Lucy Dudko: ‘Red Lucy’s’ daughter makes documentary on mother’s gun-toting exploit
HER mother, Lucy Dudko, hijacked a helicopter to break her lover our of jail. Now Maria Dudko is challenging the accepted narrative of the dramatic chase that followed inside Silverwater’s jail in Sydney.
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THE daughter of Lucy Dudko, who made Australian criminal history by audaciously hijacking a helicopter to break her lover out of jail, has returned to Australia to make a full-length documentary about her mother’s exploits.
Maria Dudko, also known as Masha, was just 10-years-old when her Russian mother staged one of the country’s most spectacular prison breaks in March 1999, hijacking a helicopter at gunpoint to land inside Silverwater jail in Sydney to breakout her lover armed robber John Killick.
The exploit sparked a national manhunt and international headlines and prompted Maria, at the instigation of her father Alex Dudko, to make the public plea: “Mummy please stop before it gets worse”.
Dudko, dubbed ‘Red Lucy’, would eventually be captured, convicted and spend seven years in jail while Maria and her scientist father moved back to Moscow.
But mother and daughter stayed in contact with once a month letter writing in later years and in her last year in jail spoke once or twice a week and now are collaborating on a full-length documentary with Maria looking at how her mother was portrayed by the media following her gun-toting exploits.
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Killick, who was released from jail in 2015 and is now an author, has also been interviewed at length for the project as have former NSW police officers familiar with the case.
Maria, who has been in Sydney for several weeks to work on the project, declined to answer questions about her life since 1999 but confirmed she had been to university and was now directing and on-camera interviewing her family’s story.
She co-directed “Young Russia”, a documentary series exploring Russian youth which premiered at the International Documentary Film Festival CENTER in 2017 but this project, with the working title “Come Fly With Me”, will be her first feature documentary.
She told True Crime Australia she was excited to be in Australia to make the film that would look at how her mother was portrayed and the role the police and media specifically played in her mother’s capture at a caravan park in Bass Hill in Sydney’s south west after a month and a half on the run about Victoria and NSW.
She said she wanted to “clarify” how it was police had believed they had established her mother’s involvement so quickly within a day of the crime and were later able to issue a photo of her to the media to warn the public of the armed pair’s apparent desperation and danger to the community.
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She also now wanted to understand the Australian laws that prosecuted her mother, the handling of the breakout by Corrective Services and media ethics in the saturation coverage of the dramatic event.
“I don’t remember much about the time at all but I am a filmmaker now and have a crew to make this documentary and I have questions to clarify things about this time,” she said, confirming she did not even recall her issuing of a public plea as a 10-year-old schoolgirl or subsequent events.
“I have many questions now and I live in Russia but have come here (Sydney) to find some answers. There is some things I don’t understand like why police so quickly thought they knew who was involved in this (prison break). For personal reasons I don’t want to answer any questions.”
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The film is being produced by Sam Griffin who has been involved in developing and funding numerous award-winning documentaries including contentious projects such as Struggle Street, Go Back to Where You Came From and Gayby Baby.
At the time of the jail break, Maria most likely had other things on her mind like why her softly-spoken librarian-mother left her and her father, who had all emigrated to Australia in 1993, to have a three-year affair with the career criminal and serial womaniser Killick.
The pair had met at a social event and began living together before in 1999 Killick was caged for robbing a bank and shooting at a police officer. She would visit him every day in jail and it was during these meetings the pair devised a plan.
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Dudko hired the helicopter claiming she was seeking a scenic ride about Sydney Olympic Park before she pulled a handgun on pilot Timothy Joyce, held it to his head and said “this is a hijack”. He was forced to land in the jail’s exercise yard at the time Killick and his G-Block inmates were out there. A tower began firing at the chopper as it took off with Killick.
After the break, neither pair was initially named publicly but their identity was established through prison records; Alex Dudko also told police at the time he recognised the description of the person on TV news as his wife.
He and his daughter issued pleas for her to surrender as did her parents Vitali and Tonia Zlidanove and their son, Genady, who only found out after being contacted by Mr Dudko.
“Your life is not a B-grade movie,” he said at the time during when his ex-wife and Killick were on the run.
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“There can be no happy ending. The best thing to do now is surrender. Nobody has any doubts that to do what you have done is out of character for you. You have shown everyone what you can do. You helped John Killick get out of jail. Why waste your life any further?”
Dudko has reportedly been living a quiet life in NSW since her release in 2006 as has Killick almost a decade later but the pair are not a couple and it’s not clear whether they even speak. She has made human rights complaints on the grounds her trial was prejudiced by police and the media as late as 2007 while claiming her innocence. This is despite Killick’s novels detailing their life and crime together.
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A cell mate of hers in jail said she was always quiet and kept to herself.
“She was always very quiet, you wouldn’t even think she was capable of doing something like that but desperate people do desperate things in a mad moment of madness,” fellow former prisoner Roxy told True Crime Australia this week. “She was actually a very nice girl.”