Part 3: Parramatta Gaol’s daring escapes
THESE are the men who attempted to defy possibilities and escape prison. One even succeeded after multiple failed attempts including an underground tunnel that took 18 months to dig. He has never been found.
Parramatta
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JAIL break! That’s the theme of the final part in the three-part series on Parramatta Gaol. And, it appears there have been countless attempts but very few success stories.
The prison was built by 1842 and by the mid 1860s, inmates had begun trying to break out. Some used genius tactics to climb the 10.6m tall perimeter walls and others “made do” with what was available to them.
Many worked in groups to get the job done and one even attempted to break in to the prison. One even used a pony to freedom. Here are some of the more colourful attempted escapes that have made the news.
1865
James Feely used a timber beam and twisted cord creation to scale the western wall. Guards fired at him and one bullet hit his left hip.
While this escape was occurring, prisoners in the new yard, where work was underway, rushed for the gate. William Mackie was one of the ringleaders in the yard. He was shot in the right thigh to help dismiss the attempted escape.
Warden Sadler received a blow to the head from a pick axe and two other staff received contusions while deterring the rush.
The incident occurred at 3pm and by 5pm all was quiet.
Feely and Mackie were behind an attempted escape at Darlinghurst jail a few months earlier.
1872
James Humphries, a notorious bushranger, used a rope over the wall to escape one night in October, 1872. Sgt Selly from Parramatta police was informed and officers scoured the area and sent out telegrams to nearly all places within 64km of Parramatta.
The following morning at 5am, the prisoner was found by a warden within the jail.
He was climbing the wall and got halfway up using a rope with a grappling iron attached at the end to go around the tower on the wall.
He made a pole out of battens, fixed the rope and reached the iron rails but never left the jail complex.
As a result of police not being informed of his escape for 90 minutes, two staff were suspended.
1882
A prisoner named Hicks was being sent to the dark cell when he began acting out. He broke free from guards and rushed about the passage shrieking “murder” and bawling and howling. One of the guards fell to the ground when containing him and it resulted in the back of his hand being skinned and a severely bruised forehead.
His commotion caused the 240 remaining prisoners to divide into four groups. They all began to “shout and yell blaspheme until the usually quiet gaol resembled a pandemonium”, media reported. They accused guards of kicking, beating and nearly killing Hicks. They demanded to see Hicks but their requests were denied. In response they refused to return to their cells all day. Police were summoned to assist.
Ironically, Hicks was released from prison the following day after his outburst.
1890
While working on an extension to the wall of the main building, two prisoners made a rush for freedom. Both were noticed missing almost immediately and when they refused to stop, guards opened fire. While they didn’t strike either of the inmates, it did scare one of them enough to surrender at the August 2, 1890 incident.
The other prisoner kept running and made his way through the asylum grounds next door. He took off his coat and boots and swam across a nearby creek. Hospital for the Insane chief attendance Mr Wharf and guard Mr Roy continued to pursue the inmate and kept him in sight until he hid in the undergrowth near the Old Government House baths.
They eventually dragged him from his hiding place. He had managed to put on a fresh suit of clothes. The prisoner was angry and promised to remember Mr Wharf and “exact his revenge” at a later date.
1900
Arcihbald Freeman (alias John Edwards) escaped Parramatta Gaol on March 11, 1900 after serving half of his seven year sentence for break and enter and stealing. He faced court in 1904 over the sensational attempted escape. Reported in the Evening News on July 29, 1904, while working in the carpenter’s department the inmate secured black wooden bars. He removed the iron bars from his cell window, replacing them with the wooden ones.
He managed to get through the window and climbed out.
“A fall would have meant instant death,” the newspaper reported. He crawled along the edge of the roof, got onto another building and scrambled down with the aid of an electric lighting wire to the ground. He used a rope to lower himself into the Hospital for the Insane grounds and was then free. It is thought he got a pony in Parramatta and rode through Ryde for a clean getaway.
