If it was possible, during the winter and spring that followed the death of Pretty Boy Walker, who committed suicide after taking hostages in Pentridge in Melbourne, things went from bad to worse in the prison. On 2 July 1954 there was a report that William O’Meally had shot two warders and jumped the wall. Newspaper offices and radio stations were jammed with inquiries about what turned out to be a false story. At the time O’Meally was serving life for the 1952 murder of police officer George Howell, shot at point-blank range when he tried to arrest a car thief near the Crystal Palace theatre in Caulfield. The evidence against O’Meally was strange. Before he died Howell said the man who had shot him called him a ‘fucking walloper’, an almost obsolete expression. Another officer recalled that on an occasion when he had chased O’Meally he had used the same phrase. O’Meally called an alibi which went badly astray, but he always denied he had shot the officer.
After the July false alarm, four warders were threatened by prisoners in C Division on 9 September. On the same day O’Meally injured two of the five warders who had come to his cell in B Division. Reports stated that he had been drinking a prison brew made from the black dye used for soles in the leather shop. The next day inmates and warders fought a pitched battle in B Division, the wing of choice for professional criminals who preferred to stay there rather than move to the dormitory conditions of J. It started when six of them, including O’Meally, robbers John Henry Taylor and Kevin McGarry, and housebreaker Ronald Blamey, locked themselves in a cell. A warder took a pistol and fired four shots through the grille, hitting McGarry in the knee. The men then took out the chocks which had wedged the door, but when the warders came into the cell fighting broke out before the men were taken for a spell of stone breaking in the punishment block two hundred yards away. In the Royal Melbourne Hospital McGarry would not explain why they had barricaded themselves in saying, ‘Let’s say we did it for fun.’1
Blamey, who was serving a twelve-month sentence, was later found hanged in his cell. Along with three others, he had escaped from French Island, south east of Melbourne, in May 1952, stealing a boat, two bicycles and a car for which he had received an additional twelve months. He managed to stay out for a month before he was arrested in Adelaide. Now he had hanged himself with a leather belt strapped to the bars, leaving a message written with a burned match: ‘Please deliver my body to mum.’2
On 27 August 1955 O’Meally and the robber and serial prison escaper John Henry Taylor were part of the five-man group who escaped from H Division in Pentridge. O’Meally was recaptured the same day in Coburg, not far from the prison but, along with Peter Dawson, who was shot in the back in the escape. Taylor committed a series of car hijackings and burglaries before he robbed Ladner’s jewellery shop in Smith Street, Collingwood on 6 September. He was chased and crashed the Chevrolet he was driving in Bell Street. For the breakout O’Meally received an additional forty-two months, and Peter Dawson three years. One of these years was made concurrent with the sentences they were serving. Taylor received an additional seven and Dawson six and a half, some of it concurrent with the respective twelve- and seven-year sentences for the robberies. Sentencing them Mr Justice Monahan said he did not wish to impose crushing sentences.3
His kindness went unrewarded, at least as far as O’Meally and Taylor were concerned. In March 1957 the pair, now armed with a .38 automatic handgun that had been smuggled in, again escaped from Pentridge. Chief Penal Officer Robert Davis tried to stop them and was shot in the thigh, breaking his femur. They then carjacked a ute belonging to Norman Beechey, who was filling it with oil at a nearby garage. Taylor threatened Beechey with a knife and when he fought back O’Meally produced the gun. Off they drove with the bonnet flapping, warders chasing and firing shots and, in turn, Taylor firing through the broken rear window. Finally the bonnet flapped to the windscreen, completely blocking O’Meally’s view, who then crashed the ute. Warders surrounded the pair and tied them up with rope to take them back to Pentridge. The escape had lasted thirteen minutes.
On 31 October 1957 Mr Justice Hudson told O’Meally and Taylor, ‘You are both clearly beyond hope of reform. Simply to sentence you to a further term of imprisonment would be to impose a totally inadequate form of punishment, and would provide no real deterrent against further attacks of a like character.’ They were sentenced to ten more years in jail. In O’Meally’s case, this added nothing to his sentence but the judge also sentenced both to twelve strokes of the cat o’ nine tails, to be delivered in one session. This would be the first flogging in Victoria since 1943. O’Meally appealed to the Supreme Court and then the High Court of Australia, both of which upheld the order.
