Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. A prison break was part of our episode
Speaker 1: on William J. Sharky earlier this week, and we talked
Speaker 1: about some more prison breaks in our Friday Behind the Scenes.
Speaker 1: So today's classic episode is a set of six prison breaks,
Speaker 1: including one that we just mentioned in that discussion. And
Speaker 1: this originally came out on May eleventh, twenty twenty two.
Speaker 1: Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a
Speaker 1: production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and Welcome to the podcast. I'm
Speaker 1: Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. A few years ago,
Speaker 1: I was in Philadelphia and went to the Eastern State Penitentiary,
Speaker 1: which was a prison for about one hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: years and now it's a historic site. And one of
Speaker 1: the things I learned about while I was there was
Speaker 1: a dramatic escape from the prison in nineteen forty five,
Speaker 1: and I met put that into my little notes app
Speaker 1: on my phone where I jot things down when I'm
Speaker 1: on vacation. It was one of those things, though, that
Speaker 1: I couldn't quite figure out how to make it work
Speaker 1: as an episode, and I kept circling back to it periodically.
Speaker 1: It finally dawned on me that it might work as
Speaker 1: a set of six impossible episodes because there are some
Speaker 1: common themes among a lot of the prison break stories,
Speaker 1: like there's often a lot of tunneling. Uh so uh
Speaker 1: A couple times a year, I pulled together six episodes
Speaker 1: that are are grouped together in some way, and so
Speaker 1: now we're going to have six prison breaks. And just
Speaker 1: to level set here, I would not at all call
Speaker 1: this a representative sample of history's prison escape attempts because
Speaker 1: number one, the vast majority of information we have for
Speaker 1: this episode is from places where English is the predominant language,
Speaker 1: and that's just a matter of what's available to us.
Speaker 1: Number Two, I was really focused on escapes that seemed
Speaker 1: particularly ingenious and how they were planned and carried out,
Speaker 1: not on ones that were violent. So there is a
Speaker 1: little violence in this episode, but it it is not
Speaker 1: one where the you know, a prison break happened in
Speaker 1: the middle of a violent uprising where a lot of
Speaker 1: people got killed. I was really looking at the ones
Speaker 1: that are kind of offbeat a little bit in some ways. Right,
Speaker 1: this is more Shawshank redemption than horrible riot situation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: several of them seem like clear inspirations for some of
Speaker 1: the Shawshank escape, So just know that going in, all right.
Speaker 1: So we're going to start with the prison break that
Speaker 1: inspired this episode. The Eastern State Penitentiary opened in eighteen
Speaker 1: twenty nine, and it was built in an era when
Speaker 1: reformers were trying to change the way prisons in the
Speaker 1: criminal justice system worked. In Philadelphia, this effort was led
Speaker 1: by the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons,
Speaker 1: whose members were predominantly Quakers. The prison was called a
Speaker 1: penitentiary because its purpose was to inspire penitents among the
Speaker 1: people housed there by keeping them in a state of isolated,
Speaker 1: silent contemplation. Hundreds of prisons that followed this theory were
Speaker 1: built around the world in the nineteenth century. Although these
Speaker 1: reformers were trying to move away from things like public
Speaker 1: floggings and executions for relatively minor crimes and also to
Speaker 1: make incarceration more humane, this system that they devised was
Speaker 1: innately cruel. It came to be known as the Pennsylvania system,
Speaker 1: and it was basically perpetual solitary confinement. People were totally
Speaker 1: alone in these single occupancy cells that had attached small
Speaker 1: walled in exercise yards. They were forced to wear hoods
Speaker 1: when they were in common areas so they couldn't see
Speaker 1: or talk to anybody else, and over time the prison
Speaker 1: moved away from this practice, and the Pennsylvania system was
Speaker 1: officially abandoned by nineteen thirteen. By that point, more people
Speaker 1: had recognized that endless solitary confinement was in fact cruel,
Speaker 1: but the system that replaced it was cruel, just in
Speaker 1: a different way. Overcrowding became a major issue, with new
Speaker 1: cell blocks built between the existing ones, until a prison
Speaker 1: that had originally housed two hundred and fifty people instead
Speaker 1: housed seventeen hundred. A series of riots and uprisings took
Speaker 1: place in the nineteen thirties in response to poor conditions
Speaker 1: at the prison and to low pay at the on
Speaker 1: site workshops and factories where they were forced to work.
