The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (14 page)

That was the signal for the prisoners dressed as guards, now also sporting riot gear to further disguise themselves, to head towards the loading bay outside the prison. They brought with them the “explosive” that needed removing from the pod – a small black and white television, covered in a blanket, which the “guards” would periodically spray with foam from a fire extinguisher to ensure it stayed “safe”. The van arrived a few minutes later – it had been delayed because the driver, Officer Barry Batillo, had decided to bring an older van when Hawkins told him that they were going to be moving a bomb. (As the state police report later commented, Batillo didn’t seem to see anything wrong with six officers’ lives being at risk, but he wasn’t going to take any chances with a new van!)

The men came out of the sally port carrying the bomb on a stretcher. Batillo was ordered to turn the van around and back it halfway through the gate, so it wouldn’t close on them when the inner door was opened; he believed he was being ordered to do so by Hawkins, so obeyed, and then when James Briley shouted that they were carrying a live explosive, he ran for his life. The guard in the tower briefly argued about opening both gates at once, but seeing the apparent urgency of the situation, she relented.

Linwood Briley took the driver’s seat, with the others putting the “bomb” in and then jumping in behind, and drove off. At 10.48 p.m. they were out of Mecklenburg, and started heading south-east from the jail, wanting to get over the state line from Virginia into North Carolina as quickly as possible. They abandoned the van in Warrenton, around thirty miles from Mecklenburg, where the Brileys, Tuggle and Jones parted company with Peterson and Clanton.

By this time, the hostage situation on death row had ended. Thirty minutes after the Mecklenburg Six had departed, the hostages were freed, and control of the pod returned to the authorities. Around midnight, other officers began arriving to take charge; two hours later, the Department of Corrections director Robert Landon was informed of the escape, as was the state governor, Chuck Robb. Around two hundred North Carolina law officers, along with tracking dogs, began combing the countryside around the area where the van was abandoned – it had been found very soon after the inmates fled from it. Aircraft and Virginia state troopers were also checking the land around Mecklenburg, in case only some of the fugitives had been in the van. “This is our top priority right now,” Allen H. McCreight, special agent in charge of the Richmond office of the FBI, told the press. “It’s a big one.”

The manhunt would go on for nineteen days, during which many in Richmond lived in fear, particularly those who had been involved in the prosecution of the Brileys. “I think what concerned me the most was that I had seen first-hand what they were capable of doing. I knew their determination to seek revenge. You never forget the smell of death and the smell of blood from what they did,” one former Richmond detective, Woody, now city sheriff, later recalled. They were not aware that the Brileys had no intention of coming back to Richmond; they wanted to get far away.

Clanton and Peterson only lasted nineteen hours. They tried to hitch a ride around midnight with hospital orderly Andrew Davis, asking him where they might be able to get some drugs or find some nightlife. When he said he didn’t know, and tried to throw them out of his truck, he was attacked but managed to get away. Rather than use the truck, the fugitives ran off in the opposite direction (leaving their knife in the car) and hid in the local woods overnight, before getting rid of their guards’ uniforms in the morning. Getting hungry, they headed into Warrenton and bought some cigarettes, wine, bread and cheese with money that they had stolen from the prison guards the previous night. They then stupidly made phone calls – Peterson tried to call his mother. At 6 p.m., while they were still eating their wine and cheese in a local Laundromat, the two fugitives were arrested without putting up a struggle. Earl Clanton was executed on 14 April 1988; Derick Peterson on 23 August 1991.

The other four also stole a vehicle, a blue pickup truck, which was spotted that night at a twenty-four-hour gas station in Thornburg, around fifty miles north of Richmond. Lem Tuggle was being kept in the back of the truck, facing backwards, and was becoming disorientated: “All I could see was the back of the highway signs,” he complained later. The men had decided not to stay in Richmond: the Brileys knew that that would be the first place the cops would look for them. Instead, they parted company with the other two in Philadelphia, where they bought some second-hand clothes from a thrift shop and dumped their prison uniforms. Linwood Briley gave Tuggle and Jones $25 each, keeping the remainder of the $800 they had taken from the guards, and sent them on their way. Jones desperately wanted to stay with the Brileys but Linwood firmly refused.