The floggings of Taylor and O’Meally, carried out on 1 April 1958, were the last ever in Victoria. O’Meally claimed it took three months for him to recover after it had opened his rib cage. He said that he was returned to his cell with open chest and back wounds, and was not given any medical attention. He served twenty-seven years before being released on parole on 5 July 1979. The State Cabinet had accepted a recommendation of the Adult Parole Board. The State Governor, Sir Henry Winneke, who curiously had prosecuted their 1952 murder trial, ratified the decision. O’Meally maintained his innocence over the killing of the police officer long after his release. He was last heard of in Queensland in 1995 and it is thought he may have died there.4
In New South Wales a young man, Bernie Matthews, first made headlines by escaping from Long Bay’s Central Industrial Prison in November 1970. Laundry vans are a fairly common way out of a prison but Matthews went out in the pig slops. ‘There were two trustees who used to collect the stale bread and veggies that were put in chaff bags and wheeled through the main gates to the piggery.’ Although a prison warder was supposed to prod each chaff bag to check there were no potential escapees inside, it appears there was one officer who could be easily distracted. ‘That particular screw was more interested in chatting to prisoners than inspecting the pig slops,’ said Matthews.
Once at the piggery, Matthews used a knife to cut himself out of the bag and, already dressed in civilian clothes, made his way to Anzac Parade. ‘I jumped on a bus to Town Hall and phoned a mate who picked me up in his car. We spent the evening in the billiard hall.’ During his six weeks on the run, Matthews pulled off four armed robberies before he was recaptured and sent to Parramatta Gaol. There, he was involved in five attempts to escape, culminating in an attack on three prison guards. After twenty-eight days in solitary confinement, he was dispatched to Grafton, then widely and correctly regarded as the state’s toughest jail.5
If there was a list of Australia’s, or certainly Queensland’s, most active escapees then a contender for the title would be Arthur Slim Halliday, born in Melbourne in April 1910. His parents died when he was young and he was sent to an orphanage. He was another who thought the courts had treated him harshly, claiming he had only begun to commit crimes after he was sentenced to imprisonment for fare evasion in 1935. The next year he stole his employer’s chequebook as well as a car. For this he was sentenced to nine months on Palen Creek prison farm in Rathdowney, south west of Brisbane. While he was there he was sentenced to an additional fifty-six days for a second series of charges and was transferred to Boggo Road. In March 1937 he was sentenced to two years for breaking and entering and went down complaining that a relative who had set up the job was never charged. Then on 20 February 1939 he received five years for a string of breakings—during the daytime he worked as a roofer and at night-time he returned to burgle the homes—a sentence that was meant as an example to errant southern criminals.
One of Halliday’s unsuccessful attempts to escape came early in his sentence, when he and Robert Clive Stewart drilled rivets from their cell doors. Halliday picked up another six months in December that year. Stewart had fourteen days added to his sentence. From then on Halliday’s life was one long fight against the authorities. He made his first successful escape from Boggo Road on 28 January 1940, during an afternoon church service. Although it was the first successful escape from the prison in fifteen years, as usual it was the staying out and getting clean away that were more difficult. On this occasion Halliday never went far and was caught just under a fortnight later after a twelve-hour chase from Brisbane to the D’Aguilar National Park scrub near Woodford.
He was charged with housebreaking while out and complained that he had not been able to keep the jail porridge down and was being ill fed. All Halliday got from the magistrate was that it was a matter for the visiting justice. For the breaking he received an additional nine months.6 He tried again in the October that year, making a rope from strips of his cell blanket and hammock and was on the outside a fortnight. In March 1942 he received six months for assault after he and Sidney Monroe failed in an attempt to overpower a warder. In August the next year he barricaded himself in his cell and stabbed another warder. For his troubles he was sprayed with tear gas and received three years, some of it in solitary.
On 11 December 1946 Halliday made his most celebrated escape, along with murderer Derwent Arkinstall and Victor Travis, who was serving three years for robbery and housebreaking. Back in 1939, aged eighteen, Arkinstall had been convicted of murdering taxi driver Howard Thomas Chambers on 23 May. Chambers was shot three times from behind and his body dragged into a roadside bush on the Pacific Highway. The motive does not seem to have been robbery because Chambers was found with £5 and 10 shillings in his pockets.
The three prisoners now improvised a grappling hook with supplies from the workshop to which Travis had access and climbed over the wall at the corner of the yard, Halliday’s favourite escape spot. Guards found the rope dangling just after muster and a manhunt began. Spotted by an alert cab driver in the suburb of Nundah, the search converged on the area 15 kilometres from Brisbane. Arkinstall and Halliday were recaptured five days later, found hiding, starving and filthy, up to their necks in mangrove swamps near Shorncliffe. Victor Travis was caught on Boxing Day at Redbank military camp.
Arkinstall was eventually released in December 1982 at the age of sixty-two. He was then Queensland’s longest-serving prisoner. In all, Halliday’s escapes and breaches of regulations earned him a further six years. Paroled in March 1949, he changed his name, went south and married.7 In December 1952, back in Queensland, Halliday was charged with the murder of taxi driver Athol McCowan in the previous May. McCowan’s blood-stained cab was found at Southport on 23 May and his body was found floating at Cribb Island, fifty miles away, nine days later. In June that year, when Halliday tried to rob a shop in Sydney, he was shot in the thigh, arrested and extradited.
