SYMHC Classics: Prison Breaks

This 2022 episode covers six highly ingenious and low-violence prison breaks from history. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. A prison break was part of our episode
on William J. Sharky earlier this week, and we talked
about some more prison breaks in our Friday Behind the Scenes.
So today's classic episode is a set of six prison breaks,
including one that we just mentioned in that discussion. And
this originally came out on May eleventh, twenty twenty two.

(00:23):
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a
production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and Welcome to the podcast. I'm
Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. A few years ago,
I was in Philadelphia and went to the Eastern State Penitentiary,

(00:47):
which was a prison for about one 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 nineteen forty five,
and I met put that into my little notes app
on my phone where I jot things down when I'm
on vacation. It was one of those things, though, that

(01:08):
I couldn't quite figure out how to make it work
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 uh

(01:32):
A couple times a year, I pulled together six episodes
that are are grouped together in some way, and so
now we're going to have six prison breaks. And just
to 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

(01:54):
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

(02:16):
little violence in this episode, but it 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

(02:39):
the Shawshank escape, So just 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 in the
criminal justice system worked. In Philadelphia, this effort was led

(03:00):
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 theory were

(03:21):
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 the Pennsylvania system,

(03:43):
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 Pennsylvania system was

(04:06):
officially abandoned by nineteen thirteen. 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 a prison
that had originally housed two hundred and fifty people instead

(04:29):
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 Kleimdans,
who was known as Kleiny, was housed in cell sixty

(04:52):
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 prison's initial de 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
had offered to repair it so that he could live
in it. Once he was housed in Cell sixty eight,

(05:14):
he and his cell mate 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 that encircled the prison, and then up again
to the street outside. They made a plaster mask so

(05:37):
it would look like one of them was in bed
that one would dig while the other kept watch, and
they'd put the dirt they dug up in their pockets
and then scatter it in the exercise yard. Klindens hid
the entrance to this tunnel with a panel that he
made to roughly match the intact walls of the cell,
and then put a metal trash can in front of

(05:58):
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 with whatever they could cobble together. It's pretty ingenious.

(06:21):
On April third, nineteen forty five, twelve men escaped through
this tunnel 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 of them, though, were back in the
prison within a day, and all of them had been

(06:42):
caught within a few months. Notorious bank robber Willie Sutton,
who would later totally take credit for this escape in
his autobiography, he was caught almost immediately. He basically came
out of the hall and they grabbed him right there.
Clarence Kleindenst was in custody after about three hours. One
group tried to make their getaway in a milk truck

(07:04):
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 attempt and they were
brought back to the prison infirmary. Otherwise, the men who
tried to escape were punished. Some of them were placed

(07:27):
into these tiny windowless underground cells known as klondike. 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 even
the first successful escape attempt from the Eastern State Penitentiary
that had happened all the way back in eighteen thirty two,

(07:49):
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 timeunnel entrance. Prison
authorities investigated and mapped the tunnel, and then they filled
it in and covered up the entrance with cement. Then
later in two thousand and five, Eastern State Penitentiary embarked

(08:12):
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 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

(08:35):
and as of twenty seventeen, its mission is to interpret
the legacy of American criminal justice reform. Yeah, we'll talk
about that a little bit more in the behind the
scenes on Friday. Moving on, for about eighty years, starting
in seventeen eighty eight, people convicted of crimes in the
UK could be transported to Australia's punishment. Other colonies as well,

(08:58):
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 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

(09:22):
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 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

(09:44):
be transferred to a prison in Cork on May twenty third,
eighteen thirty, which is where they would embark on this
ship that was going to take them to Australia. But
the night before that transfer to Cork, nine women and
a baby escaped from Limerick Jail. The women were Mary King,
Mary Hurley, Mary Devon, Ellen Hurley, Margaret Shaughnessy, Margaret Clancy,

(10:08):
Bridget Shelton, Mary Hickey and Catherine Welsh. 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 up to their transfer date, these
women made a habit of singing and quote noisy vociferations

(10:31):
after dark, so it had been established 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 third,
two men used a ladder that workers had left behind
while making repairs to get into the women's ward. The

(10:54):
men started helping the women get their cells open, while
the women got to their nightly singing to cover up
the noise. In the words of the Monmster 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 burglars with extraordinary success.

