Six Impossible Episodes: Prison Breaks

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. A few
years ago, I was in Philadelphia and went to the
Eastern State Penitentiary, which was a prison for about a

(00:23):
hundred and fifty years and now it's a historic site.
And one of the things I learned about while I
was there was a dramatic escape from the prison in
and I immediately put that into my little notes hap
on my phone where I shot things down when I'm
on vacation. It was one of those things, though that
I couldn't quite figure out how to make it work

(00:45):
as an episode, and I kept circling back to it periodically.
It finally dawned on me that it might work as
a set of six impossible episodes because there are some
common themes among a lot of the prison break stories,
like there's often a lot of tunneling. Uh So, a

(01:07):
couple of times a year I pulled together six episodes
that are are grouped together in some way, and and
so now we're gonna have six prison breaks and just
two level set here. I would not at all call
this a representative sample of history's prison escape attempts because
number One, the vast majority of information we have for

(01:29):
this episode is from places where English is the predominant language,
and that's just a matter of what's available to us.
Number Two, I was really focused on escapes that seemed
particularly ingenious and how they were planned and carried out,
not on ones that were violent. So there is a

(01:50):
little violence in this episode, but it is not one
where the you know, a prison break happened in the
middle of a violent uprising where a lot of people
got killed. I was really looking at the ones that
are kind of offbeat a little bit in some ways. Right,
this is more Shawshank redemption than horrible riot situation. Yeah,
several of them seem like clear inspirations for some of

(02:14):
the Shawshank escape. So know that going in, all right,
So we're going to start with the prison break that
inspired this episode. The Eastern State Penitentiary opened in eighteen
twenty nine, and it was built in an era when
reformers were trying to change the way prisons and the
criminal justice system worked in Philadelphia. This effort was led

(02:35):
by the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the miseries of public
prisons whose members were predominantly Quakers. The prison was called
a penitentiary because its purpose was to inspire penitents among
the people housed there by keeping them in a state
of isolated, silent contemplation. Hundreds of prisons that followed this

(02:55):
theory were built around the world in the nineteenth century.
Although these reformers were trying to move away from things
like public floggings and executions for relatively minor crimes, and
also to make incarceration more humane, this system that they
devised was innately cruel. It came to be known as

(03:16):
the Pennsylvania system, and it was basically perpetual solitary confinement.
People were totally alone in these single occupancy cells that
had attached small walled in exercise yards. They were forced
to wear hoods when they were in common areas so
they couldn't see or talk to anybody else, and over
time the prison moved away from this practice, and the

(03:39):
Pennsylvania system was officially abandoned by nineteen By that point,
more people had recognized that endless solitary confinement was in
fact cruel, but the system that replaced it was cruel
just in a different way. Overcrowding became a major issue,
with new cell blocks built between the existing ones, until

(04:00):
a prison that had originally housed two hundred fifty people
instead housed seventeen hundred. A series of riots and uprisings
took place in the nineteen thirties in response to poor
conditions at the prison and to low pay at the
on site workshops and factories where they were forced to work.
In nineteen forty four, a plasterer and stonemason named Clarence Kleinbens,

(04:23):
who was known as Cliny, was housed in cell sixty
eight of Cell Blocks seven, and this was at the
far end of one of those cell blocks that had
been planned as part of the prisons initial design as
a penitentiary, and it's possible that he moved into the
cell with the intention of tunneling out of it. From
the beginning, it had been used for storage, and he

(04:44):
had offered to repair it so that he could live
in it. Once he was housed in cell sixty eight,
he and his cellmate William Russell started digging a tunnel
in secret, one that went through the cell wall then
down twelve feet, requiring a ladder to get to the bottom.
From there, the tunnel leveled out and stretched about one
hundred feet, running under the exercise yard and the wall

