Worldwide it is generally regarded that the most difficult part of an escape is to stay out. An escapee, particularly one who escapes on the spur of the moment, will almost inevitably return to his home surroundings where he wrongly feels safe and protected. The police will always look for him in his usual haunts. In 1897, the very talented escapee Chummy O’Brien broke out of Yatala Labour Camp in South Australia and the police found him a few hours later at his mother’s. Fast-forward nearly fifty years. The 44-year-old, 90-kilogram Margaret Brown, alias Maud Sawyer, serving a stint in Long Bay in Sydney for stealing, embarrassed the authorities by clambering over the 2.5-metre wall on the night of 20 November 1944. She was recaptured the next day in Neutral Bay, at the home of relatives.1
Sometimes mothers never get the chance to help. While on the run with Joseph Denmead, after an 11 January 1911 escape from Darlinghurst Gaol, Cyril Pegg, who found international fame as George Enright, ‘The Human Fly’, and then served nine months for swindling kids out of their pocket money, wrote:
Dear Mother,
Don’t worry about me. I never got over those walls for nothing, or to get caught again. I know it will be a lot to ask you to get my clothes for me. It will all be over in two or three months.
I can’t move out of Sydney for a month at least. Tell Mrs Denmead what you think is the best move for us to take. She is going to keep Joe out of Sydney; so if you think of any way to help me tell her. You will never hear of the name in the papers again. I will go over to the States and do as good as anyone. I must keep out of their clutches. I will shoot myself dead if they come to arrest me, I will. Look at the money I can earn now I am free.
What is the good of life if they throw a fellow into gaol for two or three years? Waste of time—that is no good to me. The thing is I am out now, and I am going to keep out. If I act properly they will never get me.
I have no clothes on my back. Get that suit for me. It will make a wonderful disguise, with my hair dyed. I gave Willie the receipt. There is £2 to pay. You will get it all back, and lots more some day. Make arrangements with Mrs Denmead about it. Be very careful. Willie knows the tailor. Now don’t worry; take it all in good part. I have my liberty, and intend to keep it. Will close with love to all. —
Cyril.2
When they were recaptured on the 18th in Marrickville, the letter, still unsent, was found on Pegg. Five years for housebreaking and one year for jailbreaking concurrent, said the judge. And there was still another charge in Victoria to come. Released in 1915 he was taken to Melbourne where he was sentenced to a day’s imprisonment.
Nor, forty years later, did 24-year-old Victor Franz learn that a home is not a safe house. Described as an ‘incorrigible rogue’ Franz was serving three years and nine months in Pentridge in Melbourne for housebreaking. He spent two months fashioning a key to open his cell door and six nights using a drill, which he also made in jail, to create a hole in the door so he could put his hand through and turn the key in the lock. He also made two ropes using strips of leather he obtained from the jail boot shop. At dawn on Tuesday 17 July 1951 he broke out using the ropes and a self-fashioned grappling hook to haul himself over the 5.5-metre walls.
Franz was helped in his escape by Maurice Gleeson of Bay Street, Port Melbourne, who provided him with a navy suit and yellow sweater so he could change out of his prison garb. Unfortunately Franz made the mistake of lurking in Port Melbourne and at 6 pm two police constables saw him lounging in a doorway but did not at first recognise him as an escapee. Stupidly he stayed where he was and two hours later they returned. When they asked if he was Franz he acted ‘most offended’. He then took off on foot but the constables chased him down and arrested him.