The prosecution at the murder committal proceedings held in December was conducted by the corrupt officer Frederick Bischof, then an Inspector and later the Police Commissioner for Queensland. Dress code for court hearings was fairly informal in those days. The Courier-Mail reported:
Hundreds of women and girls who far outnumbered men forced their way into the courtroom for the second day. Men wore coloured sports shirts and shorts—some were barefooted—and fishermen listened to the evidence with their fishing rods leaning against the court walls.8
Spectators outside the court looking in from the veranda were asked to stand back so that air could circulate in the room, and people were asked to stop talking during the hearing.
The prosecution’s case was that Halliday was short of money, as evidenced by the fact that he had been trying to sell a truck on his way back to Sydney for £800. He had, said Bischof, made what amounted to a confession that he would not sign, something that in those days was quite a normal procedure. The highlight was a reproduction of Halliday’s dog Peter, complete with its original skin. The dog was said to have ticks that could be matched to ticks found in McCowan’s taxi. Halliday maintained that he had left Brisbane two days before the killing and had been bricked up by Bischof and other officers, but the jury retired for only an hour before he was found guilty on 2 March 1953 and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Halliday tried to escape from Boggo Road again that year, for which he picked up fourteen days in solitary confinement and, after a letter in the Courier-Mail described him as a ‘miserable caged wretch’, the kindly prison chaplain the Reverend Malcolm McDermant commented that fourteen days was too light a punishment, adding, ‘There has to be a strong deterrent for such men.’9 His last unsuccessful attempt was in 1959, when he started a fire in the mattress workshop and tried to climb through the skylight. After this his bed was fixed to the floor and there were extra locks placed on his cell door. When he was removed from his cell he was strip-searched at least three times a day. In the daytime he was placed in a cage within a cage and was handcuffed and double escorted.
The letter to the Courier-Mail back in 1953 may have been right. Even so he managed to remove his cell-door hasp in 1965. It was not until 1971 that his conditions were eased. He was released in 1976 and went prospecting in north Queensland. He died in June 1987. He had been suffering from cancer.10
In the 1920s there were suggestions that criminals from Victoria were leaving gelignite in the quarries at South Australia’s Yatala prison to help in breakouts. One of those who regularly escaped, or at least tried to, was the Scots-born John Charles Stewart, serving life for the murder of Patrick Kelly in a row during a poker game near Copley in 1925. Apparently upset over the use of the word ‘Pommy’, Stewart had beaten the man senseless with a plank of wood. On 20 August 1927 he was working with a gang of forty-three other prisoners and disappeared during the afternoon shift. His escape was through the water channel beneath the wall that surrounded the prison grounds. From there he followed the creek to the abattoir and then tried to obtain a change of clothing before getting a boat from Port Adelaide.
He was arrested in Victoria and ran the defence that he was entitled to escape because he had been wrongly convicted. It was not an argument that appealed to jury or judge and he received a further two years’ hard labour in January 1928. The next month he made another try and failed again. There had been a concerted appeal to have his original death sentence commuted, with Stewart recognising his sins and writing to a woman, ‘I once knew the Christ. Before this tragic happening my sins were not great but I did deny my knowledge of Him.’ ‘The sense of shame, regret and remorse from which he daily suffers is greater than any punishment that can be inflicted on his body’, wrote the Reverend George Parrott naively.11 He tried to escape again two years later and yet again in March 1938, this time from the Parkside Mental Hospital. He said he had done it because he wanted to be sent back to Yatala.
Finally, an inquiry into the escapes and the warders’ methods in South Australian prisons was launched by the government, which appointed New South Wales ‘expert’ G Steele. Security was tightened at Yatala and, after a single escape by Ernie Richards, there were no further escapes for nine years.
Richards, then serving ten years for robbery, had escaped on New Year’s Eve 1931 while in solitary confinement for possessing a hacksaw blade. Briefly allowed out of his cell, he had opened two doors with a key he had made from a tin plate, climbed the wall using a rope of coir made from his cell mat and a hook from the electricity conduit. Caught on a train in Queensland on 17 February, he was taken to Boggo Road in Brisbane where four days later, in full view of the warders, he climbed the prison wall. The warders opened fire and he was hit in the leg and hand but escaped for a few minutes before he was found hiding in a nearby chicken coop. He said he was grateful to the warders. Had he been at Yatala he would have been shot dead.12
Richards’ escape was the last straw so far as the South Australia administration was concerned and in February 1932 the elderly superintendent of the prison was replaced. The warders took the opportunity to complain of their working conditions. They considered the prison was seriously undermanned. There was, for example, only one guard in charge of the kitchen. Overtime was compulsory and unpaid.
