The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (31 page)

There was an interesting footnote to his case: in 1967 some Westminster students rather foolishly thought they could get the better of him, and “kidnapped” him as part of a Rag Week stunt. They frogmarched him along the road to a basement room in the college – but they weren’t able to hold Houdini Hinds for long. Within a very short time, Hinds had got hold of a bunch of keys and locked them in!

In later life, Hinds moved to Jersey and became secretary of the Channel Islands branch of the Mensa Society, a reflection of the keen amount of work that he had engaged in learning the ins and outs of the British legal system. He died on 5 January 1991.

Sources:

Time
magazine, 16 March 1962: “Alfie, the Elusive”

Hansard, 23 February 1956: “Alfred George Hinds”

Hansard, 22 June 1961: “Alfred George Hinds”

Hansard, 30 July 1964: “The Case of Alfred Hinds”

Hansard, 2 December 1964: “Prison Escapes”

Glasgow Herald,
30 July 1957: “Alfred Hinds Tells How He Planned His Escape”

Hinds, Alfred:
Contempt of Court
(Bodley Head, 1966)

Buck, Paul:
Prison Break
(John Blake, 2012)

Ronald Joseph Ryan was hanged at Pentridge Prison on 3 February 1967 for the murder of prison officer George Hodson during an escape from the jail on Sunday 19 December 1965. He was the last Australian to suffer this sentence – in large part because, even at the time of his execution, there was considerable doubt as to whether he committed the crime for which he was condemned. (The reaction of the Premier of Victoria, Henry Bolte, who had pushed for the execution, when he was asked what he was doing as Ryan was hanged – “Oh I don’t remember, I suppose I was having one of the three S’s – either a shave, a shit or a shower” – didn’t endear the process to many either.)

Ryan was serving an eight-year sentence for breaking and entering. He didn’t really start a life of crime till he was about thirty-one years of age but his time in jail saw his wife divorce him, wanting to separate herself completely from him. Ryan objected strongly to this, and planned to escape from Pentridge so he could win her back, and then take her and their children to Brazil, which didn’t have an extradition treaty with Australia. He used his time inside profitably to gain the education that he hadn’t received as a child and was regarded as pretty much a model prisoner.

His accomplice in the escape was Peter John Walker, who was in the middle of a twelve-year stretch for bank robbery. The date for their escape was chosen because it was the day of the prison staff Christmas party, and therefore there weren’t as many guards on duty as normal. Abandoning his reading of
Exodus,
Leon Uris’ book about the founding of Israel, Walker joined Ryan and they scaled a sixteen-feet-high inner wall with the help of two wooden benches. Pausing to collect a homemade grappling hook which Ryan had made from a broom handle and some wire and thrown into the long grass within the no-man’s-land area, they headed for the outer wall. They were able to climb this using blankets linked to the hook, and successfully reached the top of the wall.

It was at this point that Ronald Ryan’s life changed irrevocably. He and Walker were faced with guard Helmut Lange, who, seeing two convicts where they simply should not be by any sensible definition, froze on the spot. Rather than grabbing his M1 carbine rifle, which would be a match for the piece of galvanized iron pipe that the two men were brandishing, he did nothing. That allowed Ryan the opportunity to grab the gun. As far as anyone knows, Ryan understood the basics of using a weapon – point it, pull the trigger and fire – but evidence given by Lange at his trial would suggest that he didn’t know much more than that. Certainly, he didn’t disengage the safety catch. If he had pulled the trigger, all that would have happened is an undischarged bullet would have been ejected.

Although initially he pulled the wrong lever, Lange eventually opened the gate, allowing the two men to gain their freedom. Ryan and Walker ran out from Pentridge, and Ryan then threatened a Salvation Army prison chaplain to gain his car keys. Brigadier James Hewitt hadn’t come to the prison by car that day, and in his anger at being foiled, Ryan hit him with the butt of the rifle. He then tried to use the gun to flag down a passing car.

By this point, Lange had raised the alarm, and his fellow guard, George Hodson, came out from the prison. He took the iron bar from Walker and pursued him. At the same time, other armed warders were involved in the hunt, with one of them, Robert Patterson, claiming that he fired a shot into the air when a woman unexpectedly got in-between him and Ryan.