(05:05):
that encircled the prison, and then up again to the
street outside. They made a plaster mask so it would
look like one of them was in bed that one
would dig while the other kept watch, and they put
the dirt they dug up in their pockets and then
scatter it in the exercise yard. Kleindent hid the entrance
to this tunnel with a panel that he made to

(05:28):
roughly match the intact walls of the cell, and then
put a metal trash can in front of it, and
in the tunnel. He shored it up with wood and
installed lights and ventilation fans. When the tunnel intersected with
a sewer pipe under the prison, they built a connection
to the pipe so they could dispose of their waste
through a sewer. This was a complex engineering feat handled

(05:52):
with whatever they could cobble together. It's pretty ingenious. On
April third, nine, twelve men escaped through this tune going
to sell sixty eight while everyone else was on the
way to breakfast. At the end of the tunnel, they
broke through the last few feet of earth and scattered
in different directions as they came out of it. Most

(06:12):
of them, though, we're back in the prison within a day,
and all of them had been caught within a few months.
Notorious bank robber Willie Sutton, who would later totally take
credit for this escape and his autobiography, he was caught
almost immediately. He basically came out of the hall and
they grabbed him right there. Clarence kleindenced was in custody

(06:34):
after about three hours. One group tried to make their
getaway in a milk truck that they stole, and they
were caught after police rammed the truck with a police car.
One man, who was twenty four year old, James Grace,
turned himself in eight days after the escape. William Russell
and one other man were both shot during the escape

(06:54):
attempt and they were brought back to the prison infirmary. Otherwise,
the men who tried to escape were punished. Some of
them were placed into these tiny windowless underground cells known
as klondikes. These were too small to even stand up in.
Of course, this whole escape was enormously embarrassing for the prison.
It was not at all the first escape attempt or

(07:16):
even the first successful escape attempt from the Eastern State
Penitentiary that had happened all the way back in eighty two,
but it was a colossal security breach. Months of digging
had gone unnoticed and more than one inspection of Cell
sixty eight had failed to spot that tunnel entrance. Prison

(07:36):
authorities investigated and mapped the tunnel, and then they filled
it in and covered up the entrance with cement. Then
later in two thousand five, Eastern State Penitentiary embarked on
an archaeological study to find and map the tunnel. This
effort included ground penetrating radar work cameras, and a small
robotic rover that was kind of remote controlled and went

(07:59):
down the tunnel. They had to use a jackhammer to
get through the tunnels covered over entrance. As we said earlier,
Eastern State Penitentiary is now a historic site and as
of seventeen, its mission is to interpret the legacy of
American criminal justice reform. Okay, we'll talk about that a
little bit more in the behind the scenes on Friday.

(08:20):
Moving on, for about eighty years, starting in people convicted
of crimes in the UK could be transported to Australia
as punishment other colonies as well, but Australia is the
focus here. Often this was for a period of seven years,
but a lot of people sent to Australia never returned

(08:41):
to Britain again. They either couldn't afford to make the
trip or they didn't want to after having made a
life for themselves in Australia. And only a small number
of people who were sentenced to transportation had been convicted
of a violent crime. A lot of them had been
convicted of offenses that most people would think of as
pretty petty today. Women in particular, tended to have been

(09:04):
convicted of things like stealing handkerchiefs or cloth, or pickpocketing.
Our next prison break was a group of women who
were being held at Limerick Jail in Ireland awaiting transportation
to Australia. They were supposed to be transferred to a
prison in Cork on May thirty, which is where they
would embark on this ship that was going to take

(09:26):
them to Australia. But the night before that transfer to
a Cork nine women and a baby escape from Limerick Jail.
The women were Mary King, Mary Hurley, Mary Devon, Ellen Hurley,
Margaret Shaughnessy, Margaret Clancy, Bridget Shelton, Mary Hickey, and Katherine Welsh,

(09:46):
and the baby was Mary Devon's eleven month old daughter.
As escapes go, this one is maybe less dramatic than
some of the others that we're talking about today, but
it does still involve some ingenuity leading a to their
transfer date. These women made a habit of singing and
quote noisy vociferations after dark, so it had been established

