What may well turn out to be one of the last great escapes from a maximum-security prison was made by 35-year-old Brenden James Abbott who, on Melbourne Cup Day, 5 November 1997, Pied Piper-like, led to freedom a four-strong crew of some of the most dangerous men in Brisbane’s Sir David Longland Correctional Centre. The escape party included Jason ‘Waxy’ Nixon of the so-called and murderous Angry Gang, Peter Thomas Stirling, who was serving thirteen years for kidnapping and rape, and Oliver Alincic, who had been jailed in 1988 for the murder of Morayfield news agency worker Sandra Mackay. Alincic had previously escaped from Townsville’s jail in 1990, using a hacksaw to cut his way out of his cell, and in 1996 he was one of five prisoners who hijacked a tractor and attempted to ram their way out of Borallon jail. The fifth member of Abbott’s party was another lifer, Scots-born Andrew Jeffrey, who had been visiting Australia on a visa and had just turned eighteen in 1994 when he and two others bashed and kicked to death 34-year-old John Timms in a park on the Sunshine Coast over a minor drug deal.
It would end up as being Abbott’s last escape but it certainly was not his first. He was sentenced to fourteen years after a Perth bank raid in 1987, when he and his mate hid in the ceiling overnight and dropped down into the bank the next morning, grabbing $112,000. Now he told the judge, ‘You are a thorough gentleman, thank you very much’. The next year he was involved in the Fremantle prison summer riots, after which six years were added to his sentence. He did not remain in prison long. He escaped from Fremantle a year after the riots dressed in navy overalls, similar to those worn by guards, made in the tailor’s workshop. On 24 November 1989 he and his offsider, Englishman Aaron Reynolds, climbed into an air conditioning duct that went through the ceiling to the roof. They leapt three metres from the armoury to the perimeter wall at the rear of the superintendent’s residence. A third man, who fell and broke his leg, was recaptured.
For a time Abbott and Reynolds camped north of Perth, emerging a month later to rob a TAB in the city, firing at a pursuing police car. They then hooked up with a Japanese tourist with whom they travelled for a time. On two stolen motorbikes they crossed the Nullarbor Plain and headed on to Sydney where Reynolds, who was taking increasing risks with what he said and to whom, went his own way. Back in Perth Reynolds was arrested in January 1990 and nine years later was deported to England.
From then on Abbott criss-crossed Australia, robbing as he went, often hiding in a bank ceiling overnight, ready to drop down and confront the staff when they arrived to open the vault. Sometimes referred to as ‘The Drop in Bandit’, he acquired his better-known nickname, ‘The Postcard Bandit’, from his supposed trademark of sending cards from various cities and towns in Australia to the searching police. Certainly there were photographs of him at Uluru and on the Gold Coast.
It was 1995 before this particular spree ended when a police raid on Abbott’s younger brother Glenn in Perth turned up Abbott’s post office box number on the Gold Coast. A search of the box produced his pager that, in turn, led to the unit in Queensland where he was living. This time he pleaded guilty to two robberies and, convicted of a third, was sentenced to a further twelve years. Abbott really asked for trouble when, on his recapture, he remarked, ‘I won’t be here long. They couldn’t keep me in Fremantle.’ Possibly as a result of his bravado, for the first part he was in solitary confinement but when he was back in the general prison population in Sir David Longland he began his next escape plans.
Abbott has not been the only man on the run to taunt the police. In July 2010 Nahum Leedie, wanted for failing to comply with the terms of a partially suspended sentence for assault, disappeared from the Northern Territory and lived it up around the country posting notes on his Facebook page about the good time he was having. Despite friends warning him this would certainly lead to his arrest, particularly after he appeared on the NT most wanted list, he posted the last note a few hours before he was found in Victoria.1
The same year Justin Grant was one of five prisoners who escaped from a low-security farm at Townsville Correctional Centre. Also in July Grant, a convicted armed robber, escaped while handcuffed, barefoot and in a shirt advertising he was a prisoner, trotting off when a warder opened a car door to let him out in the grounds of a hospital. Worse, the police said they had no idea where he could be. In fact, he had not gone very far and was found eight days later in a McDonald’s car park that had free wi-fi access, after he had gone on Facebook to taunt the police over their failure to locate him: ‘Wat r u doin 2 cach me’. Back inside, to the annoyance of the authorities, he or his friends still continued to post notes on Facebook.2
The year 2010 seems to have been a vintage year for posting images on Facebook. After a shipment of heroin worth an estimate $50 million was seized in Sydney in July, Hakam Arik, alleged to be the financier and fixer for the Comancheros outlaw motorcycle club, disappeared to Hong Kong from where he sent photos of himself meeting with another wanted man to his three hundred Facebook admirers. He did not last long on the outside. In December he was arrested trying to cross from northern Cyprus to the Greek side. Granted bail, he disappeared again, and since then he seems sensibly to have gone off Facebook.3
In 1987 guards at Sir David Longland in Brisbane claimed they had thwarted a bid by ‘black activists’ to smuggle guns into the jail and then take the prison by force. That may be but at the time Queensland’s prisons were leaking prisoners like a sieve. One of them, Brett Langford, had escaped from Queensland and New South Wales jails at least five times, the most celebrated being when, at least partly through the negligence of senior staff, he took part in the March 1989 mass escape from Boggo Road in Brisbane sometimes called the ‘Boggo Road Run Run’.
