The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (42 page)

On the evening of 5 December, Binse and Skellington disappeared for a short time, but returned to the property by 6.20 p.m. After the three robbers had dinner with their landlord, Smith headed out around 8.20. As he was driving through the small town of Creswick, he was stopped by a police officer, and after a tense four-minute stand-off, there was an exchange of gunfire. At the end of it, Jockey Smith lay dead.

Knowing that Binse was in possession of radio scanners which would within minutes pick up the many reports flying around from police officers describing the death of Smith, the Armed Robbery Squad moved on the farmhouse, arresting Binse and Skellington.

Binse would spend the next thirteen years in jail, but not for want of trying to escape. The year following his double escape, he planned on getting out of Pentridge, along with thirty other convicts taken from the prison’s top-security H Division. Rather oddly, most of the information about the plan was derived from Binse’s own diary, seized shortly before the escape was due to take place – quite why he was keeping such detailed notes has never been explained.

According to the reports, Binse was one of four inmates in charge of the escape plan. Double murderer John William Lindrea had already managed to get out of Pentridge; another of the plotters, Robert Chapman, had done a runner from an amusement park while on day leave; while convicted car thief and escapee Paul Alexander Anderson acted as a “consultant”. The idea was that one of the inmates would overpower the single guard on night duty, take his gun, and then open the cells of the thirty escapees. After that, they could either get hold of the keys for the separated-off area of H Division, get out into the main part of the jail, and then scale the outside wall behind the prison – or they could use the guard as a hostage, and use him to bargain their way out through the main gate. Along the way, a bit of revenge would be dealt out: Julian Knight, who had killed seven people and injured nineteen others during a killing spree in Hoddle Street, Clifton Hill, in 1987, was regarded as an informer by a number of the escapees, and he was going to be either seriously injured or killed as a by-product of the escape.

Whereas good luck aided Binse to get away from Pentridge in 1992, he suffered from the reverse the following year. On 25 October, a day before the escape was going to occur, Pentridge prison officer Les Attard was stabbed seventeen times with a pair of tailor’s shears. Unsurprisingly, the prison authorities cracked down and carried out an intensive sweep of the entire jail. To their annoyance, the guards discovered that Binse’s cell door had been compromised: the lock had been neatly cut with a hacksaw blade. They also found a home-made prison officer’s uniform, which had been completed using Binse’s civilian shirt. As well as confiscating Binse’s diary – and discovering the details for the plan – they got hold of two home-made daggers, six ersatz Office of Correction shirt insignias, and a hacksaw blade.

A blade also featured in Binse’s next attempt, two years later. Rather than getting involved with a large group, Badness worked solo on the bars in his cell. After carefully removing them, he made his move, but was recaptured in the prison grounds; according to some reports, John William Lindrea was with him when he was found.

The following year, by which point he was spending all but one hour a day in leg irons and handcuffs, he was sent to New South Wales to face the charges arising from his crimes in autumn 1992. A further six and a half years were added to his sentence, and the judge advised him to change his lifestyle, or he would rot in jail. He tried to bring legal action against the state for the restraints, but the Court of Appeal threw out the action.

In 2001, Binse was one of the first prisoners sent to the new Supermax facility at the Goulburn Correctional Centre, marking him as one of the elite one per cent of offenders within the Victorian prison system – the psychopaths and the ingenious escapers. Nicknamed the HARM-U by the inmates (from its original name, the High Risk Management Unit), it has all the lack of pleasant facilities and the high presence of security of the American Supermax. Prisoners are rarely let out of their cells; they get little time with other inmates. If they are moved around, they are in leg irons and handcuffs. And Christopher David Binse did not get out of there until he was permitted to do so in 2005.

Binse didn’t stay out of jail for long. He was rearrested for threatening a security guard and a receptionist at a strip club in November 2005, and other firearms and drugs offences, returning to prison until April 2008. At that point, he was interviewed for the
Real Prison Breaks
series, and intimated that he was gradually learning the error of his ways. The former prison guards and police officers interviewed evidently didn’t believe it for one moment – with good cause. Binse was apprehended just before Christmas 2008 with a loaded pen pistol, a Taser stun gun and a spray canister by members of the Special Operations Group.