(10:08):
that they were just loud. Someone had provided them with
a file, some nitric acid also called aquafortis, and other
tools to help them get out of their cells. Then,
on the twenty three, two men used a ladder that
workers had left behind while making repairs to get into
the women's ward. The men started helping the women get

(10:30):
their cells open, while the women got to their nightly
singing to cover up the noise, and the words of
the monmouthster Merlin quote this amusement they enjoyed with more
than ordinary spirit on this occasion, and without exciting any
particular notice. Meantime, the iron fastenings were assailed by the

(10:51):
burglars with extraordinary success. That continued knocking was heard in
the adjacent ward, but the sound of their operations was
so drowned and the melody of the accompanying voices as
not to reach the ears of the jail governor or
his assistance. The locks gave way before repeated efforts, and
nine females with an infant were extricated from Durance Vile.

(11:15):
Once they were out of their cells, the women and
their accomplices climbed back down the ladder and used it
to get over the outer walls unnoticed. But these women
did not stay at large for long. Mary Hickey was
caught the night of the escape, and newspapers reported on
the capture of other women in the following days, including

(11:35):
Catherine Welsh, who asked to be taken back to the
Limerick jail after being caught shoplifting. Yeah, they were going
to take her to a different jail and she was like,
can I just go back to Limerick because that's where
I escaped from. It appears that, with one possible exception,
all of the women involved in this prison break did
wind up being transported to Australia. Two of them are

(11:58):
mentioned in an article about a ship that departed for
Australia on January twenty nine of eighteen thirty one, and
then all but one of the rest of them are
listed on ships actual registers of the people being transported.
So there were five on a ship that departed on
September eighteen thirty one, and then one on a ship
that left on March nine of eighteen thirty three, so

(12:22):
that leaves only one of the women unaccounted for. We
are going to take a sponsor break, uh and after
that will come back to more escape stories. Next up,

(12:42):
we have the escape from Alcatraz in nineteen sixty two,
and way back in two thousand eight, prior hosts of
the show, Candice and Josh did an episode title Did
Someone Really Escape from Alcatraz? Number one? That is fourever Ago.
It was an entirely different show with the different format
at that point, and most of that ten minute episode

(13:04):
is focused more on the general history of Alcatraz as
a prison and not on the escape itself. If you're
interested in the more general history of Alcatraz, we talk
about that a bit in our two parter on the
Occupation of Alcatraz. Those episodes came out in twenty nineteen.
So Alcatraz is an island in San Francisco Bay. It
has a steep rocky shoreline, and it is surrounded by

(13:27):
treacherous waters. Although this may have discouraged people from trying
to escape, there were still fourteen different escape attempts during
Alcatraz's time as a federal prison that was from four
to nineteen sixty three. Nearly all of the thirty six
men involved in these attempts were captured or killed, but

(13:48):
five of them are classified as missing and presumed drowned.
Two of them were Theodore Cole and Ralph Row, who
filed through the bars of a window in the mat
shop and tried to escape during a storm in ninety seven.
The other three were involved in the nineteen sixty two escape.
There were actually four men involved in this attempt, Frank Morris,

(14:12):
John Anglin, John's brother Clarence, and Allan West. They had
all been convicted of various burglaries, robberies, and thefts, and
they'd all been incarcerated together before, and they all knew
each other. They had been transferred to Alcatraz after having
tried to escape from other prisons. They started planning to
escape from Alcatraz in December of nineteen sixty one. Morrison

(14:36):
the Englands had been assigned cells that were adjacent to
one another, and one of them found some old saw
blades they thought they could use. These men improvised so
much for this escape attempt. They improvised tools to dig
and break through walls, including making a drill from a
vacuum cleaner motor, although that turned out to be too

