wall without a rope and ran across a section of the prison farm while under fire from the Pentridge warders. He stole a bicycle and rode past a group of girls playing tennis, telling them, ‘It looks like I’ve got a long ride in front of me today, girls.’ He was picked up on 18 December while drinking at the bar of a Fitzroy hotel. He had dyed his hair but was still easily recognised. The Light shone again and at one of his remand appearances the following January he told the court it had been a spur-of-the-moment attempt. Now he had a new interest in life and had ‘found the straight and narrow’. But Skinner’s Light soon dimmed when this time nine months were added to his sentence.
Kevin Joiner was a totally different kettle of fish. In 1945, at the age of eighteen, he was convicted of the murder of soldier Thomas Clarke in Mount Martha on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria. Clarke, Joiner and a fifteen-year-old had robbed the Maryport Guesthouse, where Joiner had once worked, and Joiner feared that Clarke would lose his nerve and dob them in. Clarke was lured into the scrub and shot. Sentenced to death, Joiner was reprieved and given life imprisonment without the possibility of remission.
A good deal of planning went into Skinner and Joiner’s escape on 14 April 1952—by now Skinner’s Light was not even flickering; it was a question of ‘If at first you don’t succeed …’ An imitation gun was made on a prison lathe and they bailed up a warder, took his rifle and made for the wall. Workmen’s ladders had been left near the cookhouse and they used them to scale it—but by now they had been seen. Joiner was over the four-metre wall before the warders reached him, but Skinner was caught and dragged back. In the fall he broke a bone in his foot.
Rolling on the ground in agony, Skinner was still telling the warders he’d make it one day. ‘I’ll really do it yet. I’ll get away, and no one will ever get me again.’ He had clearly had high hopes of success this time; he had even arranged to meet a woman that night in a Melbourne hotel. Because he was recaptured within the prison walls, Skinner was not charged with the escape but still faced disciplinary charges.
Joiner nearly made it to the safety of nearby St Paul’s Catholic Church before Warder White, ‘reputedly one of Pentridge’s best shots’, fired two warning shots. Joiner didn’t stop and the third shot was through his back. He collapsed on the lily bed at the rear of the church, where Father Norris gave him the last rites. A month later the coroner said that no blame could be attached to any of the warders. The diminutive Skinner was held responsible by inmates for Joiner’s death and as a result he was loathed in Pentridge.18
Skinner was eventually released in August 1955 and immediately put his time in Pentridge to good use, writing a series of articles for The Argus explaining yet again how he had renounced crime and was on the straight and narrow. The reason that James Robert ‘Pretty Boy’ Walker had marked him as a man to be shot when he took hostages in Pentridge was because Skinner was one of the few people who would stand up to him. Skinner’s new hero was Andrew Kilpatrick, the ‘Barwon River Killer’, who had cut the hands off Donald Lewis after he dobbed him in over a Colac robbery.
The Light faded once more. Within a year Skinner was wanted in New South Wales, where he had jumped his bail. He was not reporting to his parole officer and most interestingly a young woman, Colleen Wentworth, said he had stood over her to break and enter a Melbourne shop. She had been drinking with him and he had pushed her over the gate. When she lit a match to see where she was she dropped it and started a fire. Journo Geoff Clancy, who presumably had been deceived by Skinner’s earlier protestations, begged him to give himself up. No, said Skinner, writing back that he had a complete alibi. He had never met the girl and she must have confused him with someone else. By the way, the jacks were standing over him trying to get him to dob in his former friends.
Some prisoners lead contradictory lives inside and outside prison. A violent and controlling personality, Archie Butterly had killed a man while a teenager in Victoria. A Western Australian escapee who came east, he died on the run from the Metropolitan Remand Centre, Melbourne, in 1993. Butterly had an extensive criminal record, including convictions for manslaughter and armed robbery. In 1974 he robbed a Perth department store and three years later, while on work release, he robbed a bank, injuring two customers.
However, while in Fremantle Prison he was described as intelligent and charming. He wrote reams of prose and poetry and attended Murdoch University as an external student. Then in 1980 he and his offsider, Stephen Booth, attempted to escape by digging a hole in the wall of their cell. They entered the adjacent cell and then dug their way through to the Catholic Chapel. They removed a metal-framed window and dislodged a bar from the opening. Butterly climbed through and shimmied down a drainpipe to the roof of a walkway two floors below. Unfortunately for him, he fell from the roof to the Parade Ground and broke his foot. Meanwhile his companion panicked and returned to his cell. Realising he would be unable to escape on a broken foot, Butterly hobbled to the Stick Officer’s Hut in the Parade Ground and turned himself in.
