We might start with a positive – not for the authorities of course – and look at
prison escapes that went marvelously right.
We might remember one of the greatest escapes of all time, and that was because it involved
three men breaking-out of Alcatraz Prison.
They went missing in 1962, and still no one knows if they survived or died in the waters
of San Francisco Bay.
Then you have the final escape of Henri Charrière, aka, Papillion, which involved sailing away
on a makeshift raft.
Or what about the numerous, incredibly cunning escapes of the serial-killer scoundrel, Charles
Sobhraj, a man we have talked about already at length.
More recently we saw the brazen escape of the gangster Joaquín Guzmán Loera, aka,
El Chapo, but like many escapees he was recaptured.
Let’s now look at failed escapes:
The Hapless Hitcher Obviously, once you’ve managed to escape
from jail or prison you should be careful who you talk to as suspicion from another
might land you right back in jail.
In 2018, the BBC reported that 31-year Allen Lewis was being taken from Greenup County
Detention Center in Kentucky, USA, when he told officers that his handcuffs were too
tight and were hurting him.
As an officer tried to help Lewis, after a short struggle he made a run for it.
Freedom at last!
But the man was stuck on a highway and needed a ride.
In desperation he held out his thumb and a kind driver stopped for him.
Except the driver noticed that Lewis was trying to hide what seemed like handcuffs fastened
to one wrist.
It turned out that the man driving the car was a police officer himself.
Lewis got a ride right back to jail.
The authorities later said, “He thought he was getting a ride, and he did.”
You might call this guy a chancer, but we’ll get around to some hardcore criminals who
orchestrated amazing escape attempts.
An Explosive Letter Writer This is yet another failed prison escape attempt
in 2018.
This time it involved a man called Sean Damion Castorina and he was trying to break-out of
Alamance County Detention Center in Graham, North Carolina.
Serving time for first-degree murder, Castorina wouldn’t have been released for quite some
time, so he tried to figure out how he might get out a bit faster.
His cunning plan to expedite his sentence was to build an explosive and blast his way
out.
Well, he needed help for that, so he wrote a letter to two of his friends with information
about how to make a bomb and which prison wall they would blast – near to where Castorina
would be waiting.
What could possibly go wrong?
Well, he sent that letter with bomb-making information to the wrong address and it was
picked up by a regular sort of person who subsequently informed the authorities.
The media later wrote, “He has now been charged with four counts of felony conspiracy,
two counts of manufacture/assemble a weapon of mass destruction, and one count of attempted
escape from jail.”
Reading Between the Lines Be careful what you say when planning a prison
escape, even if you think your words are coded.
In 2010, a 67-year old prisoner at the Isle of Wight's Parkhurst prison in the UK thought
he would send a message to the outside via a letter.
In the letter these words were written: “More heat, less light.”
It sounds innocuous, but guards that were monitoring all the prison mail became suspicious.
It turned out that this former science teacher had been hatching a plot to escape from what
some people have called the “British version of Alcatraz.”
Seeing that the prisoner had written more heat in one letter, the guards heated up some
of his correspondence.
This revealed that he had been using dried lemon juice to write down his escape plans.
The heat showed he’d sketched detailed maps of the prison, while messages were conveyed
using encrypted code and messages hidden in Sudoku puzzles.
He was also planning to use a helicopter to pick him up in a part of the prison where
it could land.
He was found out.
Later the prison governor said,”I am delighted at the way our security team and Hampshire
Constabulary have foiled a possible escape attempt.”
He was then moved to another prison, but reports state that none of his accomplices were arrested.
Love Won’t Tear Us Apart This one should be a Hollywood movie, if it’s
not already and we don’t know about it.
It’s the story of a woman called Barbara Ann Oswald.
In 1978, she hijacked a helicopter that she had charted, except she didn’t count on
the pilot being an ex-Vietnam vet.
She put a gun to his head and told him to head to United States Penitentiary, Marion,
in Illinois.
She was trying to help inmate Garrett B. Trapnell, a con-man, career-criminal and air pirate.
Oswald was the lover of Trapnell and the two had planned to get married.
She didn’t get very far as the pilot of the helicopter wrestled the gun from her and
shot her in the head.
That was the end of her and the end of the escape attempt.
But the plot thickened.
The daughter of Oswald was convinced that Trapnell was her father (he wasn’t) and
she very much wanted to get him out.
She was only 17 years old when she hijacked TWA Flight 541 just months after her mother
had died in her attempt to get Trapnell out.
The brave daughter held the 80-something passengers for hours and flew to another location with
about 40 passengers.
She had said she had dynamite strapped to her chest, but the three sticks turned out
to be flares.
She was finally arrested.
Trapnell, who had hijacked a flight himself in the past, said there was no way that the
young Oswald was his daughter.
He’d never even met her mother face-to-face.
Lord ‘Couldn’t Keep His Mouth Shut’ Over in Australia three hardened criminals
who were all serving long sentences for drug trafficking got the idea to hir e an SAS soldier
living in the Philippines to get them out of prison in Melbourne.
Except a man called Lord Tony Moynihan got in the way.