Presently South Australia’s longest-serving prisoner for a single murder is Barry Michael Fyfe, known as ‘The Birdman’, because at one time he was allowed a lorikeet in his cell in the mistaken hope it would help in his rehabilitation. Fyfe pleaded guilty in 1996 to the murder of Anthony Trevor Tilley, a former police officer serving a sentence for raping an Aboriginal woman in a police van. Fyfe stabbed him in the back in the Yatala prison kitchen, twisting the knife. On this occasion there does not appear to have been any motive behind the attack.
The crime added twenty-eight years to his 25 and a half-year, non-parole period for prior offences that included two for attempted murder. One took place in Port Lincoln prison when Fyfe attacked another inmate with a pick and hammer. Now, with a 45-year minimum period making him ineligible for parole until 2037, in 2004 an application for leave to appeal out of time against his sentence was refused. By 2007 he was still being kept separate from other prisoners in Yatala and an application for judicial review failed.13
In July 2003 an escape plot involving Fyfe, another murderer, Paul John Page, both then in Yatala’s top security G wing, and robber and serial escapee Anthony John Smith was foiled. It was thought the escape, which involved crashing a truck through the perimeter of the jail, was planned for early September, far too long a time for anything to be kept secret in a prison. Five mobile phones and six hacksaw blades had already been smuggled in.
At the age of nineteen Smith had been arrested following a bank robbery in Walkerville, which had netted $22,000, and he escaped in 2000 after he eluded his guards while on a hospital visit to his father, the armed robber Anthony Thiele Smith, now hopelessly addicted to heroin. The one-time footballer sprinted away from his guards, disappeared into the grounds of the Botanical Gardens and that was the last seen of him for a year. During that time he shot two people while escaping from a bank robbery in the Adelaide suburb of Myrtle Bank. While on the run he stayed in the Radisson Plaza, photographing himself and his current girlfriend lying on a bed surrounded by the proceeds. At his trial in February 2003 he presented a picture of penitence but Judge Ann Vanstone thought his evidence ‘unpersuasive and cynical’. He drew eighteen years. His aunt thought the sentence unfair. ‘Other people do worse things than he’s done and they get off scot free,’ she told attentive journalists.
Perhaps she had some justification. In 2006 a criminal lawyer visiting his client recently convicted of a home invasion was found apparently trying to smuggle two mobile phones and drugs into the prison. The charges were later dropped; no reason was given. The fact that hacksaw blades and pliers could be found hidden in prisoners’ cells was down to work overload. Officers no longer had the time to conduct enough searches.14
Smith was involved in another attempted escape in March 2007. This time it was foiled when guards found a mobile phone, iPod, screwdriver and superglue in a cavity in his cell.15 For some years Smith never gave up trying. In October that year he escaped while receiving treatment at the Royal Adelaide Hospital and at the end of March 2011 he could be found on the prison roof. He was there nearly an hour before he came down voluntarily, telling officers it had been a protest about his treatment in the prison. He was sent off to isolation in G wing. Undaunted, in February 2013 a sharpened screwdriver, substances believed to be drugs, two mobile phones and chargers were found in his cell at Port Augusta.16
The great absconder, Darcy Ezekiel Dugan, may have been the most famous escapee from a prison van or tram but over the years the trick had been worked before, notably by Joseph Schmidt, a Sydney gunman who had escaped twice by the same method. The first time was from a van taking Schmidt to Darlinghurst Gaol in Sydney, and the second was when, in November 1930, he was put in a police van at Burwood and, helped by John Milton who joined him at Annandale, spent the journey tearing up the floorboards before dropping onto the road. He was thought to have caught a boat from Newcastle but in fact he remained fairly static and was found a fortnight later in scrubland.17
Then on 4 February 1933 Hilton John Barclay, appealing against his seven-year sentence on a variety of breaking charges, and William Howard, also serving eighteen months on breaking charges, escaped by cutting a hole in the roof while the prison van was on its way to the Coburg jail, Melbourne. Almost immediately Barclay was stopped by railway officials as he was trying to board a train without a ticket, but he gave a false name and address and was allowed to go. At the end of the month the pair were recaptured in a house at Frankston, where detectives found two ‘prepossessing’ young women along with a revolver, gelignite and dynamite caps. Barclay had asked the court to give him fifty lashes and detention in a prison reformatory in return for a reduction of his seven-year sentence but the court declined his offer. Two days before Howard’s recapture, his father Stephen died. He had been walking near La Trobe Street when he was kicked by a bullock, fracturing his skull.18
By the age of sixteen Dugan was an accomplished little house and shop breaker. The next year he pleaded guilty to ninety-six charges of breaking and by the time he was twenty-one he was in Long Bay after several escapes from Gosford’s Training School for Boys. At twenty-two he was able to boast, ‘No gaol will ever hold me’, and over the years he often made good that boast.