Gleeson was charged with harbouring and was allowed bail of £150 with a surety. Franz was later sentenced to an additional six months for his escape. Nor did Gleeson and his friends learn. Within a week Gleeson was in the Carlton watch house on a charge of car stealing when he escaped along with George Parker and William O’Brien. O’Brien was the first to be caught, found drinking with his girlfriend in a city hotel. He had made some effort—his red hair had been dyed black. Parker and Gleeson did at least move interstate and were arrested after a car chase in Sydney. In March 1952 Gleeson was declared a habitual criminal and sentenced to five years.3
A really good modern example of a lack of infrastructure is that of Robert Cole, also known as Andrew David Robertson, who escaped on 18 January 2006 from the hospital at Long Bay prison in Sydney, where he had been sent in November 2003. The brother of the actress Denise Roberts, he had been found not guilty of theft and assault by reason of mental illness. Weighing into prison at 70 kilograms, by using laxatives he slimmed down to 56 kilograms for his escape through the cell window. He had scraped the bricks next to the bars in his cell using a butter knife. After scaling a wall and walking along the top of it, avoiding video cameras and motion detectors, he dragged himself over the rolled razor-wire perimeter fence with the help of a blanket from his cell. Apparently no one had noticed either his rapid weight loss or that he had been chipping away at the brickwork outside his cell window. It was a great deal of effort for little purpose. He was caught three days later in Grosvenor Lane off Bondi Junction’s Oxford Street Mall. Cole had not been difficult to spot. He had assumed a limp but a close look showed he had made himself a false beard with a permanent marker pen. For his pains he was sentenced to a further non-parole period of a year.4
Police will lean on the escapee’s relations in order to catch the jail-breaker, and so the fugitive is almost always obliged to rely on criminals to protect him and not dob him in. The more money on offer, either from the reward or the proceeds, the more likely they will either take the man’s money, dob him in or both. One who stayed around too long, possibly because he wanted to mind his business interests, was drug dealer and one-time Marrickville Council member George Savvas, who had led a charmed life in the courts until his eventual imprisonment in 1989.
A doctor who had charged Savvas with fraud had had his surgery firebombed and his chauffeur was killed. Two years later the charges were dismissed. Savvas then went into drug distribution with the Sydney identity Barry McCann. The arrangement, according to the prosecution at a subsequent trial, had been to sell some three kilograms of heroin in Melbourne, but instead Savvas sold it in Sydney, undercutting McCann’s normal distribution price. McCann announced he would seek reprisals. On 27 December 1987 he went to an evening meeting at the HJ Mahoney Reserve in Marrickville and was seen there about nine o’clock by an off-duty detective walking with his wife and dog. Next morning McCann’s body was found face down on a bench. He had been shot twenty times in his back and head.
In 1988 Savvas was arrested and charged with McCann’s murder. At the trial it was suggested there had been a falling-out between the pair, not only over the price undercutting but also because of the apparent disappearance of two suitcases and their valuable contents. The immediate reason for McCann’s death, alleged the prosecution, was that Savvas knew his partner was out to kill him and he needed to get in first. After a ten-week trial Savvas was acquitted on the direction of the judge but was later sentenced to twenty-five years’ imprisonment for heroin trafficking. In 1992 Savvas was again charged, this time with the importation of heroin while in prison, and was convicted in June 1994.
On 6 July 1996 he put on a blond wig, false beard and moustache and, wearing Ray-Bans, passed through six apparently locked gates and walked out of Goulburn prison’s visiting area in civilian clothes. Where he obtained these and why no one noticed him leave have never been satisfactorily explained. He was one man who had enough contacts to be able to remain on the outside but he was sufficiently arrogant to stay in Sydney. It was not until May the next year that he was dobbed in by a caller who told the police Savvas was in the Suntory restaurant behind the Hoyts cinema complex in Kent Street. When officers arrived they found him drinking red wine and eating fillet of beef with two women who were left to settle the bill.
Immediately on his return to prison in the autumn of 1997, Savvas, along with the backpacker murderer Ivan Milat and two others, began planning what would have been a daring escape from Maitland prison. There was no question of simply walking out in a false moustache. This time it would have involved scaling an eight-metre wall topped with razor wire and evading surveillance cameras. They had thought they could get through gates overlooked by guard towers and staffed by officers armed with Ruger rifles. What Milat and Savvas and their two offsiders did not know was that their plan had been detected weeks before but it had been allowed to run on in the hope that their outside networks would be scooped up.
On 17 May Milat was removed to another jail and Savvas, who was not assessed as a suicide risk by the prison staff, was locked in a cell that, to all intents and purposes, was a steel cage. He had no access to the wing or to other inmates; it was a prison within a prison with 24-hour patrols. On 18 May Savvas was found hanging from a bed sheet in the doorway of his cell. One prisoner told the inquest, ‘I just heard that he was strung up,’ but on 18 April 1998 a coroner ruled that he had hanged himself while distressed.
