Читать книгу Prison Break - True Stories of the World's Greatest Escapes - Paul Buck - Страница 9

It is only to be expected that our gadget-laden world will provide ever more powerful and sophisticated surveillance cameras to maintain watch over those imprisoned – along with superior designs of locks and other fastening contrivances that make it difficult for duplicate keys to open them. And that’s not to forget sensors that can pick up slight vibrations, ideal for use at night.

The job of the escapee is rarely an easy one, particularly for those in the most secure prisons, or ‘prisons within prisons’, as some are now styled. But it has always been the case that a prisoner in transit is passing through the penal system’s weakest link, whether being taken to prison in the first instance, transferred from one prison to another, or transported to court for an appearance. The prison system itself inadvertently presents this enticement via its own policy of unsettling prisoners by continually shifting them from one prison to another, providing greater potential for escape than is perhaps necessary. Of course, there are also instances when prisoners themselves engineer a day out in court just to take advantage of that weakest link, making a bid for freedom in the most fundamental way.

Such an occasion attracted attention in May 1966, at the time of a spate of escapes. The government of the day ordered a report by Earl Mountbatten into what it saw as an intolerable situation, which recommended a mass of improvements to prison security. The escape in question was hatched in Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight by John McVicar, whom we will encounter again in his role in another major breakout. The Parkhurst inmates knew that if they caused an incident (in this case one prisoner stabbing another), it would require them being taken before Winchester Assizes on the mainland.

This is indeed what happened, and on return from their day out, thirteen convicts (nine of whom were involved in the plot) set about seven prison officers and escaped. The authorities had received a tip-off that an attempt would occur, but the likelihood pointed to it happening at Portsmouth, where they would take the ferry back to the island. Police had been deployed around the terminal for just such an eventuality but they had it wrong, for it happened as the coach passed through Bishop’s Waltham.

The prisoners had three improvised keys with them. Ten of the men who had been handcuffed in pairs freed themselves. The other three were joined to prison officers. On a signal, the freed men jumped up, most going for the guards whilst another went for the driver to take control of the steering wheel. As the coach ground to a halt, the door was opened and nine men took off.

The police escort behind them radioed for help, and two policemen quickly multiplied to one hundred and twenty personnel, along with dogs and an RAF helicopter. Seven prisoners were rounded up within a few hours, and another one a couple of days later. Only two got clean away, McVicar being one of them. He had all summer to stretch his legs before being recaptured.

And yet, despite such machinations, there will always be room for the opportunist to seize the moment. John Bindon, the villainturned-actor (Poor Cow, Get Carter, Performance), who helped give the ‘hardman’ archetype its cinematic image in 1970s Britain, recounted how, in his earlier days, he was being transferred by prison bus from one borstal to another, along with his friend Alan Stanton.

It appears that Stanton had small wrists and was able to slip out of his handcuffs, and from there to abscond out of the window. No other details are given, other than it was in “the middle of London”. All we know is that Stanton immediately stole a car, for he is reputed to have driven past the prison bus, catching the eye of Bindon, still seated at his window. When the officers asked where “the little one” had gone, Bindon informed them he had just waved at him from a passing car.

Stanton wasn’t the first to thumb his nose in such a humorous way. It is recorded that, two and a half centuries earlier, after escaping from Newgate Prison, Jack Sheppard rode past the gates of that same prison in a carriage with a woman on either side, all of them the worse for drink, only to end the night recaptured. He was subsequently hanged at Tyburn shortly after. (Things were not quite so drastic for Stanton, though he was caught within two weeks.)

In the century after Sheppard, that habitual prisoner, Charles Peace, the original ‘old lag’, having committed countless thefts, burglaries and two murders, thought to hurl himself out of the window of a moving train. He was being taken from London’s King’s Cross (starting the day at Pentonville Prison, where he was serving life for the attempted murder of a policeman) north to Sheffield, to stand trial for murder. He had originally been taken up on 17 January 1879, to be charged before the stipendiary magistrate, and was returned to London until the second hearing on the 22nd. Again they took the early morning train to Sheffield at 5:15am. We are not talking Eurostar or high-speed trains, but they still sped along at a fair rate, and the reality of clambering out must have been more hazardous than some James Bond fantasy. In fact, Peace hurt himself on landing and was recaptured.

