Films and television series like to show the criminal leaping spectacularly to freedom through the courtroom window, no sooner than sentence has been pronounced. Right before the judge and jury, with two fingers in the air to all and sundry; it looks thrilling. Yet open windows do not necessarily equate with an easy escape. Who’s to know where the police or other guards happen to be situated around the premises? For the escapee it’s a calculated gamble. Nevertheless, it still happens.
It seems that Albert Spaggiari had it all worked out for his appearance before the examining magistrate in Nice, where he was accused of masterminding the famous robbery of the safe deposit boxes at the Société Générale bank. His team had tunnelled into the vaults from the sewer system and had spent the weekend systematically rifling the boxes, taking cash, gold, gems and jewellery estimated at sixty million francs – according to the insurance claims made afterwards, though many believe that was only a fraction of the undeclared items such boxes contain. And even then they only opened three hundred and seventeen out of four thousand boxes, their haul curtailed by a storm that triggered the sewer system back into action.
Given that Spaggiari was a photographer and had been arrested on his return from a visit to the Far East as official photographer of the Mayor of Nice, Jacques Médecin, perhaps it’s not surprising that he left behind in the plundered vault an exhibition of sexually compromising photos discovered in the boxes of wealthy local dignitaries. Presumably he hoped to give the scene-of-crime team and local media something to get their teeth into. Out of the twenty-six-strong gang, only Spaggiari and six others were rounded up, thanks to a tip-off from someone’s ex-girlfriend.
On 10 March 1977, Spaggiari created a distraction to cover his escape from the magistrate’s office. He presented a document to the magistrate to examine before turning to the window, complaining of the heat, opening it and leaping through, falling nine feet onto the roof of a parked car and escaping on the back of a waiting motorcycle. The car owner later claimed he had received a cheque in the post to pay for the damage. This seemed consistent with the man who had scrawled on a wall in the bank vault, “Without hatred, without violence, without guns.”
Spaggiari was never caught. He probably spent most of the next twelve years until his death in Argentina, though it was believed he slipped in and out of France regularly. He could certainly afford to.
Jacques Mesrine was France’s most famous robber through the 1960’s and 70’s, a reputation enhanced by the nature of his escapes. His first on home soil was from a court in 1973, when he took the judge hostage. Mesrine had earlier visited the court with his associates to show them around, and to determine where guns should be planted if he were brought to trial. He was carrying out so many robberies by then that it was inevitable. But he knew that, once they started to draw up charges against him, they would have to take them in chronological order, which would mean commencing with the relatively minor crime of passing dud cheques some years earlier. Any trial would be held at Compiègne, the nearest town with a court.
He was right. On 6 June 1973 he was taken by train from Paris to Compiègne, fifty miles away. The carriage had been reserved for Mesrine and his entourage of armed guards. Mesrine was to maintain a theme throughout the day of having a bad stomach, “attacks of dysentery” as he called them. He regularly requested the toilet and on each visit a guard would check out the cubicle first, in case anyone had hidden a weapon there. He went three times on the hour-long train journey. On arrival at the station, the local police joined the escort as he was loaded into a police van – though not before he noticed one of his accomplices in the forecourt flick a cigarette to the ground, the sign that all was going as planned.
Mesrine was taken to the police station and placed in a cell, though regular visits to the toilet were carried out to maintain his ruse. The court session was scheduled for after lunch and he relaxed with his escort on the drive there, lulling them into a false sense of security. As they pulled into the Palais de Justice courtyard, Mesrine saw his accomplice outside in the street, behind the wheel of a white Alfa Romeo.
Whilst waiting to be called into court, he asked for the toilet again and was led, still handcuffed, to the outside public conveniences. After it was checked he entered the first cubicle and complained that there was no toilet paper. They tried the second, which was “filthy”, and he demanded to be taken back inside. The guard suggested they try the lawyers’ toilet upstairs. This time, as Mesrine expected, the guard did not check first, and, though still handcuffed to his escort, he managed to withdraw a 9mm Luger from behind the cistern and stick it in his belt. His forward thinking some months earlier had paid off.