1926
Frederick Anthes tried to break into Parramatta Jail. He wanted to retrieve the songs he had written while he was an inmate there.
He had been sentenced to the jail four years earlier. While there he took up writing songs. When he was freed on May 29, 1926 he couldn’t take the songs with him. He had kept them rolled up and buried in a pickle jar in the jail’s garden, away from the prying eyes of fellow prisoners and guards.
Reported in the Cumberland Argus, Anthes was the author of numerous songs by his release.
“Once free and outside the grey, grim walls of the gaol he found himself separated from his compositions and was, driven to commit the extreme and somewhat incomprehensible crime of breaking back into the prison to liberate his buried treasure”.
In his minds, his songs would make him a fortune once he sold them to music publishers.
Sgt Walsh spotted a man walking along Church St on June 12. He became dubious of the man and arrested him. Once back at the station, Anthes confessed to being responsible for placing a stolen ladder against the prison wall, attempting to get in.
Staff had found the ladder and presumed it was part of a break out plot.
Anthes explained he had put the ladder there to see if it was tall enough for him to be climb in and retrieve his jar of songs.
He visited the prison with the sergeant and dug up the pickle jar, claiming they were worth 60,000 pounds. He was sentenced to 12 months for stealing a ladder and crowbar and he never did sell any of his songs.
1936
Kenneth Farlow was serving a life sentence for attempting to shoot Constable Ulrich in Vaucluse in 1931 when he knocked on his cell door, alerting staff that something was wrong. A senior guard opened the grill leading to Farlow’s cell and, after handing over his revolver, peered through the trapdoor into Farlow’s cell.
Farlow told the guard his cistern was leaking and, as he opened the cell door to investigate, Farlow poked what appeared to be a revolver against his forehead.
The guard momentarily stepped back and as Farlow jumped out of the cell, the guard threw a padlock at him.
Farlow raced towards the main gate but gaol regulations at the time stipulated a guard must lock the grill door after the other guard has entered. They were standing ready for an emergency.
As Farlow approached the grille door, the guard fired a shot which frightened the inmate.
Unable to escape, he ran back and was overpowered and put back in his cell. The weapon he had pointed at the guard’s head was a piece of wood carved to represent a revolver.
1938
Three men escaped the gaol on December 17, 1938. John Williams, John Eade and Joseph Bourke had used a ladder to make their escape which had been hidden in the bakehouse. It consisted of roughly sewn flour bags attached to a long stick.
Williams was recaptured in a Redfern house on February 3, 1939 and John Eade was recaptured shortly after escaping.
At the time of printing, Warwick Daily News reported Bourke was still at large.
1946
Darcy Dugan is Parramatta Gaol’s most notorious escape artists. Born in 1920, he committed numerous armed holdups, a bank robbery and he even robbed a hospital. It was behind bars where he became famous for his escape attempts.
He escaped from what was believed to be ‘escape proof” circumstances a total of six times.
A daylight escape saw him go through a ceiling, the roof and snuck over the outer wall at Long Bay Jail.
It was the second incident in the same day, just 25 minutes after being imprisoned.
Dugan was being transported between Darlinghurst Courthouse and Long Bay Jail when he escaped from a prison tram on March 4, 1946. He used a kitchen knife to rip an hole in the roof and escape as the tram passed Sydney Cricket Ground.
In 1949, Dugan and William Mears escaped from Long Bay by forcing a bolt off a door, prising away the ceiling and scaling a wall.
They were on the run for nine days before they were captured at gunpoint in a Menai hut.
While out, the pair robbed a woman in Paddington at gunpoint. They were each sentenced to eight years in jail and another two for the escape.
Just two weeks later the pair escaped a Central Police Court cell. Dugan used a hacksaw to cut through the bars of a cell window and they escaped.
Three staff were sacked due to the embarrassing situation.
They lay low in Collaroy, dying their hair and Dugan grew a moustache. Mears started wearing glasses to change his appearance.
