To date, no one has ever escaped prison in New Zealand and managed to stay away forever - they are all caught and hauled back eventually.
But over the years many a man - and a couple of women - have tried.
One of the most
Prison break: How NZ inmates escaped jail and went on the run
Arthur Taylor speaks about his great escape. Photo / George Heard
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Cutting through bars of a shower block window
Arthur Taylor is one of New Zealand’s most high-profile criminals.
With upwards of 150 convictions for offending including fraud, burglary, aggravated robbery, kidnapping, firearms, and drugs, he has spent almost 40 of his 67 years locked up.
Having spent that long in jail, it will come as no surprise that Taylor has escaped custody multiple times.
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In New Zealand, there are various categories of prison escapes.
Inmates can take off from court during an appearance or from hospital while getting medical treatment.
They are also known to escape from prison vans.
A breakout escape is when an inmate physically breaches the perimeter security fence of the prison they are remanded at.
Taylor managed to do just that at Auckland Prison at Paremoremo in June 1998.
It all started when three other inmates in the maximum security wing - murderers Graeme Burton and Darryn Crowley and bank robber Matthew Thompson - asked him to help them plan a breakout.
Taylor ended up joining them.
“I wasn’t meant to escape - bloody Crowley had come to me and told me they wanted to escape so I got it all organised, I got it all in progress,” he told the Herald.
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“I was due to be out in three months, and about two weeks before it was all due to go down, Corrections came to me and said, ‘Oh sorry, we made a miscalculation on your release date, you’re not actually due to get out for 18 months’.
“I had made all the preparations with my partner and my son… so I was bloody spewing.
“So I thought, ‘you bastards, I’ll show you,’ - and that’s what was behind it.”
Taylor got the tools he needed to remove a window in D Block and cut through the fence.
He organised a getaway car and driver, and arranged a cache of camping gear, food, clothes, weapons and money they could take into the bush.
The plan was to hide out there for as long as they could, then go their separate ways.
Taylor picked a Monday for the escape - after he’d had his weekend visits with family.
They waited til dark and then it was all go.
Earlier, the men had cut through the bars of a window in the shower block.
All they had to do was reach through and undo the bolts holding them in place, remove the window bars and climb through.
Taylor laughs remembering Burton with “a bloody big crescent” tightening the bolts rather than undoing them.
Once he righted the wrong, the men jumped out.
As they did, a call came over the PA system for Crowley to report to the guard’s office.
“Oh Jesus, he had to get his escape kit off in a hurry, get dressed back in prison clothing and shoot back up to the control centre.
“Anyway, he came back down and we got back through.”
The getaway driver had cut the perimeter fence but the convicts had to do the internal fence themselves.
“I gave Graeme Burton a set of bolt cutters, and of course, he breaks them. Lucky I had a cellphone and I called Swainey and said, ‘Have you got another set of bolt cutters out there mate?’”
“Swainey” is Neil Raymond Swain, the getaway driver.
He had been released from Paremoremo a year earlier on parole after serving just over five years of a 12-year sentence for crimes in Christchurch in the early 1990s.
Swain was convicted of bombing the Sydenham police station, kidnapping Crown witnesses at gunpoint and torching their properties.
“Thank f*** he had a pair and he threw them over. I’d thought, ‘we’re f***ing trapped,’ but fortunately we got hold of the bolt cutters and managed to cut through the bloody fence and we got out.”
They clambered through the perimeter fence and ran up the road to where the van was hidden.
“I will always remember as we sailed up Ridge Rd, which overlooks the prison, I called a couple of my mates and said, ‘The eagle has landed’.
“There’s no better feeling than being suddenly free when you’ve been in a shithole like Parry - drinking a beer and kicking back,” said Taylor.
So now the audacious escapees were out and on the lam - what next?
Taylor had called a friend and arranged for her to pick him up. He would help his mates haul the gear into the bush and then leave them to it.
But then he realised Swain had acquired a number of firearms and when he saw Burton with one he faced a hard decision.
“When I saw Burton cradling an assault rifle I thought, ‘f***ing Jesus Christ,’ and that’s when I made up my mind,” he recalled.