Back outside the courtroom, Mesrine waited on the bench. When he was called, he asked if his handcuffs could be unlocked. They refused and he remained attached to one of his guards as he entered the court. No sooner had Monsieur Guérin, the presiding judge, started to read the charge than Mesrine leapt forward, dragging the guard with him, and grabbed the judge, threatening to kill him as he waved his Luger with the other hand. Mesrine ordered his cuffs to be unlocked, then, with everyone in the court forced to lie on the floor, he dragged the judge as his shield towards the door, firing a couple of shots into the courtroom to show that he meant business. Out of the court, he kept moving towards the gates, whilst policemen moved towards him with raised guns, too scared to shoot for fear of hitting the judge.
As Mesrine made the street, he pushed the judge aside and sprinted the hundred yards to the getaway car. Bullets sped past him, one hitting his right arm. As he reached the Alfa Romeo, the door opened and he leapt in. They pulled out as a police van drove straight into their path. Mesrine’s driver reversed and swung round before the police driver could react. As they swerved past Mesrine fired through the van’s windscreen, hitting its driver.
Mesrine had made a thorough reconnaissance earlier and planned the best way out, using minor roads because, as expected, roadblocks had been erected on the main roads. Twenty miles away, at Meaux, they switched cars to reach a farm hideout. They had covered all eventualities, including a shootout, and first aid was available to remove his bullet. What particularly pleased Mesrine that night, as he celebrated, was that when he was arrested he had boasted to the Commissaire that he would escape within three months. He had done just that, by two days.
This is an appropriate place to give Alfred Hinds his first outing in this book. Hinds was in full battle with the justice system, to the extent of conducting his own defence. He made escapes to publicise his claim that he was fitted-up over a jewel robbery at the Maples department store in London. He was frustrated by the way the system continually misread the way he interpreted the law books that he now buried himself in. These legal points might have been of little consequence to many in the judicial system, for they received their wages and went home at the end of each day, their battles seemingly little more than intellectual games. For Hinds, it was his freedom that was at stake. It was not a game.
Hinds had determined that, during his next trip to the Law Courts in the Strand, he was going to make another escape bid. (As we will see later, he had previously made a famous escape from Nottingham Prison in November 1955, with Patsy Fleming.) Upon arrival at the Law Courts from Pentonville Prison, on 25 June 1957, his handcuffs were removed and he led the officers to the staff canteen for tea and coffee. Hinds found a padlock and key taped, as arranged, under a canteen table. He had expected only a key, but would find out why soon enough.
Moving up to the courtroom, Hinds reminded his two guards it was advisable to go to the toilet prior to stepping into court. The key his friend had provided would fit the toilet door. As he approached, he saw two “of the biggest and brightest” nickel-plated screw eyes, one on the jamb, the other on the door. “They were like searchlights.” Now he knew why he had been passed the padlock. He opened the toilet door for the officers and ushered them in before him, as he had done at every door since they had arrived at the court. They went through. Hinds grabbed the door and pulled it shut after them, whipped the padlock out and fastened it through the eyes. His guards were imprisoned in the toilet.
Hinds became lost among the crowds and activity of the courts. As he made his way out into Bell Yard, he saw his wife, Peg, and made himself known as he hurried past. He slipped across the Strand and down a turning for Temple tube station. His brother Bert, who had seen his escape, caught up and arranged to meet him at Waterloo station in thirty minutes.
Bert arrived with a car, driven by a friend, and took Hinds to London Airport. The Dublin flight had just left, so they raced for Bristol to catch a flight there. By an unlucky chance, Bert made himself suspicious to the girl at the desk as he bought his brother’s ticket. She called the police, believing he might be connected with a local murder enquiry. All three were arrested. The clerk said later that if she’d known it was Alfie Hinds she wouldn’t have called the police, such was the feeling among many people in England about the press coverage of his case.
Most guards (like most people) have an unwarranted sense of trust and decency in allowing a person some privacy in places like the toilet. The infamous serial killer, Ted Bundy, even managed to exploit that trust in being allowed to use the law library on his own.
Bundy had initially been arrested in August 1975, in Salt Lake City, on suspicion of burglary. A search of his apartment led to evidence that was to convict him of the kidnap of Carol DaRonch, for which he was given fifteen years in Utah State Prison. As the Colorado authorities were pursuing a murder charge against him in relation to the death of Caryn Campbell, they asked for him to be transferred there in January 1977.