Back at the end of the nineteenth century it was still relatively easy to escape from some prisons and police stations and simply vanish. Fingerprinting would not be recognised in Australia for another decade and provided the escapee had moved interstate there was a very good chance that, if he was caught in, say, New South Wales, no one would bother to bring a police officer over from South Australia to identify him. Some escapees have been gone so long they must be regarded as missing or presumed dead. Certainly dead in the cases of repeat escapee Edward Sutcliffe and John Henry Sparks, the only man to make a successful long-term escape from Pentridge.
The best or worst (depending upon one’s viewpoint) of Western Australia’s criminals tended to gravitate east. In March 1898 Edward Sutcliffe and two others had made a short-lived escape from the quarry at Fremantle’s jail. The three had received three months’ solitary confinement with the first seven days on a bread-and-water diet. In 1901 Sutcliffe was sentenced to three years for a robbery under arms when he, William James and Angus Taylor stole a safe containing over £200 from the Abbotts Hotel, Murchison. A crowd gathered to watch as they loaded it on to a buggy and Sutcliffe threatened to shoot anyone who intervened. Later they forced the landlord to have a drink with them in the hotel bar before they made off.
Sutcliffe, who had seven previous convictions, was not pleased with the verdict or sentence, telling the judge, ‘You are sentencing us because we’ve been in jail before. This is British Justice I suppose.’ William James, who had previous sentences totalling twenty years, received another five and Taylor three. Taylor and James remained in Western Australia committing petty thefts over the next few years while in 1902 Sutcliffe led a short-lived riot in a protest over conditions in Fremantle Gaol.
On his release in May 1904 he immediately made his way to the goldfields where he was arrested after trying to rob a camp in Kalgoorlie’s Brookman Street. He was caught red-handed and fractured the skull of butcher Henry Boyt as he tried to escape. Sutcliffe ran an alibi defence, saying he had been in the Home from Home Hotel that night but in June he was sentenced to seven years and twenty-five lashes. It was a question of no sooner in than out. While waiting to be taken to Fremantle he obtained a dinner knife, dug out bricks in the wall near a trapdoor in the Kalgoorlie lock-up and squeezed through. This time, however, Sutcliffe was clean away.5
He seems to have gone to Ireland where he joined a cavalry regiment. Then in June 1906 he wrote from the barracks in Aldershot, England, to a colleague, saying that a life grooming horses did not suit and, ‘There is a little job I can easily and safely do and then I am off. Liverpool is the easiest port to get away from.’ He wrote he was likely to go to America and then return in a few years to Western Australia. That seems to have been the last heard of him.6
The twentieth century opened with John Henry Sparks’s escape in 1901 with another prisoner, John O’Connor, who had been sentenced in 1894. Sparks had previously carried out a daring and partially successful robbery in early December 1899 at Rutherglen in north east Victoria. He and his offsider, John Negus, bailed up Edward Visick, manager of the No. 12 Premier mine, and relieved him of £1000 that he had withdrawn from the bank to pay the miners. When Visick and his clerk were in their buggy and only a few hundred yards from the mines, the robbers, dressed in grey suits with fake red beards and wearing black masks, rode up and shot the horse as Visick tried to drive away from them, and they threatened to shoot Visick as well. It had been a well-planned robbery.
Sparks and Negus rode their horses to the Murray at Gooramadda and then, leaving the horses in Victoria, took a boat across the river to New South Wales where they had left two fresh animals. Their mistake, however, was to double back into Victoria at Mulwala. It was Negus’s abandoned horse that betrayed them. People recognised it as having been purchased by him a few days earlier and Negus, who had at one time worked for the tram company, was well known in the district. Both were caught in Collingwood. Negus had recently served six months in Western Australia for receiving; now he and Sparks were sentenced to ten years’ apiece with hard labour.7
O’Connor, Spark’s fellow escapee, began his prison career with a fourteen-day sentence for theft when he was twenty-one and had become an expert housebreaker and burglar. In 1893 he received twelve months in Prahran in Melbourne, and in August the next year thirteen years for a robbery under arms. It is perhaps surprising he went with Sparks because he had less than two years of his sentence to serve. On 3 July 1901, heavy fog hampered the guards’ vision and Sparks and O’Connor found a corner of the wall to climb where the jagged glass was not so thick as elsewhere. One stood on the shoulders of the other to mount the wall then, lying across the top of the wall, hauled the other up.8
After the breakout the government offered a £100 reward for their recapture and in September that year O’Connor was arrested in Sydney. He had completely failed to realise that a change of state did not necessarily make him invisible to the authorities. He was in Hyde Park with two women when he made a remark to a passing policeman. The officer thought he might be a deserter from the Royal Australian Artillery and tried to arrest him. O’Connor would have none of it and two other constables joined in the struggle. O’Connor produced a gun and shot one of the policemen in the neck. After his arrest he gave the name John Hastings but O’Connor was recognised through his tattoos. In June 1902, claiming he had had no help in the breakout, he was sentenced to an additional three years. In fact the Public Service Board had already decided that, at best, there had been considerable negligence over the jailbreak. One warder had been dismissed and another had a £3 reduction made to his annual salary.