Peace had not initially intended to leap when it was moving. At any station where the train stopped, he tried to find excuses to go down to the toilet. He had probably tried this on the earlier trip, for the two warders had provided bags for him to use – and then throw out of the window! Peace used the act of disposal as his excuse for opening the window, and made his bid for freedom by taking a flying leap through it. One warder caught his left foot just in time. Peace held onto the footboard and kicked furiously with his right to free himself. The other warder, unable to get to the window, pulled on the communication cord to urge the driver to stop. The train steamed on for a mile, with Peace desperate to liberate his foot. When he finally freed it from his shoe and tumbled down onto the line, it still took another mile before the driver halted the train, and only then due to encouragement from passengers in other carriages.

Though the warders ran back along the line ahead of the reversing train, they needn’t have worried. Peace was still lying beside the track, near Kiveton Park, unconscious and bleeding from a bad wound on his head. He was lifted back into the guard’s van of the train and taken to the police station at Sheffield, where he was attended by a surgeon. The case was adjourned for eight days.

The method works much better if one can get the means of transport to slow down considerably – particularly if it’s an airplane. This is supposedly the case with Frank Abagnale. For a few years, starting in his late teens, he led a busy and successful life as a confidence trickster, forger and impostor, details of which were recorded in a book that reads like a Steven Spielberg movie. (Which in fact is what it became. Called Catch Me If You Can, it starred Leonardo DiCaprio as Abagnale.)

Abagnale’s personal adventures offer an impressive escape from a plane, a British Viscount VC-10, flying him back to face trial and undoubted imprisonment in the United States in 1971. Excusing himself to go to the toilet, just before the pilot signalled to fasten seatbelts, Abagnale released the toilet fasteners from its apparatus, a self-contained unit, and climbed down into the space beneath, knowing there was a hatch used to remove the in-flight toilet waste at the end of each journey. After the plane landed on Runway 13 at JFK International Airport, he waited for the moment it slowed, and then virtually stopped, as it turned to the taxi strip. Then he dropped ten feet from the hatch to the ground and made his getaway, leaving the FBI agents on the plane staring at an empty toilet. It begs the question of how he managed to stay in the toilet once the crew knew he was not fastened in his seat, but no one seems to have checked out his disappearance at that point.

Abagnale scaled a cyclone fence under cover of darkness, took a cab to Grand Central Station, then a train to the Bronx to visit a girl who had stashed some clothes, money and a set of keys for a Montréal safe deposit box for him. Leaving her most of the money, he took a train for Montréal. There he collected $20,000 and proceeded to Dorval Airport to take a flight to São Paulo, knowing that the United States had no extradition treaty with Brazil. But he never made the flight, for a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman saw him in line at the ticket counter. He was later escorted to the Canadian border and handed over to the US Border Patrol. Today, Frank Abagnale runs a financial fraud consultancy company, and can be viewed on YouTube talking about his exploits.

It’s not impossible to escape from a moving plane (on the ground, anyway). It happened in California in December 1985, when Reginald Still was being taken to Sacramento to stand trial. No sooner had the plane landed, and slowed to around fifty miles per hour, than Still broke open the emergency door and leapt onto the wing, then the runway, leaving eight guards behind on the plane. And he was wearing leg irons and handcuffs at the time!

In much the same way, Mickey Green, a.k.a. ‘the Pimpernel’ (a name acquired by evading arrest for more than twenty years), a successful armed robber in the 1970s before moving on to the lucrative ventures of gold bullion and drug smuggling, took the opportunity to escape from the airport itself, en route from California to Paris. FBI agents had arrested him in 1993, at the former mansion home of Rod Stewart that he was renting in Beverly Hills. As he was wanted in Paris to serve seventeen years for a drug trafficking conviction, he was being flown back across the Atlantic. Though Green had British nationality, he also carried an Irish passport. When the plane made a stopover at Shannon Airport, he simply alighted from the plane and slipped through customs. As extradition terms between Ireland and France were weak at the time, he decided to stay in Dublin for a while, acquiring a luxurious property outside the capital. Later he moved on to Spain, when his presence came to the attention of the IRA and he was advised that he might do well to depart.

What is quite remarkable is how so-called dangerous men who are facing heavy sentences are sometimes moved around in such cavalier ways. School kids are used to the hired coach for their days out breaking down en route, as schools cut corners on the financial outlay. But it seems the prison authorities have no more foresight.