A 500 pound reward for information leading to the recapture of the pair was too good for their “friend” Lennie McPherson, who had helped them in their armed robberies across Sydney, after 62 days on the run.
Dugan spent 43 years behind bars. He was out for a short time in the 1970s, exposing police corruption and crooked cops and gangsters but he was allegedly framed and put back inside by the very men he was trying to expose. His last release was in November 1985 at the age of 65. He died in 1991.
1947
Kelvin Diggins was handcuffed to a bracket in a police van to be transported from Long Bay to Parramatta Gaol. The 22-year-old broke the bracket and jumped out onto the street. He was arrested three days later near Yass, walking along the Hume Highway.
He had hitched a lift in a truck and spent time hiding before attempting the last leg of his journey.
Diggins was 24 miles from his home town of Burrows. Since escaping the police van he had not eaten and lived on water.
According to the Yass Tribune-Courier, the soles of his boots were worn out and his prison clothing ragged.
1953
Five inmates were sentenced to 28 days of solitary confinement and three months of segregation from other prisoners after their attempted escape.
Antonio Martini, Sidney Grant, William Burnie, Edward Garland and Sylvester Garland had been working in the tailor’s shop and locked the supervisor in and went next door to the engine room.
They took the engineer’s ladder and locked the engineer in and propped it against the western wall and started to scale it. Martini was first to go.
Armed guards fired more than 10 shots at him but he scaled the 10.6m wall and jumped down the other side. He broke his ankle as he hit the ground and was recaptured a few minutes later by a Parramatta Mental Hospital attendant.
The rest of his escapee mates fell down after the ladder was pulled away from the ladder.
1954
Inmate John Murphy aka Percy Parsons was admitted to Parramatta Hospital for a sinus operation. Two days after the surgery he had escaped in his pyjamas.
More than 50 police hunted for Murphy who was serving a one-year sentence for break and enter and stealing.
Despite being under the guard of prison officers in the hospital, he tricked them.
When he asked to go the toilet, he went in and climbed out of the window.
Police set up road blocks leading out of Parramatta within 30 minutes but were unable to find him.
1968
Prisoners were being mustered in the jail’s exercise yard on the morning of August 24, 1968 when guards spotted two inmates climbing the 7.62m yard wall using a rope made out of mattresses.
William Treacy, 22, and Alfred Douglass, 24, slung a hook attached to the ropes on to the top of the wall and brazenly began the climb.
A guard fired four warning shots to stop them but they both clambered over the wall and escaped through the mental asylum hospital grounds next door.
Douglass had been serving an 18 month sentence for break and enter while Treacy had a five-year sentence for break and enter and stealing.
Their escape sparked a five-day statewide hunt which ended with riot police raiding a Larra St, Guildford home.
Detectives armed with pistols stormed the house at 6.20am and found Treacy and his 19-year-old wife hiding behind the lounge door. Douglass was hiding behind a bedroom door where Treacy’s five-month-old son was sleeping in a cot. His wife was refused bail because she was already on a suspended sentence. She was eventually granted bail on September 7, having already spent eight days behind bars. Throughout the time the baby was in the care of grandparents.
Two men and a woman were also arrested at the home for harbouring a criminal.
1972
Leonard Lawson AKA Lennie Lawson was jailed for rape and sexual assault. he was sentenced to death but it was commuted to 14 years for his 1954 Terrey Hills incident. He sexually assaulted and stabbed a Manly teen to death in 1962 and the following day stormed a chapel in Moss Vale and took Sydney Church of England Girls Grammar School (SCEGGS) schoolgirls hostage.
In the siege he killed a teen. His crime lead to being sentenced to life imprisonment. While behind bars at Parramatta Gaol, Lawson was in the audience of a concert which included a group of dancers who were putting on a show in 1972. At the end, Lawson pulled out a knife and held the blade to the throat of dancer Sharon Hamilton in what is believed to have been an attempt to escape.
