How jailhouse lovers led a life of crime across Victoria
ONE was a Melbourne criminal jailed for a string of felonies, the other a prison warden at Melbourne Remand Centre — but our city’s answer to Bonnie and Clyde didn’t lead a glamorous life on the run.
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JAILHOUSE lovers Peter Gibb and Heather Parker felt pretty comfortable as they wined, dined and chatted with patrons at the Gaffneys Creek Hotel, even though Gibb and their mate Archie Butterly had just escaped from jail.
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But soon Gibb’s and Parker’s bid to be together ended after a long shootout with police, and Butterly was dead.
Twenty-five years ago, Gibb and Butterly were just days away from carrying out one of Melbourne’s most daring prison escapes helped by Parker, a prison guard who risked everything in a heady sexual relationship with Gibb, a violent armed robber with a manslaughter conviction.
It wasn’t Gibb’s first time inside, nor was it his first escape.
In 1974, Gibb was shot by a policeman when he was arrested over a series of armed robberies in Melbourne and Sydney.
He was sentenced to seven years’ jail in 1975 but was released early.
By November 1981, he was back inside charged over the armed robbery of a bank in Hampton that netted $146,000 and for his part in the alleged murder of Stephen Kenneth Haines, in February 1981.
Haines, who was on bail over a burglary, was rumoured to have been in on the Hampton bank job, and it was alleged three men including Gibb had heard he’d developed a case of loose lips.
Gibb wasn’t keen to stick around at Pentridge.
He bundled the blankets on his bed to make it look like he was sleeping, used a hacksaw blade to cut a small gap in the window bars, climbed out, replaced the severed bars and descended two floors into an exercise yard.
There, he retrieved a homemade grappling hook and rope that was hidden behind the boiler room, and scaled the jail’s forbidding bluestone walls to freedom.
Gibb was at large for a month and spent most of his time with another escapee, Trevor Smith, around St Kilda.
Smith was already in Beechworth Prison on other matters and escaped after homicide detectives came to question him about the bashing murder of a priest, Father George Scerri, in Brunswick in July 1980.
Gibb was arrested with friends in Coburg. Smith was shot dead as police pursued him.
A month later, a witness told a coronial hearing over Haines’ death that Gibb and two others killed Haines, then Gibb partly dismembered the body to fit the shallow grave they dug.
“‘He laughed and said, ‘I chopped the bastard’s legs off with an axe, and put them beside him’,’’ the witness said.
Gibb was later found guilty of murder but was granted a retrial, pleading guilty to manslaughter. He said his gun went off accidentally as he and Haines wrestled.
With the manslaughter, the robbery, and his escape, he was jailed for 13 years with a minimum of 10.
In February 1993 he was convicted of another armed robbery and was sent to the Melbourne Remand Centre to await his sentence.
It was there that Gibb met Heather Parker, a prison warder with two sons who was married to a fellow warder at the remand centre.
Parker was beguiled by Gibb. Rumours were rife that the pair was on together and, at one point, they were observed going into a linen closet together.
Parker was quickly transferred away but, during a visit with Gibb, passed him a small amount of explosive.
Gibb used the explosive to blast an armoured second-storey window at the remand centre on March 7, 1993.
With Butterly, whose record included manslaughter and false imprisonment convictions, he climbed down to LaTrobe Street on knotted bedsheets.
The pair ran to a Ford Falcon station wagon with a handgun hidden inside and drove off as a warder ran vainly after them.
They crashed the Ford on the West Gate Freeway on-ramp at Montague Street, South Melbourne. Both men were hurt, Butterly seriously.
A motorcyclist stopped to help them. They stole the bike and took off again, crashing it in South Melbourne, engaging in a shootout with two police who had arrived in a divisional van.
One of the officers was shot twice in the upper body but survived.
Gibb and Butterly stole the divvy van and roared away to pick up a getaway car, a Mitsubishi Pajero registered to Parker.
They met up with Parker, then the trio headed for the bush. Gibb and Butterly were patched up by unwitting staff at the Latrobe Regional Hospital in Moe before the three motored north, hiding in the forest.
By the time they arrived at the Gaffneys Creek Hotel, northeast of Melbourne, Gibb had shaved a bald patch into the top of his head to change his appearance.
Gibb and Parker enjoyed their cosy dinner for two as Butterly lay injured in their room.
The three drove away the next morning, their room in flames. The fire spread to the rest of the historic pub and it burned to the ground.
Three days later, searching police stumbled on to the Pajero and discovered their camp.
The fugitives and police exchanged shots for around half an hour.
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’d shot himself in the head with the service revolver he and Gibb grabbed from the wounded policeman in South Melbourne.
In court soon after, Gibb and Parker were described as “star-crossed lovers” and that Parker had developed a “pathological infatuation” for Gibb before the escape.
She later told the Nine Network’s 60 Minutes program: “I did not think of anything else. The world did not include anything but us”.
At times, they chatted and even held hands in the dock.
They got matching sentences of at least 10 years in jail over the escape.
It’s believed they exchanged long love letters while they were incarcerated.
In 1995, Gibb successfully appealed his conviction over the 1980 Hampton bank job, reducing his cumulative sentence.
Gibb was released in March 1997. Six months later, he collected Parker in a limousine upon her release for a night on the town. They lived together for years.
That same year, a fictionalised account of the escape hit the big screen. One Way Ticket starred Peter Phelps and Rachel Blakely, their characters’ names changed to Mick Webb and Deborah Carter.
Parker was fined $1500 in 1999 for handling stolen goods.
Gibb did more time for the 2005 burglary of a car yard and for perverting the course of justice.
Two years later, Parker was charged in connection with the assault of a woman said to have been having an affair with Gibb.
By the time Gibb died in January 2011, he and Parker were no longer an item.
In a drunken prank, Gibb briefly placed the eight-year-old son of a friend in a freezer.
Three men did not see the funny side of the gag, and bashed him inside his housing commission house in Seaford.
He died in hospital two days later, aged 56. An autopsy found Gibb’s had a serious heart condition that was worsened by his heavy drinking. No-one was charged over the bashing.
By that time, Gibb lived alone and had been seriously ill in the months before he died of a heart attack.