The death of James Robert ‘Pretty Boy’ Walker in Pentridge on 26 May 1954 was a curious affair. Whether gunman and standover man Walker actually died after a failed escape attempt as the newspapers suggested is open to question. At first the papers reported his death as an escape attempt, with warders shooting, when he and two offsiders made a break for it, but in reality it was nothing like that. One of ten children and generally regarded as one of the more formidable men of the post-Second World War Melbourne underworld—until he came up against Leslie ‘Scotland Yard’ Walkerden, that is—Walker shot himself in the head in his cell in B Division.
Suspected of the September 1937 shooting of Jerry Lynch in the Tophatters Club in Sydney’s Kings Cross, Walker was also in the frame for two other murders, but the worst thing on his record in his early years had been a sentence of two and a half years for the theft of a tray of jewellery in Lismore in northern New South Wales. Released in 1939 Walker, regarded as courteous, charming and cold-blooded in equal parts, moved to Melbourne at the outbreak of war as a gun for hire and debt enforcer, commanding high fees. In 1941 he opened his own baccarat school in a one-bedroom flat in Grey Street, East Melbourne, reckoning on profits of £100 a night. His partners included the treacherous James Coates, who was crooked enough to cheat his own school, and the club was regularly raided by the police and lasted only five months. After that Walker returned to the standover racket and was shot by Walkerden in the thigh.
Some weeks later, near the old Melbourne Hospital, he was shot once more by Walkerden. Walker dragged himself up the steps and, amazingly, survived. He had clothes smuggled into the hospital and went back to Sydney. On his return to Melbourne he was once more set up to be killed by Walkerden, in what was to have been a meeting of reconciliation in Lonsdale Street. Instead in a taxi-cab chase through Swan, Bourke and Russell streets, Walkerden opened fire in Little Collins, hitting the taxi in which Walker was travelling. Two of the bullets ricocheted into the wall of the King’s Hotel. Walker had the cab driver take him to Spencer Street Station and once more he padded back to Sydney. From there he took a job as a kitchen porter on the Queen Mary, which was being used as a troop ship. It would be some time before he ventured to Melbourne again.
By the time he did, in his absence his estranged wife Rita had taken up with the bully and standover man Tom Fogarty. It appears that on 17 March 1953 Walker was in Barkly Street, St Kilda, on other business when he heard a woman call out and realised it was his wife fleeing from Fogarty, who was threatening to kill her. Walker, conveniently armed with a shotgun, shot him in the stomach. When Fogarty cried out, ‘Help me …’ Walker said he would and did so by firing again. Walker was arrested in a boarding house in South Yarra two days later.
Sentenced to death he told the judge, Justice Gavan Duffy, ‘I ask you to recommend the death penalty be carried out. I would appreciate it very much if you would.’ After the Ronald Ryan case there was never any question Walker would be hanged and, reprieved, he began his life sentence in Pentridge, where he seems to have had friends on both the inside and outside. He had a constant supply of both cigarettes and alcohol. At the time of his death two flasks of whisky were found in his cell.
Walker managed to get hold of a gun along with thirty-six bullets and decided to execute five criminals he considered to be scum. They included Maxwell Carl Skinner, whom he blamed for the death of Keith Joiner in an escape attempt; Harold Dusty Sheehan, whom he thought was standing over other prisoners digging an escape tunnel; and William John O’Meally, who on 30 January 1952 had killed a policeman, George Howell, in Caulfield. According to the official report, during the afternoon of 26 May Walker had reported sick and as was the practice he was told to remain in his cell. He then asked to see the warder in charge of B Division, saying he had something confidential to tell him.
He was taken to see the warder in charge and when the warder was told it was a private matter the escorting officer left the room. Walker then pulled out his gun and politely told the warder in charge, ‘I am sorry to say what I am going to say. I am a desperate man,’ adding that he had six bullets in the gun. ‘Five, I can use five of them on you and still have one left for myself.’ The man who had gone outside was called back in and tied up, as was Senior Warder Ashe. For some reason Walker put the gun down on the desk and Ashe made a grab for it, fired and hit Walker in the foot. The gun fell to the ground and, being handcuffed to the desk, he dragged it behind him and again tried to get Walker’s gun. Walker kicked him in the face, breaking his nose, and then reloaded the gun but, instead of shooting Ashe, he ran back to his cell.