In November 1996, Blundeston Prison in Suffolk needed to transfer ten prisoners to Wandsworth Prison in London. But they had no vehicle available, so they hired a private coach with its driver. It barely moved two miles down the road before it broke down, and a replacement had to be sent along so that six of the ten could continue on their journey. The six, five of whom were robbers – Lee Mitty, Warren Edwards, Gary Staggs, Christopher Ward and David Currey – and the other, Stewart Warwick, jailed for possession of firearms, were only accompanied by five officers, whereas it would be usual to have a dozen for six prisoners in transit, particularly as they were regarded as dangerous, and three of them (Mitty, Edwards and Staggs) had impressive records for escape. Not that the prison officers knew of their records; perhaps they did not even know they were being moved because they had formed a gang inside the prison, and had been involved in a fight resulting in some unpleasant injuries. As was noted by a perplexed Prison Officers Association representative, “It is very strange that they [the prison service] were trying to split up the gang by taking them from a secure environment on to a standard coach.” And all together, at the same time too.

When they were going down the M25 it appeared that the prisoners slipped their handcuffs, one of them showing the others how to dislocate the thumb to achieve this. Around the Waltham Abbey area of Essex, they took over the coach and viciously set about the officers, inflicting quite extensive bodily damage with the captured truncheons. They also destroyed all their personal files, which were travelling with them, hurling the ripped documents out of the window, and changed into their civilian clothes which were also on board. In the meantime, the coach driver was forced to press on with his journey towards the capital. When they reached Duncombe Road in Archway, their ride over, they all climbed down and escaped.

Similarly, in February 1992, John McFayden, who was two years into a life sentence for murder, in addition to forty-seven years for drug offences, was being taken by taxi from Full Sutton, near York, down to Wormwood Scrubs in London, apparently to see relatives, when he pulled a blade on the two-man escort and ordered the female taxi driver to drive him to Euston. Though he was caught before the year was out, it still seems remarkable that pre-travel body searches can be so sloppily carried out, particularly for such a vulnerable transportation system which, as the Home Office pointed out, was used dozens of times each day.

In the course of his reminiscences, the late Reggie Kray mentions the escapes of a few men he met inside. One can’t fail to notice the role that ‘pulling a blade’ plays in these actions. He notes how Steve McFadden escaped in transit from one prison to another, producing a knife and injuring one of his four escorts in his bid for freedom. Another friend of his, Micky Fenlon, pulled one of these prison-crafted knives on his way to Exeter Prison, hijacking the coach with all its occupants, convicts and officers. The vehicle was driven someway towards London before he parted company and made his own way.

A nightmare situation presents itself in the case of Billy Hughes, who was to all appearances a petty criminal who had served five sentences for housebreaking, before being charged with rape and grievous bodily harm. He was held on remand in Leicester Prison, where it appears that his criminal record was slow in catching up with him. In fact, it was at the prison but not delivered to the appropriate department until the day after he escaped. The man the warders thought was a pleasant character had a history of violence against the police that included killing two police dogs with his bare hands. He was not really the ideal person to place in the prison kitchen, where he spirited away a seven-inch boning knife six weeks before using it. (No search was made by the authorities despite the knife going missing.)

And if they had been more competent, they might have thought better of taking him to Chesterfield Magistrates’ Court for his weekly remand appearances by taxi, accompanied by two not particularly tough officers. Or indeed, they might have searched him thoroughly and not casually frisked him. Hughes managed to prolong the court procedures for ten trips by giving contradictory instructions to his solicitors, requiring further days out. All the time he was preparing for his escape.

Hughes struck on 12 January 1977, as the hire car turned off the M1 at Junction 29. There he leaned forward and dealt the warder in the front-passenger seat a blow to his head. Then he turned to the officer he was handcuffed to in the backseat, produced the boning knife and slashed him across the neck, causing a deep five-inch wound. As the warder in front recovered and turned, Hughes lunged at him with the knife, making two vicious strokes, one slashing his hand, the other exposing his jawbone.

Hughes ordered the car to go straight through Chesterfield and out onto the moors. At Stonedge he stopped the car, had his handcuffs unlocked and pushed everyone out to the side of the road, cuffed them together and collected whatever money they had between them. Then he jumped back in the car and fled. It was a cold, snowy January and the roads were bleak. He lost control on the ice within two miles and crashed into a wall at Beeley, near Chatsworth, home of the Duke of Devonshire. Once the alarm was raised by the warders, warnings were issued quickly to all within the area and roadblocks were set up.