Of Sparks, there was no sign. As the years went by there were reported sightings of him and multiple mistaken arrests. The first was after a wages snatch in Botany in November 1901, when several hundred pounds was stolen. There had been a number of daring robberies and the police were convinced that someone of Sparks’s calibre was carrying them out. This time it was Frederick Vallery who had three of the stolen Rutherglen notes in his possession. The police went to Sydney the following year to interview a housebreaker but with fingerprinting in its infancy and not universally recognised they had to rely on photographs. In 1909 Alfred Lawson said he had been on a robbery with Sparks at Block 14. In December 1913 Edward or John O’Neill, whom Inspector Heritt had thought was identical to Sparks, was arrested and released. The next year it was a James Albert Griffiths who received £26 compensation for his false arrest. One story is that Sparks escaped to South Africa where he was killed by former offsiders whom he had double-crossed in Australia.
Of course it was easier in the days of the Sutcliffes and Sparks of this world. It was possible to escape from some prisons and police stations and simply vanish. Fingerprints were not recognised as reliable in Australia until 1912. If the defendant gave a different name in a different state then unless the local police knew him from descriptions or tattoos it was unlikely an officer from the state in which he had been first arrested would be sent to identify him.
An Italian seaman Alfredo Alveta, serving a sentence for larceny, is believed to have been the only man to escape from a South Australian prison and not be recaptured. Along with Edwin Murch he escaped from Gladstone Gaol, 200 kilometres from Adelaide and chosen as a site for a railway hub, in the early hours of 15 October 1911. Murch, who had been charged with forging a telegram, was captured at Franklin Harbour but there was no sign of Alveta. He was a competent sailor and it was thought he had managed to get a working passage on an ocean-going ship.9
Until 2011 Luke Hunter must have been regarded as one of Australia’s most successful escapees. Convicted in 1990 of the murder of Brian Nagle at Yarrowitch in New South Wales and sentenced to a 21-year term, in prison he behaved well and was transferred to Queensland in 1993 to be nearer his family. On 27 February 1996 Hunter escaped from the Borallon Correctional Centre near Ipswich by cutting through a fence with a stolen pair of bolt cutters. Hunter was last seen in prison clothes, armed with a knife, running away from the prison. Around 7.30 pm he held off guards with a knife while armed robber Philip John Nash used a pair of bolt cutters, stolen earlier in the day from the prison workshop, to cut through two perimeter fences. They headed for the car park but Nash never made it. He was caught by guards and had two years added to his ten-year sentence.
Hunter did make it into the bush. It might be thought that this heavily tattooed red-haired man would be found relatively easily but he was not. There was no sign of him for fifteen years, by which time it was thought he must have had plastic surgery. He had not. On 13 February 2011, he was arrested while jogging near his home at Herberton on the Atherton Tableland. He had been at large for fourteen years, eleven months and fourteen days, but where had he been?
In the early months he had been with the Jesus Group, allegedly a polygamist cult that had not known he was on the run. From 1997 he had been working perfectly satisfactorily as a groundsman for Queensland Health at Herberton Hospital under the biblical name Ashban Kadmiel, which he had been given by the sect. Members spoke highly of his work with deprived children; one saying the Hunter of 2011 bore no resemblance to the man who had escaped fifteen years earlier. Hunter and his partner had apparently left the safety of the sect to raise money to build a school in Africa but he had been dobbed in. He received an extra two and a half years on his sentence for the jailbreak, with a recommendation he become eligible for parole in November 2022.10
In contrast to Hunter some robbers simply will not lie down quietly while on the run. Brett Edward Blatch escaped Palen Creek Correctional Centre, south west of Brisbane, while serving a fifteen-year sentence for armed robbery. He became involved in the cannabis cultivation business in Queensland’s Glass House Mountains, run by Peter Joseph Davies and Wayne Carmody. It was bound to end in blood and tears. After all, Blatch had been charged on three occasions with manslaughter or assault, including shooting a security guard who would not reveal the safe combination, and one in 1991 when he was alleged to have attacked a fellow prisoner who was reading the Bible in his cell. He had been acquitted on all of them.