On 7 June Bundy was taken to the Pitkin County courthouse in Aspern, in preparation for another hearing for his murder trial. During a recess he asked to visit the court’s law library, as he was running his own defence. Over the months, whilst he behaved as a model prisoner, “always very polite and personable”, his guards had become slack. Though he was supposed to have four watching over him, often it was two, and sometimes just one. He had even been left alone in the courtroom. Bundy realised that, at certain points in the day, there were few people around and he could virtually walk out of the building.
A few days prior to his planned escape he had his hair cut, to look as different from his photos as possible. On the 7th he dressed with added clothes, including white shorts. His handcuffs were removed inside the courthouse, before he was taken to the courtroom. Though it was a stuffy day, nobody commented on his bulky sweater and appearance. At mid-morning recess, as the courtroom emptied, Bundy crossed to the law library at the back. The deputy watched him for a while, eventually going out for a cigarette in the hallway.
The first time Bundy approached the library window he saw a female reporter beneath. He walked around the room again, knowing that the next time he came to the open window it would be time to go. He climbed onto the ledge, positioned himself and jumped, escaping through a second-floor window that was routinely left open in warm weather.
He fled to safety down by the river, stripped to his shorts, pulled on a red bandana and bundled all his clothes into a makeshift pack that he threw over his shoulder. Then he walked casually through the small resort town and headed for the Aspern mountains. It took him an hour and, though there was a search in operation, he could not hear or see anything below, much to his amazement. Tracker dogs did set to work, but in the opposite direction – for they had picked up the scent of the female deputy who had brought Bundy a sweater, making straight for her home.
Bundy stayed free for six days, hiding out in a cabin for part of the time. But he had a poor sense of direction. He was looking for signs to Crested Butte, as he had plotted a course to the East Coast that used it as a starting point, but he continually missed his turns as he wandered around. Eventually, he stole a 1966 Cadillac and drove back into Aspern, down Main Street, and through to the pass. He wasn’t to know that he could have driven straight out of town, as no roadblocks were there by that time. But he was nervous, and it was his erratic driving that attracted police attention. He was stopped and arrested by an officer who had regularly escorted Bundy back and forth from his cell to the court. They estimated he had covered fifty miles, going round and round, and lost thirty pounds in those six days.
They still did not know they had a serial killer on their hands. He was charming, witty, handsome and well-educated, and was studying law when he was first arrested. He certainly did not fit what most people assume to be the profile of a multiple murderer.
Bundy was again locked in the smaller Glenwood Springs jail. It seems he was able to acquire a hacksaw blade, probably from another inmate, as well as $500. In his cell, he sawed through the welds holding a metal plate in the ceiling over an old light fixture. It was a small hole, and the slim prisoner made huge efforts to shed even more weight until he was able to squeeze through into the crawlspace. Though the noise he made was noticed, it was never checked out.
In December, two days before Christmas, Bundy heard that his trial would start in early January in Colorado Springs. Time was running out for his escape bid. On 30 December, leaving books and files under his blanket to give the appearance he was asleep in his bed, Bundy dressed in thick, warm clothes and climbed into the crawlspace, before moving across to the jailer’s apartment. It seems the jailer and his wife had gone out for the evening to see a film. Bundy climbed down into their linen cupboard and left via their front door.
To escape into the Colorado night in December was not a pleasant experience. It was cold, a snowstorm had started up. Bundy stole an old MG but it broke down. He had been looking for four hours for a car to steal, as he didn’t know how to hotwire an ignition. In the end he hitched a lift into the town of Vail, and by chance saw a bus about to leave for Denver, where he took an early flight to Chicago. Seventeen hours after his escape, with Bundy neatly ensconced in Chicago, the guards in the little Glenwood Springs jail noticed that their sleeping charge was a pile of books, files and clothes. Discovery didn’t occur until after noon, for Bundy had been declining breakfast, choosing to sleep late instead.
His final murderous spree was set to begin, leading to his ultimate arrest and eventual execution in Florida. During that short time-span, Bundy committed numerous petty crimes to finance his freedom, making his way across country until he stopped in Tallahassee, Florida, where he acquired documents to pose as a student, Kenneth Misner. In the early hours of 15 January 1978, he entered the state university’s Chi Omega sorority house to bludgeon four sleeping young women, leaving two dead and the others seriously injured. One of the murdered girls had double bite-marks on her buttocks that matched Bundy’s. All this was accomplished within thirty minutes. His next step was another house, not far away, where another female student was bludgeoned and left injured.