It was not as if the prison officers did not know about the escape plan. Two weeks before, a dog had told them there was a plan to rush the main gate but the information was disregarded. There had been a second chance when, three days before the escape, an anonymous telephone caller told them it was going off at the weekend but this too went unheeded.
The escape was masterminded from the outside by armed robber Francis Gordon Post, who had not been recaptured after an escape from Boggo Road with Wayne Michael Ryan and three others in September the previous year. Most of them had been recaptured by the following March. Post, however, had been more fortunate when in February 1989 he avoided the police in a trap at a bowling club. He was now suspected of two major robberies on the Gold Coast, and of another eight robberies in Queensland and New South Wales.
It was in the afternoon of 11 March, when the men were out on the prison oval playing football and the laundry van was about to leave, that it all went off at Boggo Road. The hydraulically operated inner gate opened and would normally take seconds to close before the second gate opened. At that moment around thirty prisoners made a dash for it. Some tried to scale a six-metre inner fence but were pulled back. Nine made it between the gates but one of them had his leg trapped and as a result the second gate would not open. Between them the prisoners had a zip gun and a replica with which they forced a gate officer to hand over his keys. They then escaped through a side gate, taking an officer with them as hostage. The men split up and were chased by another officer, who fired at them with an M1 carbine. Some ran down Annerley Road, some through a car park, and some towards a school. One man was caught in a taxi and a second was found in Logan City. That left six.4
After a fortnight on the run the armed robber and veteran escaper Bart Vosmaer, who had escaped from Long Bay in Sydney back in the 1960s, was caught along with sex offender Vincent Sangricoli as they ate hamburgers and studied a map near Parramatta Lakes. Then Langford was caught at a Camperdown motel in Sydney’s inner west. That left three: Wayne Ryan, Ian Hunter and Leslie Connolly. Francis Post, still at large, teamed up with Hunter and, on April Fools’ Day, the pair were caught in the Victoria Hotel at Enmore, in south-west Sydney. Post was snaffled as he went to place a bet at the bar, where an undercover police officer had replaced the barman after a tip-off. Post had a loaded handgun but surrendered quietly. Hunter tried to make a break but was caught after a short chase. Wayne Ryan was found in a Bondi flat on 17 April and Leslie Connolly hid out with friends in Hobart before being recaptured in mid July. One by one they had all been reeled in. Once again an escape that may have been well planned and reasonably well executed did not have the necessary support system in place.5
Unsurprisingly there were ructions in the prison and one scapegoat, or preferably more, had to be found. The chosen sacrificial lamb, so to speak, was a gate officer, Peter Brougham, who had not been in place at the time of the escape. He was off selling raffle tickets for the defence fund of eleven officers facing charges of assaulting prisoners. In his defence he pointed out that manning the gate was not crucial. It was left unmanned about half the time and, anyway, he had only sold tickets during his lunch break.6 In the wash-up it was the prison general manager who copped it. He was stood down within the week. As for the officers on the assault charges, one was acquitted and a nolle prosequi, a formal note of abandonment, was entered against the remainder. In the inquiries after the breakout it was discovered that fifty-five Queensland prison officers had serious convictions.