“She said, ‘Are you coming with me?’ and I said, ‘No I can’t love. If I don’t stay here that Burton’s going to kill some bastard and guess who’s gonna get the f***ing blame for it all as the ringleader’,” Taylor said.
“She said, ‘I’ll stay here then,’ but she was on bail at the time for one of the biggest methamphetamine rings on the North Shore.”
Taylor managed to convince her to leave, while also worried she’d blow their cover.
But days later, the men did that for themselves.
“Unfortunately I woke up in the middle of the night and I’m looking around for these three - I’d told them not to go into town,” Taylor said.
“I headed down the track to Muriwai and I get near the fire station and I hear all the carousing going on.
“They’re holding a party - they’re dressed up in the firemen’s gears and drinking all their piss and playing pool on their tables.
“I said to them, ‘You can’t do this. They [the police] haven’t got a f***ing clue where we are, they’re looking in all directions and alerts will have gone out within 30-50km of Auckland for any unusual break-ins, anything like that’.”
Taylor convinced the men to go back to their camp before anyone heard or saw them.
But it was too late.
“The next morning I woke up and there was a f***ing helicopter screaming overhead, there’s dogs barking in the distance.
“We just got out of there by the skin of our teeth before the cops headed up that road.
“We just stayed in the bush all day, stayed low… but by nighttime I was freezing, it was the middle of winter and I just said, ‘We’ve got to get out of here’.”
With no food, clothes or supplies, they had to think fast if they wanted to remain free.
So they stole a car and “headed out of town, fast”.
Taylor drove them to South Auckland where they went through a McDonalds drive-through and ordered breakfasts - and a banana thickshake for Burton.
Then they headed for the Coromandel, stopping briefly for fuel and cigarettes.
“And there was [a newspaper] with my f***ing face on the front page,” said Taylor.
“Then a police car came screaming past us and I thought someone had rung us in from the store but we just drove straight on.”
They stopped once more so Burton could throw up - he hadn’t been in a car for years and had motion sickness.
Then Taylor called a mate who cleaned holiday homes.
He was directed to a house in Tairua, owned by an American millionaire, that did not get used over winter.
When the inmates arrived - joined by Taylor’s female mate from Auckland - it was like Christmas.
Bedrooms of their own, plush beds and linens, a stash of food and alcohol, a heated pool, electric toilets and high-end clothes awaited them.
They lived it up for a few weeks before the escape unravelled.
One of the men was craving fish and chips, so Taylor drove them to Tairua village to get food. But on the way back he pulled into the wrong driveway.
“Some people came out, a husband and wife, and I thought, ‘oh, f*** no,’ cos the whole country was in an uproar at this stage, the whole country’s looking for us.”
The men took off for the bush again and had not lone scarpered from the mansion when police roared up the road.
They got separated and Taylor and his mate tried their best to stay under the radar.
He fell down a cliff into the ocean at one stage and had to scramble back up when confronted by a chopper full of cops.
Eventually, he knew his freedom was over. There were helicopters above, armed cops on the land and boats on the water, which meant nowhere to run.
They got him as he hid behind a tree.
“They moved in and I heard the dog. I just froze against the tree, the dog came up, and ran straight past.
“They were all moving past, f***ing heaps of them, I thought they were going to go past…. Then one of them looked up and made eye contact with me. He was raising his bushmaster.
“Just at that moment a news helicopter came screaming overhead - he looked up, he looked at me and he shouted, ‘Stop, surrender!’ and that was it.
“I had to surrender, there was no f***ing way I was getting out of there.”
Disguises, grinders and dummies - how other escapes played out
Dangerous and on the loose - Damon Exley
Damon Exley - also known as John Willis - escaped from Rimutaka Prison near Wellington by stealing a guard’s uniform, commandeering a construction van and simply driving out the gates in disguise.
Two days later, he brutally raped a woman who picked him up thinking he was a harmless hitchhiker.
He was arrested soon after the attack when the woman told a stranger in a laundromat what had happened.
Catch me if u can - Kevin Polwart
Kevin Polwart was part way through a sentence for robbery and was working in the yard at Paremoremo.