After lying low for a few weeks, Bundy moved on in early February to Lake City, where he abducted, raped and murdered a twelve-year-old girl. She was his last victim. He was stopped by a Pensacola policeman on 15 February, on suspicion of driving a stolen car.
It is similarly displeasing to hear how easily Belgian serial child rapist and murderer Marc Dutroux slipped away from his guards, in 1998 – even if, in the event, it was only for a few hours. The people of Belgium had been outraged that this infamous criminal, with his shameful slur on their national character, was allowed to travel twenty miles daily from his cell in Arlon to the courthouse in Neufchâteau to examine the prosecution files in preparation for his trial, protected by only three accompanying policemen – or, as was the case on the day he escaped in April 1998, just two. But it was his right to see the files, as there were so many that they could not make copies.
His escape was made whilst one of the officers was out of the room, collecting further files, and the other was dozing in a chair, enabling the unhindered Dutroux to grab the gun from his belt and flee the courthouse. Perhaps it was a small blessing that the gun was unloaded. Dutroux stole a car to escape. Whilst the alarm was raised immediately, resulting in five thousand police, helicopters and planes joining the search – including many from the neighbouring countries of France, Germany, Luxembourg and Holland – it was a forest warden who spotted the stolen car stuck in the mud. Tracker dogs caught up with Dutroux. After this incident, his files were brought to him in prison.
An earlier and altogether different European social threat, the Red Army Faction – or, as they were initially known in the media, the ‘Baader-Meinhof gang’ or ‘group’, to deny them military status – came into being in May 1970, when Andreas Baader, imprisoned in Tegel Prison, Berlin, for arson convictions, escaped from custody. At 8am on 14 May, Ulrike Meinhof, a well-known German journalist, had gone to the library at the Dahlem Institute for Social Research and asked to work there, as she had often done before. She was told that the main reading room was closed that day, because Baader was being brought from Tegel to conduct research on “the organisation of young people on the fringes of society”. She said she knew of this, because she was collaborating on the research with him. No one checked that this was approved. Though Meinhof was sympathetic, she was not yet a member of Baader’s militant leftwing group at this point.
Meinhof changed the furniture around, placing a chair for him next to hers, with their backs to the windows. At 9:30am Baader arrived in a car with his escort of two policemen. With some reluctance, they decided to release his handcuffs so that he could work. They checked the fastenings on the windows and sat either side of the main door. No one checked Meinhof ’s bag, which contained a gun.
A little later, there was a ring at the front door and two women, Irene Goergens and Ingrid Schubert, entered disguised in wigs. They were told they could work in the hallway until the reading room became vacant. They settled at a table. When the doorbell went again, they answered it and let in a masked man with a loaded Beretta, who shot one of the library personnel as he turned to run. The three of them burst into the library and scuffled with the police. In the commotion a teargas pistol was fired, whilst Baader and Meinhof jumped out of the window. The others followed, all making their way to a stolen silver Alfa Romeo, with fellow nascent terrorist Astrid Proll at the wheel.
Gerard Chapman was the criminal for whom the term ‘Public Enemy Number One’ was coined by a lawman in the 1920’s, and then picked up by the newspapers way before the FBI began providing its ‘Most Wanted’ list. He escaped a number of times from custody, raising cheers in the picture-houses when newsreels reported his escapades. He was a conman but became a robber alongside his criminal mentor, Dutch Anderson, whom he met during one of his spells in prison.
Chapman lived the high life in Manhattan with fine clothes and expensive women. Educating himself with music and literature, he was known as ‘the Count of Gramercy Park’. His first escape was probably the most spectacular, in that it had the touch of a showman. Caught for a robbery with his accomplice Anderson, after stealing five sacks of registered mail that totalled just over $1.4 million (the biggest haul in history at that time), they were taken to the main Post Office building for questioning. In the middle of the interrogation, Chapman yawned and stepped from his chair, dashed to the window with a “sorry gentlemen”, went out onto the sill and was gone. Everyone rushed to the window and looked seventy-five feet down to the street, wondering how he could have survived the fall. Then a detective noticed a cleaner at the building opposite pointing frantically to the side of the window. Chapman had sidestepped and moved along the ledge to come back into the building via another window. He was recaptured four offices along.