Once questioned by a parole board as to whether he had reformed, Butterly displayed a remarkable degree of honesty, telling the board, ‘I am a professional criminal and will never get let out.’ He was being unduly pessimistic and perhaps his honesty went in his favour because he was later released. He was, however, correct in his own character assessment. He was soon arrested again, this time in Victoria, trying to rob another bank.
Meanwhile the man with whom Butterly made his final escape could from time to time count himself as unlucky. In October 1973 Peter Robert Gibb had been at an airport when a bomb hoax led to a search of passengers’ bags and in his was a rifle, a pistol and $1075 allegedly from a hold-up at an NSW TAB. Two years later he received seven years.
Gibb was given parole but in mid November 1981 he was back in Pentridge facing charges of murdering Stephen Kenneth Haines at Carnegie and of a robbery of $146,000 from a Hampton bank. The unfortunate Haines had been his offsider in a string of burglaries and after being arrested was given bail. Gibb believed that, at least on this occasion, offsider now had the same spelling as dobber. That night, armed with a .357, he went to see Haines to persuade him to stand firm. A struggle broke out and Haines died on the carpet. Gibb was convicted of murder but the conviction was overturned on appeal and in August 1994 he pleaded guilty to manslaughter and to the series of burglaries. The original bank robbery charge was dropped. The upshot was that he received thirteen years with a ten-year minimum.19
It was during this spell inside that the 27-year-old Gibb used a hacksaw blade in a makeshift frame to cut through two metal bars in the window of his second-storey cell. He then crawled through a hole 30 centimetres long by 20 centimetres wide, replacing the bars after him. Using a rope, he lowered himself into a B Division exercise yard and collected a grappling hook made from two meat hooks and three broom handles, which was hidden behind a boiler house. He scaled a wire fence and two bluestone walls using the grappling hook, before lowering himself into Church Street. Before his escape Gibb had used the time-honoured prisoners’ trick of leaving clothes and blankets bundled up in his bed, making it appear he was asleep.
For a time on this particular escape he teamed up with another escapee, Trevor John Smith, who had, it seems, confessed to another prisoner that he was the killer of seventy-year-old Brunswick priest Father George Scerri in a long-unsolved 1957 bungled robbery. When it became clear Smith was to be interviewed he escaped along with drug dealer Mbada Said Khoury. They split up and Khoury was caught shortly after driving a stolen car through Seymour, a hundred kilometres north of Melbourne. Some weeks later Smith was also picked up by police, but he managed to talk his way out of an arrest by giving a false name. Now, he teamed up with Gibb, travelling with two St Kilda prostitutes before discarding them on 5 December and moving to Jessie Street in Coburg. Smith had less than a week to live.
Gibb was the major target of the police surveillance operation and the police were staking out the premises when Smith pre-empted things by arriving tooled up with another man. He saw the police and made a dash for it, ignoring the calls of Detective Sergeant William Seddon of the CIB surveillance unit to stop. Instead he turned round and the detective, fearful of the safety of children who were playing in the street, let alone his own, fired two shots, one of them fatal. No weapon was found on Smith but the coroner said, ‘I believe that Smith was previously armed and either discarded or disposed of a revolver when being chased. Seddon was unaware of these circumstances.’ Inside the Coburg flat, police found cut-down guns, ammunition, false moustaches and sledgehammers. Gibb surrendered quietly.
As for the killing of Father Scerri, the coroner thought there was a great deal of suspicion attached to Smith but added, ‘But in my opinion there is not enough credible and corroborated evidence to conclusively link him with the murder.’ He recorded an open finding. In fairness to Smith there were a number of other names in the frame for the murder, including John Asciak, the Western Australian drug baron, who died in February 2010.
In March 1993 Gibb was sentenced to twelve years with a minimum of ten for an armed robbery. Robber and criminal chronicler Mark ‘Chopper’ Read believed that having female prison officers in a male prison was a snare and delusion. He said he knew of some who would have sex with a prisoner for $100 a shot. In the case of Heather Parker, however, it seems it was all for ‘lurve’. Married to another prison officer she fell in love with the handsome womaniser Gibb and the union was consummated in a broom cupboard. As a result Parker’s marriage and career suffered greatly.