Nearly a decade after that breakout in late spring 1997 it was time for Abbott, who had collected another ten years for more robberies, to make his last break, this time from high security at Sir David Longland. Another prisoner’s girlfriend, Natalee Anne Hunter, smuggled angel or diamond wire—wire coated with diamond particles that can saw through solid steel—wrapped in cling film into the prison per vaginam or, as she described it, ‘in a womanly way’. On 1 November she pushed the wire through a small hole drilled in the Perspex window while talking to a prisoner in the non-contact visitors’ area. The wire was then attached to lavatory brushes to make saws that were used to cut through the cell bars late at night. One of the reasons Abbott’s escape was successful was that in spring that year warders had stopped the practice of tapping cell bars to make sure they were secure.
Four days later everything was ready. Abbott had signed over his television set to Hunter’s five-year-old son, saying he would not be needing it anymore. On Cup Day, with the outside help of former inmate nineteen-year-old Brendon Luke Karl Berichon, who hero-worshipped him, Abbott led the five-man escape. The men finished cutting through the bars of their cells but one lagged behind and the others had to go back to help him. They stacked plastic chairs from which to jump over the B Block fence and then cut through four sets of security fences. In what must have seemed like scenes from a Western, bolt cutters and an automatic rifle were thrown over the fence and Berichon sprayed bullets at the guards with a Winchester M14 as Abbott finally cut through to freedom. The men ran to a car parked at the nearby Wacol rifle range and sped off, now chased by a police car. Meanwhile Berichon, firing from a hilltop outside the jail perimeter, managed to disable an armoured car sent to stop the escape. Unfortunately the getaway car had not been filled with petrol and soon afterwards the escapees dumped it in the suburb of Forest Lake.
Abbott’s co-escapees did not last long on the outside. They were all picked up within the month. Peter Stirling was recaptured two days after the break when he was spotted in the unluckily named Tweed Heads brothel, Number Thirteen, and was sentenced to an additional six years. One of the girls had taken him back to her home and the others called the police.
Oliver Alincic, now calling himself Nathan Jensen, was caught after he went to Nimbin where he lived in a stolen Nissan car. There he propositioned a woman, offering her marijuana for sex, and when she refused he chased her and her boyfriend up the street. As he drove off they took his registration number. He also received six years and an additional twelve months for a breaking he committed after the escape. In 1999 he said he had new evidence that would clear his name of the original murder. It never materialised.7
Andrew Jeffrey lasted nearly four weeks before being arrested during a violent fight outside a Melbourne pub. He had been boasting to two men that he was a robber who had escaped from prison and was giving one of the men a bad beating when he was seen by a police officer. In 2009, now aged thirty-two, he was deported to Scotland.8
Jason Nixon enjoyed fifteen days of freedom before being recaptured after firing a shotgun during a struggle with two detectives who found him with a young prostitute at a luxury Noosa apartment. He and Abbott were thought to have robbed a Commonwealth Bank in Palm Beach and a Westpac in Burleigh Heads, taking $13,000 and $50,000 respectively. On 24 September 1998 Nixon was sentenced to eighteen years for his part in the escape and other armed robberies carried out while on the run, concurrent with his life sentence. The police recovered several thousand dollars found in the apartment. He received a further twenty-year jail term for attempting to murder one detective and seriously assaulting the other during his capture.
Nixon’s court appearances did not end there. In October 2004, he was in court for slaying double murderer Mark Day a year earlier. They had seemed to get on perfectly well until unfortunately Nixon’s parole date of November 2014 for the earlier murder of Bart Vosmaer had to be vacated. Just before 11 am on 8 October 2003, while sunbathing in the prison yard, he killed Day, beating him with a sock full of bars of soap in full view of the prison’s 24-hour CCTV cameras. He maintained his act was one of self-defence but the cameras showed him standing on Day’s throat for something like six minutes. The subsequent inquiry did not show the guards on duty at the time in any sort of favourable light either. The guard assigned to monitor the surveillance cameras failed to alert other guards that a murder was occurring, mainly because he was reading a magazine and making personal phone calls. Day might have also been saved because two members of the staff of the Queensland State Ombudsman’s Office were leaving the Maximum Security Unit at the time and they saw Day pinned to the ground by Nixon. They clearly did not consider it their business because they left without telling the guards. When Nixon later spoke to Centre Services Manager Ian Eggins he told him, ‘I had a problem with Day and it’s all resolved.’ This time he received an indefinite life sentence. In 2013 he received an additional forty-two months for attacking two prison guards. His indefinite sentence will not be reviewed until October 2034.9
Abbott was, however, in a wholly different class as an escapee. On 13 November he carried out a robbery on a Commonwealth Bank branch on the Gold Coast. Then on 19 December, six weeks after the escape, disguised as a businessman in a grey wig and with a false moustache and brandishing a .45 Webley, he took some $300,000 from the Yirrigan Drive branch in Mirrabooka in Western Australia. Despite ‘sightings’ all over the country, Abbott and Berichon, who had joined him, continued to remain a step ahead of their pursuers, mostly living quietly in a cream-painted brick terrace cottage at 41 Nicholson Street in Carlton, Melbourne until, on 14 April 1998, they purchased a blue Toyota Land Cruiser in Bendigo.