Speaker 1: In nineteen forty four, a plasterer and stonemason named Clarence Kleimdans,
Speaker 1: who was known as Kleiny, was housed in cell sixty
Speaker 1: eight of Cell Blocks seven, and this was at the
Speaker 1: far end of one of those cell blocks that had
Speaker 1: been planned as part of the prison's initial de as
Speaker 1: a penitentiary, and it's possible that he moved into the
Speaker 1: cell with the intention of tunneling out of it. From
Speaker 1: the beginning, it had been used for storage, and he
Speaker 1: had offered to repair it so that he could live
Speaker 1: in it. Once he was housed in Cell sixty eight,
Speaker 1: he and his cell mate William Russell started digging a
Speaker 1: tunnel in secret, one that went through the cell wall,
Speaker 1: then down twelve feet, requiring a ladder to get to
Speaker 1: the bottom. From there, the tunnel leveled out and stretched
Speaker 1: about one hundred feet, running under the exercise yard and
Speaker 1: the wall that encircled the prison, and then up again
Speaker 1: to the street outside. They made a plaster mask so
Speaker 1: it would look like one of them was in bed
Speaker 1: that one would dig while the other kept watch, and
Speaker 1: they'd put the dirt they dug up in their pockets
Speaker 1: and then scatter it in the exercise yard. Klindens hid
Speaker 1: the entrance to this tunnel with a panel that he
Speaker 1: made to roughly match the intact walls of the cell,
Speaker 1: and then put a metal trash can in front of
Speaker 1: it and in the tunnel. He shored it up with
Speaker 1: wood and installed lights and ventilation fans. When the tunnel
Speaker 1: intersected with a sewer, pipe under the prison. They built
Speaker 1: a connection to the pipe so they could dispose of
Speaker 1: their waste through a sewer. This was a complex engineering
Speaker 1: feat handled with whatever they could cobble together. It's pretty ingenious.
Speaker 1: On April third, nineteen forty five, twelve men escaped through
Speaker 1: this tunnel going to sell sixty eight while everyone else
Speaker 1: was on the way to breakfast. At the end of
Speaker 1: the tunnel, they broke through the last few feet of
Speaker 1: earth and scattered in different directions as they came out
Speaker 1: of it. Most of them, though, were back in the
Speaker 1: prison within a day, and all of them had been
Speaker 1: caught within a few months. Notorious bank robber Willie Sutton,
Speaker 1: who would later totally take credit for this escape in
Speaker 1: his autobiography, he was caught almost immediately. He basically came
Speaker 1: out of the hall and they grabbed him right there.
Speaker 1: Clarence Kleindenst was in custody after about three hours. One
Speaker 1: group tried to make their getaway in a milk truck
Speaker 1: that they stole, and they were caught after police rammed
Speaker 1: the truck with a police car. One man, who was
Speaker 1: twenty four year old, James Grace, turned himself in eight
Speaker 1: days after the escape. William Russell and one other man
Speaker 1: were both shot during the escape attempt and they were
Speaker 1: brought back to the prison infirmary. Otherwise, the men who
Speaker 1: tried to escape were punished. Some of them were placed
Speaker 1: into these tiny windowless underground cells known as klondike. These
Speaker 1: were too small to even stand up in. Of course,
Speaker 1: this whole escape was enormously embarrassing for the prison. It
Speaker 1: was not at all the first escape attempt, or even
Speaker 1: the first successful escape attempt from the Eastern State Penitentiary
Speaker 1: that had happened all the way back in eighteen thirty two,
Speaker 1: but it was a colossal security breach. Months of digging
Speaker 1: had gone unnoticed, and more than one inspection of Cell
Speaker 1: sixty eight had failed to spot. That timeunnel entrance. Prison
Speaker 1: authorities investigated and mapped the tunnel, and then they filled
Speaker 1: it in and covered up the entrance with cement. Then
Speaker 1: later in two thousand and five, Eastern State Penitentiary embarked
Speaker 1: on an archaeological study to find and map the tunnel.
Speaker 1: This effort included ground penetrating radar work cameras, and a
Speaker 1: small robotic rover that was kind of remote controlled and
Speaker 1: went down the tunnel. They had to use a jackhammer
Speaker 1: to get through the tunnels covered over entrance. As we
Speaker 1: said earlier, Eastern State Penitentiary is now a historic site
Speaker 1: and as of twenty seventeen, its mission is to interpret
Speaker 1: the legacy of American criminal justice reform. Yeah, we'll talk
Speaker 1: about that a little bit more in the behind the
Speaker 1: scenes on Friday. Moving on, for about eighty years, starting
Speaker 1: in seventeen eighty eight, people convicted of crimes in the
Speaker 1: UK could be transported to Australia's punishment. Other colonies as well,
Speaker 1: but Australia is the focus here. Often this was for
Speaker 1: a period of seven years, but a lot of people
Speaker 1: sent to Australia never returned to Britain again. They either
Speaker 1: couldn't afford to make the trip or they didn't want
Speaker 1: to after having made a life for themselves in Australia.