(14:56):
noisy for them to really use. Scrap wood became basic paddles,
and a concertina that is a musical instrument that's sort
of like an accordion became a pump to inflate their raft,
and that raft, apparently using instructions they found in popular mechanics,
they made a six ft by fourteen foot raft out

(15:16):
of about fifty raincoats. They may have taken some of
these raincoats from other men by force, but there was
also a rumor that if anybody successfully escaped from Alcatraz,
the government would shut the prison down, So it seems
like some of the men were happy to kind of
wear their raincoats out to the exercise yard and then
leave them there to be picked up, kind of donating

(15:39):
them to this effort to get the prison shut down.
The escaping men then used contact cement they had stolen
from various workshops around the prison and heat from the
steam pipes to vulcanize the seams of the raft. They
used this same method to also make life preservers. Each

(15:59):
of their cells had an air vent, and they used
various tools to make a series of holes around these
vents so that the whole thing in each cell could
be pulled out from the wall. This got them into
a utility corridor, where they made and hid what they
would need to escape. Yet another improvised tool with all
this was a periscope, which they used to watch for

(16:21):
guards while they were working. They also worked out a
way to get from the corridor and onto the prison roof.
Similarly to how Clarence Kleinen and William Russell had used
a mask they made to make it look like one
of them was in bed while the other one was
digging a tunnel, these four men made heads out of
homemade plaster and painted them topped them with human hair

(16:44):
so that it would make it look like they were
asleep in their beds. Um these heads, I think they're
actually pretty good, better than I could do, I think.
On June, Frank Risks and the England Brothers went out
through their removed ventilation grates, covering the hole behind them

(17:05):
with whatever they could. Alan West had tried to reinforce
the concrete around his grate and had accidentally cemented it
in place, and by the time he was able to
get it free, his accomplices had already left. From up
on the roof Morris and the Englands climbed down a
smokestack and then over a fence, cutting through the barbed

(17:26):
wire at the top of the fence, and then they
seemed to have launched their raft from the northeast corner
of the island. But then what happened to them after
that is a mystery. During bed check on the morning
of June twelve, a guard at first thought that the
three men were still asleep in their beds, but then
realized they weren't in their cells after touching one of

(17:46):
the fake heads through the bars, and a man hunt began.
Authorities recovered a package of letters sealed in rubber paddles
and life vests, either in the water or washed up
at various points around the San France Ascope Bay. Sailors
from a Norwegian freighter reportedly saw a body in the
water on July seventeenth, but did not report that until October.

(18:10):
Although there have been some simulations that suggests that the
three men could have made it to shore was theoretically possible.
At this point, they are presumed to have drowned in
their escape attempt. The FBI closed the case on December
thirty one of nineteen seventy nine. Although Alcatraz did close
less than a year after this escape, it was because

(18:32):
the prison needed a multimillion dollar restoration project, and on
top of that, it was expensive to operate because of
its island location. The federal government decided that it would
be cheaper to just build a whole new prison than
to try to restore and keep running Alcatraz. Next up,
Libby Prison was originally a food warehouse and then later

(18:55):
it became home to a grocery and ship provisioning business.
Was in Richmond, Virginia, and during the US Civil War,
the Confederate government ticket over and turned it into a
prison to house US prisoners of war, particularly US military officers,
and conditions there were really just appalling. Obviously, it was

(19:17):
not built to be a prison, and beyond that, it
was situated on a canal that routinely flooded the building.
Cellar in wet weather and the rising waters drove rats
out of the cellar and into the rest of the structure.
The windows were open spaces covered in bars, and they
let in little fresh air, but not much light, and
they didn't offer much protection from storms or extreme temperatures.

(19:42):
The upper two floors where the prisoners were housed, were
very sparsely furnished. There weren't even enough bunks for everyone.
This was an immensely overcrowded facility, with as many as
one thousand people packed into just six rooms, without enough
food or supplies. Un Surprisingly, disease was rampant. Colonel Thomas E.