At pretty much that same moment, Hodson fell dead. Fourteen witnesses gave evidence at the trial that followed and all confirmed that only one shot was fired – but many of those witnesses were convinced that the shot came from Ryan’s gun. Some said that they saw it recoil, others that there was smoke. Yet M1 carbines at the prison were loaded with smokeless ammunition, and the weapon doesn’t have any recoil. Former prisoner Harold Sheehan eventually claimed that Ryan had been kneeling down at the time the shot rang out, but his statement in 1993 was twenty-six years too late to save Ryan.

Perhaps not realizing that Hodson had been killed – or by that stage, knowing that they were in far too deep to stop now – Walker and Ryan commandeered a car and sped away. They changed cars twice more before heading for a safe house which had been arranged for them in the north-western Melbourne suburb of Kensington. The next day they moved into a flat in Elwood, to the south of the city, belonging to Christine Aitken.

The hunt for the two men was fuelled by anger at the death of the prison warder. Newspapers claimed that Ryan had shot Hodson three times after seizing him, and the Chief Secretary and Attorney General, Arthur Rylah, issued a warning to the two fugitives that the Hanging Act was still in force. On 23 December, they robbed a bank in Ormond, and on Christmas Eve, Walker murdered Aitken’s boyfriend, Arthur Henderson. After that, they returned to the safe house in Kensington, hiding until their accomplice obtained a car for them. On New Year’s Day 1966, they drove the 550 miles to Sydney.

They didn’t last long there. Ryan wanted to reconnect with an old friend in Sydney, but she wasn’t home when he called. Her daughter agreed that she would meet with Ryan and her mother at Concord Repatriation Hospital on the evening of 6 January. However, the woman had recognized Ryan and contacted the police. (Some sources suggest that they were betrayed by ex-con Lennie McPherson to whom they had gone for faked passports.) When he and Walker went to the rendezvous, the police were waiting for them. Even though Ryan was carrying a loaded revolver, he was captured without incident; Walker also gave up without a struggle. Multiple weapons were found in the boot of the car, alongside an axe, a hacksaw, a jemmy and coils of rope.

On the journey back to Melbourne, Ronald Ryan admitted that he had shot George Hodson. Or at least, that was the police version of events. According to Detective Sergeant K.P. Walters, Ryan told him: “In the heat of the moment you sometimes do an act without thinking. I think this is what happened with Hodson. He had no need to interfere. He was stupid. He was told to keep away. He grabbed Pete (i.e. Peter Walker) and hit him with an iron bar. He caused his own death. I didn’t want to shoot him. I could have shot a lot more.” Detective Senior Constable Harry Morrison had his own conversation with Ryan to relate: “The warder spoilt the whole show. If he had not poked his great head into it he would not have got shot. It was either him or Pete.” To his dying day, Ryan denied making these statements. In fact, the only document signed by Ryan during this period stated that he would give no verbal testimony.

It wasn’t enough to save him. Even conflicting testimony from various witnesses didn’t sway the jury. Ryan explained to the jury what had happened in the guard tower: “At no time did I fire a shot,” he said. “My freedom was the only objective. The rifle was taken in the first instance so that it could not be used against me.” He maintained that he had kept the rifle so that ballistics evidence would prove that he hadn’t fired the shot – but the bullet that killed Hodson passed through the prison warder, and was never found. Nor was the cartridge from which it came. And with only one bullet missing, and no sign of an undischarged bullet in the watchtower, it was easy to deduce that the only bullet fired was the one that hit Hodson.

Although the jury believed that the mandatory sentence of death would be commuted, they still found him guilty; one juryman, Tom Gildea, was convinced that if they had known they were sending Ryan to the gallows, they would have convicted him of the lesser charge of manslaughter.

None of his appeals was successful, and, after a tot of whisky, Ronald Ryan walked to the gallows calmly at 8 a.m. on Friday 3 February 1967. “Please make it quick,” he asked the hangman, who duly obliged.

The controversy didn’t die out. One of the eyewitnesses who gave evidence at the trial wrote to the
Australian
newspaper in 1992 stating bluntly, “Let me assure you and your readers that Ryan did kill Hodson . . . It was a sickening sight. I also witnessed a slight puff of smoke come from the carbine Ryan used. This was probably as a result of a bullet passing through a well-oiled barrel bore.”