Speaker 1: And only a small number of people who were sentenced
Speaker 1: to transportation had been convicted of a violent crime. A
Speaker 1: lot of them had been convicted of offenses that most
Speaker 1: people would think of as pretty petty today. Women in particular,
Speaker 1: tended to have been convicted of things like stealing handkerchiefs
Speaker 1: or cloth, or pickpocketing. Our next prison break was a
Speaker 1: group of women who were being held at Limerick Jail
Speaker 1: in Ireland awaiting transportation to Australia. They were supposed to
Speaker 1: be transferred to a prison in Cork on May twenty third,
Speaker 1: eighteen thirty, which is where they would embark on this
Speaker 1: ship that was going to take them to Australia. But
Speaker 1: the night before that transfer to Cork, nine women and
Speaker 1: a baby escaped from Limerick Jail. The women were Mary King,
Speaker 1: Mary Hurley, Mary Devon, Ellen Hurley, Margaret Shaughnessy, Margaret Clancy,
Speaker 1: Bridget Shelton, Mary Hickey and Catherine Welsh. And the baby
Speaker 1: was Mary Devon's eleven month old daughter. As escapes go,
Speaker 1: this one is maybe less dramatic than some of the
Speaker 1: others that we're talking about today, but it does still
Speaker 1: involve some ingenuity. Leading up to their transfer date, these
Speaker 1: women made a habit of singing and quote noisy vociferations
Speaker 1: after dark, so it had been established that they were
Speaker 1: just loud. Someone had provided them with a file, some
Speaker 1: nitric acid also called aquafortis, and other tools to help
Speaker 1: them get out of their cells. Then, on the twenty third,
Speaker 1: two men used a ladder that workers had left behind
Speaker 1: while making repairs to get into the women's ward. The
Speaker 1: men started helping the women get their cells open, while
Speaker 1: the women got to their nightly singing to cover up
Speaker 1: the noise. In the words of the Monmster Merlin quote,
Speaker 1: this amusement they enjoyed with more than ordinary spirit on
Speaker 1: this occasion, and without exciting any particular notice. Meantime, the
Speaker 1: iron fastenings were assailed by the burglars with extraordinary success.
Speaker 1: The continued knocking was heard in the adjacent ward, but
Speaker 1: the sound of their operations was so drowned in the
Speaker 1: melody of the accompanying voices as not to reach the
Speaker 1: ears of the jail governor or his assistance. The locks
Speaker 1: gave way before repeated efforts, and nine females with an
Speaker 1: infant were extricated from Durance's vile. Once they were out
Speaker 1: of their cells, the women and their accomplices climbed back
Speaker 1: down the ladder and used it to get over the
Speaker 1: outer walls unnoticed. But these women did not stay at
Speaker 1: large for long. Mary Hickey was caught the night of
Speaker 1: the escape, and newspapers reported on the capture of other
Speaker 1: women in the following days, including Catherine Welsh, who asked
Speaker 1: to be taken back to the Limerick jail after being
Speaker 1: caught shoplifting. Yeah, they were going to take her to
Speaker 1: a different jail, and she was like, can I just
Speaker 1: go back to Limerick because that's where I escaped from.
Speaker 1: It appears that, with one possible exception, all of the
Speaker 1: women involved in this prison break did wind up being
Speaker 1: transported to Australia. Two of them are mentioned in an
Speaker 1: article about a ship that departed for Australia on January
Speaker 1: twenty ninth of eighteen thirty one, and then all but
Speaker 1: one of the rest of them are listed on ship's
Speaker 1: actual registers of the people being transported. So there were
Speaker 1: five on a ship that departed on September twenty seventh,
Speaker 1: eighteen thirty one, and then one on a ship that
Speaker 1: left on March ninth of eighteen thirty three, So that
Speaker 1: leaves only one of the women unaccounted for. We are
Speaker 1: going to take a sponsor break, and after that we'll
Speaker 1: come back to more escape stories. Next up, we have
Speaker 1: the escape from Alcatraz in nineteen sixty two, and way
Speaker 1: back in two thousand and eight, prior host to the show,
Speaker 1: Candace and Josh did an episode titled did someone Really
Speaker 1: Escape from Alcatraz number one, That is Forever Ago. It
Speaker 1: was an entirely different show with a different format at
Speaker 1: that point, and most of that ten minute episode is
Speaker 1: focused more on the general history of Alcatraz as a
Speaker 1: prison and not on the escape itself. If you're interested
Speaker 1: in the more general history of Alcatraz, we talk about
Speaker 1: that a bit in our two parter on the Occupation
Speaker 1: of Alcatraz. Those episodes came out in twenty nineteen. So
Speaker 1: Alcatraz is an island in San Francisco Bay. It has
Speaker 1: a steep, rocky shoreline, and it is surrounded by treacherous waters.