Blatch was on day release on 2 May 2001 when he failed to return. Instead he went to stay at Carmody’s Glass House Mountains house, five kilometres from the Spanner Road property Davies shared with his wife Kerry and their six children. Carmody and Davies had been close friends as well as being involved in growing an illegal marijuana crop. But the relationship became strained with the appearance of Blatch, a former childhood friend of Carmody’s. First, Davies told Carmody he believed Blatch was stealing his cannabis and that he was no longer prepared to share the profits with him. Carmody was also afraid that Davies would dob Blatch in with possibly fatal consequences for the business. Instead the fatal consequences were for Davies. Around midnight on 13 July 2001 Carmody and Blatch drove up to Davies’ home to sort things out and, while there was considerable dispute about who pulled the trigger and whether the gun was actually aimed at Davies, there is no doubt he ended up dead on the floor, or actually on the ground outside his house, shot in front of his wife and teenage son.
Blatch’s appeal to the High Court, in which he claimed that he should only have been convicted of manslaughter, failed in 2005. Back in prison for the murder, Blatch at least had some light relief. Prison officer Amber Brown fell for him and they had sex together for quite some time before the authorities discovered the affair—love letters found in his cell were the giveaway—and she resigned from the service. The pair had met in an area known as the clusters, where Blatch had been placed at mealtimes when staffing levels were low and there were no security cameras.11
Anthony Perish went on the run on 5 August 1992 after a partially successful drug bust involving nearly $100,000. He stayed away for fourteen years, during which time he leased land from the Department of Infrastructure and Planning in the semi-rural district of West Hoxton, New South Wales, and turned it into a fortress with three-metre-high walls and electric fencing, and twenty-seven security cameras. Inside the house was a room lined with steel plate.
In September 2006 armed police, with a helicopter hovering overhead, stormed the house. It had been thought Perish might try to commit suicide by cop but when it came to it he surrendered quietly. Six months after his arrest the trial over the 1992 raid collapsed with witnesses and records no longer available and he walked free.
In his years on the loose Perish and his brother Andrew had been up to their armpits in criminal activity, including drug manufacturing in rural New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia, as well as the 2001 murder and dismemberment of drug dealer and police informant Terry Falconer. By the beginning of 2009 the police had sufficient evidence to arrest the brothers for the murder of Falconer and for their massive drug activity. In January the police raided a property in Girvan in the Hunter Valley where Perish had hidden out, cooked drugs and dismembered Falconer’s body. Convicted in 2011 of murder and criminal conspiracy, Perish was sentenced in 2012 to eighteen years, brother Andrew received nine years and associate Matthew Lawton fifteen years.12
Another long-term escapee was involved in a long-running saga over an internet pornography site. One-time Foxtel television presenter Roberto de Heredia had quarrelled with his former business partner Brett Boyd after lending him the money to set up the internet pornography site with Boyd’s girlfriend, model and part-time prostitute Simone Cheung. On 15 June 1998 Boyd had been the victim of a letter-bomb attack in which he lost his left eye and right thumb when he opened a package that had been sent to Cheung at her home in Belrose, Sydney. It was alleged to have been sent by de Heredia.
On 14 September, de Heredia was interviewed over the bomb attack and released without charge, but he was arrested at Sydney Airport when he was due to fly to England five days later. On 15 April 1999 he was eventually granted bail of $100,000. The next day Boyd, armed with a machine gun, was arrested outside Randwick police station where de Heredia was due to report as part of his bail terms. Now, in turn, Boyd was given bail and for a time left Australia. On 7 July de Heredia was shot in the arm and shoulder outside his Botany Bay home. Observers believed it was not necessarily Boyd who shot him and that de Heredia was quite capable of organising the shooting himself.