(20:04):
Rose of the Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry started planning an escape
almost as soon as he arrived at Libby Prison. He
thought it might be possible to dig a tunnel from
that rat filled cellar to a nearby tobacco shed where
they could get out without being seen by guards. Because
all of the rats and the ongoing flooding problems made

(20:28):
the seller smell terrible, so bad that it was nicknamed
rat Hell. That also meant the Confederate guards mostly stayed
out of it, so this was one place they could
work on. A tunnel mostly undetected. Construction of an escape
tunnel started with removing bricks from behind a stove in
the kitchen, which was the only room the imprisoned men

(20:49):
were allowed free access to. This made an entry into
the cellar, and from there Rose and his accomplices started
digging with makeshift tools, putting the into an old spatoon
to take it away. It was hard to tell how
far they had gotten, though, and at one point they
broke through the surface and realized that they still had

(21:09):
several feet left to go. They managed to fill that
accidental opening in before they were noticed. Robert Knox Needen
was a cartographer who was being held at a neighboring prison,
and he wrote this account of the escape, which happened
on February nine, eight sixty four. Quote. Everyone wanted to
be first. In order to get down the chimney as

(21:31):
well as the long tunnel. It was necessary to strip naked,
wrap the clothes in a bundle and push this on
before them. As soon as it was seen that only
a few men could possibly get out for daylight, all
rushed for the mouth of the tunnel who could, each
man being determined to get out first. The room was
now crowded to suffocation, all struggling to get in the hole.

(21:54):
The strongest men forced their way to the front, while
the weak ones were more roughly brushed side and jammed
up against the walls. Sneeton also made a map of
the prison in watercolor, showing the prison, the tunnel route,
nearby streets and other buildings, and the James River and
its adjacent canal. That map is now in the collection

(22:15):
of the Virginia Historical Society, and one account of this
escape During the roll call the next day, a Confederate
official said, where are they all? And somebody answered, they
fell out the window, which cracks me up a whole
lot of window drops. One hundred nine men managed to

(22:35):
escape through that tunnel, with more than half of them
successfully making it to Union territory. Some of the ones
who managed to evade capture had helped from Unions by
Elizabeth van Lew who was mentioned in our prior episode
on Mary Elizabeth Bowser, which was a Saturday classic not
too long ago. Forty eight of the men were recaptured

(22:56):
and too drowned while trying to cross a river. Colonel Rose,
who had started the whole escape plan, was one of
the Ones recaptured, and he was held at Libby until
April eighteen sixty four, when he was released as part
of a prisoner exchange. A few weeks after this escape,
h Judson Kilpatrick and Ulric Dollgren tried to liberate the prison,

(23:17):
but they were discovered. Dolgren was killed, and papers he
was carrying with him suggested that there was a plan
in the works to burn down Richmond and kill Confederate
President Jefferson Davis. After this, Richmond's proest Marshal John H. Winder,
authorized Major Thomas Pratt Turner, who was commandant of the prison,

(23:39):
to dig a pit under the prison, fill it with gunpowder,
and blow the whole thing up if there were any
further escape attempts. That threat was never carried out. Soon
the Confederate Army started transferring men out of Libby to
other prisons. After the war was over, the entire thing
was dismantled and moved to Chicago, where it operated is

(24:00):
the Libby Prison War Museum from eighty nine to I
have many questions about that, but I did not look
into answering them because it was outside the scope of
this podcast. We're going to take a quick sponsor break
and then get to two more escapes. Next up we

(24:27):
have Shira Torre Oshier, who successfully escaped from four different
prisons in Japan in the thirties and forties. English language
accounts of these escapes have some contradictions. This was also
true of Japanese accounts that I found and ran through
Google Translate, but still the basics and the places where
they kind of intersector just fascinating. He was initially imprisoned

(24:51):
for burglary and murder in a crime that had been
committed by a group of men, and he maintained that
he had not been involved in the murder, and there
are some accounts of this that described him as falsely accused.
His first escape was from Almori Prison after he'd been
incarcerated there for about three years. He had found a
piece of wire in a wash tub and he used

(25:13):
that wire to pick the locks. He was caught just
a few days later. Then in two he was transferred
to Akita Prison. His cell had been designed to deter
escape attempts, but he noticed that the wood around a
skylight in the ceiling was starting to rot, so he
climbed up there night after night, loosening the rotten wood.

