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The ones that got away
1. Which 18th Century British burglar and thief escaped from prison four times before being executed in front of 200,000 Londoners? 2. Britain’s biggest mass breakout occurred on September 24, 1983 when 38 prisoners escaped from which penal institution? 3. What was the name of the tunnel through which 76 Allied prisoners of war escaped from Stalag Luft III in 1944 in what became known as The Great Escape? 4. In 1962, Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin became the only convicts to escape from which ‘inescapable’ prison? 5. What were the names of the two Great Train Robbers who escaped after being sentenced to 30 years in jail in 1964, one from Winson Green Prison in Birmingham, the other from Wandsworth Prison, London? 6. Born William Henry McCarty, how was the convicted murderer who escaped from Lincoln courthouse, New Mexico, on April 28, 1881, better known?
Britain’s biggest mass prison break-out occurred 30 years ago this month. Do you know where it was? The answer to this and our other questions about famous escapes are overleaf.
7. What was the name of the 1978 Oscar-winning film about 23-year-old student Billy Hayes who escaped from Imrali Island Prison on a rowboat in 1975 when his sentence for hashish smuggling was increased to 30 years? 8. What was the name of Germany’s ‘escape proof’ WWII prison (pictured above) for ‘incorrigible’ Allied officers, from which 30 of 130 escapees eventually managed to reach friendly territory? 9. Nicknamed ‘Houdini’, what was the name of the safe cracker who escaped three times – from Nottingham Prison, the Old Bailey and finally from Chelmsford Prison – in the 1950s?
10. From which impregnable British fortress did Jesuit priest John Gerard become one of only a few known successful escapees in 1597? 11. Pascal Payet, currently incarcerated in France for murder, escaped from prison in 2001 and again in 2007, and even went back in 2003 to help free his accomplices, each time using what piece of hijacked equipment? 12. In the 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne uses a poster of which movie star to conceal the escape tunnel (pictured below) he dug in his cell? 13. Which 18th Century womaniser, imprisoned for ‘public outrages against the holy religion’, escaped from the Doge’s Palace, Venice, by gondola with a renegade priest? 14. Oberleutnant Franz von Werra had a unique distinction among WWII PoW escapees. What was it? 15. Who used a fake gun made of wood and shoe polish to escape from Crown Point, Indiana county jail on March 3, 1934?
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