Speaker 1: Although this may have discouraged people from trying to escape,
Speaker 1: there were still fourteen different as escape attempts during Alcatraz's
Speaker 1: time as a federal prison that was from nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: four to nineteen sixty three. Nearly all of the thirty
Speaker 1: six men involved in these attempts were captured or killed,
Speaker 1: but five of them are classified as missing and presumed drowned.
Speaker 1: Two of them were Theodore Cole and Ralph Rowe, who
Speaker 1: filed through the bars of a window in the mat
Speaker 1: shop and tried to escape during a storm in nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty seven. The other three were involved in the nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty two escape. There were actually four men involved in
Speaker 1: this attempt, Frank Morris, John Englin, John's brother, Clarence, and
Speaker 1: Alan West. They had all been convicted of various burglaries, robberies,
Speaker 1: and thefts, and they'd all been incarcerated together before, and
Speaker 1: they all knew each other. They had been transferred to
Speaker 1: Alcatraz after having tried to escape from other prisons. They
Speaker 1: started planning to escape from Alcatraz in December of nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty Morrison the Anglans had been assigned cells that were
Speaker 1: adjacent to one another, and one of them found some
Speaker 1: old saw blades they thought they could use. These men
Speaker 1: improvised so much for this escape attempt. They improvised tools
Speaker 1: to dig and break through walls, including making a drill
Speaker 1: from a vacuum cleaner motor, although that turned out to
Speaker 1: be too noisy for them to really use. Scrapwood became
Speaker 1: basic paddles, and a concertina that is a musical instrument
Speaker 1: that's sort of like an accordion became a pump to
Speaker 1: inflate their raft, and that raft, apparently using instructions they
Speaker 1: found in popular mechanics, they made a six foot by
Speaker 1: fourteen foot raft out of about fifty raincoats. They may
Speaker 1: have taken some of these raincoats from other men by force,
Speaker 1: but there was also a rumor that if anybody successfully
Speaker 1: escaped from Alcatraz, the government would shut the prison down,
Speaker 1: So it seems like some of the men were happy
Speaker 1: to kind of wear their raincoats out to the exercise
Speaker 1: yard and then leave them there to be picked up,
Speaker 1: kind of donating them to this effort to get the
Speaker 1: prison shut down. The escaping men then used contact cement
Speaker 1: they had stolen from various workshops around the prison and
Speaker 1: heat from the steam pipes to vulcanize the seams of
Speaker 1: the raft. They used this same method to also make
Speaker 1: life preservers. Each of their cells had an air vent,
Speaker 1: and they used various tools to make a series of
Speaker 1: holes around these vents so that the whole thing in
Speaker 1: each cell could be pulled out from the wall. This
Speaker 1: got them into a utility corridor where they made and
Speaker 1: hid what they would need to escape. Yet another improvised
Speaker 1: tool with all this was a periscope, which they used
Speaker 1: to watch for guards while they were working. They also
Speaker 1: worked out a way to get from the corridor and
Speaker 1: onto the prison roof. Similarly to how Clarence Kleindenst and
Speaker 1: William Russell had used a mask they made to make
Speaker 1: it look like one of them was in bed while
Speaker 1: the other one was digging a tunnel, these four men
Speaker 1: made heads out of homemade plaster and painted them topped
Speaker 1: them with human hair so that it would make it
Speaker 1: look like they were asleep in their beds. These heads,
Speaker 1: I think they're actually pretty good. They're better than I
Speaker 1: could do, I think. On June eleventh, nineteen sixty two,
Speaker 1: Frank Morris and the England brothers went out through their
Speaker 1: removed ventilation grates, covering the hole behind them with whatever
Speaker 1: they could. Alan West had tried to reinforce the concrete
Speaker 1: around his grate and had accidentally cemented it in place,
Speaker 1: and by the time he was able to get it free,
Speaker 1: his accomplices had already left. From up on the roof,
Speaker 1: Morris and the Anglands climbed down a smokestack and then
Speaker 1: over a fence, cutting through the barbed wire at the
Speaker 1: top of the fence, and then they seemed to have
Speaker 1: launched their raft from the northeast corner of the island,
Speaker 1: but then What happened to them after that is a mystery.