(25:37):
Then he waited for a stormy night to disguise the
sound of his moving along the prison roof, and then
he climbed up through that skylight he removed and then
climbed out. Shura Tory maintained that the accusations against him
were false and that his incarceration was unjust. And then
he went to the home of a police officer who
had previously been kind to him. He had hoped that

(25:59):
the officer would be willing to help him, but instead
the officer turned him in and Shiratry wound up at
a boschery prison. This was Japan's northernmost prison, and it
was a place where some of the nation's most notorious
people were housed. Even though the prison was supposed to
be escape proof, Shiratry was kept handcuffed there except when

(26:19):
he was bathing. For this escape, and this is the
detail that made me put this on the list. Shira
Torri spit the miso soup from his meals onto his handcuffs,
and the meal slot in his door had miso soup.
You know, it's really salty, so he was wanting the
salt in the soup to weaken the metal in his

(26:40):
handcuffs and that meal slot. This was during World War
two and the prison had huge skylights in the roof,
so it was kept in blackout conditions at night. On
the night of August, Shiratory broke through his weekend handcuffs
and meal slot, reportedly dislocated his shoulders to do so

(27:02):
and escape through the skylights under cover of darkness. A
Boscherie prison is now a museum and has a model
of Shiratory climbing to the windowed roof to escape in
his underwear, although details are fuzzy about how exactly he
climbed up to the skylights. If he had just dislocated
his shoulders, yeah, even if he had popped his own

(27:23):
shoulders back into place, that seems like it would have
been incredibly painful and difficult to try to do because
it was. It's not a low ceiling. It's like a
very high ceiling with big skylights up there. Regardless of
the detail with that though, Sharratory hid in an abandoned
mine until after the end of World War two, and
then a farmer caught him stealing food from the fields

(27:46):
and Shiratory stabbed him. The farmer later died of his injuries,
and Shiratory maintained that the stabbing had been done in
self defense. At this point, Shiratory had escaped from prison
three times and he had been convicted of committing other
crimes in addition to that first robbery and murder during
his escape, so he was sentenced to death. He was

(28:08):
housed at Supporto Prison to await his execution. Two of
his previous escapes had involved climbing up through ceilings and roofs,
so that was apparently where the guards focused when they
secured his cell, So in ninety seven he went out
through the floor instead. He pried up the floorboards and
then used again the bulls from his meals, used them

(28:31):
ashovels to shovel through the dirt underneath the floor. He
was once again caught. That was about a year later,
but this time, rather than adding to his sentence again,
a court ruled that Serratory really had stabbed the farmer
in self defense after he had escaped from Abbashery prison.
His sentence was reduced to twenty years in prison, and

(28:52):
he was released in nineteen sixty one. He lived free
for quite some time. He died in nineteen seventy nine.
Yeah he as I understand, it became kind of an
anti hero in in in Japan because of all of this.
And now we have one last escape ee who is
another man, but his wife is the one who should

(29:12):
really be credited with planning it and carrying it out.
This was William Maxwell, the fifth Earl of knits Dale,
who was probably born at Terrible's Castle in Scotland in
sixteen seventy six. His father had died when he was
a child, and he was raised mostly by his mother,
who was a Catholic and then later a Jacobite that is,
a supporter of the Stewart claim to the British throne.

