Melbourne prison breaks: How criminals escaped from jail
When Ronald Ryan made the rash decision to break out of Pentridge, it was a move that ultimately cost his life. And there’s been plenty of other Melbourne prison escapes.
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They’re solid fortresses surrounded by high fences and barbed wire, built to house society’s most dangerous criminals and punish wrongdoers.
But despite seemingly impenetrable security measures, these stories suggest that with enough determination and some creative thinking, it’s possible to break free.
Here are some of Victoria’s greatest — and sometimes deadly — prison escapes.
RONALD RYAN
Ronald Ryan was serving time for a string of petty theft offences when he made the rash decision to break free of his Pentridge prison cell.
It was a move that would ultimately cost the father of three his life and earn him an unenviable place in the history books as the last person to be executed in Victoria.
Ryan and fellow inmate Peter John Walker made their bid for freedom from the B Division exercise yard during the warders’ Christmas party in 1965.
The pair clambered over the 5m-high brick wall, using knotted blankets attached to an improvised grappling hook.
Once at the guard tower, they threatened a warder with a piece of piping to get him to open the gate for them.
Once through, they clubbed the warder before using a Salvation Army Brigadier as a hostage as they continued on their way.
In the midst of the hurried escape, respected Pentridge guard George Hodson was shot and killed.
During their 17 days on the run, the two men robbed a bank, with Walker later killing a tow-truck driver who had recognised the pair.
The men were recaptured outside Concord Hospital in New South Wales after Ryan arranged a double date with an ex-girlfriend who reportedly tipped off the police.
Ryan was sentenced to death for the murder of Hodson, despite considerable doubt it had been him who had fired the fatal shot.
Many believe it was Walker, while there has also been speculation it had been one of two guards shooting at the escapees had struck the popular warder.
Ryan was hanged inside Pentridge in 1967 — two years after the notorious escape.
It was the first hanging in Victoria in 16 years and would ultimately be the state’s last.
His body is buried in an unmarked grave inside the ground of the former Pentridge prison.
GETTING OUT EASIER THAN IN
A prisoner who fled from the minimum security Beechworth Correctional Centre discovered it was much easier to break out of jail than in.
Martin Alexander Piper was serving a 23-month sentence for dishonesty offences when he strolled out of the prison and into nearby bushland about 9am on April 7, 2013.
But about two hours later Piper had a change of heart and walked back to the Flat Rock Rd prison only to discover he couldn’t get back in.
The jail had been plunged into lockdown after staff realised Piper was missing.
Piper was arrested a short time later and charged with escape. He was given a three-month sentence.
Piper, originally from Traralgon, wasn’t the first prisoner to make a break for it from the Beechworth jail, but he might be the first to return of his own accord.
A LONG TIME ON THE RUN
Police gave up on ever finding George Mulholland after he escaped from the Melbourne City Watch House in 1928.
Arrested for stealing a policeman’s baton during one of the many violent union strikes on Melbourne’s waterfront during the depression, Mulholland, who was 23 years old at the time, used a nail to pick the lock of his cell door and climbed down a spiked gate to the street.
58 years later, at the ripe age of 80, Mulholland casually strolled into the watch house in 1986 to give himself up only to find he was no longer a wanted man after police decided to drop the case several years earlier.
He was given his original mug shot and fingerprints as a souvenir and sent on his way.
Mulholland, then 80, told reporters he had managed to slip past the guard quite easily because “he was distracted by two women at the time”.
Mulholland’s friends smuggled him out of Melbourne on a motorbike and he then jumped on a train to Sydney.
He settled in Newcastle, where he was married in 1934, and became and advocate for Aboriginal causes.
“I’ve got no grudges against the police,” he said.
“They had a job to do, but so did we.
“I thought … it was time I settled all this trouble. Luckily there wasn’t any.”
PRISON LOVERS’ EXPLOSIVE ESCAPE
In a story straight out of a movie, Peter Gibb persuaded his lover, prison officer Heather Parker, to bring him explosives at the old Melbourne Remand Centre.
He and jail mate Arthur Butterly blasted their way through a second-storey security window on March 7, 1993 and climbed down a string of knotted bedsheets to La Trobe St.
They sped off in a getaway car before switching to a stolen motorbike, which they later crashed.