Around now, it seemed as if Binse was losing the easy charm that had characterized his actions. He had pulled a gun on three officers in May 2012 when they were checking the registration of his motorbike, and had raced to his girlfriend’s house where he barricaded himself inside. By the end of the two-day siege, even his girlfriend had walked away from him, worried about his state of mind; officers involved in the situation were seriously concerned when he exited the house still carrying a gun. Would Binse’s story end with “suicide by cop”? In the end a gun that fires small beanbags was used to bring him down – and Christopher David Binse was arrested to face trial yet again . . .

The account of Binse’s arrest following Jockey Smith’s death is highly misleading in the
Real Prison Breaks
instalment, implying that police had no idea that Binse was involved with Smith. In fact, as discussed, they were simply biding their time to ensure that they had sufficient evidence to arrest all three perpetrators.

Sources:

Sydney Daily Telegraph,
9 May 2009: “Inside the walls of Super-Max prison, Goulburn”

Real Prison Breaks,
Discovery Channel, 2008: Christopher David Binse interview

Melbourne Herald-Sun,
24 May 2012: “Christopher Dean Binse charged with multiple offences”

The Age
(Victoria), 22 May 2012: “Born to be Badness: the criminal behind the East Keilor siege”

Silvester, John and Andrew Rule:
Tough. 101 Australian Gangsters
Floradale Productions & Sly Ink, 2010

The Age
(Victoria), 23 May 2012: “Meet Badness, the man behind the siege”

Melbourne Herald-Sun,
19 December 2008: “Armed bandit Christopher Dean Binse arrested”

Haddow, Peter “Jockey Smith’s Last Stand” contained in:
On Murder 2
(BlackInk, 2002, edited by Kerry Greenwood)

As he was being handcuffed and leg irons applied, leaning up against a police cruiser, a tired-looking Tony Artrip was pressed by reporters who were keen for answers from the man who had just led their local cops on a merry chase through the town of Marmet, West Virginia, after robbing a bank. When he finally gave his name, one reporter recognized it, and asked him what the secret of his regular escapes was. “I don’t know, man. Just luck, I guess,” Artrip drawled before asking a cameraman if he could pass his love on to his daughter, Cierra.

This incident in 2009 marked the end of Artrip’s third escape from custody, twelve years after he first made a daring bid for freedom from the Boyd County Detention Center in Cattletsburg, in the north-east part of Kentucky. In April 1997, Artrip was being held in Boyd County, awaiting transfer to a state prison to serve a ten-year stretch for a burglary in Scioto County, Ohio, as well as being a persistent felony offender. The prison was comparatively new at that point, completed in 1991, and the ninety-three-bed facility was built in a podular style, with the cells circling a centralized control room. The theory was that the inmates would be visible at all times to the guards – as long as the guards were paying attention, of course. Like so many institutions constructed around that time, the prison authorities believed it was escape-proof. To the average offender this was probably true, but Tony Artrip had no intention of remaining in the Kentucky lock-up.

Alongside Artrip in Boyd County were Alan Scott Williams and Donald Tipton, who were awaiting a retrial for the armed robbery of a supermarket in Westwood, Kentucky. They decided to use a different mode of exit from the prison than the usual jail breakers: a tunnel wasn’t practical, so rather than go down, they went up – into the ceiling of the prison itself. The men noticed that the panels in the false ceilings in their cells weren’t welded together particularly well, and if a sufficient degree of pressure was applied, they could be loosened. Lying on the top bunk in Artrip’s cell, they were able to push at the panel until it came free.

As a reward for keeping their cells clean, inmates at Boyd County were allowed special privileges, including movie nights, and during a screening of the Mel Gibson historical epic
Braveheart
on 29 April 1997, Artrip and his accomplices made their move. As Gibson’s William Wallace was noisily telling the Scottish army that the English might take their lives, but they’d never take their freedom, Artrip, Williams and Tipton kicked the ceiling panel out of the way, pulled themselves up into the space above, snapped the welding around a grating beneath an air-conditioning unit, pushed that aside, and went out onto the roof. They then leaped the twenty feet over the fence, and ran into the night.

Tipton and Williams split away from Artrip, heading to Arizona, where they were eventually arrested after they carried out a hold-up in the city of Winslow. They served their sentences for that, and the escape, in an Arizona prison. Williams was later sentenced to life imprisonment for the armed robbery of the Citizens National Bank branch in Ashland on Christmas Eve 2009: because of his record he was tried as a persistent felony offender, and the jury recommended the maximum term.