Speaker 1: During bedcheck on the morning of June twelfth, a guard
Speaker 1: at first thought that the three men were still asleep
Speaker 1: in their beds, but then realized they weren't in their
Speaker 1: cells after touching one of the fake heads through the bars,
Speaker 1: and a manhunt began. Authorities recovered a package of letters
Speaker 1: sealed in rubber paddles and life vests, either in the
Speaker 1: water or washed up at various points around the San
Speaker 1: Francisco Bay. Sailors from a Norwegian freighter reportedly saw a
Speaker 1: body in the water on July seventeenth, but did not
Speaker 1: report that until October. Although there have been some simulations
Speaker 1: that suggest that the three men could have made it
Speaker 1: to shore was theoretically possible, at this point, they are
Speaker 1: presumed to have drowned in their escape attempt. The FBI
Speaker 1: closed the case on December thirty first of nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 1: Although Alcatraz did close less than a year after this escape,
Speaker 1: it was because the prison needed a multimillion dollar restoration project,
Speaker 1: and on top of that, it was expensive to operate
Speaker 1: because of its island location. The federal government decided that
Speaker 1: it would be cheaper to just build a whole new
Speaker 1: prison than to try to restore and keep running Alcatraz.
Speaker 1: Next up. Libby Prison was originally a food warehouse, and
Speaker 1: then later it became home to a grocery and ship
Speaker 1: provisioning business. Was in Richmond, Virginia, and during the US
Speaker 1: Civil War, the Confederate government took it over and turned
Speaker 1: it into a prison to house US prisoners of war,
Speaker 1: particularly US military officers, and conditions there were really just appalling. Obviously,
Speaker 1: it was not built to be a prison, and beyond that,
Speaker 1: it was situated on a canal that routinely flooded the
Speaker 1: building's cellar in wet weather, and the rising waters drove
Speaker 1: rats out of the cellar and into the rest of
Speaker 1: the structure. The windows were open spaces covered in bars,
Speaker 1: and they let in little fresh air, but not much late,
Speaker 1: and they didn't offer much protection from storms or extreme temperatures.
Speaker 1: The upper two floors where the prisoners were housed were
Speaker 1: very sparsely furnished. There weren't even enough bunks for everyone.
Speaker 1: This was an immensely overcrowded facility, with as many as
Speaker 1: one thousand people packed into just six rooms, without enough
Speaker 1: food or supplies. Unsurprisingly, disease was rampant. Colonel Thomas E.
Speaker 1: Rose of the seventy seventh Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry started planning
Speaker 1: an escape almost as soon as he arrived at Libby Prison.
Speaker 1: He thought it might be possible to dig a tunnel
Speaker 1: from that rat filled cellar to a nearby tobacco shed
Speaker 1: where they could get out without being seen by guards.
Speaker 1: Because all of the rats and the ongoing flooding problems
Speaker 1: made the cellar smell terrible, so bad that it was
Speaker 1: nicknamed rat Hell. That also meant the Confederate guards mostly
Speaker 1: stayed out of it, so this was one place they
Speaker 1: could work on a tunnel mostly undetected. Construction of an
Speaker 1: escape tunnel started with removing bricks from behind a stove
Speaker 1: in the kitchen, which was the only room the imprisoned
Speaker 1: men were allowed free access to. This made an entry
Speaker 1: into the cellar, and from there Rose and his accomplices
Speaker 1: started digging with makeshift tools, putting the dirt into an
Speaker 1: old spatoon to take it away. It was hard to
Speaker 1: tell how far they'd gotten, though, and at one point
Speaker 1: they broke through the surface and realized that they still
Speaker 1: had several feet left to go. They managed to fill
Speaker 1: that accidental opening in before they were noticed. Robert Knoxneden
Speaker 1: was a cartographer who was being held at a neighboring prison,
Speaker 1: and he wrote this account of the escape, which happened
Speaker 1: on February ninth, eighteen sixty four. Quote. Everyone wanted to
Speaker 1: be first in order to get down the chimney as
Speaker 1: well as the long tunnel. It was necessary to strip naked,
Speaker 1: wrapped the clothes in a bundle, and pushed this on
Speaker 1: before them. As soon as it was seen that only
Speaker 1: a few men could possibly get out for daylight, all
Speaker 1: rushed for the mouth of the tunnel who could, each
Speaker 1: man being determined to get out first. The room was
Speaker 1: now crowded to suffocation, all struggling to get in the hole.