An extensive search of farmhouses and local properties was made. Police guards were placed on his most recent lover in Chesterfield, as she had told him they were finished whilst he was on remand. Police also expected he might return to Blackpool, where his estranged wife had earlier received death threats from him.

For some reason, Billy Hughes was missed by all those searching for him. He had gone to ground less than a mile from the place where he was last sighted, not long after he hijacked the taxi – Pottery Cottage in the hamlet of Eastmoor, close to the headquarters set up by the police at the local pub, the Highwayman.

Pottery Cottage was to become a scene of carnage. On his arrival Hughes had taken hostage an elderly couple he found there, Arthur and Amy Minton. Later, as other members of the family arrived home, Gill and Richard Moran, and their ten-year-old daughter Sarah, were also taken and locked in separate rooms. Though he killed Sarah and her grandfather, Arthur, immediately, he still kept the survivors separate and maintained the pretence that each was alive by taking food into their rooms at mealtimes.

The next day council workers came to clean the septic tank, as Sarah’s mother drove alone to fetch a newspaper and cigarettes for Hughes. No outsider had any inkling that something was wrong and she gave no sign that Hughes was in her home. Later that day, Hughes went out with Gill on errands. Each time nothing untoward occurred. The following day, Richard and Gill went shopping and filled the car with petrol. A while later, Hughes and the husband went to the plastics company where Moran worked and stole £200 from the safe.

That evening the grandmother, Amy, tried to escape through a window. Hughes caught her, slit her throat, and left her in the garden covered in snow. It was time for him to depart. The only two members of the family still alive were the husband and wife, though they remained in the dark as to the fate of their loved ones.

Hughes decided to take only Gill with him, and tied up her husband back at the house. However, the tyres of the family’s Chrysler car would not grip in the snow, so they knocked on a neighbour’s door and asked to be towed out. Ready to depart, Hughes returned to the house and stabbed the husband to death.

What he did not know was that Gill had whispered to the neighbour about her predicament, and the police were about to join their trail. Soon in attendance at the cottage, they would realise the gravity of the situation.

Having chosen such bad weather for his escape, any form of car chase was doomed to end in a further crash. When this happened Hughes kept Gill Moran as his hostage, his knife at her throat. Switching to one of the police cars, a fresh chase got underway that led into Cheshire and a further crash into a bus that was used as a roadblock. With the woman as his hostage, he demanded another car.

In the meantime, police marksmen had arrived. When an outside light at a nearby house came on suddenly, it triggered a dramatic mêlée as Hughes started swinging an axe he had brought along, both at his hostage and the police, who were trying to get into the car. One marksman shot him in the head from twelve feet through the windscreen, with a Smith & Wesson .38. Another shot forced Hughes to try to clamber from the car, at which point he was shot in the chest. In the first such incident in modern times, the British police had shot dead a prison escapee.

Some people leave it right to the last minute until their bid to escape is put into operation. The escape of Clifford Hobbs and Noel Cunningham took place in June 2003. As the Securicor van taking ten remand prisoners from Brixton Prison to the Inner London Crown Court turned into Avonmouth Street, just along from the Elephant and Castle, it halted outside the gate to the court’s yard and waited to be admitted. It was just after 9am. Two men who had been seen loitering earlier in the nearby park stepped in front of the van. One was dressed as a postman and carried a Royal Mail bag. Both were armed with handguns.

The ‘postman’ demanded that the driver open the hatches. The driver wasn’t successful so he was told to open the side door. He was then shot in the knee. The second gunman ordered the emergency hatches (used in the event of a serious accident) to be released. Then the two men entered the van, and the prison escort was made to unlock the door to the separate cells after being pistol-whipped. The rear doors were then opened for the prisoners to escape, none of whom were handcuffed. All ten were given the opportunity to run, but only three escaped – though one, Tony Peters, surrendered later that same day.

The breakout had been organised for Hobbs and Cunningham. They were due in court to face charges of conspiracy to steal £1.25 million from a Securicor van in Effra Road, Brixton, a robbery that failed when they were ambushed by the Flying Squad. Once out of the van, they and their liberators ran across the nearby park, Newington Gardens, before going their separate ways, one in a getaway car from Bath Terrace, the other on the back of a motorbike from Brockham Street.