A fortnight later, a car that de Heredia had been using was found abandoned in Kings Cross with blood smears on the driver’s window and nearby on the ground. De Heredia was not seen again, but no one seems to have thought him to be dead. On 13 August a warrant was issued for his arrest. At the end of January 2008 Boyd hanged himself at his father’s home in Belrose. Meanwhile Simone Cheung had fled the country along with a nightclub owner, Lee Stolzenhein.
That was where things remained until in 2016 de Heredia was arrested at London’s Gatwick Airport using a false passport when he was visiting his family in Britain. He had, it was alleged, originally fled to Spain, where he had lived as a foreign exchange trader. Extradited to Sydney he told the court he had nothing to do with the parcel bomb and that he had fled because he was in fear of his life and did not believe he could get police protection. In June 2017 a jury disagreed over the allegation of attempted murder and he was remanded for a retrial.
Shortly after de Heredia’s arrest in September 2016 Cheung resurfaced as former Penthouse Pet Simone Farrow, also known in America as Simone Starr. She had been posting packages of ice concealed in bath products to Australia for seven months in 2009, using the proceeds from her smuggling to fund her lifestyle in California. Arrested late that year, she skipped bail twice and spent four years on remand before pleading guilty at the Sydney District Court. She was sentenced to a six and a half-year minimum.13
One man who did stay out and alive for over twenty years was Francis Noel Cox. During that time the authorities did not make much effort to retrieve him. He had been serving a sentence for bashing a night porter with a metal bar when he escaped from Boggo Road in Brisbane, jumping the fence in 1971. While on the run he clocked up an enviable number of achievements, apparently without being recognised. On the debit side he was made bankrupt four times, while a plus was that he claimed social security and workers’ compensation after slipping on a snow pea sprout at the Brothers Leagues Club in Cairns. He married and had three children before deserting the family for a younger woman. Jail time in Western Australia was in his own name, as were the welfare cheques he received. Back in Queensland he ran a number of rorts, claiming to be both a member of the SAS and a student nurse. He was finally and poetically arrested in Townsville in 2002 by a police officer who had not even been born when he escaped.
Double killer Anthony Gerard Sebastian ‘Tony’ Lanigan is, though, possibly the longest-surviving escapee from a maximum-security prison. In February 1969 he killed Norman Gordon, hitting him over the head with a bottle during a hotel robbery. Sentenced that year to fourteen years’ jail, he was paroled on 15 February 1977. He was free only a month before he shot dead Narelle Grogan on 20 March during a $40,000 robbery of opal dealer Jack Anderson at his Cronulla home. Lanigan was probably dobbed in by robber and standover man Neddy Smith and this time he was sentenced to life, later set at a minimum fifteen years and six months.
The next year he was involved in a brilliant but failed escape attempt from Parramatta. The route was to be through a tunnel inside a cupboard built near the foot of his bed in 1 Wing. In on the escape plot were kidnapper and rapist Bill Munday and Stephen Shipley, killed in 1981 by Munday and others who wrongly believed he had dobbed them in. But things cannot be kept secret in a prison and the actual dobber was Michael Murphy who, as a reward for his information, was given a reduced classification, only to escape from Silverwater in 1985 and go on, with his brothers and two others, to gang-rape and kill nurse Anita Cobby in February the next year.
The tunnel had been an amazing effort. Fully equipped with lights and fans stolen from the governor’s office, it was six metres past the outside wall and a mere 30 centimetres from the surface when it was discovered. Lanigan received an additional five years for his part in the attempted escape. The discovery of the tunnel shattered him and he became more and more of a recluse.
Due for a parole board hearing, he absconded in 1993 from Long Bay, failing to return from work release. He had $15 with him and, with no support system, he spent a night in a park in Katoomba and then flagged down a police patrol car, giving himself up. The escape cost him a further two years on his sentence.
By 1995, when Lanigan was again due before a parole board and was now a model prisoner, he was not known to have close outside contacts. He had not had a visitor for the past two years, nor had he made or received telephone calls. However, on 20 March that year he cut through the fence at Parramatta and has never been seen again, at least by the authorities. At first there were suggestions he might have obtained work on a ship, and others thought that he was living as a recluse in the mountains. As the years have passed it has become more and more likely he has died.14
The mystery involving escapees who disappear, particularly those who escape near the end of their sentence, is captivating for authors and the public alike. Award-winning writer Michael Robotham based his 2015 novel Life or Death on the escape of Lanigan, who he says is probably ‘Australia’s least most wanted fugitive’.