When robber and escapee John Brendon Parker was coming to the end of his career Dugan, one of Australia’s greatest serial escapers, was at the peak of his. While on remand at Long Bay, Dugan cut his way out of a police van travelling at 25 miles per hour (40 kilometres per hour) on 25 January 1946. He dropped onto the Parramatta Road but he was better at escaping than at staying out. That summer the prison doors hardly stopped revolving. On 4 March he escaped again, this time cutting a hole in the roof of the prison tram taking him to Darlinghurst Courthouse from Long Bay as it passed the Sydney Cricket Ground. The other prisoners sang loudly to cover the sawing and Dugan and another young inmate, Robert Lewis, were off through Centennial Park, staying out for thirty-six hours.19
On 20 August 1949 he and William Cecil Mears escaped from Long Bay, jumping six metres down from the prison wall. A week later they were found in a shack on the Georges River. Three warders were charged with carelessness and one was fined. On 15 December that year Dugan and Mears escaped from Sydney’s Central Police Court. It was Mears’ second successful escape, Dugan’s fourth. At the time they were serving ten years for the robbery of an elderly woman in Paddington. The whole thing had been part of a well-arranged plan. Mears, who was facing a charge of carrying a pistol, subpoenaed Dugan to give evidence on his behalf. They were placed in the same cell at lunchtime and sawed through the bottom part of a three-quarter-metre bar near the cell door. From there it was into the corridor and away. Tests undertaken later showed it had taken them one hour and fourteen minutes, during which time no checks seem to have been made on them. This time three warders were dismissed.20
The Sydney Morning Herald thundered:
Detectives are reported to have gazed in astonishment at the narrow opening through which the criminal and his companion presumably crawled. What is more astonishing is that the men were able to get possession of a hacksaw under the noses of their custodians, and then cut their way through an iron bar, an inch and a half in diameter, without being heard.21
Unfortunately any admiration the public may have had for the pair faded when they held up and robbed the popular jockey Jack Thompson at Randwick on 8 January 1950. It totally evaporated when they held up the Ultimo branch of the Commonwealth Bank just before 11 am on 13 January. Mears jumped on the counter and Leslie Nalder, the 59-year-old bank manager, reached for his gun. Mears shot him in the chest. He then began firing wildly, hitting a customer and narrowly missing other bank employees. The pair escaped in a waiting stolen car without any loot.
It is possible they went to Melbourne, because on 21 January the police rushed to Fitzroy after a Terry Byrne was shot. After this there were thoughts they might be on their way to Queensland or perhaps heading for Fremantle on the SS Orantes, but a search failed to find them. On 3 February they were at Mort’s Dock in Balmain, Sydney, where they held up a payroll van, retreating when the armed escort fired on them. It was not until 14 February that they were found in bed in a cottage in Alexander Street, Collaroy, a beach suburb north of Sydney.
Found guilty and sentenced to death in June 1950 for the attempted murder of Nalder, in December Dugan’s and Mears’ sentences were commuted and they were sent to Grafton in northern New South Wales, thought to be escape proof. They were to be closely guarded and kept under almost constant supervision but, when it came to it the strict conditions were relaxed—that, or Homer nodded. In October 1951 Dugan tried to saw through his cell bars with a hacksaw. He was discovered halfway out of the cell window and guards threw scalding water at him, before locking him in solitary for two weeks.
On 13 August 1952 Dugan tried again to escape from Grafton. He hoped that heavy rain would stop warders hearing him digging his way out of his cell. However, unlike the Central police station escape, the warders had their ears to the bars. As a result he received fourteen days in the punishment cells and four months of special treatment.22
In cell confinement a prisoner was placed on alternate seven days’ bread and water and ‘unemployed’ (reduced) rations. Separate confinement or special treatment also amounted to solitary confinement. It was after that Dugan went on a hunger strike for three months, until he was moved by train in a special compartment, handcuffed to two warders, to the prison hospital in Long Bay. He looked so awful that detectives, who had intended to follow the car from the station to the prison in case the now emaciated Dugan made another escape attempt, simply drove back to headquarters.
For a time Dugan, eating again and returned to Grafton, remained where he was until 14 June 1953, when he led a twelve-man attempted jailbreak. The aim was to break out as the prisoners left the chapel around 9.45 after Sunday service. Two of the men, MJ Williams and David Golding, both serving eight-year sentences, had earlier attacked a warder in Bathurst and tried to escape. When that failed they were sent to Grafton. Other men on the break included the bank robber and repeat escapee Antonio Martini, Sidney Grant, convicted of the August 1946 murder of detective Victor Ahearn, and Desmond Jones, serving life for the October 1944 murder of fish shop proprietor Theodosis Penglis, at Alexandria.23 The prisoners, though, had been dobbed in by a long-term dog looking for remission. The warders came out of their hiding places and ‘a fierce fight began in which fists and batons were used,’ said the Minister of Justice in most self-congratulatory mode.