(11:19):
The continued knocking was heard in the adjacent ward, but
the sound of their operations was so drowned in 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's vile. Once they were out

(11:41):
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 Catherine Welsh, who asked

(12:02):
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 mentioned in an

(12:24):
article about a ship that departed for Australia on January
twenty ninth of eighteen thirty one, and then all but
one of the rest of them are listed on ship's
actual registers of the people being transported. So there were
five on a ship that departed on September twenty seventh,
eighteen thirty one, and then one on a ship that
left on March ninth of eighteen thirty three, So that

(12:47):
leaves only one of the women unaccounted for. We are
going to take a sponsor break, and after that we'll
come back to more escape stories. Next up, we have

(13:07):
the escape from Alcatraz in nineteen sixty two, and way
back in two thousand and eight, prior host to the show,
Candace and Josh did an episode titled did someone Really
Escape from Alcatraz number one, That is Forever Ago. It
was an entirely different show with a different format at
that point, and most of that ten minute episode is

(13:29):
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 treacherous waters.

(13:54):
Although this may have discouraged people from trying to escape,
there were still fourteen different as escape attempts during Alcatraz's
time as a federal prison that was from nineteen thirty
four to nineteen sixty three. Nearly all of the thirty
six men involved in these attempts were captured or killed,
but five of them are classified as missing and presumed drowned.

(14:18):
Two of them were Theodore Cole and Ralph Rowe, who
filed through the bars of a window in the mat
shop and tried to escape during a storm in nineteen
thirty seven. The other three were involved in the nineteen
sixty two escape. There were actually four men involved in
this attempt, Frank Morris, John Englin, John's brother, Clarence, and

(14:40):
Alan 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 Morrison the Anglans had been assigned cells that were

(15:03):
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 noisy for them to really use. Scrapwood became

(15:25):
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 foot by
fourteen foot raft out of about fifty raincoats. They may
have taken some of these raincoats from other men by force,

(15:48):
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 them to this effort to get the
prison shut down. The escaping men then used contact cement

(16:11):
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 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

(16:32):
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 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 Kleindenst and

(16:56):
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 so that it would make it
look like they were asleep in their beds. These heads,

(17:16):
I think they're actually pretty good. They're better than I
could do, I think. On June eleventh, nineteen sixty two,
Frank Morris and the England brothers went out through their
removed ventilation grates, covering the hole behind them with whatever
they could. Alan West had tried to reinforce the concrete
around his grate and had accidentally cemented it in place,

(17:39):
and by the time he was able to get it free,
his accomplices had already left. From up on the roof,
Morris and the Anglands climbed down a smokestack and then
over a fence, cutting through the barbed 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.

(18:01):
During bedcheck on the morning of June twelfth, 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 the fake heads through the bars,
and a manhunt began. Authorities recovered a package of letters
sealed in rubber paddles and life vests, either in the

(18:22):
water or washed up at various points around the San
Francisco Bay. Sailors from a Norwegian freighter reportedly saw a
body in the water on July seventeenth, but did not
report that until October. Although there have been some simulations
that suggest that the three men could have made it
to shore was theoretically possible, at this point, they are

(18:45):
presumed to have drowned in their escape attempt. The FBI
closed the case on December thirty first of nineteen seventy nine.
Although Alcatraz did close less than a year after this escape,
it was because 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

(19:08):
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 it became home to a grocery and ship
provisioning business. Was in Richmond, Virginia, and during the US
Civil War, the Confederate government took it over and turned

(19:31):
it into a prison to house US prisoners of war,
particularly US military officers, and conditions there were really just appalling. Obviously,
it was not built to be a prison, and beyond that,
it was situated on a canal that routinely flooded the
building's cellar in wet weather, and the rising waters drove

(19:52):
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 late,
and they didn't offer much protection from storms or extreme temperatures.
The upper two floors where the prisoners were housed were
very sparsely furnished. There weren't even enough bunks for everyone.

(20:14):
This was an immensely overcrowded facility, with as many as
one thousand people packed into just six rooms, without enough
food or supplies. Unsurprisingly, disease was rampant. Colonel Thomas E.
Rose of the seventy seventh Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry started planning

(20:35):
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 the cellar smell terrible, so bad that it was

(20:57):
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 were allowed free access to. This made an entry

(21:18):
into the cellar, and from there Rose and his accomplices
started digging with makeshift tools, putting the dirt into an
old spatoon to take it away. It was hard to
tell how far they'd gotten, though, and at one point
they broke through the surface and realized that they still
had several feet left to go. They managed to fill
that accidental opening in before they were noticed. Robert Knoxneden

(21:43):
was a cartographer who was being held at a neighboring prison,
and he wrote this account of the escape, which happened
on February ninth, eighteen sixty four. Quote. Everyone wanted to
be first in order to get down the chimney as
well as the long tunnel. It was necessary to strip naked,
wrapped the clothes in a bundle, and pushed this on
before them. As soon as it was seen that only