It seems he had a talent for escaping through windows. When he was imprisoned another time, he feigned illness by drinking disinfectant in order to be moved to the prison hospital. There he escaped by going out of the window, using bed-sheets to lower himself. He was cornered two days later and shot a number of times in the process. His subsequent admission to the prison hospital was for valid reasons, a bullet having penetrated his kidney. It was feared he might die, but, six days later, he escaped in exactly the same way. He was now free to commit further crimes with his companion, for Anderson had tunnelled out of Atlanta State Penitentiary around the same time.
However, he was later captured with another man whom he unwisely chose as his new accomplice. When the accomplice was caught after they killed a policeman during a failed robbery, he boldly boasted that Chapman was his partner. That was to be Chapman’s final crime. Such was the adulation for the man that bouquets arrived daily, right up until his execution in 1926.
The escape of Brian Nichols from Fulton County courthouse in Atlanta owed little to cunning and finesse, and more to sheer violence and brutality. On 11 March 2005, Cynthia Hall, aged fifty-one, a five-foot two sheriff ’s deputy, had just removed Nichols’ handcuffs, to enable him to change from prison uniform into civilian clothes for a court appearance, when he attacked her and grabbed her gun. He used enough violence to put her in hospital with head injuries, placing her in a critical condition. It seems surprising that she was the only guard for a six-foot one black male, weighing two hundred and ten pounds, who was facing life imprisonment on a retrial for charges of rape, false imprisonment, sodomy, possession of a machinegun and handgun, and large quantities of marijuana. Added to that, he had been caught in court, two days earlier, with two handmade knives in his shoes.
Having overpowered the guard, his escape attempt took the lives of the judge, a court reporter, a police officer and a US Customs agent. Nichols started his bid for freedom by making his way across to the old courthouse via a skybridge and entering the private chambers of Judge Rowland Barnes, where he overpowered another officer, removed his weapon and entered the courtroom behind the judge’s bench, shooting Barnes in the head, doing likewise to the court reporter as he made his exit. Nichols managed to go down eight floors of a stairwell whilst being chased by another deputy, whom he shot and killed once they were outside.
A number of cars were hijacked, the first being a towtruck obtained at gunpoint outside the courtroom. Another was a Honda Accord that he took from a reporter, whom he pistol-whipped to obtain the vehicle. He abandoned that car before he had even left the parking area, switching to another.
Twenty-seven miles north of Atlanta, in Duluth, Georgia, Nichols approached Ashley Smith at an apartment complex and forced her into her bathroom where he tied her up, placing a towel over her head whilst he took a shower. Fearing for her life, she struck up a rapport with the man over several hours, telling him about her five-year-old daughter. Though he wanted marijuana, she only had methamphetamine to offer, as she was addicted but was trying to get clean. She read to him from the Bible and from a book that inspired her, Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life. She told him how her husband had died in her arms after a brawl a few years before, and showed him a large scar across her torso from a drug-fuelled car crash.
She was undoubtedly having some effect on Nichols, and was trying to convince him to surrender. She made him pancakes for breakfast, and he let her leave to visit her daughter, who had been taken from her as a result of her drug use. Smith then phoned the police, and the apartment was soon surrounded by all manner of agents. Nichols surrendered peacefully.
Today, at this point in writing, the new trial has still not begun, for fifty-four charges and eleven scenes-of-crime are now involved (including the courtroom, which has been sealed off ever since the murders), and the defence has become so complex and costly to the taxpayer that there are fears the trial may never really take place.
Wayne Carlson became an escapee after his first conviction for stealing cars in 1960, when he was eighteen years old. His total number of escapes to date is thirteen, both in the United States and Canada.
His life has been a series of petty robberies and imprisonments, with most escape methods employed: sawing through bars, climbing down a sheet rope and over the fence (Regina Correctional Centre, 1970); locking up seven sheriffs and five prisoners, armed with a .38 Smith & Wesson (Burlington Correctional Centre, 1973); sawing through bars and tying up a guard (Windsor State Prison, 1974); making a key to doors (Fort Saskatchewan, 1976); leaving a dummy in bed, hiding under piles of dirt in the yard and cutting through a fence (Stony Mountain Penitentiary, Manitoba, 1982); failing to return on a day pass (Bowden Institution, Alberta, 1987).
In 1974, Carlson was reminded of Dillinger’s wooden gun escape when he saw an inmate carving a pipe with the end of an Exacto blade. He wanted a gun that looked real head-on, not just from the side. “He’d placed silver paper from a cigarette package into each chamber of the cylinder,” Carlson later wrote, “so when I looked into the front end of the revolver, it appeared to be loaded. [He] had burned the wood and then blackened it further with shoe polish, giving it a dull, gunmetal shine.”