Once other warders had heard shots being fired they went to the armoury and drew guns and ammunition. Walker was surrounded and when it became clear he would have to shoot a warder, he shot himself in the head instead. He was taken to the Royal Melbourne Hospital where he died. He left behind detailed allegations of widespread corruption and brutality in Pentridge, which were published in The Argus. Again it was a mystery to the authorities how he could have so much writing paper at his disposal. Following what Chief Secretary Galvin described as a ‘most searching investigation’, his allegations were unsurprisingly rejected as ‘extravagant and wild assertions’ that were ‘partisan and grossly exaggerated to attract attention’.1
The only conclusion reached at Walker’s inquest in September that year was that he had killed himself but not everyone in Pentridge agreed on that. Walker was extremely popular with the inmates so not surprisingly allegations were made that warders had killed him. Journo Brian Hansen thought, ‘The evidence may well have justified an open verdict had it been subjected to rigorous cross-examination.’ It was not. The coroner recorded that he was ‘unable to say what state of mind the deceased was in at the time’. Nor was it ever established how he managed to smuggle out the manuscript that was later published. Perhaps more significant was the unanswered question of why the police were not allowed in for twenty-one hours after Walker’s death. ‘Something is rotten in the state of Pentridge,’ said The Argus on 1 September, calling for a full inquiry. No, said the government ten days later.2
One gangland death in Melbourne that went unsolved for twenty years was of James John, a standover man at a Two-up school, who was shot five times as he walked in the Exhibition Gardens in Carlton by a man who leapt out of a car. It was not until Walker’s death that diary entries confirmed it was he who had shot John. Walker also admitted shooting and killing Johnny Downs in Gore Street, Fitzroy, and wounding Jack Devine near Caulfield racecourse in December 1933, as well as also claiming a Mr Fixit as the man ‘to go to’ in Melbourne’s underworld. But the secret of who he was died with Walker.3
In September 1970, trusty Terrance Haley, Murray Andrew Brooks and Raymond Clifford Gunning had been allowed out for afternoon work from Cadell Training Centre on the Murray River, 180 kilometres north of Adelaide. That afternoon the work consisted of stealing a car and making their way to a remote farmhouse. There they surprised the Schiller family, tied them up, stole rifles, kidnapped the daughter Monica Schiller and tore the ignition wires out of her boyfriend Graham Smith’s car. Some time later the resourceful Smith managed to bite through his ropes and raise the alarm.
Two days later a light aircraft pilot spotted the escapees, after they had crashed their car in the bush. They were recaptured following a short gun battle at the Birdsville Track near the Northern Territory border. They had been hoping to make it to Darwin and board a boat to Malaysia. Haley received a total of fifteen and a half years for the kidnapping. It had been a fairly pointless exercise because all three had been due for release within a few months. Happily, Monica was released relatively unscathed.4
It is barely credible that within two years Haley was allowed out of Yatala one afternoon to play tennis on 6 January 1972. He and Lloyd Murray Reed escaped along with another two prisoners. One was caught immediately but the other three made it into New South Wales where, four days later, they were caught after a high-speed chase. They had been seen holding up a takeaway food shop in Mascot, Sydney, and the number of their car was noted. This time he received thirteen years.
For Haley it was a round of the harsher New South Wales prisons of the time with his stints including an extra two years for his part in the notorious Bathurst riots of 1982. Then in February 1983, sent back to South Australia, he was brought naked into court in Adelaide and charged with assaulting two prison officers. The charges were dismissed and the South Australian Ombudsman called for an independent government inquiry into the incident. He did have some fortune. His case was taken up by Gabrielle Carey, who had written the teen novel Puberty Blues with the later bestselling author Kathy Lette. Carey later wrote Just Us, an account of her relationship with Haley. It was made into a film in 1986.
Some escapees who kill do so back in prison rather than while on the run. On the outside Edwin Eastwood simply kidnapped his victims. On Friday afternoon 6 October 1972 he and Robert Boland snatched an entire school, consisting of twenty-year-old teacher Mary Gibbs and six pupils, during music class at the Faraday Primary School near Bendigo, locking them in a van and demanding a $1 million ransom. The kidnapping followed that of Graeme Thorne, abducted and killed by Stephen Bradley for the money won by his parents in a lottery. The government said it would pay the $1 million unconditionally. Minister Lindsay Thompson volunteered personally to deliver the money but it was not necessary. When Boland and Eastwood left the van unguarded, the enterprising Mary Gibbs kicked out the door and led the children off to safety. Boland, whom Eastwood always maintained was innocent, naming a David O’Ryan as his co-kidnapper, received sixteen years and Eastwood a year less.