Speaker 1: The strongest men forced their way to the front, while
Speaker 1: the weak ones were more roughly brushed aside and jammed
Speaker 1: up against the walls. Sneaden also made a map of
Speaker 1: the prison in watercolor, showing the prison, the tunnel route,
Speaker 1: nearby streets, and of their buildings, and the James River
Speaker 1: and its adjacent canal. That map is now in the
Speaker 1: collection of the Virginia Historical Society. In one account of
Speaker 1: this escape, during the roll call. The next day. A
Speaker 1: Confederate official said, where are they all? And somebody answered,
Speaker 1: they fell out the window, which cracks me up a
Speaker 1: whole lot of window drops. One hundred and nine men
Speaker 1: managed to escape through that tunnel, with more than half
Speaker 1: of them successfully making it to Union territory. Some of
Speaker 1: the ones who managed to evade capture had help from
Speaker 1: Union spy Elizabeth van Lew who was mentioned in our
Speaker 1: prior episode on Mary Elizabeth Bowser, which was a Saturday
Speaker 1: classic not too long ago. Forty eight of the men
Speaker 1: were recaptured and too drowned while trying to cross a river.
Speaker 1: Colonel Rose, who had started the whole escape plan, was
Speaker 1: one of the ones recaptured, and he was held at
Speaker 1: Libby until April thirtieth, eighteen sixty four, when he was
Speaker 1: released as part of a prisoner exchange. A few weeks
Speaker 1: after this escape, h Judson Kilpatrick and Olrich Dahlgren tried
Speaker 1: to liberate the prison, but they were discovered. Dahlgren was killed,
Speaker 1: and papers he was carrying with him suggested that there
Speaker 1: was a plan in the works to burn down Richmond
Speaker 1: and kill Confederate President Jefferson Davis. After this, Richmond's proest
Speaker 1: Marshal John H. Winder Awe, authorized Major Thomas Pratt Turner,
Speaker 1: who was commandant of the prison, to dig a pit
Speaker 1: under the prison, fill it with gunpowder, and blow the
Speaker 1: whole thing up if there were any further escape attempts.
Speaker 1: That threat was never carried out. Soon the Confederate Army
Speaker 1: started transferring men out of Libby to other prisons. After
Speaker 1: the war was over, the entire thing was dismantled and
Speaker 1: moved to Chicago, where it operated as the Libby Prison
Speaker 1: War Museum from eighteen eighty nine to eighteen ninety nine.
Speaker 1: I have many questions about that the but I did
Speaker 1: not look into answering them because it was outside the
Speaker 1: scope of this podcast. We're going to take a quick
Speaker 1: sponsor break and then get to two more escapes. Next up,
Speaker 1: we have shiratrre Yoshier, who successfully escaped from four different
Speaker 1: prisons in Japan in the nineteen thirties, and four English
Speaker 1: language accounts of these escapes have some contradictions. This was
Speaker 1: also true of Japanese accounts that I found and ran
Speaker 1: through Google Translate. But still the basics and the places
Speaker 1: where they kind of intersector is fascinating. He was initially
Speaker 1: imprisoned for burglary and murder and a crime that had
Speaker 1: been committed by a group of men, and he maintained
Speaker 1: that he had not been involved in the murder, and
Speaker 1: there are some accounts of this that described him as
Speaker 1: falsely accused. His first escape was from Almory Prison, after
Speaker 1: he'd been incarcerated there for about three years. He had
Speaker 1: found a piece of wire in a washtub and he
Speaker 1: used that wire to pick the locks. He was caught
Speaker 1: just a few days later. Then, in nineteen forty two,
Speaker 1: he was transferred to Akita Prison. His cell had been
Speaker 1: designed to deter escape attempts, but he noticed that the
Speaker 1: wood around a skylight in the ceiling was starting to rot,
Speaker 1: so he climbed up there night after night, loosening the
Speaker 1: rotten wood. Then he waited for a stormy night to
Speaker 1: disguise the sound of his moving along the prison roof,
Speaker 1: and then he climbed up through that skylight. He removed
Speaker 1: and then climbed out. Shiratori maintained that the accusations against
Speaker 1: him were false and that his incarceration was unjust. And
Speaker 1: then he went to the home of a police officer
Speaker 1: who had previously been kind to him. He had hoped
Speaker 1: that the officer would be willing to help him, but
Speaker 1: instead the officer turned him in and Shiratori wound up
Speaker 1: at a Bascheri prison. This was Japan's northernmost prison and
Speaker 1: it was a place where some of the nation's most
Speaker 1: notorious people were housed. Even though the prison was supposed
Speaker 1: to be escape proof, Shiratory was kept handcuffed there except
Speaker 1: when he was bathing. For this escape, and this is
Speaker 1: the detail that made me put this on the list.