Carlson wanted to use the fake weapon to break out of an upcoming court appearance. He pondered how to get a gun, fake or otherwise, past the various security searches when he changed from his prison clothes to his own for court. He reckoned he could get through the superficial body pat if the search was cursory enough by placing the gun in his pants and winding elastic bandage around his body.
To avoid the closer skin search he created a scene, refusing to go to court when they came for him, getting into a temper and offering a display of aggression by smashing a table so that they grabbed him, performed only a perfunctory body pat and fixed him in a belly chain, his hands linked to his waist. When they placed him in a room to change his clothes he created another scene, until in the end they were pleased to let him be taken to the van in his prison denims with no skin search made.
Having made the guards nervous by suggesting he was going to court in connection with a cop-killing charge in Canada, he was taken into the courtroom with his handcuffs removed but his chains left on. He was actually there to receive sentence for his recent escapes. After receiving three-to-seven years, he relaxed with his guards and said he needed to go to the toilet ‘bad’. In the toilet, the guard thought their man was tame enough to let him step into the middle cubicle.
Carlson removed his fake gun and leapt out, thrusting the weapon in the guard’s face, dropping it to his stomach before he could realise it was a fake. He tried to reach for the officer’s gun, but the guard twisted away. He then tried to outmanoeuvre the guard, saying he just wanted him to put his gun down on the floor. Once it was down, Carlson snatched it up and checked to see if it was loaded. “As I looked into the cylinder I glimpsed semi-wad-cutter ammunition. Semi-wad-cutter bullets are indented instead of pointed, and the slugs immediately expand on impact with flesh and bone, leaving huge gaping wounds in their wake. As soon as I saw the slugs I put my gun in my pocket and used his. I pulled the hammer back and left it on full cock.”
Carlson then took the officer and his companion, who was waiting outside in the corridor, from the courthouse. Going out the back way, they walked unhindered across the lawn and into the underground parking lot. Once the other guard was disarmed, they climbed into the car, with Carlson taking the wheel. Though the guards were in the back, he warned them of the damage their guns loaded with semi-wad cutters would do if he had to use them. Carlson drove out the city and up the Interstate, his foot down hard, knowing they wouldn’t try to jump him at that speed. Later he turned them out of the vehicle. His recapture brought much media attention.
In 1999, he was finally let out on parole and was apparently developing a new life, having written a book and been involved in a prison suicide prevention programme and other activist work, as well as getting married – not once, but twice. But the dice didn’t seem to roll right. Carlson slipped into drinking and smoking marijuana, broke his parole stipulations via possession of a gun, and was sent back inside in 2004. He will be seventy-three when he emerges from jail, unless he finds another way out.
Larry Marley, the IRA activist, registers on the roll-call of escapees for his breakout from a courthouse, where he was already being charged with attempting to escape from prison. He had been arrested dressed as a British army patrolman after making his way, with some comrades, through the compound at Long Kesh, where they moved unimpeded until they reached the last gate. They were taken to the Newry courthouse on 11 March 1975. There, in the holding cell, they discovered that the bars on the toilet window were rusted. The ten prisoners broke them and went out into the yard, though not before scrawling, “Up the IRA” in soap on the mirror. An electricity transformer provided the climbing frame to get over the fencing, most of them making the long drop over the barricade uninjured, after which they stole cars and headed for the Irish border.
If we direct our attention to the American Wild West, we come across tales of escapes from the jailhouse at every turn. Henry McCarty, a.k.a. William H. Bonney, was as famous for his escapes as for his short career as an outlaw and gunman, better known as ‘Billy the Kid’. Bonney (the name he regularly used) also continually escaped his pursuers, but it is his custodial escapes that concern us. As so much is written about him, there is also confusion as to what is fact, fiction or myth.
His first escape was at fifteen, when he was locked up in Silver City for a robbery. The sheriff probably thought he was too young to be kept in a cell, and allowed him the run of the corridor outside. When the sheriff ’s back was turned, Bonney was up the chimney. He seems to have escaped whatever jail he was put in. The most famous escape attributed to him occurred in April 1881, and was to be his last. He was taken to the Lincoln County Courthouse, guarded by two men, James W. Bell and Robert Ollinger, and kept in handcuffs and leg irons in a room on the second floor.