Gibb had been serving time for the armed holdup of a security van in Sunshine. He also had prior convictions for manslaughter, armed robbery and weapons offences dating back to his mid-teens.
After a police shootout in South Melbourne where they wounded an officer and stole his gun, they fled with Parker to the bush, hiding out at Gaffneys Creek Hotel in northern Victoria where they wined and dined at the hotel restaurant and mingled with other guests.
The fugitives left the hotel the next day when a fire broke out in the room they had been staying in, burning the historic pub to the ground.
Three days later, police and sniffer dogs stumbled across the trio’s camp where shots were fired back and forth.
Gibb and Parker were nabbed trying to escape by wading across the Goulburn River.
Butterly was found dead in the camp, face down. A coroner later found he had shot himself with the service revolver he and Gibb had grabbed from the wounded policeman.
Parker and Gibb got matching sentences of at least 10 years in jail for the escape.
In 1995, Gibb successfully appealed an earlier bank robbery conviction, reducing his cumulative sentence.
He was released in March 1997. Six months later, he collected Parker from the Deer Park Metropolitan Women’s Correctional Centre in a limousine and the pair lived together for years.
However, by the time Gibb died in January 2011, the jailhouse lovers were no longer an item.
In a drunken prank, Gibb had briefly put a friend’s eight-year-old son in a freezer.
Three men didn’t see the funny side of the gag and bashed the 56-year-old in his Seaford housing commission home.
He died in Frankston Hospital two days later. No on was charged over the bashing.
The notorious escape wasn’t Gibbs’ first.
In 1981, Gibb bundled blankets on the bed in his Pentridge cell to make it look like he was sleeping then used a hacksaw blade to cut a small gap in the window bars and climbed out, replacing the severed bars before descending two floors into the exercise yard.
There, he retrieved a homemade grappling hook and rope from behind the boiler room and scaled the jail’s bluestone walls to freedom.
He spent a month on the run, mostly hiding out in St Kilda, before he was caught in Coburg and returned to prison.
TRIO COOKS UP ESCAPE PLOT
Violent inmates at Victoria’s biggest maximum security prison were just last year caught trying to break out by removing bricks from the wall of a cell.
The trio used spoons, forks, a screwdriver and other makeshift tools to dig the bricks out in a Shawshank Redemption-inspired bid for freedom.
The men used stolen paint and tissues to conceal the gaps where the mortar had been dug away.
By the time officers foiled the escape plot, three large Besser block-style bricks were able to be removed, leaving a gap big enough for a person to climb through.
Prison sources believe once through the hole, the men had planned to hijack or sneak aboard a rubbish truck as part of the breakout.
The crude excavation work is believed to have taken place mostly at night when prisoners are locked away in their cells.
All three men were moved to Barwon Prison, with at least one — a 22-year-old — charged over the escape attempt.
It is not known how long the work had gone undetected before officers thwarted the plan.
SERIAL ESCAPE ARTIST
Repeat escapee Christopher Dean Binse liked to taunt police with cards while on the run, including a Christmas greeting showing Santa with bags of cash.
The armed robber broke free six times, once from St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne after he was stabbed at Pentridge Prison in 1992.
A female friend smuggled a gun on to the ward, which he used to get past three guards.
He was caught five weeks later in Sydney where he again escaped, this time from Parramatta jail.
In 1993 Binse pleaded guilty over the hospital escape and was sentenced to another eight months’ jail.
Later that same year, Pentridge authorities thwarted a bold escape plan involving Binse.
Prison officers seized Binse’s diary and found the plan to free up to 30 of Victoria’s most dangerous prisoners from Pentridge’s then top security H Division.
Less than two years later, in June 1995, Binse and convicted double murderer John Lindrea managed to cut their way out of their high-security cells at Barwon Prison, only to be found two hours later hiding under building materials within the jail confines.
For that attempt Binse was forced — between June and September 1995 — to wear leg irons, handcuffs and a body belt while out of his cell.
Binse has long loved to taunt the authorities as they chased him around the country.
After one armed robbery in Melbourne, he took out a classified ad in the Herald Sun announcing “Badness is back”.
He also sent Melbourne armed robbery squad detectives Christmas cards with messages such as “wish you were here”.
On Guard – an eight-part podcast – uncovers what really goes on behind bars as former correctional officers share shocking secrets from the frontline of working with some of Australia’s most infamous criminals. Listen to episode 1 below
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