Who supplied the explosives that blew out a second floor window of the Melbourne Remand Centre on Sunday, 7 March 1993 in the escape by Butterly and Gibb is not clear but, weapons apart, it was something of a Keystone Cops affair. Sheets were tied together but they were nine metres short of the pavement in La Trobe Street and forty-year-old Butterly, who does not seem to have been the most agile of men, fell, badly injuring his leg. Parker may not have provided the explosives but she had supplied a getaway car, a Ford Falcon with a gun in the glove box and a key in the ignition.
Gibb seems to have been about as good a driver as Butterly was an agile escaper, but in fairness they were being chased by a prison officer in a taxi. They had two crashes, the second of which was at the entrance to the West Gate Freeway, where they hijacked a motorcycle at gunpoint and rode off for the rendezvous with Parker. No better on a bike, Gibb crashed again and this time passing police intervened. Officer John Schoenpflug was shot twice and Gibb’s arm was broken by Officer Warren Treloar with a baton. Nevertheless he managed to get hold of Treloar’s service revolver and held it at Schoenpflug’s head, telling Treloar to back off. The pair then commandeered the police van and drove off to meet Parker, this time without crashing. She drove them to Frankston where she had a Mitsubishi Pajero waiting and, after they had been patched up at the La Trobe Regional Hospital and Gibb and Parker had celebrated on the back seat, off they went to the historic Gaffneys Creek Hotel near Mansfield for rest, if not recuperation.
In the middle of the night, possibly to conceal the amount of blood shed by Butterly, who was still bleeding badly, they set fire to their room and the landmark hotel went up in flames. On the following Saturday, six days later, the Pajero was found at Picnic Point near Jamieson, north east of Melbourne. Gibb and Parker were captured after a gun battle with police and Butterly was found dead. Who actually shot Butterly remains a mystery. He may have shot himself rather than be captured but there are suggestions he may have been shot by Gibb at his request. At the inquest into his death the coroner reported, ‘Whether Butterly took his own life after firing a limited number of rounds at police or he was shot by Gibb or Parker essentially will remain unanswered.’
Placed in the security wing at Barwon, Parker now claimed she was suffering from stress brought on by her colleagues’ remarks about her affair with Gibb, arguing she should be paid for sick leave from the prison service. She also appeared on Channel 9’s 60 Minutes, for which she was paid $30,000, confiscated by the court in October 2004. In July 1984 Gibb received a ten-year sentence for her part in the escape, reduced on appeal to five. A television film was later made of their exploits.
Gibb was also given ten years and after his release he was suspected of drug dealing. His later convictions included handling stolen goods, attempting to pervert the course of justice and possessing a prohibited weapon. He and Parker stayed together and had two children but in March 2007 she pleaded guilty to assaulting a girlfriend of Gibb’s three years earlier. In mitigation her lawyer claimed their relationship had been a ‘living hell’. She received eighteen months’ imprisonment, wholly suspended for thirty months. Gibb went back to prison for two months for trying to persuade the girlfriend not to give evidence.
In January 2011 Gibb, now long estranged from Parker, died from a heart attack after a bashing near his unit in Seaford in south-east Melbourne. As a joke Gibb had put a young child in a deep freeze but sadly those who saw him do it lacked his sense of humour.20
In Queensland repeat escapee Harold McSweeney was killed on a bus going to Eagle Farm in 1992. In March the previous year he and three others, including the killer and member of the prison ‘Angry Gang’, Jason ‘Waxy’ Nixon, had escaped when they hijacked a prison garbage truck inside the prison walls and rammed their way through the gates of the old Boggo Road Gaol. Two, including Nixon, were recaptured within a matter of hours and the third was found in a hotel at Brisbane’s Kangaroo Point four weeks later. McSweeney lasted another six weeks before he was caught following a car chase in Toowoomba on the Darling Downs, in which Detective Ross Barnett was shot in the hip and McSweeney rode off on a stolen motorcycle firing randomly at officers. Shortly afterwards, afraid that if the police found him they might shoot first, he walked out of the bush to surrender to Frank Warrick, a Channel 7 reporter. He received a further six months for the escape.
During their time on the run he and his colleague had carried out a series of bank robberies backed by semi-automatic SKS rifles. On 12 June McSweeney was at the Brisbane court awaiting sentence on another armed robbery charge when, at around 8.45 am as he was about to be strip-searched, he produced an imitation pistol made from polystyrene and forced a prison officer to release him from a holding cell. It was a daring but ill-thought-out and short-lived escape. Hotly pursued by half a dozen prison officers, including a dog handler, he ran along Adelaide Street across George Street to a bus stop at City Place, where he pushed his way onto a bus through the rear door, scattering passengers as he made his way to the driver, where he put the gun to his head and shouted, ‘I’ll kill you, get going!’, ordering him to drive off. The driver bravely refused and by this time the bus was surrounded. Prison officer Roy Coker ordered him to surrender and when McSweeney waved the balsa-wood gun at him, Coker shot him dead.