He waited until the guards were out of sight and then made his move, using an angle grinder to cut through the fence, dropped the tool, slithered through the hole and bolted.
Prison staff only realised Polwart was gone when they found his message on a white-painted concrete wall -, a crudely drawn rabbit etched in, with five words: “Catch me if u can”.
He was on the run for 51 days before he was recaptured in a city cemetery after a member of the public recognised him and called 111.
Polwart also escaped from Rimutaka Prison in 2001, creeping to the perimeter fence at dawn and using wire cutters to create a hole big enough to crawl through.
The next day he stole about $600,000 in cash and cheques when he robbed a Armourguard van.
He was recaptured after a tip from the public about where he was staying.
Stuck in the mud - Dean Wickliffe
Dean Wickliffe is the only person to have escaped from Auckland Prison at Paremoremo twice - in 1976 and 1991.
In May 1972, Wickliffe received a life sentence for the murder of Wellington jeweller Paul Miet.
His first escape, detailed in a book he wrote about his life, lasted just minutes.
He collected sheets and fashioned a rope that he used to climb up and over the first wall, then he had to jump 12 feet (3.6m) across to the top of the outside wall.
He made it, but was caught soon after when he got stuck in the mudflats as he attempted to cross an estuary during low tide.
The Corrections officers’ rugby team was exiting the prison and gave chase, recapturing Wickliffe soon after.
But in 1991, he got out again and spent a month at large.
This time he took advantage of staff cuts that meant the prison was low on guard numbers and scarpered across the yard and up over the walls while no one was looking.
“I had it down to a fine art. I trained for six months to get myself physically fit. It’s a real adrenaline buzz, there’s no way to really compare it,” he said.
“The moment my feet dropped over the outside walls and outside fences I was just on a high, there was no stopping me.”
The wild boy - George Wilder
George Wilder’s exploits in the 1960s earned him national folk hero status and even a song.
But all he wanted was his freedom, and he tried again and again, escaping from prison three times in 1962, 1963 and 1964.
Wilder’s first lag was a four-year stint at New Plymouth Prison for what was then called shop breaking, and stealing cars - Jaguars were his weakness.
He hated being locked up, and in May 1962 he escaped for the first time, scaling a 10m wall. He spent the next 65 days evading capture.
In January 1963, he escaped from Mt Eden Prison with three other inmates.
The group went on a crime spree, stealing food and other supplies to survive, and leaving their victims thank-you and apology notes in their wake.
They carried on like that for 175 days.
The third time, on February 4, 1964, Wilder armed himself with a sawn-off shotgun, kidnapped a guard at gunpoint and, with two other inmates, forced his way out of Mt Eden.
Hours later, under the threat of tear gas, he gave himself up.
The rapist and the dummy - Dion Matthews
Dion Matthews was jailed after he abducted a 15-year-old girl as she left the Auckland Easter Show in 1996 and repeatedly raped her before leaving her tied to a tree.
Four years later, he learned his son was sick and was desperate to get out of Paremoremo to see the boy.
Matthews used a homemade key, which he’d copied from the original, to let himself into a storeroom in his medium-security wing.
He hid in there until lock-up, knowing the guards would not come looking for him because they’d think he was in bed.
He’d left a dummy in his place, fashioned from his clothes and a basketball, and, sure enough, the guards checked the room and ticked him off the muster list.
After lock-up, Matthews emerged from the storeroom and kicked in a ceiling panel to climb on to the prison’s roof.
From there, he shimmied down a fire escape and cut his way through the perimeter fence.
Guards spotted the hole in the fence at 1am but thought all the inmates were in bed so did not report it.
When Matthews didn’t show at breakfast at 7.30am, the guards discovered he was gone.
He was captured later that day in Auckland city.
Bad girls - Melissa Wepa and Patricia Aldridge
The use of a dummy was also instrumental in two other inmates’ escapes in the early 90s - this time, women.
Melissa Wepa, in prison for murder, and Patricia Aldridge, who was doing time for theft, were put in a cell together at Arohata Prison and plotted to get out.
They smuggled a screwdriver into their cell and unscrewed every fitting and piece of furniture in the room.