Jones and Tuggle took the van and continued to head north, reaching Vermont, and camping just across the Massachusetts border in the Green Mountain National Forest for three days. Ten days after they had escaped from Mecklenburg, they stopped about ten miles short of the Canadian border, and to raise some funds, Tuggle went back to a gift shop he had noticed in the small town of Woodford. He stole $100 from the elderly owner, who had the presence of mind, despite a knife to her throat, to take the licence plate number of the van. The state police put out an APB for it and within a few minutes Tuggle had been apprehended. He surrendered without an argument, and was returned to Mecklenburg. Lem Tuggle was the last of the Mecklenburg Six to be executed. He recorded a cassette tape giving his account of the escape which was smuggled out of death row, and subsequently uploaded onto YouTube. He received a lethal injection on 12 December 1996.

Jones thought he had been abandoned by Tuggle. He broke into a house and called his mother, who told him to turn himself in. He thought about it for a few minutes, then went to another house and asked to use the phone. He then called the state police, explained who he was, and agreed a meeting point. At 5.30 p.m. he was picked up and taken back to Mecklenburg. Derick Jones needed two separate supposedly lethal jolts of electricity to kill him on 22 August 1991.

The Brileys took longer to catch. They had gone to ground in Philadelphia, working at Dan’s Custom Car Factory. Known as Slim and Lucky, James and Linwood had been introduced to the eponymous Dan by their uncle, Johnnie Lee Council, and fitted straight into the small business, to all intents and purposes out-of-towners just working to keep a roof over their heads. However, after Lem Tuggle admitted he had dropped the brothers in Philadelphia, the FBI began surveillance on Council, who quickly led them to the Brileys.

The Bureau staked out the garage, sending in an undercover informant to befriend the Brileys, then on the evening of Tuesday 19 June, as the feared mass murderers were barbequing chicken and drinking beer, the FBI swooped. Although the brothers tried to deny who they were, scars on James’ chest were a giveaway. They were arrested and held on $10 million bail before returning to Mecklenburg.

Linwood Briley went to the electric chair on 12 October 1984. Not long before he did so, he told an interviewer, “I had my nineteen days. They couldn’t take that away.” James followed him six months later, on 18 April 1985.

Major changes followed at Mecklenburg. Many inmates had felt that the prison had been like a powder key, ready to explode, and in July it did, with full-scale riots breaking out on two separate occasions. (Although some sources suggest that the fear of these led to the Mecklenburg Six breaking out earlier than they had originally planned, this does not appear to be supported by the evidence.) The warden and the chief of security were both suspended without pay for ten days, and then moved to other jobs. Five of the guards taken hostage were fired, including the two control-booth guards. When Dennis Stockton’s diary was smuggled out and published in
The Virginian-Pilot
newspaper in September, many of the deficiencies of the system were brought to light. Two months later, the Department of Corrections boss Robert Landon resigned.

“We have done all we could to ensure nothing like that ever happened again,” the assistant warden maintained in 1994. New guards were hired and the system changed so that individual guards didn’t control all the locks. All the cell windows – which had been taken apart and used to form some of the knives the prisoners created – were now checked daily, and the evening recreation period was abolished. That didn’t stop men trying: Willie Turner, who had prevented James Briley from killing the guards during the break out, was able to create huge numbers of weapons which were found in his cell, including a three-foot-long Samurai sword made from pieces of his bedframe, as well as keys for nearly every door in the building that took them. However, as his execution date grew near, Turner’s mental stability crumbled, and eventually his stash was found. He was transferred to Greensville prison and sent for a lethal injection on 25 May 1995. A gun was found inside a typewriter in his cell after his death.

Mecklenburg Correctional Centre ceased to be the home of the death-row prisoners in 1997; it was closed down in 2012.