It ended pretty abruptly.
1979
A phone call from Parramatta Jail undid what is believed to be one of Australia’s most daring prison breaks to date.
Michael Murphy’s 15 cent phone call to his grandma letting her know he’d be out on the weekend unravelled Anthony Lanigan’s 18-months of digging an underground tunnel.
Murphy dialled the number …
“Hello,” said the woman. “Hi,” Murphy said. “I have some great news. I am getting out this weekend. I’ll see you on Sunday.”
The phone call ended.
The infamous killer’s call to his grandma prompted her to call Parramatta Gaol to find out more about his release. The prison guards were alarmed, so went hunting in his cell.
It is here they uncovered the elaborate tunnel hidden underneath his cupboard.
Murphy was among seven men who, from 1978 to 1979, dug a World War II-like tunnel using knives, forks and eventually acquired a shovel.
He acquired the tunnel after its original owner, Anthony Lanigan, was transferred to Long Bay Jail.
The armed robber and two-time murderer pleaded to return to Parramatta. He hated Long Bay. He was one of only a handful of prisoners who had been locked up in Katingle, a house of horror that was closed after four years.
“I still have nightmares about this place and I was comfortable at Parramatta,” he pleaded with a prison officer.
The transfer back to Parramatta occurred but he was relegated to another cell. Someone else was in the 2.7m by 3m cell.
Desperate to get back into his cell, he approached Murphy and demanded he move on.
“Why would I do that,” Murphy said. “I like this one, it has a big hole.”
Murphy had found the tunnel but Lanigan was able to convince him to swap but it came at a cost.
He let Murphy in on his escape plans and recruited another five inmates to help.
Among those are believed to have been rapist and murderer Bill Munday, armed robber Stephen Shipley and Leslie Wakefield.
Prison officer Roy Foxwell said Lanigan would go down and tunnel all night and only have an hour of sleep.
“During the day each of the six would go down for a couple of hours, one at a time so they wouldn’t be missed,” he said.
“They had seven separate shifts going in the tunnel. It was quite extraordinary.”
Lanigan returning to his old cell piqued the interest of guards. A search of his cell but nothing was found.
The search rattled Lanigan so he pushed on even more furiously with the escape plans. He was able to get six keys to his cell and gave them to Murphy to distribute.
The three-foot hole in the one wing cell floor was now a tunnel that ended just 30cm below the turf of the linen company next door.
Lanigan spoke to his chain gang. “We are breaking out on Saturday night. We will go down after lights out and breakthrough in the dark. You will be home for breakfast on Sunday,” he said.
Murphy couldn’t remain tight-lipped. He grabbed some coins and ran to the phone to make a call. Prison guards were alerted to the phone call and searched cells.
“They ripped off a cupboard that had been fixed to the wall and there was the tunnel directly underneath. It was bloody amazing,’’ prison officer Foxwell said.
The guards found the six keys and Murphy spilt the beans. They ripped off the cupboard that was fixed to the wall and found the tunnel underneath. Just in the nick of time. They found it the morning of the planned escape — Saturday, September 8, 1979.
The prison was sent into lockdown while police and torches were called.
Lanigan spilt the beans, declaring he had been digging for 18 months and had used wood from the stores to make support beams, electric lights and extension cords.
Once Lanigan got through the sandstone floor he navigated the tunnel through four walls and over a mote before getting under the main wall.
Lanigan was given another five years for the attempted escape and sent back to Long Bay. He promised to keep out of trouble. He did until 16 years later.
In 1995 he finally escaped.
The 47-year-old was a minimum security prisoner and simply turned his back on the farm, a place where low risk prisoners worked, and walked through a hole in the fence.
He has never been found.
Murphy escaped from Silverwater in 1985 after being given an extended sentence for his role in the Parramatta Gaol escape. He was back in prison the following year after his part in the rape and murder of Anita Cobby.