Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast
How I Escaped One of the World’s Toughest Prisons | David McMillan
Fri, 28 Feb 2025
David McMillan (born 1956) is a British-Australian former drug smuggler who is the only Westerner on record as having successfully escaped Bangkok's Klong Prem prison. His exploits were detailed in several books and in the 2011 Australian telemovie Underbelly Files: The Man Who Got Away.Follow me on all socials!Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/insidetruecrime/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@mattcoxtruecrimeDo you want to be a guest? Fill out the form https://forms.gle/5H7FnhvMHKtUnq7k7Send me an email here: [email protected] Prison Consulting? Book a Call With Dan Wise https://calendly.com/federalprisontime/matt-coxDo you want a custom "con man" painting to shown up at your doorstep every month? Subscribe to my Patreon: https: //www.patreon.com/insidetruecrimeDo you want a custom painting done by me? Check out my Etsy Store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/coxpopartListen to my True Crime Podcasts anywhere: https://anchor.fm/mattcox Check out my true crime books! Shark in the Housing Pool: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0851KBYCFBent: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BV4GC7TMIt's Insanity: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08KFYXKK8Devil Exposed: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08TH1WT5GDevil Exposed (The Abridgment): https://www.amazon.com/dp/1070682438The Program: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0858W4G3KBailout: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bailout-matthew-cox/1142275402Dude, Where's My Hand-Grenade?: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BXNFHBDF/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1678623676&sr=1-1Checkout my disturbingly twisted satiric novel!Stranger Danger: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BSWQP3WXIf you would like to support me directly, I accept donations here:Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/MattCox69Cashapp: $coxcon69
Chapter 1: How did David McMillan escape from prison?
Day one of the trial was smugglers' helicopter escape plan that was across the tabloids. I couldn't even kill myself in this jail. I actually wanted to escape just to kill myself. I had to develop a bit of a system to get over these internal walls. It had another moat on the inside of the prison that ran around. It was actually a sewer, and that had barbed wire in the middle, and I couldn't
figure a way of getting my ladder over to the other side. But when I got out of that cell, when I squeezed through the bar into the night and looked up at the sky that I hadn't seen for almost two and a half years, I'd never seen the night sky, never seen stars or anything, and then looked back into the cell, but the people I knew in there I thought suddenly it was all finished. It was all gone.
That didn't matter anymore. My survival out here was what mattered.
Hey, this is Matt Cox. I'm with David McMillan. He has escaped two prisons where he was on death row, and it's going to be a really interesting podcast. I hope you check it out. Thank you very much.
Hello, Matthew, and thank you for taking me even by wire to Tampa in Florida. And I think you've introduced me a little bit, but just to let people know, I'm now quite ancient, but from the age of You know, they say, up until you're 18, you are looking for trouble, but after 18, you find it. And I certainly did.
I traveled around smuggling, made just about every mistake that's possible, and found myself in Bangkok, Thailand, looking at a death sentence. In fact, only a couple of weeks away from a death sentence. got out of that one, which we'll talk about, I guess. And did I learn anything? I guess I must have. But did it stop me? No.
I was in Karachi in Pakistan several years later, looking at the death penalty there. Was that an escape? Not in the literal sense that it was in Thailand, but as we'll find, it was in some ways more difficult.
Okay, so... Um, just the accent and your appearance and the fact that I've read maybe, I think there's like 20 books that were written by, I can't believe I can't remember, you know, the, the, the character of Sean Dillon.
Not exactly. Oh, my gosh.
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Chapter 2: What led to David's arrest in Thailand?
You can do the time and you get rewarded, or I'll get you the best deal you can possibly get. I'll even give you a cover story so you can look like you're ratting out the big boss. It'll be... We'll make some fictional character for you to talk about. Or plan B, I'll get you out and that's it. I look forward to that, the idea that if such a thing happened, would it be possible to break them out?
I didn't imagine that this is something I'd be asking for myself given time, but sure enough it was. It became very elaborate to dump the tails behind me, following me around to give them an explanation of where I was. I had a business partner, Michael Sullivan, quite a few years ago, 2001. Now, as you think of this, you know your phone's tapped. What's best to do about that?
Well, you know you've got a pipeline straight to your opposition. So whenever you feed them down that pipeline, they should accept it. So I recorded a conversation with Michael when I left Eurasia. I said, go to a pay phone, ring my mobile phone, my cell phone, and play this tape over it.
And he did, and they were absolutely convinced that I was still somewhere roaming around Melbourne, but just laying low. So when they got a call from the USDA that it, that I'd been located in Thailand, they were kind of shocked. But I really jumped ahead in the timeline here because the case where the police were following me about, the big case, we go back to 1980, they did steam in.