(29:34):
After the Stewarts were forced into exile during the Glorious
Revolution of six when William became an adult, he married
Lady Winnifred Herbert. They met while William was in France
to pledge his loyalty to the exiled James the second
and seventh and Winnifred was visiting her father, who was
one of the people who helped get James's wife and

(29:55):
son out of England during the Glorious Revolution. Once the
returned to Scotland, they tried to be discreet about their religion,
and their political views since most of their neighbors were Protestants,
but they were still the targets of suspicion, and on
Christmas Eve seventeen o three, a mom broke down the
castle gates and ransacked the property, looking for any Catholics

(30:18):
they might be harboring. Yeah, their political views also would
have been treason, so it was very important to keep
that very quiet. William was cleared of any wrongdoing after
this mob breaking down his door, but he was stripped
of one of his titles and ordered to pay a
bond to ensure that he would not plot against the throne.

(30:39):
Authorities kept him under close watch, and during all of
this he bequeathed most of his property to his eldest son.
This might have been an attempt to protect that property
from being confiscated if he were arrested again. In seventeen fifteen,
William was part of the Jacobite Rising of seventeen fifteen.
We have covered the Jacobite risings on the show before,

(31:00):
and briefly. This was one of a series of failed
attempts to restore the Stewards to the British throne. William
commanded a group of gentlemen volunteers, and after the Battle
of Preston he was one of almost fifteen hundred Jacobites
taken prisoner. In January of seven sixteen, he pled guilty
to treason, and on February nine he was sentenced to

(31:22):
be hanged, drawn and quartered. His execution was scheduled for
February twenty one. Winnifred was determined to get him released,
so she traveled to London. This was wintertime, when the
snow became too deep for her carriage to get through,
she finished the journey on horseback. She met with King

(31:43):
George the First, clinging to his robes when he refused
to accept a petition on her husband's behalf. She refused
to let go of those robes as he tried to
walk away from her, and so he dragged her across
the room. And as words spread about that that wound
up earning her some popular support. People did not like
the idea that the uh the king had dragged this

(32:06):
distraught wife across the room. She bribed the guards at
the Tower of London where William was being held, to
allow him to receive visitors in gifts, and she visited
him repeatedly, often with the company of other women. On
the night before he was to be executed, she arrived
with her maid, Cecilia Evans, and her friends Mrs Morgan

(32:27):
and Mrs Mills, and she had brought women's clothes and
makeup with her. As Winnifred got William dressed and made up,
she had a loud conversation with her friends about where
in the world Cecilia had disappeared to she knew exactly
where Cecilia was. This was all part of a ruse
meant to be overheard by the guards. Winnifred's companions then

(32:50):
left the prison one by one, and then they were
followed by Winifred and William together as though William were
her maid. He was hiding the lower part of his
space behind a handkerchief because they did not have time
to shave him for leading him out. Ah, this is
I can think of so many comedy troops I would

(33:11):
love to see recreate this. Once William was outside, Winnifred
doubled back, went to his empty cell and had a
pretend conversation with him, closing the door behind her when
she left. On the way out, she told the guards
he was at prayer and should not be disturbed. The
guards didn't even realize William was gone until everyone involved

(33:32):
in this ruse was safely away from the tower. Yeah,
this whole thing really banked on causing the guards to
be confused about exactly how many women had arrived with
her and where precisely they were at any given moment.
After getting out of the tower, William took refuge at
the Venetian embassy and then he escaped to Dover while

(33:52):
dressed as a Venetian ambassador. He went to Bruges by
boats and then to Paris, where he reconnected with his wife.
The two of them became part of the Stewart Court
in exile. In seventeen seventeen, they moved to Rome and
that is where William died in seventeen forty four. William
had a reputation for always living beyond his memes, and

(34:13):
he died in debt. But when a Fred became a
popular heroine in Jacobite writing, she died in seventeen forty nine. Alright,
if you're thinking, hey, why wasn't the John Dillinger escape
in here, that was pretty ingenious. Yes, that's true, but
there is an episode on Dillinger already that is going
to be an upcoming Saturday Classic. Yeah, it seemed like