Four years later, in December 1976, Eastwood masterminded an escape from his cell on the ground floor of the east wing in Geelong Gaol, taking with him Michael Pantic, then serving a sentence for shooting at a policeman following a sixteen-hour rampage in the Dandenongs. Eastwood was the prison’s radioman and he occupied the cell next to the one where the radio equipment was kept. There was an opening between the two cells so he had, in effect, a double suite. He and Pantic scraped away the mortar between their adjacent cells, replacing it with wet toilet paper carefully painted over to make it look like plaster. They then did the same with the wall between the radio cell and the passageway leading to the outside laundry yard.
On the night of their escape, the two men slipped into the passageway, forced the padlock on the grille gate to the yard and climbed over the wall. Their absence was not discovered until the following morning. In fact, in the same week while they were out, armed robber Michael Considine and burglar Frederick Brooks jumped the jail’s outer wall and were off. Unsurprisingly the Victorian Minister for Social Security said that to lose four prisoners in a week was a ‘deplorable situation’.5
Pantic was recaptured a week later but Eastwood remained at large until 15 February 1977, when he returned to his old habits and kidnapped nine children and their male teacher from Wooreen Primary School in South Gippsland, demanding a $7 million ransom. During the day he captured a further six people after the stolen ute he was driving collided with a timber lorry and men in two other vehicles had stopped to investigate. Recaptured after a high-speed chase, this time he was sentenced to twenty-one years.
In 1981 while in Jika Jika, Pentridge’s prison within a prison, Eastwood stabbed convicted rapist Glen Davies and was acquitted after claiming self-defence. While inside he completed a religious course run by Seventh Day Adventists and was paroled in 1990. Unfortunately, within three months he was caught after a factory burglary and his parole was revoked. He was sentenced to a further twelve months’ imprisonment. He later wrote a book about his experiences.6
On Sunday 5 September 1982, four Long Bay prisoners, including two convicted murderers, planned to blow their way out of the Sydney jail during visiting hours. They had prepared a sketch map of the prison, sheet ropes and improvised Molotov cocktails made from coffee jars into which they planned to put lawnmower fuel. Another part of the plan was to make ladders out of broomsticks and bedheads. However, they made the mistake of telling other prisoners that they were going to seize a warder and hold him hostage. Their cells were raided and Steven Elliott, aged twenty-one, Terry Hitchens, eighteen, John William Day, twenty-eight, and Paul Martin, eighteen, were charged with conspiring to escape.
Elliott and Hitchens had been convicted of the murders of two taxi drivers, Raymond Savage and John Allen, in the June and were awaiting sentence. Day was serving fourteen years for armed hold-ups and Martin was a mere car thief. After the attempt was thwarted Elliott and Hitchens were moved to Goulburn while Day and Martin were moved to a higher-security unit in Long Bay. Later Elliott told Corrective Services Superintendent Ron Woodham that it was all Hitchens’ plan. ‘The go was to firebomb one of the back towers, torch the screw in the back tower and get his gun.’ Hitchens was said to have told a police officer he had been the ringleader but added defiantly, ‘If I am charged there will be more than petrol bombs going off.’7
Another poor year for the Pentridge authorities was 1983. In the previous five years only seventeen had broken out but this year twelve escaped. They included armed robbers Trevor Charles Bradley, Ross Anthony Burleigh, Peter Kay Morgan and murderer Norman Leslie Bloomfield, who escaped on 16 April leaving behind copies of jail blueprints along with an oxyacetylene torch, a hydraulic jack and wire cutters. The four made it to Healesville and at 7 am on the following Sunday burst into the house of a family at nearby Christmas Hills. Armed with knives they tied up the man and woman and their two children, holding them for thirteen hours until dark. They then stole their car to get away, after which the family raised the alarm at 8.15 pm.
After that they held up five teachers, tying them up at gunpoint at a Rotary youth camp near Bendigo. Morgan and Bradley, who had injured his ankle during the escape, were caught after the police tracked a stolen Jeep they were driving to Merton. Burleigh was captured while hitchhiking on the Maroondah Highway near Merton. But Bloomfield got away, hiding on farmland, and lasting on the outside until the following Saturday, when he was caught on his twenty-fifth birthday as he tried to climb a fence at Euroa, 151 kilometres north-east of Melbourne. He had been recognised when he went to buy a newspaper and cigarettes. He told the police he had intended to buy himself six stubbies for his birthday and was planning to return to the city by jumping a freight train. His birthday was ruined even further when he was bitten by a police dog and had to be taken to a doctor for injections. The search had cost the police $10,000 a day.