There seem to be variations in the story, but one account is that he was returning from the toilet out back in the yard, accompanied by Bell. Despite his chains he got ahead of the guard, slipped his handcuffs and turned to hit Bell with them, reaching for his gun first and shooting him dead. Ollinger, who had taunted Bonney and hoped to kill him with his new shotgun, heard the shot across the street at a restaurant. Bonney had already taken Ollinger’s shotgun from the office and drew his attention from a window, before blasting the returning deputy. He removed his shackles and rode away at a leisurely trot, on a borrowed horse – it was returned two days later. As they say, the rest is history. Outlaw-turned-lawman Pat Garrett was called and set off in pursuit, later gunning Bonney down in a darkened room.
The life of Christopher Evans (who, in partnership with the Sontag brothers, was the leader of a gang known as the California Outlaws) is a great story in itself, but for our purposes here, this legendary train robber and great nemesis of Southern Pacific Railroads (robbing the company’s safes on board, but never the passengers – or even the US Mail) was almost lured into an escape from jail so that he could be gunned down by railroad detectives and their henchmen, to save their greedy company any further trouble.
The man who had been instructed to arrange the escape was Ed Morrell, who worked as a spy for the gang because he was acquainted with the detectives. He decided to frustrate the railroad’s plan by bringing the escape bid forward by twenty-four hours. Morrell, who worked in the restaurant across the road from the Fresno County Jail, turned up with Evans’ evening meal on 28 December 1893. Evans was awaiting transfer to Folsom Prison to serve a life sentence.
Beneath the platter was a gun. Morrell joined Evans as they guided the jailer down Mariposa Street to reach a team and buggy tied up a block away. Evans needed to be helped because, prior to being returned to custody, he had been involved that same year in a mighty gun battle at the Stone Corral in which George Sontag had been killed whilst Evans, despite being riddled with bullets, had survived – though he needed his arm to be amputated, an eye removed, and he was left with some brain damage from the shotgun pellets that entered his head.
Evans’ flight was closer to a hobble. It was freezing winter, but at least he was helped by many sympathetic residents of the area, until the reward was raised high enough to bring forth a betrayer. Evans was returned to prison where he stayed until 1911, before being released to live out his final years with his family.
When the police station is used to hold prisoners today, one may not think that a gun could be passed directly to set a breakout into operation. Bonnie Parker may have been able to hand a gun through the bars to Clyde Barrow as late as 1930, but things today are surely more complex with regard to security. Nevertheless, guns are still smuggled in along with the full array of tools needed for escape.
Nikolaus Chrastny offers us a good view of how the system can be a lot less smart than the criminal whose sole intent is to escape. Scotland Yard and Customs officers had a problem when they arrested Chrastny in 1987. He named his drug smuggling partner as Roy Garner, a villain and alleged police informer, and further alleged that Garner had a useful friend in Detective Superintendent Tony Lundy (subsequently allowed to retire on health grounds with full pension and good service medal). At stake was the smashing of a major cocaine smuggling ring. To protect their star informer, with whom they were doing a deal, Customs officers moved him out of London. They handed him over to the police in South Yorkshire, who would hide him in a police station in Rotherham where they could interview him quietly over a period of time, and where it was less likely that others would try to either rescue or silence him.
Chrastny was kept in a normal cell, but fraternised with the police officers so easily that they feared they might become complacent and their prisoner’s situation be jeopardised. He was moved to Dewsbury police station and the safety of the West Yorkshire police (who had earlier looked after the Yorkshire Ripper), housed in a section usually reserved for female prisoners. Though Chrastny was under arrest and regarded as a dangerous, high-security risk, he was also treated as a guest because of his status as high-level informant or ‘supergrass’. He received privileges such as a television set and a stereo hi-fi. The only problem was that the cells were not equipped with electric plugs, and for these appliances to be of any use required a lead to run from his cell to a plug in the room opposite, the doctor’s office. This meant that his cell door had to be left open, along with that of the doctor’s room. The only barrier to freedom was the gate that closed between his cell door and the hallway.
