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OVER THE WALL (PART 3) - PETER ATKINSON
Although separated by four months and carried out in different prisons, the next two escapes were linked. We’ll come back to that linkage later. This was an extremely serious incident given the fact that two guns were used and the escapers were particularly dangerous. It was around 8 o’clock on a Sunday evening in early September 1994. Ten prisoners were accommodated in the Whitemoor special unit with seven officers on duty. Here we are again with regular staff manning a small unit that looked after some of the most troublesome inmates. Despite the darkness, six of the inmates were allowed to wander casually into the small exercise compound by pre-arrangement. They picked up a wide range of tools and equipment that were passed through the cell windows that would help
Issue No. 91 Autumn 2024
Peter Atkinson
them breach two fences and surmount the two walls. A lot of preparation had gone into the escape and the ensuing Enquiry report pointed to staff having been conditioned over many months that allowed the inmates far too much latitude. A hole was cut in the first fence with some bolt croppers and then ropes, poles and clamps were used to get through one more fence and over the walls. Halfway through the escape, the men were seen on CCTV and the alarm raised.
One can imagine the horror of the camera operator seeing six escaping inmates manoeuvring themselves over the walls. Staff made brave effort to try and stop them, conscious that the escapers had more than one gun. One officer who pulled on a climbing rope to try and dislodge an escaper got shot in the leg from another prisoner hanging off the top of the wall. As more shots were fired, the six men eventually made it over the final wall, although one fell heavily as a supporting guy rope was cut by staff.
The escape benefitted from some careful planning, and the mid-evening timing was designed to catch the special unit staff off guard as they anticipated the end of their shift. What the planning had not taken into account was the fact that a good number of night staff were outside the prison waiting to come on duty. As the alarm was sounded, this group of staff were able to run round the outside wall and closely follow the fleeing inmates into the dark Cambridgeshire countryside. Quickly supported by Police and a helicopter with a thermal imaging camera, all the inmates were caught within two hours. When apprehended, the prisoners had £474 in cash, but more worryingly, they had left behind a pound of Semtex explosives hidden in the bottom of a recreational paint box.
What made this escape so dangerous was that five of the men involved were active IRA members. Patrick Joseph Magee, born in 1948 was convicted in 1986 and given eight life sentences, having been held responsible for planting the bomb at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, killing five people at the Conservative Party conference. Peter Sherry born in 1955, was convicted in 1986 for being in possession of explosives and planning a bombing campaign across England. He received a life sentence. Gilbert (Danny) MacNamee, aged 33 at the time of the escape, was reputed to be a highly skilled bomb maker and was implicated in the 1983 Hyde Park bombing. He received a 25-year sentence for conspiracy to cause explosions. Liam O’Dwyer, 32 at the time of the escape, was serving his sentence for having been caught in possession of a large cache of arms and explosives hidden in the Welsh countryside. Liam McCotter born in 1963 was serving 17 years for plotting an extensive bombing campaign in England. Last but not least was the helicopter hi-jacker from the 1987 Gartree escape, Andrew Russell. For his involvement in that escape, he was serving 10 years. It was thought that he may have tagged onto the IRA escape party because he was more than willing to use firearms.
Sir John Woodcock, as a former Chief Constable of Police, was charged with leading the Enquiry. He was very critical of Whitemoor staff at various levels. The Governor was Brodie Clarke but he had only worked for a total of 30 days in command, so had not been there long. It was acknowledged that he had started work on rectifying some of the imbalance between extensive inmate privileges and staffs general laxity. This takes us to the core of what Sir John identified as at the heart of the problem; conditioning.
By way of trying to get the charge of conditioning into some kind of perspective, It is worth appreciating that the prisoners in this escape were an experienced and cohesive group of republican bombers. Some could be charming, persuasive and undoubtedly were intelligent. Based on their activities over the years however, they were clearly deceitful, cunning, devious, ruthless and hostile to British society. In addition, they were completely inured to loss of life. There could not be a starker contrast between those features and the general temperament of prison staff, who in the main were decent, law abiding, stable, family people with a desire to get on positively with their charges, given that they lived cheek by jowl with them for years on end. Looking at comparable Services, our military have an enemy on whom they can focus without ever having to think they might be reasonable people. The police mostly have a bunch of criminals to take on without any need to regard them as worthy pillars of society. Prison staff are clearly in a very different position altogether in relation to those in their long-term care.
The Report pointed to some serious conditioning going on in the special unit but there were factors at work where prison staff may well have been forgivably gullible at the hands of some very manipulative, experienced and accomplished inmates. Responding firmly to people with considerable skill at appearing wholly benign, is often easier said than done. Everybody will remember the case across large swathes of the NHS, large sections of the sporting world, many charitable bodies and media outlets, who all regarded Jimmy Savile to be a decent charity man. Many people in the film world, who gave him much regard, had no idea that Harvey Weinstein was such a prolific predator. That’s conditioning. Who would have thought at the time, behind the affable façade, that Jimmy Savile was such an evil person? Which prison officer at the time would have thought that the sociable Patrick Magee, once described as, “…a formidable assassin…”, and “…cunning…” was actually a man of huge manipulation? He was given a minimum term of 35 years but only served 14 on account of being released in 1999 under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.