Speaker 1: Shiratory spit the miso soup from his meals onto his handcuffs,
Speaker 1: and the meal slot in his door had miso soup,
Speaker 1: you know, so it's really salty. So he was wanting
Speaker 1: the salt in the soup to weaken the metal in
Speaker 1: his handcuffs and that meal slot. This was during World
Speaker 1: War Two, and the prison had huge skylights in the roof,
Speaker 1: so it was kept in blackout conditions at night. On
Speaker 1: the night of August twenty sixth, nineteen forty four, Shiratory
Speaker 1: broke through his weakened handcuffs and meal slot, reportedly dislocating
Speaker 1: his shoulders to do so, and escape through the skylights
Speaker 1: under cover of darkness. A Baucherie Prison is now a
Speaker 1: museum and has a model of Shiratory climbing to the
Speaker 1: windowed roof to escape in his underwear, although details are
Speaker 1: fuzzy about how exactly he climbed up to the skylights.
Speaker 1: If he had just dislocated his shoulders, yeah, even if
Speaker 1: he had popped his own shoulders back into place, that
Speaker 1: seems like it would have been incredibly painful and difficult
Speaker 1: to try to do because it was. It's not a
Speaker 1: low ceiling, It's like a very high ceiling with big
Speaker 1: skylights up there, regardless of the detail with that though.
Speaker 1: Shiratory hid in an abandoned mine until after the end
Speaker 1: of World War II, and then a farmer caught him
Speaker 1: stealing food from the fields and Shiratory stabbed him. The
Speaker 1: farmer later died of his injuries, and Shiratory maintained that
Speaker 1: the stabbing had been done in self defense. At this point,
Speaker 1: Shiratory had escaped from prison three times, and he had
Speaker 1: been convicted of committing other crimes in addition to that
Speaker 1: first robbery and murder during his escape, so he was
Speaker 1: sentenced to death. He was housed at Supporo Prison to
Speaker 1: await his execution. Two of his previous escapes had involved
Speaker 1: climbing up through ceilings and roofs, so that was apparently
Speaker 1: where the guards focused when they secured his cell. So
Speaker 1: in nineteen forty seven he went out through the floor instead.
Speaker 1: He pried up the floorboards and then used again the
Speaker 1: bowls from his meals used them as shovels to shovel
Speaker 1: through the dirt underneath the floor. He was once again caught.
Speaker 1: That was about a year later, but this time, rather
Speaker 1: than adding to his sentence again, a court ruled that
Speaker 1: Shiratory really had stabbed the farmer in self defense after
Speaker 1: he had escaped from Abushiri prison. His sentence was reduced
Speaker 1: to twenty years in prison, and he was released in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty one. He lived free for quite some time.
Speaker 1: He died in nineteen seventy nine. Yeah, he as I understand.
Speaker 1: It became kind of an anti hero in Japan because
Speaker 1: of all of this. And now we have one last
Speaker 1: escapee who is another man, but his wife is the
Speaker 1: one who should really be credited with planning it and
Speaker 1: carrying it out. This was William Maxwell, the fifth Earl
Speaker 1: of Ninsdale, who was probably born at Terrible's Castle in
Speaker 1: Scotland in sixteen seventy six. His father had died when
Speaker 1: he was a child, and he was raised mostly by
Speaker 1: his mother, who was a Catholic and then later a
Speaker 1: Jacobite that is, a supporter of the Stuart claim to
Speaker 1: the British throne. After the Stuarts were forced into exile
Speaker 1: during the Glorious Revolution of sixteen eighty eight, when William
Speaker 1: became an adult, he married Lady Winifred Herbert. They met
Speaker 1: while William was in France to pledge his loyalty to
Speaker 1: the exiled James the Second and seventh and Winifred was
Speaker 1: visiting her father, who was one of the people who
Speaker 1: helped get James's wife and son out of England during
Speaker 1: the Glorious Revolution. Once they returned to Scotland, they tried
Speaker 1: to be discreet about their religion and their political views,
Speaker 1: since most of their neighbors were Protestants, but they were
Speaker 1: still the targets of suspicion, and on Christmas Eve seventeen
Speaker 1: oh three, a mom broke down the castle gates and
Speaker 1: ransacked the property, looking for any Catholics they might be harboring. Yeah,
Speaker 1: their political views also would have been treason, so it
Speaker 1: was very important to keep that very quiet. William was
Speaker 1: cleared of any wrongdoing after this mob breaking down his door,
Speaker 1: but he was stripped of one of his titles and
Speaker 1: ordered to pay a bond to ensure that he would
Speaker 1: not plot against the throne. Authorities kept him under close watch,
Speaker 1: and during all of this he bequeathed most of his
Speaker 1: property to his eldest son. This might have been an
Speaker 1: attempt to protect that property from being confiscated if he
Speaker 1: were arrested again. In seventeen fifteen, William was part of
Speaker 1: the Jacobite Rising of seventeen fifteen. We have covered the
Speaker 1: Jacobite risings on the show before, and briefly. This was
Speaker 1: one of a series of failed attempts to restore the
Speaker 1: Stewarts to the British throne. William commanded a group of
Speaker 1: gentlemen volunteers, and after the Battle of Preston he was
Speaker 1: one of almost fifteen hundred Jacobites taken prisoner. In January
Speaker 1: of seven sixteen, he pled guilty to treason, and on
Speaker 1: February ninth he was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered.