Sources:

Jackson, Joe and William Burke Jnr:
Dead Run
(Times Books, 1999)

Los Angeles Times,
3 July 1994: “Wounds Deep 10 Years After Nation’s Largest Death Row Escape”

Lem Tuggle Death Row recording (YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/v=UA-DdHiTnsA
)

Times-Despatch,
13 December 2011: “McDonnell orders Mecklenburg Correctional Center Closed”

Times-Despatch,
31 May 2009: “Death-row escape [graphic]”

Free Lance-Star,
31 May 1994: “Virginia’s greatest jailbreak”

Times-Despatch,
2 June 1984: “2 Mecklenburg escapees captured; prison officials were warned twice”

Times-Despatch,
1 June 1984: “Death row inmates are hunted in N.C.”

Times-Despatch,
1984: article by Bill McKelway reprinted at
http://www.leelofland.com/wordpress/escape-from-death-row-the-briley-brothers/

No matter what you may read in some of the more conservative papers in the United Kingdom, prison is not a safe or pleasant place to be. True, there are some old lags who have become institutionalized, and find the environment inside prison much better than anything they can find in the outside world. But they are the exceptions, not the rule – and many of the prisons around the world are anything but safe or pleasant.

Take, for example, Bali’s infamous Kerobokan prison, known to its inmates as Hotel K. In its time, it has housed the Muslim bombers responsible for the Bali nightclub massacre, a Balinese King convicted of killing his brother, Australian yachtsman Chris Packer after he was found with illegal weapons on his boat, and international chef Gordon Ramsay’s brother, Ronnie. First impressions might suggest that it’s moderately pleasant but the moment a new inmate steps through the doors, he or she is entering a world of violence, filth and deprivation. Unsurprisingly, many of those who have been arrested on drugs charges want to escape from its confines, despite the sometimes lax approach demonstrated by the guards. Sex, drugs and alcohol are easily available, if you’ve got the cash, and some prisoners have even been able to get “days at the beach” with guards. But if you try to escape and fail, then chances are you’ll be beaten up as much by your fellow inmates as by the guards.

There have been some successful escapes from Hotel K, which was built hastily in 1976 to replace the original jail in Denpasar that had been demolished to allow a shopping mall to be built. It holds both men and women, and usually has about three times the 320 prisoners that it was designed to contain. At various times, parts of the perimeter walks have crumbled, affording prisoners a chance to escape.

The greatest escape – which led to major improvements in security at the jail in the short term – saw 289 prisoners abscond on the afternoon of Sunday 5 December 1999. It was masterminded by “Tony”, who was incarcerated for his part in the murder of a Javanese debt collector. Tony had watched as his brother, Saidin, a former soldier, had cut off the man’s head after he had threatened to kill the family of one of his friends. Although Tony hadn’t actively participated in the killing, which his brother had been hired to carry out by the threatened friend, he had helped his brother to roll the man’s headless corpse into a ditch not that far, ironically, from Hotel K, and was sentenced to imprisonment in the notorious jail.

Saidin was released from Hotel K within a few months: the Balinese court had failed to hear his appeal case within the mandated length of time, so there was little option but to release him. His brother wasn’t so lucky, but he had no intention of remaining within Kerobokan any longer than he needed to.

Once in Hotel K, Tony became involved with Filipino prisoner Nita Ramos, one of the many drug dealers incarcerated, as he prepared for his escape. Tony (and Saidin while he was still there) had a powerful reputation within the jail as a result of the brutality of their crime, and few prisoners would take the chance of crossing them. All the male inmates were ordered to save their daily ration of kerosene, used for cooking, and everyone was instructed, under pain of death, to run when the escape started. Those who had the most to lose, whose sentences were coming to a close, were included, even though everyone was aware that if they were recaptured, their sentences would be increased.

In Hotel K, the fifty-three prisoners held in the women’s portion, Block W, were locked up for the night at 4.30 p.m. Within a few minutes, smoke could be seen rising from the men’s part of the prison, and by 4.45, it had become thick enough that the women began to fear for their lives. Its cause: kerosene-soaked mattresses, which had been placed in every cell block of the men’s section. Tony had set the first pile alight within his own block, and as soon as the guards raced towards that, others were ignited in a coordinated pattern, so that the fourteen guards were quickly stretched beyond their capacity to cope, particularly when the prisoners began to take them captive too and keep them together in an office.