Mr Cafe was a 25-year-old prison officer on duty at Long Bay jail when his life changed forever.

At 2.30pm, on Friday August 8, 1975, the former house painter from West Wyalong in country NSW was helping open the security gates to allow prison trucks to pass.

As the “bird cage” of the Metropolitan Reception Prison (MRP) within Long Bay jail opened, three screaming prisoners appeared from within the jail, firing shots while demanding the keys to the armoury.

Mr Cafe, on the job for three years, was grabbed by one of the prisoners who pointed a gun to his head. The prisoner needed no introduction — it was Russell “Mad Dog” Cox.

The violent armed bank robber who had been serving a 15 year sentence for his crimes dd not did not pull the trigger — it was a replica — but the ordeal for Cafe was not over.

The young prison officer whom had crossed paths with the “quiet and polite” inmate months earlier was suddenly at the end of another gun, this time a fully loaded Beretta and held by Cox’s accomplice Marco Motric who screamed: “Will we take this one? Is he a dog?”

Mr Cafe was dragged into one of the trucks where another prisoner, Allen Roy McDougall stood firing a gun, smashing the windscreen.

As the prisoners made their escape, Mr Cafe was pushed out of the windscreen in a bid to stop prison ­officers from opening fire at the truck.

After the vehicle was rammed by a guard trying to thwart the escape, the trio tried to flee on foot, with Cox taking Mr Cafe with him at gunpoint as a human shield.

A gun battle erupted. Motric pushed the loaded Beretta between Mr Cafe’s legs. He pulled the trigger, twice. Once bullet passed through Mr Cafe’s upper thigh, the second lodging in his buttock. Motric was shot four times in the melee.

The escape attempt failed, with Cox, Motric and McDougall, rounded up in a bloody gunbattle.

Mr Cafe took two weeks off work to have the bullet removed, before returning to do night shifts, while Cox, who sustained a gunshot wound to his arm, was transferred to of the “escape-proof” maximum security complex Katingal to serve out a life sentence for maliciously shooting at Mr Cafe, and fellow officers Sam Pavich, Jeff Jones and Alex Cook.

Two years later, Cox successfully escaped Katingal, cutting his way out to become one of Australia’s most wanted men.

Evading police for 11 years as he travelled the world working as a labourer and seaman, Cox was recaptured in 1988 in yet another bloody shootout, with police in Melbourne, during a botched payroll van robbery.

For more than four decades, Mr Cafe has tracked Cox’s life, and remains haunted by that day in 1975.

Speaking exclusively to The Sunday Telegraph from his home in north Brisbane, the retired prison officer, who is featured in the book “Long Bay” by former prison nurse Patrick Kennedy, said he felt the need to talk with Cox.

Asked what he would say to the paroled prisoner who is also believed to be living in Queensland after walking free in 2004, Cafe said he would invite him over for a barbecue.

“It happened 43 years ago, but it could have been yesterday,” Mr Cafe, 68, said.

“I’m okay, but I do think about it. I was just a baby. My wife was five months pregnant at the time. After that, things changed. We lost our son later in a car accident.

“I heard he has reformed, was counselling street kids and even having cakes and tea with a ladies group at a church.”

Mr Cafe had been on the job at Long Bay for three years when he encountered Cox, who, despite his reputation, he thought of as “one of the nicest blokes”.

“I just treated people as they treated me, and Cox was alway polite,” Mr Cafe said.

“He and I were about the same age, born a month apart and also in Balmain.

“We had a lot in common, except he was serving a 14-year prison sentence for armed robbery.”

When Cox was on the run, Mr Cafe became a prisoner of his own thoughts, convinced he was seeing the prisoner wherever he went.

“I once thought I saw him in Lane Cove, just over the bridge on the main highway in a little blue car just driving past,” he said.

“I would come home from night shift and half expect to see him. It used to cause me a lot of angst.”

Almost two decades later, Mr Cafe did come face-to-face with Cox. Following his return to prison, Cox made a special visit to the Arthur Gorrie Remand Centre in Queensland for a court appearance. Mr Cafe, who transferred to the prison in the early 1990s, was working in the reception area when the jail was placed in lockdown to receive “a special visitor”.

“Cox came in and I walked over and said: Russell — long time, no see,” Mr Cafe said.

“I said: The last time we met, you took me for a ride’. He stares at me and then stands up and shakes my hand. He said sorry and that it shouldn’t have happened, that it wasn’t part of the plan.”