As might be expected Dugan fared worst from the visiting magistrate. He received twenty-eight days’ punishment cells and six months’ separate confinement on a mutiny charge and a further fourteen days’ consecutive for the assault and a final fourteen days’ concurrent for the escape attempt. The others were given lesser cell confinement but still six months’ separate confinement. What they received in the way of ‘special treatment’ from the warders both before and afterwards is unrecorded.24
There was some help for Dugan from the outside. In the October two hundred people, including Bishop EH Burgmann, signed a petition to the state governor, asking for Dugan, Williams and Golding to be released from separation:
We are only a very small section of the citizens who are deeply disturbed by the punishments imposed, and are fully convinced that a further continuation of the ‘separate treatment’ of these three men is not justified by any of the ethical purposes of punishment, as accepted by modern penologists. Neither would it induce any moral improvement of the prisoners. Nor is it necessary for the security of the community, as Grafton Gaol alone, without any ‘separate treatment,’ is, whatever else it may be, certainly an example of a ‘security gaol’.
The petition continued:
‘Separation of prisoners’ is equivalent to complete isolation, without work, and with a restricted diet. New South Wales is the only country within the orbit of Western civilisation where isolation of such a duration can be imposed on prisoners.25
The Bishop was ignored and life continued in Grafton largely unhindered by any further public or ministerial scrutiny.
Detective Ray Kelly was involved in the repeated captures of Dugan. On one occasion in 1958 he used his informants to tell him where Dugan was. In fact, Dugan was waiting patiently in a 1.3-metre hole for the chance to move over the prison wall. It was not until the late 1960s that there was another chink in the armour but it was soon soldered.
When Darcy Dugan was released on parole in September 1967 after serving seventeen years, he went to work at the Wayside Chapel in Kings Cross with the Reverend Ted Noffs. There he took the opportunity of making a series of allegations, both in the newspapers and on television, of the beatings that took place at Grafton as well as what he claimed were the homosexual practices of some of the warders at Parramatta. For once a prisoner’s calls did not fall on deaf ears and the Synod of the Anglican Diocese of Grafton passed a resolution calling on the Premier of New South Wales to investigate the matter. Minister of Justice John Maddison wrote back saying there was no point in any inquiry. The allegations dated back to 1953, when Dugan was in Grafton, and he could assure the Bishop there was no brutality or sadism now, nor had there been under the present administration. He was wrong on almost every count and, in fact, Dugan had been in Grafton as recently as July 1963.
Dugan, now with his wife Margaret, whom he had married at the Wayside Chapel, lasted barely two years on the outside. Unfortunately, as the Light from the chapel faded, he set to work putting together a team of robbers, the so-called ‘Lavender Hill Mob’, named after the crooks in the Ealing comedy film of that name, and in 1969 he was arrested and charged with seven armed robberies, totalling over $175,000. Now any lingering credibility he had evaporated and, for the moment, he was back inside. This time it was for fourteen years.26
The law took a curious attitude to those who had been condemned to death and reprieved. In effect they became non-persons. In 1976 Dugan claimed he had been libelled in the Daily Mirror. The defence was both ingenious and successful. Since Dugan had been sentenced to death he was of ‘corrupt blood’ and could not sue while under a death sentence, which was deemed to be still in existence.
He was released in May 1980 and the next month Noffs officiated again when Dugan married Canberra businesswoman Jan Simmonds, the sister of the prison escapee Kevin Simmonds.27 She thought he had settled down but he had not. The marriage did not last but their friendship did. The next year, said to be in desperate financial trouble, he was arrested and returned to prison following a raid on a Sydney service station. Now he was jailed for three and a half years. The judge refused to set a non-parole period and he was released in 1984. He died on 22 August 1991 in a Cabramatta nursing home and was buried at Rookwood Catholic cemetery. He had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease. His biography, Catch Me If You Can, was published the next year.28
As for his offsider Mears, he served his sentence and in January 1953 was transferred out of Grafton. He might just about be described as one of the prison’s few success stories for after his release he retired from serious crime. In 1979 he was awarded $46,000 for injuries received in a road accident. He spent his last years cutting up touches in Sydney pubs, telling his stories for which he never found a publisher. He died in October 2002 aged eighty-two. An unclaimed winning lottery ticket was sufficient to pay for his burial.
More recently a continuing thorn in the flesh of the prison service has been Christopher ‘Bad Boy’ or ‘Badness’ Binse. By the time he was fourteen Binse, later the short-term companion of bank robber James ‘The Jockey’ Smith, had been labelled uncontrollable and sent to Turana Boys Home in Parkville, Victoria. From then on his career became another revolving door of crime and prison. At seventeen he was sent to Pentridge and on his release started to commit more serious crimes, including numerous armed bank robberies. Given the nickname ‘Badness’ by a friend in Pentridge in 1988, his ego was immense. After one bank robbery he took out an advertisement in the Herald Sun that read, ‘Badness is Back’. His home in Queensland, bought with the proceeds of crime, was named Badness, and that was also his personalised numberplate.