Speaker 1: His execution was scheduled for February twenty first Winifred was
Speaker 1: determined to get him released, so she traveled to London.
Speaker 1: This was wintertime, when the snow became too deep for
Speaker 1: her carriage to get through, she finished the journey on horseback.
Speaker 1: She met with King George the first, clinging to his
Speaker 1: robes when he refused to accept a petition on her
Speaker 1: husband's behalf. She refused to let go of those robes
Speaker 1: as he tried to walk away from her, and so
Speaker 1: he dragged her across the room. And as words spread
Speaker 1: about that that wound up earning her some popular support,
Speaker 1: people did not like the idea that the king had
Speaker 1: dragged this distraught wife across the room. She bribed the
Speaker 1: guards at the Tower of London where William was being held,
Speaker 1: to allow him to receive visitors in gifts, and she
Speaker 1: visited him repeatedly, often with the company of other women.
Speaker 1: On the night before he was to be executed, she
Speaker 1: arrived with her maid, Cecilia Evans, and her friends, Missus
Speaker 1: Morgan and Missus Mills, and she had brought women's clothes
Speaker 1: and makeup with her. As Winnifred got William dressed and
Speaker 1: made up, she had a loud conversation with her friends
Speaker 1: about where in the world Cecilia had disappeared to she
Speaker 1: knew exactly where Cecilia was. This was all part of
Speaker 1: a ruse meant to be overheard by the guards. Winnifred's
Speaker 1: companions then left the prison one by one, and then
Speaker 1: they were followed by Winnifred and William together as though
Speaker 1: William were her maid. He was hiding the lower part
Speaker 1: of his space behind a handkerchief because they did not
Speaker 1: have time to shave him for leading him out. Oh
Speaker 1: this is I can think of so many comedy troops
Speaker 1: I would love to see recreate this. Once William was outside,
Speaker 1: Winnifred doubled back, went to his empty cell and had
Speaker 1: a pretend conversation with him, closing the door behind her
Speaker 1: when she left. On the way out, she told the
Speaker 1: guards he was at prayer and should not be disturbed.
Speaker 1: The guards didn't even realize William was gone until everyone
Speaker 1: involved in this ruse was safely away from the tower. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this whole thing really banked on causing the guards to
Speaker 1: be confused about exactly how many women had arrived with
Speaker 1: her and where precisely they were at any given moment.
Speaker 1: After getting out of the tower, William took refuge at
Speaker 1: the Venetian embassy and then he escaped to Dover while
Speaker 1: dressed as a Venetian ambassador. He went to Bruges by
Speaker 1: boat and then to Paris, where he reconnected with his wife.
Speaker 1: The two of them became part of the Stuart Court
Speaker 1: in exile. In seventeen seventeen, they moved to Rome and
Speaker 1: that is where William died in seventeen forty four. William
Speaker 1: had a reputation for always living beyond his memes, and
Speaker 1: he died in debt. But Whenifred became a popular heroine
Speaker 1: in Jacobite writing, she died in seventeen forty nine. All Right,
Speaker 1: if you're thinking, hey, why wasn't the John Dillinger escape
Speaker 1: in here? That was pretty ingenious, Yes, that's true, but
Speaker 1: there is an episode on Dillinger already that is going
Speaker 1: to be an upcoming Saturday Classic. Yeah, it seemed like
Speaker 1: a good thing to add in there since they do
Speaker 1: talk about that escape in that prior episode. Thanks so
Speaker 1: much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode
Speaker 1: is out of the archive, if you heard an email
Speaker 1: address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the
Speaker 1: course of the show, that could be obsolete. Now our
Speaker 1: current email address is history podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1: You can find us all over social media at missed
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