Don’t let the Lord title fool you, this man had once run a brothel, he had trafficked
drugs himself, and he later grassed on others to reduce his own time in prison.
One of the people he grassed on was the man known as Mr. Nice, aka Howard Marks, the Oxford
educated global pot trafficker who later became a celebrity of sorts.
Anyway, so our Lord told the authorities that he had learned that the three Ozzies had hired
an SAS guy to land on the tennis courts of the prison in a helicopter and break them
out.
He also said once they were dropped off they would be taken in a van to Sydney and then
they would board a yacht and sail into the sunset.
None of that happened as the cops just waited for the men to wait on the tennis court and
then arrest them during the escape attempt.
Again, this could be a movie, and one of the guys who tried to escape has been featured
in books.
His name is David McMillan, another well-to-do Brit who speaks the Queen’s English, but
trafficked drugs for a living.
He not only became one of the world’s biggest smugglers, but he is the only man, ever, to
have escaped from Thailand’s notorious Klong Prem Central Prison.
He wrote a book about this called “Escape”, saying because conditions were so brutal in
Thai prisons and the fact he’d get death likely reduced to life, he had no choice but
to get out early.
The Human Stain Ok, back to criminals we might not label with
the epithet “mastermind.”
In recent years you can see that quite a few prisoners in Brazil have successfully escaped
from prison by crawling into and out of sewers.
This can be a messy business of course, but one can imagine the smell of feces can be
put up with when the sweet smell of freedom is just around the corner.
But in 2016, things didn’t go as planned for one fella.
You can find a video of him online being pulled back out of a clogged sewer in what the media
only said was a Sao Paulo Prison.
The video shows the captured man later standing in his cell, his skin painted brown, a coating
the Telegraph newspaper called, “human filth.”
Current Status: On the Run All of you out there know very well that if
you were ever to successfully breakout of jail or prison then the next best thing is
probably to keep your head down.
Right?
We mean, you wouldn’t post a photo on Facebook of your free face?
No way.
And you certainly wouldn’t post a picture of your free head and not do anything about
that globe icon that ensures anyone can see this picture…Well, CBS news in 2010 reported
that a man called Chris Grego did just that, and he was wanted by police.
This one is perhaps a bit of a cheat as Grego managed to evade cops before he was actually
sentenced for assault, so it’s more of an escape from law than a prison break.
We just like the story.
While Grego was out he kept updating his Facebook page, and so cops didn’t have to try very
hard to find him.
Grego had even showed off, posting his own wanted poster on his page.
One of the arresting officers told the press, “If it wasn't for criminals like him our
job would be a lot harder.”
Almost Perfect: 9/10 Sometimes we can be brilliant, and occasionally
we just fall at the last hurdle.
That’s fine, at least we got to that hurdle.
But in this case you might wonder if the guy could have pushed himself just that little
bit further.
His name is Robert Emery, and he was locked up at Oregon State Prison in 2010.
The Oregonian newspaper tells us that this hardworking man, “broke windows, drilled
out a door lock, broke into metal tool cages, bashed a hole in the laundry wall, lugged
bags of tools, dug under one fence and climbed over another.”
He’d also left a dummy in his cell, something we often see in movies.
The media reports that he had spent time making this figure, so it would look just like a
real sleeping person.
It had been a physically demanding night, and the news tells us that Emery wasn’t
just tired but he was bleeding, too.
Emery, then 50 and serving time for robbery, kidnapping and assault, after being hurt on
the razor wire fence then just decided to catch a few ZZZZs.
He got under a blanket and went to sleep in the yard.
Some reports, perhaps bordering on click bait, state he fell asleep as he was just so tired.
More responsible media, however, say he actually gave up as he could not scale the razor wire
fence.
Watch Your Weight While you could argue it isn’t the worst
prison in the history of the world, the Tower of London evokes nightmarish pictures of bodies
being torn apart on the rack, of hellish screams coming from dank chambers, of cruel leaders
leaving anyone they disliked there irrespective of any crime being committed.
But people escaped, and as late as the 20th century when a man picked a lock with a spoon.
In the early 18th century the Earl of Nithsdale dressed up as woman and managed to get past
guards.
For that trickery he saved his own head.
In the 16th century Jesuits John Gerard and John Arden performed the tried and tested
rope over the wall thing, and managed to lower themselves down to freedom.
It’s said they did this with mangled hands, a punishment hors d'oeuvre before they were
really hurt.
But this is not a show about success, and we must tell you about Gruffydd ap Llywelyn,
the son of a Welsh King back in the 12th and 13th centuries.
He was imprisoned in the Tower of London after some disagreement with the King of England,
with the latter not keeping his end of a bargain.
It’s said the king put Gruffydd up as a “guest” in the tower, but the Welshman
wasn’t keen on the idea.
In 1244, he made a rope out of cloth and bits of sheets, and then he tried to lower himself
out of a window.
His makeshift rope snapped – we are told he was a portly man – and he fell to his
death.
And that’s all we have for you.
Can you add to this list?
Which one was your favorite?
Tell us in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other show Man so Violent Even Other Prisoners Fear Him.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.