One night after lock-up, they dressed dummies in their prison-issued clothing and laid them in their beds.
Then they took the furniture they had unscrewed and used it to smash their way through the cell floor, climbing out through the hole.
At 3.30am, a couple of guards on a cigarette break heard a noise that sounded like “wood being dropped” on the ground, and thought it was coming from a carpark.
They went to have a look, found nothing amiss and went back to their smokes. Little did they know that the women were scaling scaffolding that had been left in place by workmen next to a 4m perimeter fence.
They went up and over, then over one more fence to freedom.
At 7.15am, the guards went to the women’s cell to unlock them, discovered the dummy ruse and the hole in the floor, and raised the alarm.
The women were at large for only two days before they were caught; a large lizard tattoo across her face made Wepa easy to spot.
It emerged that both had made previous attempts to escape, and Corrections was slammed for putting them in a cell together.
Escape to Melbourne - Trevor Nash
One of the first to skip jail and then the country was Trevor Edward Nash, who was jailed for 10 years for his part in a robbery in Auckland in 1956 where £20,000 was stolen - a huge amount in the day.
Four years after he was sentenced, Nash escaped from Mt Eden Prison and travelled to Melbourne - how he did it is still unknown.
New Zealand police scoured the length of the country for Nash, oblivious to the fact he was across the ditch. Nash may never have been caught had it not been for an eagle-eyed Aussie сор who recognised him in the street, despite his disguise.
When Nash was arrested, police found a huge amount of the stolen cash on him.
The international escapee - Brian Curtis
In 1993, Brian Curtis escaped from Auckland Prison and successfully eluded those hunting him for six years, living in a poor suburb of Manila under a fake name.
He may have stayed there longer, too, had he not been tripped up by his own fingerprints during a botched European jaunt.
Curtis, a drug lord known as “New Zealand’s Godfather,” was one of the country’s most high-profile criminals and the first man to be sentenced for life for drug offending.
In 1993 he and another inmate got out of Auckland Prison - also using dummies in their beds - and cut their way out of the dining room.
They didn’t run immediately, though, taking their time to cover their tracks by using toothpaste and paint to conceal cut marks in the bars so the guards wouldn’t cotton on to how they had made it outside.
Then they walked through the yard to the outside wall and, using a ladder built from pieces of shelving and tape, climbed over it with ease.
Curtis got out of New Zealand by boat and ended up in Manila.
On a trip to Amsterdam in 1994, he was caught using a forged traveller’s cheque, and Dutch police took him in for fingerprinting.
The name Peter Coutts - according to his fake Irish passport - was recorded and he was let go.
A few years later, a young cop working at Interpol named Mike Bush - who went on to become the Commissioner of the New Zealand Police - sent Curtis’s fingerprints to international law enforcement offices, and bingo - a match was returned from Amsterdam.
Bush spent the next three years hunting Curtis and in July 2001, received a call from a police officer in Manila who had spotted ‘Coutts’.
Local police and immigration officials busted Curtis soon after, and he was deported to New Zealand, charged and put back behind bars.
Corrections - zero tolerance for escapees
Corrections’ chief executive Jeremy Lightfoot said in the agency’s latest annual report that he and his colleagues across the country remain committed to ensuring the secure accommodation and movement of people in prisons.
“We are responsible for ensuring the safe containment of those who are in our custody while in prison. This includes while people are being transferred between prisons or being escorted outside the prison perimeter for medical reasons or court hearings,” he said.
“Every year we carry out tens of thousands of escorts between prisons, courts, medical facilities and rehabilitation providers.
“The overwhelming majority of escorts occur without incident.
“Public safety is our top priority, and no escape is acceptable. If a prisoner escapes from custody, we immediately contact police, who are responsible for locating and returning the individual to custody as soon as possible.
“A person who is convicted of escaping lawful custody can receive a maximum sentence of five years’ imprisonment.”
Anna Leask is a Christchurch-based reporter who covers national crime and justice. She joined the Herald in 2008 and has worked as a journalist for 18 years. She writes, hosts and produces the award-winning podcast A Moment In Crime, released monthly on nzherald.co.nz