Artrip headed back to his home town of Ashland, six miles north of Boyd County Jail, where he had family and friends. Although the police received various tips regarding his whereabouts, he always seemed to be aware when they were coming for him, and he managed to remain out of the law’s clutches for nearly six weeks. His luck deserted him on 3 June when he was caught in a routine traffic stop in Ironton, Ohio, a few miles on the other side of the Ohio river. He was sentenced to fifteen years for the escape, but after remission for good behaviour, and despite reports that he attempted to escape from the federal facility in which he was being held in 2000, he was released in 2002.

He didn’t stay out of jail for long. In 2005, he was arrested for three armed robberies and in the early summer of 2007 was being held at Grant County Detention Center at Williamstown, Kentucky, awaiting sentence after pleading guilty. Contemporary reports indicate that he had been there for about two and a half months, held in solitary confinement for all but one hour a day, when he made another daring escape, once again going up into the ceiling to get to an air vent, the roof and freedom. This time, rather than go from his cell, Artrip was more brazen: around 11.30 p.m. on the night of 24 June 2007, he scaled a basketball backboard in the prison gym recreation area, leaped to the wire mesh behind it all the way to the ceiling, then wormed through the ductwork to reach the vent. By the time the guards had reacted, he had jumped the eighteen feet off the roof and escaped into the woods surrounding the prison, evading a cordon of guards that was quickly set up.

The US Marshals, Kentucky state police and local police agencies all began another manhunt anticipating that he would repeat his pattern from before, and return to Ashland, in part so he could visit his daughter Cierra. John Schickel, US Marshal for the Eastern District of Kentucky told reporters that Artrip had “a history of escapes and bank robberies, and we consider him dangerous”.

However Artrip went straight back to work – his kind of work, robbing banks, and brought his cousin Chris along to help. On 30 June, he entered a bank in Princeton, West Virginia (three hundred miles south-east of his last confirmed location at the prison), handing the teller a note reading, “Give me all the money or I’ll start shooting”. He shoved the $1,600 into a McDonald’s bag, and drove off, later abandoning the car. Two days later, continuing to travel south-east, he hit a bank in Raleigh, North Carolina, using a gun to gain access to the tellers’ drawers, emptying them of cash. He then spent around $57,000 on a vacation to Panama City, where it was reported he and Chris (called a nephew in some reports at the time) partied.

On the night of 27 July Chris and Tony were spotted in a red van, along with a female passenger. The girl was arrested on drugs charges but Chris and Tony fled into a nearby wood (something Tony Artrip was very good at doing). The Kentucky State Police, along with the US Marshal’s Office, the Kentucky State Police Response Team, the K-9 unit from the Enforcement Special Investigation, the Boyd County and Greenup County Sheriff’s Departments, and the Ashland Police Department all scoured the woods for some hours but to no avail. The next morning at 11 a.m., Chris was arrested at a roadblock on Route 5. There was no sign of Tony. (Chris continued a life of crime: he and his cousin Randall Artrip were fought off by a machete-wielding home owner Grant Lambert when they tried to rob him on 13 May 2010 using a toy gun. They were charged with first-degree robbery, as was their driver Amy D. Sturgill. Chris, who was seriously injured in the attack, was sentenced to twelve years, Randall to ten. Sturgill got a five year term.)

Tony’s next reported robbery came at the start of August, when he headed north, and visited a bank in Monroe, Michigan, making an unauthorized withdrawal at gunpoint. On 21 August he went to another Monroe bank, but was nearly caught by police, who had tracked him down to the place in Frenchtown Township where he had been staying, apparently trying to establish a new life for himself, furnishing the house and buying a new television. Slipping out of a window, he managed to elude them in a stolen red pickup truck. He returned to North Carolina, where marshals received a tip that he was in the Asheville area, and started distributing posters there on 10 September. Once again, luck was with Artrip: although he was spotted by a marshal the next day, he was able to lose his pursuers in nearby woodland. Three days later, he was caught on camera during a raid on a bank in Mount Airy, North Carolina. By this point, law enforcement officials reckoned, he had stolen around $93,000 since escaping from prison.