The escape caused a huge outcry both within the criminal justice system, the popular press and the government hierarchy. As a relatively new and clearly inexperienced Director General of the Prison Service chosen from outside its ranks, Derek Lewis came under immense pressure. The report suggested that there was much to commend his general ability as head of a large government organisation. His lack of experience in a government agency however contrasted with the relatively newly appointed Home Secretary, but vastly skilled politician, Michael Howard. Pitching Mr Lewis against Michael Howard never seemed to be a fair competition. The Home Secretary was highly critical of what had happened at Whitemoor and he made his feelings well known. An already significant fracture between the two men was to get a whole lot worse, less than six months later on account of another serious prison escape.
With a much higher public profile, Parkhurst prison on the Isle of Wight, built in 1888, experienced a very damaging escape in early January 1995. Three prisoners got out of the jail undetected late one Tuesday evening. The three men had managed to remain behind in the sports hall having quietly detached themselves from the original group of ten inmates who were returning to their wing at around eight o’clock at the end of a sports session. A lot of preparation had gone into this escape in that a pass key had been made in the Metal Fabrication shop along with a lengthy steel ladder, wire cutters, a rope, a gun,
£200 and blank ammunition. When the staff had left with their reduced group of inmates, the three men let themselves out of the sports hall with the manufactured key and unlocked a workshop close by where one of them had worked undetected in making the steel ladder, the key and the imitation gun. After gathering their equipment, they left the workshop and locked the door behind them. They cut a hole in the mesh fence and then, completely undetected, scaled the wall and away. It took three hours before a patrolling dog handler noticed a hole in the fence and raised the alarm.
Once over the wall, they walked to the nearby Island capital Newport about two miles away, where they boarded a taxi that took them to Sandown. They knew there was an airfield close to Sandown with the prospect that they could steal an aircraft given that one of them was a trained pilot. All they found was a 2-seater Cessna 105, which of course presented a problem given that there were three potential passengers not two. They tried to start the engine by poking a piece of wire into the ignition slot. The wire broke, getting wedged in the key slot and that was that. They wandered towards the coast to try and steal a boat but were unsuccessful. After four days on the run cold and hungry, they were seen by an off-duty prison officer walking on a road not far from the prison. Police were called and two of the inmates gave themselves up suffering from exhaustion. The third younger prisoner made a run for it and was caught an hour later in the water trying to swim across the river Medina near Newport that would have brought him nearer the spot from where he had escaped four days earlier.
Anybody suffering from the delusion that these were swashbuckling heroes who had carried out an audacious and daring break for freedom, need to take account of who these men were. Keith Rose, born in 1939, was the trained pilot of the group. In 1991 he was given a life sentence for a murder he had committed ten years previously, of the wife of a supermarket manager who he was trying to kidnap. The lady had been shot in the head six times. He was classified Category A and continuously denied the murder despite all the evidence to the contrary. Andrew Rodger aged 46 at the time of the escape, was from Scotland. He was serving life for having bludgeoned a swimming pool attendant to death in 1987. He had been diagnosed with significant mental health problems. Matthew Williams who was the youngest of the three aged 31, was given five life sentences in 1989 for bombing, arson and administering a poison. He had placed a quantity of explosives under a bench in Liverpool city centre and in his possession was some stolen cyanide, enough to kill 300 people. He was reported to have had previous mental health problems. After his release from Parc prison in 2014, he was cornered having just carried out a particularly gruesome and sensational murder of a young woman. Resisting arrest and covered in the victim’s blood, he was tasered three times as a means of trying to subdue him and died at the scene. He was regarded as a highly dangerous man and had repeatedly suffered from schizophrenia. These were not nice people and there was nothing romantic or heroic about the Parkhurst escape.
Two escapes so close together from prisons holding Category A prisoners were seen as highly damaging for “law and order”. General Sir John Learmont was called in to carry out the Enquiry, helped along by the author of the Whitemoor escape report Sir John Woodcock. Long before the report was published, the metaphorical nasty stuff hit the fan. An escape from Whitemoor prison that most people had not heard of, did not have the same resonance as Parkhurst. The notorious Island jail caught the public and political imagination and questions were asked in both Houses of Parliament whilst newspapers had a field day. The Director General, Derek Lewis was in the spotlight again and some Ministers were asking for his resignation. The prison was severely criticised and it was suggested at the time by some political commentators that the Home Secretary ordered the suspension of the Governor John Marriott, so that Michael Howard could appear tough and, “…save his own political skin…”
He famously denied any pressure he might have put on Derek Lewis to dismiss John Marriott in a legendary BBC Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman. When the question of Mr Howard’s possible operational interference was put to him 14 times, he inexplicably would not answer. A more thoughtful examination of the issues arrived at the conclusion that the systems within the Prison Service rather than any one operational manager was at fault, but this did not stop Mr Marriott losing his job, despite having successfully governed Parkhurst, with all its security shortcomings, for the previous five years. When the Learmont report was published, following on the heels of the Whitemoor Woodcock report, Michael Howard insisted that the Director General himself had to go and Derek Lewis duly lost his job. The Learmont report interestingly emphasised that no disciplinary charges ought to be levelled at any Parkhurst staff, which of course raised the question of why Governor Marriott had paid such a high price himself by being removed from his post and transferred to H/Q.