A former warder at Boggo Road described the killing enthusiastically: ‘The twitching body was dragged from the bus and onto the roadway with blood running everywhere. A handcuff was applied to his wrist but it was not required.’ Full of regret and the subject of death threats, sadly Coker killed himself on 27 January 1994.21
Understandably McSweeney’s family wanted to know why he had not been shot in the leg. The answer was that the head was the only clear target the officer had. And why had McSweeney not been handcuffed and in leg shackles? Because he was being strip-searched was the answer to that. His mother thought that his treatment in prison was the reason for his criminality. The Courier-Mail thought that maybe he had been soured by the death of his sister in a fire.22
During his criminal career McSweeney was said to have trained sixteen year olds in the art of bank robbery. Unsurprisingly he did not trust banks and hid his share of a $240,000 hold-up of an Armaguard truck in a cemetery. The police found it when they followed a woman who had visited him in prison to the graveyard. He was also believed to have helped plot the 29 April 1991 escape of fellow blagger Marco Guilo Pernich, who was awaiting sentence for a robbery at Brisbane’s Carindale shopping centre on 5 February 1990. He and another man had held up two Armaguard security officers and stolen $150,000. One bandit, wearing a panama hat and writing on a small briefcase, suddenly produced a gun and told them to lie on the ground. The other, who had been out of sight behind an ice cream delivery van, had a sawn-off .22. They escaped in a stolen sedan.
While on remand Pernich had poured bleach in his eyes and as he arrived at the casualty department of the hospital at around half-past six in the evening two armed men poked a gun through the ambulance window. Pernich snatched one of his guard’s .357 revolver and they all made off. He was not found for just over a year, when he was confronted and surrendered in Melbourne on 5 June 1992. Pernich was found hanged in Sir David Longland Correctional Centre in Wacol, Brisbane, on 3 February 2001, one of the ‘suicides’ later investigated as possible killings by members of the Angry Gang.23 If James ‘Jockey’ Smith did not kill anyone during his many escapes it was more by good luck than good judgement. Smith, born in 1942, the second-youngest of eight children, was brought up in Colac in Victoria, and was known as ‘Jockey’ because, as a teenager, he was apprenticed to a trainer. Unfortunately, he grew too heavy to be a jockey and took up garage breaking. Aged nineteen, Smith, until then a cleanskin, was sentenced to eighteen months with a nine-month minimum. His co-accused, who had a criminal record, received less, and it is generally thought that this apparent injustice soured Smith against the system.
It was while he was serving this sentence that Smith met Ronald Ryan. After they were released, they teamed up and this time it was Smith who tried to shoot a police officer when he was caught after robbing a branch of Mark Foy’s in 1962. Fortunately, the gun jammed.
From 1963 onwards, Smith served short sentences for a variety of offences, including breaking and entering, and possession of explosives. In 1973 when Police Constable Russell Cook was searching a car, Smith tried to shoot him and, once more, the gun jammed. He made his way to Sydney and in December 1974 was arrested there at gunpoint with Marko Motric, Stanley Ernest Jones and docker Chuckie Bennett’s great friend Brian O’Callaghan—another man who could be described as ‘a robber’s robber’—on a charge of conspiring to steal money from the Public Transport Commission at Redfern. All were also charged with the robbery of a $75,000 railway payroll.
Smith was granted $10,000 bail but, not surprisingly given his track record, he failed to appear in Sydney’s Central Criminal Court the next month. He was arrested, again at gunpoint, the same month while sunbathing on Sandringham’s beach in Melbourne with Valerie Jane Hill, the robber Bertie Kidd’s former wife, and her daughter. Sent to Pentridge, he was there only a matter of days before, on 10 December, he blagged a visitor’s pass from a migrant, Todor Jovanovski, changed his clothes in the visitors’ lavatory, and walked out. A prison officer chased him towards Sydney Road until Smith got in a car and was driven off, allegedly by Valerie Hill, who was later charged with assisting his escape.