Chrastny’s wife, Charlotte, visited him regularly, even sharing a meal with him in the jail. She was such a regular presence that they stopped searching her, and she would bring in beer, cigars, extra food and books. It is believed that two hacksaw files were concealed by her in the spine of the Sherlock Holmes novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles. To fill in the hours between interviews with the Customs officers, Chrastny requested model-making equipment, including Plasticine, paint, glue and Blu-Tak. He put them to good use, though not in making models. With background music to drown out his activities, at night he sawed through the bars of the outer gate of his cell and filled the gaps temporarily with Plasticine.
Fortunately, he was just finishing his preparations when he was informed, in early October, that within a few days he would be moved back to London to appear in court. That night he carefully removed the bars and went through the gate, replacing them so as not to make it too easy to trace his path. Then he crossed the hallway into the medical room, which was unlocked because of his electrical lead. As the window had no bars, he moved rapidly out and into the police station yard, climbing the gate. It is believed he was met by a car.
At 11:30am the next morning, when the prisoner had his breakfast brought to him in bed, along with his morning newspaper, he seemed to be fast asleep. When the police returned twenty minutes later, an accompanying inspector accidentally kicked the gate, dislodging one of the bars. In the empty bed was a note: “Gentlemen, I have not taken this step lightly. I have been planning it for several weeks. The tools have been in my wash-kit for several years in preparation for such an occasion.” Later that day he phoned Dewsbury police station and repeated his apologies.
That is the last anyone has heard of Chrastny on these shores. Everyone involved blamed someone else’s unprofessional behaviour. And everyone cursed how the opportunity to haul in an international drug ring had been botched. So who had helped him? His associates? Corrupt Scotland Yard detectives, who may have had a lot to lose by his evidence? Or his wife Charlotte, a former German policewoman, who visited him not long before he escaped? She was later to receive a seven-year jail sentence, not for aiding and abetting her husband’s escape, of which she was acquitted – but for conspiracy to import and distribute cocaine.
Arthur Hutchinson had planned to escape from court in September 1983. He even told his two-man escort, when they took him from Armley Prison in Leeds to Selby Magistrates’ Court for his fifth appearance, that he would be escaping that day. They laughed. But when they arrived, the desk sergeant, the only person on duty, was busy with two juvenile absconders and buzzed in the prisoner with the warder handcuffed to him. Hutchinson was taken to the interview room. Whilst they were busy counting out £120 that he had brought with him, Hutchinson asked for the toilet. They unlocked his cuffs and he went to use the toilet in the next cell. Or so they thought.
Actually, he had gone up the stairs to the courts. As soon as they realised, the police ran round the front, expecting him to appear through the public entrance. But Hutchinson knew the layout of the place from his previous visits. He was also fortunate in that some doors were unlocked, as the court was undergoing redecorating work. He went straight into the courtroom, startling the decorator, ran across the press bench and dived headlong through the window. It was closed. Glass went everywhere as he fell six feet onto the wire netting over the police station exercise yard. Then he dropped onto the roof of a van, crossed the schoolyard next door and escaped into the streets of Selby. No major search was put in operation. He had convictions for petty theft and sex with underage girls, and his current charges were rape and burglary, but he was probably not regarded as dangerous.
What followed would change all that. Unsurprisingly, when he dived through the glass window and landed on the wire below he made a four-inch gash in his leg. It became infected, so he went to the Royal Infirmary in Doncaster to have it treated. They told him to return in two days, when he was given antibiotics. He continued moving around the area, eventually sharing a room at a guesthouse in Sheffield with two others. It had been four weeks, and the police had focused no press or media attention on him at all.
It seems that he met an eighteen-year-old, Nicola Laitner, in a pub in Sheffield, and she told him of her sister’s wedding at their home in Dore. Perhaps she invited him, casually or purposely. In any case, Hutchinson arrived late at the house on 24 October 1983, when the family were recovering after the day’s wedding celebrations. A marquee still stood in the garden. It seems that Hutchinson wasted no time in killing wealthy solicitor Basil Laitner, his wife, Avril, and their elder son, Richard, using a Bowie knife, and then turned his attention to the daughter, Nicola, raping her twice, in her bed and in the marquee. He then robbed the house of cash and jewellery, before departing.
On the run, Hutchinson phoned his mother. The call was monitored and, once the police realised that he was injured, they played up the wound to the media, indicating that it was serious, that gangrene would develop and amputation would result. In fact it was not a major injury, if looked after properly. In any case, Hutchinson was captured in a field near his hometown in the Northeast, trapped by police dogs.