Two interesting little side issues emerged from Sir Johns report. There was the strange suggestion that all Governors should wear uniforms. More importantly, there was the question of whether some kind of ‘Supermax’ prison should be built to house all the dangerous and difficult prisoners under one roof. Each of these proposals are in place in the American system where the Wardens (Governor equivalent) are in uniform, and one large federal supermax prison exists in Colorado with several other smaller ones run by a few States. Both suggestions were met with some misgiving in the UK and to many people’s relief, neither proposal went any further.
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I’d left the service by the time of the next escape, so don’t really recall it. Possibly it might not quite belong with those of a more ‘notorious’ reputation, but having said that, John Massey’s escape from Pentonville in 2012 had three features that gave it some prominence. When 26 years old, Mr Massey from Kentish town, shot dead a pub doorman, Charlie Higgins with a sawn-off shot gun at the Cricketers Arms in Clapton in 1975, he received a 20-year sentence at the Old Bailey the following year. He went on to become one of the longest serving prisoners in the country in that he was ‘inside’ for close on 43 years. That is the first sliver of notoriety. The next is the fact that he had managed to slip away from formal custody, four times, although two of those were from an open prison and one was from an escort. The third feature was that at the age of 64, he escaped from Pentonville by hiding in the gym after the rest of his group had been returned to their wing at around 18.30 hours one Wednesday evening in June. In what would have been broad daylight, he was then reputed to have climbed over the high Pentonville outer wall. It was never clear whether he used some discarded netting from the sports hall or knotted sheets. Many people regarded such a feat as highly implausible for a man one year short of his old age pension. An interesting suggestion, but never proved, was that he had some significant inside or outside help of some sort. If he had managed to sling a rope or knotted sheets over the wall, how was it anchored if nobody was on the other side to secure it? He was eventually released from Warren Hill Category C prison in Suffolk in 2018 and went, still on parole, to a hostel placement in London.
We stay at Pentonville for the next escape involving the 28-year-old Matthew Baker and the 31-year-old James Anthony Whitlock on the 6 November 2016. Both prisoners from East London, were on remand awaiting sentencing, sharing a cell on G wing. Mr Baker had been found guilty of attempted murder whilst Mr Whitlock had been charged with 19 counts of stealing from ATM machines. Both inmates had pre-convictions and Mr Baker was described as the more dangerous of the two. A previous offence involved assaulting a policeman. His current crime was that he nearly killed a man by attacking him with a knife inflicting 26 stab wounds.
During the early part of Sunday evening, the men had put dummies in their beds to make it look like they were asleep. With a diamond tipped saw, they cut through one of the window bars which allowed them to squeeze through the narrow gap. Where the diamond tipped cutter came from was never discovered. With some knotted sheets, they dropped from their window onto a roof. Slinging the makeshift rope onto a tall CCTV camera pole, this allowed them to swing over to the top of the outer wall at the front of the jail. If this had actually happened, the suggestion was that both men would have been accomplished trapeze artists. There was the suspicion that the men had some help during the escape from a colleague on the outside. With the help of a mobile phone, contact may have been made to the accomplice who might have managed to get a rope over the wall where the escapers were standing. It’s feasible that Mr Baker and Mr Whitlock wanted to keep quiet about an accomplice to avoid any police investigation into one of their friends on the outside.
Because the men were not needed for work the next day following their escape, their absence was not discovered until halfway through Monday. The staff had obviously looked into the cell and concluded that they were asleep in bed. After two days on the loose, Mr Baker was found under the bed of his sister’s house, 10 miles from the prison in Ilford. He had dyed his ginger hair black as an attempt at disguise. Mr Whitlock was found in Hackney six days after the escape. At the ensuing Court hearing, Mr Baker received life with a 10-year recommendation, and an extra 30 months for his escape. Mr Whitlock received a 54-month sentence with 24 months added due to the escape.
All the facts and details described above are freely available on the internet or accessible in published literature, so I can safely confirm that I haven’t breached my signing of the Official Secrets Act. The range of names are available on the world wide web and mention of individuals has merely been drawn from records that are available to anyone. Some names and dates and accounts do differ from one article to another, but by cross checking I have tried to arrive at an account that is likely to be the truth. It was a matter of weaving together all the strands of information into a coherent narrative. Writing an article like this inevitably results in some mistakes and/or the omission of important detail, and for that I apologise unreservedly. I regret also, if I have raised a few unpleasant memories for some of the staff concerned. I would argue however that it is important for the prison staff’s point of view of these escapes, to be accurately recorded.