One thing Smith was good at was dealing with horses, and so he combined the names of two of the country’s top trainers, Tommy Smith and Bart Cummings, and set up as trainer Tom Cummings. He did well at country tracks but usually country trainers do not have the Winxs of this world in their yards and the nearest their lives get to a bed of roses is running down the field at Rosehill. So it was back to the work he did best.
On 21 January 1976 he shot and injured Constable Jerry Ambrose in a robbery in Kensington, Sydney. On 13 June the following year, book-maker and crime associate Lloyd Tidmarsh was killed at his home in Kogarah. The prosecution would claim that Smith and his offsiders broke into Tidmarsh’s home about 11 pm on the Monday of a long weekend, the assumption being the bookmaker would have a substantial amount of cash in his safe. He was working at a desk in his office when the robbers entered the house and demanded the contents of the safe. His son was dragged out of bed, and he and Tidmarsh were forced to lie face down on the office floor, the son being told he would be shot if he moved. Apparently, he did move, and one of the robbers hit him. Tidmarsh went to help his son and, after a struggle, four shots were fired, one hitting him in the heart. Tidmarsh’s daughter would give evidence that she recognised Smith’s voice—when Smith was excited, it became very high and squeaky—as that of a man she had heard in her mother’s bedroom.
By this time, with some justification, Smith was being described as the most dangerous criminal in New South Wales. He was living in Humbug Reach, near the south coast town of Nowra, when the police were tipped off. On 14 September 1977 more than sixty police and a naval helicopter searched the area and, after one of Smith’s neighbours in Illaroo Street told them he had heard gunshots, the police moved in on a small cottage at the end of the street. There they found Valerie Hill and Smith’s dog, which was shot when it attacked them. But Smith had gone.
Later he was seen running into the bush by the Shoalhaven River. He more or less hijacked a car, telling the woman driver to take him to Bomaderry train station, where he was cornered in a telephone booth. He always denied that he then tried to shoot Detective Bob Godden in the stomach. The detective saved himself by putting his thumb between the breech and trigger of the gun in Smith’s hand. In court, Smith’s lawyer, Brian Cash, made a fighting statement:
The defendant has been the subject of unfair character assassination in the press. He tells me he wonders if there is any sense of fair play. He has instructed me to say he is not guilty of all charges … Police in this State and the State of Victoria have found it fashionable to make Smith their scapegoat for their own difficulties in solving major crimes.
At the end of December 1977 Smith was committed for trial with O’Callaghan and the others. It was alleged that, following up the good work of Shiner Ryan and Jewey Freeman half a century earlier, they had intended to rob the Eveleigh railway workshops. The same month he was charged with Western Australia’s then biggest hold-up, the snatch of the taxation department’s $176,000 payroll two years earlier.
At his trial in Sydney for the attempted murder of Constable Ambrose, he told the jury that he had not been in New South Wales on that day. His confession, he said, had been fabricated because, ‘I have been an embarrassment to the police force for making these allegations against them all the time.’ Fabricated records of interviews had been used against him previously, he said, and he had been trying to have the records investigated. The jury convicted him after an hour and on 17 March he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
There was worse to come for Smith. On 27 April 1978 he had a long day in court, defending himself in committal proceedings on a charge that, armed with pistols, a carbine and a shotgun, he had assaulted Kenneth Augustine McNamara and others on 2 March 1976 and robbed them of $71,640. After the court adjourned, he was charged with the Tidmarsh murder and with robbing him of papers and an unknown amount of money.
In September 1978 Smith went on trial, along with Francis Montgomery (who, in 1947, had been sentenced to seven years for an armed robbery at the home of jockey Athol Mulley) and Neil Collings, charged with having robbed Daniel Taylor of $180,000 at South Hurstville. Collings allegedly told the police that he had received merely $40 as his share, and had only taken part because he was being stood over by a big bookie to whom he owed $40,000.
Valerie Hill was charged with being an accessory after the fact. It was alleged she had driven Smith to Sutherland so he could take part in the robbery, and had then driven him back to Nowra. She received four and a half years with a two-year non-parole period. In January 1980 she and Smith married in Long Bay Gaol. Collings had collapsed in the cells at Darlinghurst Courthouse while the jury was out and died following a heart attack. Francis Montgomery, who pleaded guilty, received ten years.
It was July 1983 before Smith was found guilty of the Tidmarsh murder. Seventy-eight witnesses had been called in the case, in which he defended himself, the trial lasting five months. The jury took a mere two and a half hours to reach a verdict. He was sentenced to another term of life imprisonment on 9 September for what Mr Justice O’Brien called ‘a deliberate and vicious killing’. In 1986 the Court of Appeal quashed the conviction on the grounds of O’Brien’s inadequate directions to the jury and ordered a retrial. It never took place.