On 20 April two transit policemen stopped the heroin-addicted Berichon during what they thought was a drug deal in a shopping mall in Box Hill. Berichon produced a false driving licence and, when asked to empty his bag, it was found to contain a number of clean $50 notes. He then drew a gun and shot Constable Baltas in the hip and Sergeant Scott Roberts in the arm before forcing a woman to drive him home. When the police traced him the next day to Nicholson Street, the cottage was empty. It was thought that Abbott would split from Berichon as he had done from other former companions but, in an error of judgement, Abbott remained loyal to the man who had done so much for his escape.
The Toyota was left at Melbourne Airport and Berichon and his illegal immigrant girlfriend, Ruang Khiankham, known as Michelle, drove to Adelaide and then on to Alice Springs, and from there to Darwin and the Luma Luma holiday apartments. Abbott was booked in to the same apartments for 1 May. Through telephone monitoring and tip-offs the police traced Abbott, who had travelled from Queensland to the units. In the end the capture of Australia’s most wanted men was easy. Berichon had been recognised by staff at the Top End, who had seen pictures of him circulated by police. The next day, as Abbott headed for a nearby laundromat to pick up his washing, officers from the Northern Territory Tactical Response unit were waiting outside and pounced. Abbott received a further twenty-three years. Berichon got thirteen with a nine-year minimum for his attempt to kill the two police officers. Natalee Hunter, who had supplied the diamond wire, pleaded guilty to aiding an escape from lawful custody and, for her sins, was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, with a recommendation for parole after eight months.10
What emerged after the escape was an amazing story that this had only been the first step of an interstate crime syndicate to stage a series of mass breakouts in Queensland. Their aim was to release the most dangerous prisoners, including armed robber and escapee Francis Post, and to kill Queensland’s prisons minister Russell Cooper and an unnamed Sydney businessman. There was $15,000 on offer to fund a breakout at Borallon. An attack was to be made on Woodford, with a helicopter standing by to take away maximum-security prisoners, and an attempt was to be made to destroy the walls of the Sir David Longland. The syndicate’s ultimate aim was to dominate Australian crime, but quite where the necessary troops were going to come from for these operations was never disclosed. Indeed, what hard facts there were behind the story is another matter, but certainly following Abbott’s escape, security in Queensland prisons was raised to a standard unknown in other states and two additional maximum-security units were built.
Francis Post never gave up his escape attempts. Transferred to Borallon, he tried again on 2 February 1998, with Wayne Morrell and Barry Maxworthy, helped by three men on the outside. The escape was thwarted but a bullet was fired, narrowly missing prison officer Sandra Buckley. In May 2003 he tried and failed again, this time at Wolston Correctional Centre, with Oliver Alincic, who had been on Brenden Abbott’s great escape team. The next year, Alincic drew an extra six months for bronzing (smearing faeces) his cell.
Back in prison the heavily guarded Abbott took up painting. He complained of chest pains, but it was feared he might be planning another escape if he could get to an outside hospital. In the autumn of 2006 he was transferred out of the mainstream prison population in Woodford to the maximum-security Arthur Gorrie Remand and Reception Centre. He had asked to be transferred to Western Australia to be near his mother but this had been refused by the authorities.
Claiming he had been a cleanskin since 2005 Abbott was eventually granted parole. Suddenly, however, Western Australia thought it would like him back after all. On his release in April 2016 he began a fight to resist extradition to Western Australia, where he was due to serve a further seven years from the 1980s as well as charges relating to his old escape. His fight was ultimately unsuccessful and he was returned to Western Australia, but there was some small respite. On 16 January 2016 he was sentenced to five months for the breakout, to be concurrent with the remainder of his sentence. The Perth magistrate said Abbott had only himself to blame but he did not wish to impose a crushing cumulative sentence. He will be eligible for parole in 2026 when he will be sixty-four.11