However, Morgan was not finished. In June that year warders foiled an escape in which he was involved along with Kevin Gutsell, who was serving life for murder, and Barry Quinn, serving life for a double murder during a robbery at a motel in St Kilda. This time Morgan and Quinn had managed to climb the mesh grille from above the exercise yard before they were found cutting the wire mesh.8
Morgan and the others received lengthy sentences for the kidnappings. Quinn did not live long enough to try another escape.
On 24 March 1989, two prisoners, Stephen Burnett and Peter Boyd in Fremantle Prison for armed robbery, were on sick parade at the prison’s hospital. At around 10 am, when a garbage truck paid its weekly visit to collect rubbish from the hospital kitchen, the prisoners used a knife to overpower the driver and commandeered the truck. They drove it across the East Bank and rammed the metal gates in the south wall, but on the fourth attempt they managed to break through, taking the gates partly off their hinges. The guard in No. 3 gun tower fired on the truck, shooting out the front tyres as it was reversing into the street. The men drove the truck for less than a kilometre to Wray Avenue, where they abandoned it in the middle of the road. They then dragged a taxi driver from his cab outside the Beaconsfield Hotel and a chase involving several police cars and three police helicopters began.
Three quarters of an hour later they abandoned the cab in Yangebup, taking to bushland near the railway line. Police caught Boyd, but Burnett, armed with a carving knife, evaded them. He then ran into a nearby residence and threatened the two men there with the 30-centimetre knife. Both men were ordered outside to their car, where one of them escaped and raised the alarm. Burnett drove away with the other man as hostage in the stolen car.
Police lost track of the vehicle for more than an hour but at 12.40 pm it was seen in Kelmscott. Detectives chased and stopped the stolen car in a side street off Albany Highway. Abandoning the car and his hostage, Burnett ran into the nearby bush but was captured within minutes. Boyd and Burnett were eventually returned to Fremantle Prison and later charged with a series of offences relating to the events of their escape. Alterations were made as a result of the escape, including the addition of bollards and steel ropes both inside and outside the gates and a Cyclone mesh fence, closing off part of the area.
One man who seized a number of hostages in an unsuccessful escape attempt, when he was cornered after a bank robbery, was 35-year-old Turkish-born Hakki ‘Tim’ Bahadir Atahan. By the time of his death in a police shoot-out Atahan, who had arrived in Australia in 1970, was thought to have robbed at least seventeen Sydney banks, netting over $175,000. The time span was just under nine months.
He had first lived in the western suburbs before he opened a takeaway on Parramatta Road in Auburn. Unfortunately he was a heavy gambler and as a result lost his business and his marriage. He then became a cab driver but his career ended on the afternoon of 31 January 1984. After robbing two banks, he was then chased into the Commonwealth Bank in George Street by police and staff from the two banks at around 3.15 pm. Undaunted, he fired a shot and demanded to be given all the $50 notes the bank had. By now the bank had been surrounded. He took the staff hostage, believing he was now in a position to bargain.
Over the next two hours the police did try to negotiate with him and he told the manager, Graeme Stewart, ‘It’s just like the movies,’ a reference to the Sidney Lumet film Dog Day Afternoon. Around a quarter to six, using five of the staff as a human shield, he walked out of the bank’s front doors and, hijacking a Datsun car, bundled the hostages inside, forcing Stewart to drive. Followed by police marksmen in a chase-cumsurveillance involving thirty-nine police cars, a police helicopter and four water police launches, after two hours he freed one hostage and collected his 23-year-old girlfriend, telling her he was doing this for his daughter. It was after that he was trapped on Spit Bridge, which crosses Middle Harbour in Sydney, when it was raised.
As Detective Constable Stephen Canellis approached, Atahan shot him and was immediately shot and killed in turn. Canellis survived the bullet that entered his face and lodged in his chest. So much for doing this for his daughter. Atahan had lived in some style in a sixteenth-floor Manly apartment block and had a number of sports cars financed by his robberies.9
Overall, hostage taking, leading as it does to even more messy situations, has not proved to be a good escape tactic. Nor, in the future, is it likely to prove any more successful.