Four years later in court, Hobbs denied that the breakout was planned and claimed he had simply taken advantage of the opportunity when it presented itself. Conflictingly, the court was told how he indicated his whereabouts in the van by tapping on the window. Hobbs is known to have lain low for a few days in south London before obtaining a false passport and fleeing to Spain. He was tracked down and arrested at Puerto Banus, near Malaga, in August 2007. For some while it had been bandied about that he was a prime suspect in the £53 million Securitas heist in Tonbridge, in February 2006, but this seems to be unfounded. Noel Cunningham has not been recaptured, but is believed by some to be on the ‘Costa del Crime’.

In September 1984, Terry Smith and John Kendall were moved to Maidstone Prison in Kent, ostensibly to further their educational studies, though they planned to go over the wall. Things changed, and the pair of them, both armed robbers, were marked for transfer back to Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight at the earliest opportunity. Smith was still determined to escape and informed his friend outside, Tommy Hole, that he was moving the following week, on 20 November. He told no one inside the prison, not even Kendall.

Kendall undoubtedly sensed something was going down, because he asked Smith on the morning of the transfer and was told that something might happen. If they were cuffed together, he should just hold his arms out “and they will be bolt-cropped.” Kendall was cuffed to Smith, and the other prisoner on the ride, a Turkish inmate, was joined to an officer. The officer in charge sat in the front of a yellow Bedford minibus with bars on the windows, alongside the driver, whilst three other officers sat in the back with the prisoners.

No sooner had they left the prison than the van stopped at a newsagent’s, for the senior officer to rush in to buy a paper. Smith noticed a BMW pull in front of them and one of its occupants go into the shop. As the man came out he looked directly at Smith in the van. Smith told me recently that he was thinking, “What’s he come in his own car for?”

“I was worried that they had just come down to see if it was genuine I was leaving,” rather than to implement the escape. But, whatever was going to happen now, he had to wait. He was entirely in their hands.

The prison van joined the M20 heading for the M25 link someway up the road. They were followed at a respectable distance by two BMW’s. As their occupants were all professional criminals, they knew how to tail a van without being spotted. (Don’t believe movies or TV crime programmes where everyone hangs so close together that only an idiot wouldn’t rumble it.) As Smith recalls, “It was a bright yellow van. When you’re doing the visuals you can hang back a good two miles and stay out of sight. On a motorway it’s perfect. And they want to get onto those motorways as soon as they can.”

An hour after leaving Maidstone, when the van was turning off the M25 to go south on the A217 to Reigate at Junction 8, one of the BMW’s appeared, shot past the van and smashed into the driver’s side, forcing the vehicle off the road and onto the grass verge. At the same time the second BMW blocked the van from behind. Two masked men leapt from the first BMW; one, wielding a pickaxe handle, smashed the windscreen whilst the other, carrying bolt croppers, grabbed the van’s keys and headed for the rear doors.

Smith leapt forward onto the officer in the passenger seat, thrashing to free himself as he was rugby-tackled from behind. Wary of the ‘outside help’, the senior officer instructed his staff to let them go. Smith dragged Kendall out with him through the passenger side and into the back of the waiting BMW, whilst the rescuer who had wrenched open the back door found Smith and Kendall were already going out the front way. Making a U-turn the BMW sped back past the van and the traffic building up at the scene, shot over the elevated roundabout and down a string of country lanes until it was time to split up and go their separate ways. Smith took one of his associates, his friend Tommy Hole, along with Kendall onto a commuter train at Coulsdon, bound for Victoria, whilst his other two friends found a different route home.

It was close to twenty months before Smith and Kendall were recaptured, after a robbery that went disastrously wrong for Smith, who seriously injured his leg and was lucky not to lose it altogether.

Sheer force was the method of armed robber Vic Dark in September 1988, when he was being taken across London from Hackney police station to Wormwood Scrubs Prison. They had handcuffed him, daisy-chain fashion, with two sets of cuffs to the bars of the window. They had secured him so well that he wasn’t expected to be any trouble. But Dark wanted out and knew he would have “to Rambo it”, as he said later. There was no other way than to rip the whole window grille away from the bodywork of the Ford Transit van.

The bars came away, leaving him handcuffed but able to manoeuvre. He kicked out the window itself and was halfway through before the officer in the front seat reacted and grabbed his legs. In the meantime, the other guard had pulled the van up in the Gray’s Inn Road and gone around the outside to prevent him coming out of the window. Extra help arrived, and the four-strong team moved into the back to watch over Dark, taking him back to Hackney to start the whole process of transfer over again. If he had levered himself out he would have landed on his head, like poor Charlie Peace. But at least his transport would have been brought to a halt.