(22:05):
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.
The strongest men forced their way to the front, while
the weak ones were more roughly brushed aside and jammed

(22:26):
up against the walls. Sneaden also made a map of
the prison in watercolor, showing the prison, the tunnel route,
nearby streets, and of their buildings, and the James River
and its adjacent canal. That map is now in the
collection of the Virginia Historical Society. In one account of
this escape, during the roll call. The next day. A

(22:47):
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 and nine men
managed to 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 help from

(23:09):
Union spy 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 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 thirtieth, eighteen sixty four, when he was

(23:33):
released as part of a prisoner exchange. A few weeks
after this escape, h Judson Kilpatrick and Olrich Dahlgren tried
to liberate the prison, but they were discovered. Dahlgren 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

(23:58):
Marshal John H. Winder Awe, authorized Major Thomas Pratt Turner,
who was commandant of the prison, 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

(24:20):
the war was over, the entire thing was dismantled and
moved to Chicago, where it operated as the Libby Prison
War Museum from eighteen eighty nine to eighteen ninety nine.
I have many questions about that the 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,

(24:52):
we have shiratrre Yoshier, who successfully escaped from four different
prisons in Japan in the nineteen thirties, and four 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 is fascinating. He was initially

(25:15):
imprisoned for burglary and murder and 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 Almory Prison, after
he'd been incarcerated there for about three years. He had
found a piece of wire in a washtub and he

(25:38):
used that wire to pick the locks. He was caught
just a few days later. Then, in nineteen forty 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

(26:01):
rotten wood. 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. Shiratori 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

(26:24):
that the officer would be willing to help him, but
instead the officer turned him in and Shiratori wound up
at a Bascheri 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, Shiratory was kept handcuffed there except

(26:45):
when he was bathing. For this escape, and this is
the detail that made me put this on the list.
Shiratory spit the miso soup from his meals onto his handcuffs,
and the meal slot in his door had miso soup,
you know, so it's really salty. So he was wanting
the salt in the soup to weaken the metal in

(27:05):
his 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 twenty sixth, nineteen forty four, Shiratory
broke through his weakened handcuffs and meal slot, reportedly dislocating

(27:25):
his shoulders to do so, and escape through the skylights
under cover of darkness. A Baucherie 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

(27:47):
he had popped his own 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.
Shiratory hid in an abandoned mine until after the end
of World War II, and then a farmer caught him

(28:09):
stealing food from the fields 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

(28:32):
sentenced to death. He was housed at Supporo 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 nineteen forty seven he went out through the floor instead.
He pried up the floorboards and then used again the

(28:53):
bowls from his meals used them as shovels 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
Shiratory really had stabbed the farmer in self defense after
he had escaped from Abushiri prison. His sentence was reduced

(29:15):
to twenty years in prison, and 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 Japan because
of all of this. And now we have one last
escapee who is another man, but his wife is the

(29:36):
one who should really be credited with planning it and
carrying it out. This was William Maxwell, the fifth Earl
of Ninsdale, 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 Stuart claim to

(29:58):
the British throne. After the Stuarts were forced into exile
during the Glorious Revolution of sixteen eighty eight, when William
became an adult, he married Lady Winifred Herbert. They met
while William was in France to pledge his loyalty to
the exiled James the Second and seventh and Winifred was
visiting her father, who was one of the people who

(30:19):
helped get James's wife and son out of England during
the Glorious Revolution. Once they 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
oh three, a mom broke down the castle gates and

(30:40):
ransacked the property, looking for any Catholics 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

(31:02):
not plot against the throne. 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

(31:24):
Jacobite risings on the show before, and briefly. This was
one of a series of failed attempts to restore the
Stewarts 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

(31:46):
February ninth he was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered.
His execution was scheduled for February twenty first Winifred 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.

(32:08):
She met with King 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 king had

(32:31):
dragged this 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, Missus

(32:52):
Morgan and Missus 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

(33:14):
companions then left the prison one by one, and then
they were followed by Winnifred 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. Oh
this is I can think of so many comedy troops

(33:36):
I would 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

(33:57):
involved 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

(34:17):
dressed as a Venetian ambassador. He went to Bruges by
boat and then to Paris, where he reconnected with his wife.
The two of them became part of the Stuart 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

(34:38):
he died in debt. But Whenifred became a popular heroine
in Jacobite writing, she died in seventeen forty nine. All Right,
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

(35:02):
a good thing to add in there since they do
talk about that escape in that prior episode. Thanks so
much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode
is out of the archive, if you heard an email
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course of the show, that could be obsolete. Now our

(35:25):
current email address is history podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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(35:46):
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