Cafe said Cox invited him back to his cell after his court appearance for a chat, but the pair never saw each other again.

“I guess that’s why I’d like to see him, because it would mean closure for me,” Mr Cafe said.

“I just want to know why — why he had to choose crime.

“Maybe it's a form of Stockholm syndrome, I don’t know.

“I’d just really like to talk.”

ARCHBISHOP’S WIFE: GRANDMA WAS JAILED FOR RUNNING BACKYARD ABORTION CLINIC

IT was a family secret that went with Christine Jensen’s mother to the grave.

The wife of the former Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, grew up never knowing her grandmother, nor ever feeling comfortable to ask her intensely “private” mother about her.

It was only after her mother Freda’s own death at 73 that her father gave his daughter her first clue — her mother’s real maiden name.

Armed with this knowledge, Mrs Jensen waited almost three decades before sending away for her mother’s birth certificate. She was stunned to learn the truth — her mother was born in Long Bay jail.

More revelations were to follow after she was contacted by writer Eleanor Limprecht, who was researching female inmates for a novel. Mrs Jensen learned her grandmother, Rebecca Sinclair, had been running an illegal abortion clinic from home.

She was sent to the Women’s Reformatory within Long Bay at age 23 after being convicted with her husband Donald of manslaughter following the death of a 38-year-old mother-of-three, Lucy Smith during “an operation”.

After her release, she changed her surname. On her mother’s birth certificate, there was no mention of the father, who was also jailed.

Mrs Jensen said now understood her mother’s reluctance at talking about the past. While not condoning what her grandmother did, Mrs Jensen said she forgave her.

“It was a shock to learn why she was in prison — I thought she may have been a lady of the night,” she said.

“My grandmother was very young, I think she went along with my grandfather who was not a very honourable man.

“But what she did was not right. It was a business. They ran a service and someone died.

“My grandmother caused someone’s death.

“I can understand why people did it — if you have a dozen children and you are about to have another one — but it is human life.”

The medal of an Order of Australia recipient said she often thought about her grandmother during her work with charity organisations, some of which provided support for mothers in prison.

KATINGAL: WHERE GUARDS HAD TO WEAR THEIR RAINCOATS INSIDE

CEMENT beds, flickering lights, peep holes and sterile cells not much bigger than a storeroom.

Almost three decades before Goulburn’s Supermax began housing ­extreme criminals, the state government built a 40-bed experimental prison where 40 of the nation’s most dangerous and violent men would be kept.

Planned in secret — the only reference to “Katingal” in state budget papers were of a new “maximum security block at Long Bay jail” — the bunker-like ­prison operated for three years after opening in 1975.

Dubbed an “electronic zoo”, the ­prison was shut down after being the subject of a royal commission that ­declared the facility was ­inhumane.

Inside Katingal Maximum Security Prison

VIEW GALLERY

For the first time, Corrective Services NSW has released secret footage taken from inside the condemned prison, which  until  now  had  never been viewed publicly.

Believed to have been filmed by a prison officer, the footage shows a bleak interior, with boxlike cells measuring just 1.5mx3m and a central electrical control panel where prison officers ­remotely operated cell doors.

Former corrective services commissioner Ron Woodham, who takes pride in obliterating the remains of Katingal 26 years after the three-storey jail was condemned and turned into a storeroom, described it as one of the prison system’s greatest failures.

Speaking exclusively to The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Woodham said not only did prison officers have to go to work wearing raincoats to protect them from being urinated on by the inmates positioned above, but Russell “Mad Dog” Cox proved it was far from “Australia’s securest jail”.

“They broke down the unbreakable walls, they sawed the unsawable bars and they escaped from it — it was an absolute failure,” he said.

“There was no extreme security. The prison  officers also had to wear rain­coats  as the way the jail was ­designed the  ­inmates could pee on them and some wore industrial ear muffs because of  the  noise — a golden shower from the gallery.

“It had to go and the first opportunity I had, I had it knocked down.”

Cox, who was sent to Katingal after his dramatic escape bid from Long Bay, escaped in 1977 after discovering a blind spot in the security system, where he cut his way out.

Quoted in the book Long Bay by Pat Kennedy, Cox spoke of losing his memory in Katingal.

“I am very depressed by the fact that I can’t see any part of the outside world,” he said.

“Every day in this place is identical.”