Smith was released on 12 February 1992 and the next day was shot in the chest and left for dead outside his home in Curlewis Street, North Bondi. Dr Crozier, who was on duty the day Jockey was brought in to St Vincent’s, recalled:
When he arrived he had multiple gunshot wounds to the chest and abdomen; he was barely alive. We split him from the chest to just above the penis, a big mid-line incision. He’d been shot through the liver and bowel but it hadn’t hit the heart or aorta, so he survived … He left the indelible impression in me that with the right combination of good luck and good treatment a person can survive multiple gunshot wounds.
This is a far cry from the 1920s and 1930s, when a gunshot victim was likely to develop peritonitis, and must be a source of great comfort to today’s wannabes.
There were suggestions Smith included the police among his likely attackers and, in a press release on behalf of the Campaign Exposing Frame Ups and Targeting Abuses of Authority, former armed robber turned prison activist Brett Collins movingly wrote, ‘When Jimmy Smith was shot last night it just continued the long line of abuse and attacks on this gentle person’.
Naturally, Smith declined to help the police, who said that he had so many enemies it would be difficult to say who might have shot him. He was in hospital for a month and then, on 12 June, one of Smith’s offsiders, former boxer turned standover man Desmond Anthony Lewis, was shot at Bondi Junction on his way home from the Nelson Hotel, where he had been watching a rugby league match. The killing was thought to be linked to both Smith’s shooting and also to a killing the previous year.
For a time, Smith, said to be so mean he would ‘bite the head off a shilling’, made good money dealing in amphetamines. But, according to his colourful solicitor, the column-writing Chris Murphy, he gradually became something of a recluse. In November 1992 he broke the rule of never shoplifting for oneself and tried to steal an iron from a Grace Bros store at an Erina shopping mall. When the store detective stopped him, yet again he produced a gun and hijacked a couple to drive him away. Hiding in the bush, he teamed up with Christopher ‘Bad Boy’ Binse—then an escapee from Pentridge—plotting a series of armed robberies.
Smith died on 5 December 1992. About 8 pm Senior Constable Ian Harris saw him speeding and followed him to the Farmers Arms Hotel in Creswick near Ballarat, Victoria. Asked for identification, Smith pulled a gun on the officer, ordering him to hand over his own gun. When Harris kept it just out of reach of the smaller man, Smith fired a shot into the ground and said, ‘I’ll give you ten seconds to get your gun out of your pocket and get on the bonnet or I’ll blow you away.’ When Darren Neil, a driver in another car who had seen the incident, approached, Smith fired another shot into the ground. Neil retreated, drove his car a short way and dropped off his children. He then drove the car at Smith, distracting him. Harris pulled his own revolver and shot Smith three times in the chest. Former police officer Peter Haddow, appearing on the television program Tough Nuts, said, ‘In the pocket of his jeans was a canister of mace. He could’ve used that mace rather than fire shots at Ian Harris and Darren Neil. But he chose what he knew best.’
After his death, his wife Valerie Hill told Channel 9’s A Current Affair that Jockey was not a dangerous man, and that there had been no need for her husband to be shot: ‘He wouldn’t harm anybody, no matter what he’s been blamed for. He’s one of the kindest, most gentle, men you could ever meet.’ As for enemies in the underworld, he had none. ‘He was well liked and respected by his friends, so why would he have any enemies on this side?’
Generally opinions were divided. The police thought he had taken part in a recent armed robbery in which shots were fired and hostages taken. There was also a story circulating that, at the time of his death, he had been contracted to murder a police officer on the Central Coast in New South Wales, who had made allegations against his colleagues. Very much Smith’s modus operandi, it was said.
On the other hand, Chris Murphy wrote that Smith had been a protector of the young and weak in prison and that, after he had been shot at Bondi, prisoners and criminals raised $30,000 with a whip-round for him. Smith had given it to a friend to hold but the police had seized it. Murphy was instrumental in its return. Now the prisoners at the Metropolitan Training Centre sent a $500 wreath for his funeral. An associate commented that, ‘Like so many of us he was getting too old to go back to jail.’ A coroner’s verdict, as in so many of these cases, could so easily have been ‘suicide by police’.24
While many escapees paid the ultimate price for their attempt at freedom, others looked on repeat escaping as a career path.