(34:37):
a good thing to add in there, since um, they
do talk about that escape in that prior episode. Do
you have a little bit of listener mail that may
or may not involve things escaping? I do. I mean,
it could involve things escaping, but I hope not because
it's mostly about cats. This is from Elizabeth, who wrote, hello,
two of my favorite podcasters. I'm a graduate of the

(34:59):
mist In History University, but have never had anything really
superior to offer, but I figured Tracy's comment about black
cats being automatic friends with her cats gave me a
good excuse to write. Also, I'm a masshole who now
lives in North Carolina, so Tracy and I pretty much
swapped locations. I grew up near Cape cod but went

(35:20):
to graduate school at Emerson in Boston, so her references
to things in Boston make me happy. I've lived outside
of Riley for the last fifteen years. So in January one,
as a single health care worker, suffering tremendously in every
way at work, lack of socializing, etcetera, in the midst
of a pandemic, I started fostering for my local animal shelter.

(35:41):
Since then, I've had thirty five foster cats and kittens,
and I'm extremely proud of myself for only adopting one
of them. This girl became friends with my younger cat.
I have two almost fifteen year old that were mad
when I brought home a ten week old kitten in
December twenty nineteen that my coworker had found hit by
a car. This foster was approximately two years old and

(36:04):
was trapped in downtown Raleigh with a horrible looking nose.
Has seen one of the in one of the picks,
now completely healed and from an upper respiratory infection. She
was the sweetest thing ever from the very first day,
despite her being so sick. And Malcolm, my other younger cat,
finally had a best friend. I named her Salem, thinking
it was a great name due to my Massachusetts roots

(36:25):
and not realizing what a common name it was for
black cats. But Malcolm and Salem sound similar, and I
can't imagine her having any other name or my life
without her. I'm a speech therapist and I had bought
talk buttons for Malcolm, but he never quite figured them out.
Salem did within days, and I keep adding more buttons
for her to push to communicate. She's the sweetest, smartest

(36:47):
girl ever and has become Mama Salem to all the
foster kittens I've had. She also came to work with
me frequently at the nursing home I worked at until
last summer as a therapy cat. Just thought I would
let Tracy know that her cats have another friend in
North Carolina. Attached are some picks with former foster kittens
and her best friend, Malcolm the Big Boy. I love
her so much, uh so, then there's just just a

(37:11):
glorious gallery of cat pictures. Kiddies. Number one, thank you
for for fostering kittens. I know a lot of people
who do that and who have started doing that specifically
during the pandemic or have started fostering other animals during
the pandemic, And it's so important and can also be
a really good way for people who want to have

(37:32):
animals around, but like can't be the permanent caregiver for
an animal for forever for whatever reason. I also love
the talk buttons for cats and have been considering getting
uh some for my own cats, but I have not
actually started that whole process yet. Um I kind of
think if I did our cat Onyx would just push

(37:55):
the open button over and over because all she wants
to do is to have my office store be open.
She especially wants it to be open while we're recording podcasts,
and she sits out there and bangs on the doorknob.
It's not great. Uh So these pictures were all so
so adorable. I am guessing one of the reasons that

(38:16):
Salem is a popular name for black cats is that
Salem is the name of Sabrina the teenage which her
black cat familiar is named Salem. So I think that's
one of the reasons that Salem and black cats go together.
Uh So, anyway, thank you so much, Elizabeth. I love
all of these pictures and all of these stories, and

(38:36):
I want to put all these kiddy cats. Uh if
you would like to write to us about this or
any other podcast, or just your cats, or just any
pets you have, or a dog you saw, or maybe
you were outside and there was a cute bird, whatever,
it's great. We're at History Podcast at I heart radio
dot com, and we're all over social media at missed

(38:57):
in History, which is where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest,
in Instagram. Uh and you can subscribe to our show
on the I heart Radio app, or wherever you'll like
to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,

(39:20):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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Holly Frey

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