Helmut Lange, whose rifle was used to kill Hodson, if Ryan really was the killer, refused to accept a bravery commendation, and committed suicide in April 1969. Some of Ryan’s supporters claim that Lange didn’t hand over the bullet cartridge that he had found in the tower, which would have proved Ryan’s story that he never fired the gun. According to a Melbourne newspaper report, Hodson’s daughter literally danced on Ryan’s unmarked grave at the prison in 2007 before the remains were exhumed, cremated, and buried alongside his mother’s ashes.

Had it not been for the death of George Hodson, Ryan’s escape would have been almost a run-of-the-mill affair. Instead, it led to major protests, and the eventual abolition of the death penalty in Australia.

Sources:

Herald-Sun,
19 January 1997: “Ryan: the case”

Supreme Court Trial Transcript –
Queen v. Ryan & Walker, 15–30 March 1966

Sun,
31 March 1966: “Ryan Guilty”

The Australian,
7 February 1992: “Witness breaks silence to damn Ryan”

Opas, Philip,
Throw away my wig: an autobiography of a long journey with a few sign posts
(Turton-Turner, 1997)

Stoljar, Jeremy:
The Australian Book of Great Trials
(Murdoch, 2011)

One of the most audacious heists of the twentieth century, that has entered popular mythology, was the Great Train Robbery that took place near Mentmore in Buckinghamshire, England, in the early hours of Thursday 8 August 1963. Over £2.5 million was stolen from the Royal Mail train, much of which was never recovered. Many of the robbers were found, tried and imprisoned: of them, two made daring escapes and managed to stay on the run for some time.

The two who evaded justice were Charlie Wilson and Ronnie Biggs, names that have become synonymous with the Great Train Robbery. In the case of Wilson, this was justified: he was one of the prime movers in the plotting. Ronnie Biggs, on the other hand, had a less important role: his job was to hire the replacement driver who would be needed to move the train the half-mile down the track, from where it was stopped to the rendezvous with the truck that would transport the loot. In the end, the new driver couldn’t handle the type of locomotive, so Jack Mills, the original driver, was forced to take his place.

Eleven of the robbers were found guilty of conspiracy to rob and armed robbery, and on 15 April 1964, sentences of thirty years each were passed on them. Appeals three months later upheld the judge’s decision on the majority of them, including Wilson and Biggs. Within a year, both men were on the run.

As soon as he heard the thirty-year sentence, Charlie Wilson knew there was only one logical course of action: he had to escape, or face the prospect of life in prison until he was at least seventy. He was initially sent to the Victorian-built Winson Green prison, on the outskirts of Birmingham, where warders were ordered not to allow him any contact with other prisoners. However, it didn’t take long before the restrictions were not enforced as firmly, and after a couple of weeks, Wilson received a message telling him that his friend “Frenchy” was “working on it”. According to the account his wife later gave, this was a great relief to Wilson, since he trusted his French friend implicitly. The pair had planned various robberies together including the Great Train Robbery itself, and during the Second World War, Frenchy had worked for the Resistance in France, helping to release captured Maquis from the hands of the Gestapo.

Rather than take the risk of being moved from Winson Green, Wilson elected not to travel to the Court of Appeal in July for the hearing of the case. He was quite happy to wait at Winson Green until Frenchy made his move, which he expected might take anything up to a year. Instead, less than four months after the end of his trial, Wilson was a free man.

Rather like Tom Cruise in the
Mission: Impossible
films, Frenchy put together a team of six people, all of whom had the specialized skills required to carry out the task of freeing Charlie Wilson. The first two, and perhaps the most critical, were referred to as “mountain men”. The pair, whose physical size also justified their title, would be scaling the outside walls of Winson Green, and also training the other members of the quartet – one of the most expert locksmiths in England, an expert getaway driver, a Belgian pilot, and a wireless radio operator – in the techniques of climbing ropes. Although the pilot couldn’t see why he needed to be trained in rope-climbing, he was told to get on with it.

They trained at a deserted monastery in northern France: one of the walls was about the height of Winson Green’s exterior, and Frenchy ensured that it matched the sorts of problems that they would encounter. Each time they shaved a second off the ascent time, he pointed out that that equalled “another day off Charlie’s sentence”. The locksmith became concerned that he was creating calluses on his hands that would make it difficult for him to carry out his lucrative trade afterwards, but he was reassured that his proportion of the fee for the escape would more than adequately compensate him for the time off work that he had to take while he healed.