In September 1992 he escaped from Melbourne’s St Vincent’s Hospital using a gun smuggled in for him. He was then arrested in Sydney and almost immediately escaped from Parramatta on 26 October. He was not long on the outside. Hours after his friend Jockey Smith was shot dead, Binse was arrested at a farmhouse close to Daylesford north of Melbourne. The next year he was convicted of four counts of armed robbery, for which he received a total effective sentence of seven years and six months’ imprisonment with a minimum of five years. This time the sentencing judge apparently thought these offences as ‘about as bad as bank robberies can be’.
On 26 October 1993, the anniversary of his Parramatta escape, he tried to escape from Pentridge, planning while he was at it to kill the murderer Julian Knight, not because he had randomly murdered seven people but because he was thought to be an informer, a far more serious crime. By ill chance for Binse, a prison officer was attacked the day before and a security crackdown followed. A search of his cell turned up a homemade prison officer’s uniform, six prison officers’ shirts, insignia and blades and weapons, along with his plans to release thirty inmates. The group to be involved in the escape included John Lindrea, a double murderer, and Paul Alexander Anderson, another noted escapee, who had advised on tactics.
After the discovery of yet another escape attempt in June 1995, Binse was shackled in a body belt, leg irons and handcuffs before he was allowed to leave his cell. The leg restraints came off on 2 August and on 19 September the remainder was removed. Binse would receive no sympathy from the Supreme Court when in August that year he alleged Barwon’s governor had acted unreasonably in having him restrained. Nor did he get any change from the Supreme Court.29
In 1996, he was jailed for six and a half years over the 1992 armed robbery of a Commonwealth Bank, a theft of more than $36,000, and for escaping from Long Bay. The next year he lost an appeal against a ruling allowing wardens to put him in leg irons and handcuffs. In 2001 he became one of the first inmates of the $20 million high-security ‘supermax’ jail within the Goulburn Correctional Centre in New South Wales, generally regarded as the end of the line. In 2005, when he was released from there after serving his full sentence, he took the opportunity to begin a campaign calling for improved rehabilitation programs. Sadly, his time on the outside was relatively short-lived because, in December 2006, he was sentenced to a minimum of thirty months for possessing an unregistered weapon after brandishing a gun in the Spearmint Rhino ‘gentlemen’s club’ in King Street, Sydney. He had also left a bullet on the counter. The police alleged he had threatened to kill a woman at the club. While on remand for the 2006 offences, Binse was the victim of serious assault. He thought that his attackers were recruited by a particular prisoner, Gavin Preston, something that would bedevil his next few years.30
For a time, his sentences were shorter. In 2010 there were convictions for possessing cocaine, carrying a prohibited weapon, dealing in property suspected to be the proceeds of crime, and having custody of various false identity documents, for which Binse received a modest aggregate sentence of twelve months. While back in jail in Port Phillip Prison in 2011, he tried to sue Victoria over two alleged jailhouse assaults, claiming they happened at Barwon Prison in May 2006 and at Marngoneet Prison near Barwon in July the next year.
After his release in November 2011 Binse went to live with a former girlfriend and his daughter. At that time he said he was assaulted ‘by four bikies’ and talked of his fears for his safety to biker Toby Mitchell, who would later survive a shooting. Binse then obtained a bag full of weapons to protect himself and his daughter and began wearing a bulletproof vest. But he could still be seen out and about, attending the same boxing match as former Comancheros boss Amad ‘Jay’ Malkoun and Melbourne identity Mick Gatto.
Following the attack on his friend Mitchell, he decided to have it out face to face with Gavin Preston. On 9 January 2012 he drove to an address in the Melbourne suburb of Seaford in a black Land Rover. He parked his car and attempted to steal a nearby vehicle. The attempt failed, and Binse decamped leaving the Land Rover behind. The police were called and in it they found a loaded .22 semi-automatic handgun, fitted with a silencer, located beneath the driver’s seat.
Binse then went for a jackpot. He planned to rob Armaguard security guards delivering money at the Westside Hotel. At about 11 am on 19 March 2012, two guards left the van and went into the hotel. They collected $235,090, which was placed in a large blue bag. As they left the hotel and returned to their van Binse, now wearing a hood, mask and sunglasses, climbed a ladder he had brought earlier and placed behind a fence near the hotel, pointed his shotgun at one of the guards and demanded that he throw the bag containing the money over the fence to him. This was easier demanded than done and when the guard threw the bag it failed to clear the fence and landed in the car park. Undeterred, Binse ordered the two guards to lie face down on the ground, before jumping the fence to recover the bag. Pointing his shotgun at one of the guards he took the man’s service revolver and ordered the other to hand over his. He then collected the blue bag, climbed back over the fence, and rode off to the rear of the Laverton Market, where Binse dumped his motorcycle and shotgun in a nearby dam, changed clothes, and drove away in a white van.