One of the most notorious escapees in the United States through the 1920s was Roy Gardner. His exploits could have filled a book – which indeed he could have written, for he was an educated man, had taught in the English department at a Midwestern college and wasn’t slow to flaunt his knowledge, once making Shakespearian references to a judge in court. In his early days he had become a gunrunner during the Mexican Revolution, and, though he was arrested, he escaped the firing squad and returned to the States, where he became a prize-fighter and sparring partner to heavyweight champion J. J. Jeffries at his training camp in Reno, Nevada, during the summer of 1910.

Though he had an extensive criminal record which included escapes, Gardner was stunned by what he saw as the inappropriateness of a twenty-five-year sentence at McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary, Washington, for robbing the US Mail. His response to the judge was, “You’ll never get me there.” He wasn’t joking. On the train journey to prison in June 1920, he distracted the two marshals escorting him by drawing their attention to something out of the window, and then reached for one of their guns, overpowered them, and fled near Portland, Oregon.

It wasn’t long before he was caught again, being a basically unsuccessful criminal. After receiving another twenty-five years for armed train robbery, he was once more placed on a train bound for McNeil Island. And once again they failed to get him there, just as he had warned them. (The papers had printed his boast.) On board the train he asked to go to the toilet. The officers went with him, and took along another prisoner, Norris Pryor, handcuffing both men together. All four fitted into a toilet cubicle that was obviously built larger back in those days. After relieving himself, Gardner moved to the sink to complete his ablutions, but instead slipped his hand under and withdrew a gun – no one knows how it was placed there, as he was very much a lone criminal. Gardner and Pryor handcuffed the officers together, bound their mouths with the tape used to secure the gun beneath the sink, and alighted from the train in the Vancouver yards, disappearing into a misty rain. With the major press coverage his escape received, it was inevitable that Gardner was soon recaptured and transported in a more security-conscious manner to prison.

To conclude his story, it wasn’t long before Gardner determined that prison was still not for him. After little more than six weeks, whilst watching a baseball game on the prison field, he slipped beneath the bleacher seats to the ground below with two others, when the attention of inmates and guards was absorbed by a big hit in the opposite direction. With wire cutters he had brought along from the machine shop, Gardner breached the fence.

There was an expanse of open space ahead that had to be covered before undergrowth and trees would provide relative cover. Halfway across, the tower guards saw the escapees and opened fire. Both his friends were halted in their tracks, but Gardner, though hit in the leg, dragged himself onward to the bushes. Extensive searches were made and security craft circled the island, but he could not be found.

They didn’t know he had returned to the prison and was hiding in the barn, nourishing himself by milking a cow, and tending to his wound. After forty-eight hours the search was called off, the guards suspecting he had reached the mainland. Few had managed it before, for the island was surrounded by ice-cold water and fast currents. But Gardner set off from the prison again, made it to the water and drifted two and a half miles to Fox Island, from whence he swam to the mainland. That was to be his last escape. When he was recaptured he served all of his sentence, all further attempts at tunnelling under the wall, sawing through bars or taking hostages ending in failure.

If we return to earlier times for a perspective on today’s escapes in transit, we find that in 1831, Ikey Solomons (on whom Charles Dickens probably based Fagin in Oliver Twist), whilst in Newgate Prison facing a charge of receiving stolen goods, applied for a writ of habeas corpus so that he might be released on bail. He never expected it to be successful, but it would mean a visit to court.

Solomons was taken there in a coach by two Newgate turnkeys. Whilst waiting to be called, he suggested he take the officers to a public house to ‘refresh’ them. When they returned to the court, Solomons’ application was dismissed and he was escorted back to the coach to return to Newgate. En route, he convinced his guards to stop off for more refreshments at another pub. Resuming their journey, they were joined by Mrs Solomons, who climbed into the carriage and promptly threw a fit. Solomons suggested they make a detour down Petticoat Lane and drop his wife off at a friend’s home. One guard was “stupidly drunk” and the other wanted shot of the woman, so the idea was agreed upon. Surprisingly, on arrival at the address, Mrs Solomons stepped down, quickly followed by her husband, dashed into the house and locked the door behind them.

Ikey Solomons was not recaptured until many years later … in Australia.