It did not take the police long to think of Binse as a suspect and he was watched as he went on a regular basis to the Atak storage facility in Ballarat Road in Albion. Then on 20 May 2012, two police officers in an unmarked vehicle saw Binse riding a Honda motorcycle along with a man on another bike. Approximately ninety minutes later, two other police officers saw his bike parked outside the La Porchetta Pizza Restaurant in Niddrie. All four officers were outside the restaurant when Binse came out. He saw them as he was walking towards his bike. He turned around and walked back into the restaurant, followed by the police officers. When one officer put his arm on his shoulder, Binse produced a loaded revolver—one of the guns that had been taken from the Armaguard robbery. The officer backed away, dropping his police radio in the process. Binse snatched it up and was off home to Sterling Drive in Keilor East.
At 6.40 am the following day, members of the Victoria Police Special Operations Group surrounded his Sterling Drive home. Binse was inside with his partner and was armed. They called on him to surrender but instead he attempted to barricade himself inside the house. The siege ran for forty-four hours, with Binse’s partner still in there with him. From time to time during the day Binse randomly shot at the police, and fired shots from the back door of his house towards the rear fence of the property. Around half-past seven in the evening of 22 May, Binse’s partner left the house. She had not actually been held hostage but was worried that when she left this might escalate the shooting and that her departure might trigger a reaction from Binse.
At approximately 2 am the next day the Special Operations Group took action. They fired tear gas into the house, which brought Binse out carrying one of the Armaguard guard’s revolver. Told to drop it he did so but then made a move to pick it up. Several non-lethal beanbag rounds were fired at him. He did manage to pick it up but was immediately hit with further beanbag rounds, fell down and was arrested. By then Binse’s container at the storage unit had been searched and the police had seized what amounted to a small armoury, including a .357 Sturm Ruger revolver identified as stolen from one of the two Armaguard personnel and a .45 calibre Auto Ordinance Corporation brand Thompson model 1928-A1 sub-machine gun, along with ammunition.31
In May 2014 Binse pleaded guilty to the robberies, using a firearm while being a prohibited person and reckless conduct endangering persons. The trial judge, Justice Terry, accepted that he had been worried about his own safety and that of his family. Psychiatrists thought Binse was suffering from a form of mixed personality disorder with antisocial and narcissistic traits. Any future imprisonment in a restricted custodial environment (which is what he could expect) would have a significant adverse effect on his mental health. He was sentenced to a further eighteen years with a non-parole period of fourteen, with Terry echoing his colleague of 1993 in describing the offences as ‘about as bad as robberies can be’. Days after his sentence Binse revived his lawsuit against the State of Victoria for the stabbing in jail.
In December 2014 his application for leave to appeal on the grounds that his sentence was disproportionate was rejected. Justice Weinberg thought that if anything it might have been on the lenient side.32 There was further trouble for Binse when, in October 2015, now known as Christopher Dean Pecotic, he was charged with a series of seventeen offences, including seven armed robberies dating back to 1988. On 26 February 2016 Binse/Pecotic pleaded guilty to the 1990s robberies that had netted him around $400,000. In June that year his application for leave to appeal against the 2014 sentences was refused.
Earlier in the year, in August, his long-time enemy Gavin ‘Capable’ Preston had been sentenced to eleven years for killing drug dealer Adam Khoury, after pleading guilty to a charge of defensive homicide. The year ended rather more positively for Binse/Pecotic when he was back in court again in the December, now acting for himself and blaming his legal team for his troubles. ‘This is so toxic, it’s so rancid. You’ll be offended,’ he told the judges when he renewed his application for leave to appeal against the 2014 sentence. This time he was given leave to appeal on the ground that he could argue the sentence was manifestly excessive for a man in his middle to late forties.
It appeared Binse/Pecotic had begun to co-operate with the authorities which, fellow crims may fear, did not simply mean behaving better in prison. Their fears were dispelled when in Matthew Thompson’s biography Binse indicated that the only time he had ever been anything remotely doglike was the wholly justifiable occasion when he discovered an Islamic fanatic was threatening to decapitate a female prison officer. By January 2017 he had converted to Islam. Later that year Binse/Pecotic was sentenced for the robberies to which he had pleaded guilty and received what amounted to a concurrent sentence.33
Except for the very few success stories, escapes are an example of the triumph of hope over experience but, as Halliday is reported to have said when he was recaptured near Shorncliffe in 1946, ‘A man’s liberty means everything to him. You can’t blame a man for trying … I am doing life. I have nothing to lose.’