They found nothing. There were no drugs, and they ran a huge case with a conspiracy. Now, the US courts have got conspiracy cases, and I guess you know quite a few things about them. Would you agree that a conspiracy case is much harder to win than the substantive case, a case where if you've been accused that you robbed a bank on this day, That's substantive. And were you there?
Have you got an alibi? All of that. But a conspiracy that you plan to do this. And you know you're going to get the same sentence.
Or you helped the person do this.
Exactly. You were part of the conspiracy.
Right. You may not have been the main participant. You were just the guy answering the phones or picked them up. Right.
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Chapter 3: What were the conditions like in Klong Prem prison?
The best way to deal with that was make the case very hard to win. The headline in the paper of day one of the trial was, smugglers' helicopter escape plan that was across the tabloids the morning of it. Even the judge pretending that he didn't notice that that was there. And we're being dragged in in chains. And there is helicopters, but it's the police helicopter taking us to court.
I won't go into it, Matthew. A court case is a boring and miserable thing, but it ran for six months, 119 witnesses. There were 6,000 pages of transcript of bugs and recordings and stuff like that. The couriers had all turned to a state's witness. One of them was very hard to break down because he admitted he was a complete scumbag and had done the deal just to get out of trouble.
And he'd also told the cops, look, I'm under threat here. You'll have to guard me until the trial's over. And he continued his street trading with this police escort. A couple of people got back to me and said, you know that rat Peter Howard? He's down there on the street dealing away like mad, setting up shop in one of the cafes. And we keep spotting these cops looking after him.
People are running away. And Peter's saying, oh, don't worry about them. Ha! Ha! No, no, no. They're here to make sure that I can do what I damn well want. And when somebody's indemnified, anything they say can never be held against them. So Peter not only said that he built smuggling devices for me,
and he knew all about it, but he also admitted to five or six different counts of theft and a couple of drug deals that were hanging over his head. So he could never be brought to trial for any of those things because he'd said this while he was under complete immunity from prosecution. And no matter how The worse we made him look, the more credible his story was. Anyway, the jury went out.
They were a little bit on our side because they felt like the state had overdone it in our case. It was serious drugs, but on the other hand, it wasn't huge amounts, you know, two, three, five kilos. And we were drug users ourselves at the time. And I was somewhat sympathetic. So they came back after a day and said to the judge, we can't decide.
Well, he's not about to blow $5 million worth of trial on that. So he sent them back out. And they stayed out. The only thing they asked for was, oh, yeah, they got $60,000 cash out of my office. They wanted to have a play with that. Oh yeah, there were some drugs in the case.
The police, because they were not, went all the way to Thailand, brought back two kilos of heroin, set it up on a little stand in the court as an example of what heroin, when brought from over that part of the world, looks like. There was a whole operation to stage this little platform of the steaming pile of heroin
Of course, I had my lawyer always really probe deeply on the mechanics of how they brought this stuff in and what the license looked like and who was involved. But the judge, he was on to me about that. The same with the recording things I was asking about where was the recording center for tap phones and what? Equipment did they use and you know how many people man the station?
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Chapter 4: How did David navigate his smuggling operations?
Chapter 5: What challenges did David face during his trial?
And I saw one guy dressed a little better, but still with the heaviest chains I've ever seen for an elephant. And he had a garter clip around his calves and his legs, and they were holding up this heavy chain, and they were all polished. And chillingly, I saw that where the C-ring was just pushed together with most people, it was somehow welded together.
around his ankle, and you couldn't help but think, how did that happen? How did he do that? And I could see he was Chinese in origin, so we got talking. He pointed out to me that when I go to the jail, if it's a drug case that can result in life or death, you'll be wearing chains from now on until the end of your sentence. And why was he wearing them welded together?
Because he was coming from death row and he had been already sentenced to death and was trying to appeal it down. But when you're convicted of that, they put some kind of cloth in a wooden curved bit of wood between your leg and your ankle and the chain, or the link, I should say. And then they weld it together, because it's never coming off. And I would find out later on how it would come off.
from there that the court proceedings seem to take seconds you're just reminded a big iron bus drags you out from the courtroom guards with machine guns everywhere looking bored and sweaty and wanting to kill just for the hell of it um it's quite a certainly a violent town um there's a magazine there that is kind of
police gossip magazine called 9-11 and it's got all the grisly pictures of the latest shootouts and explosions and stuff like that, or even car accidents. So they're used to a fair bit of bloodshed too. You really don't, even though in the back of my mind I'm thinking, how can I get away? Is there any way to get out of this?
go to the jail, it drives, it goes to a huge complex, all I can see is walls stretching this way, walls that way, huge walls, probably, I don't know, They said the whole nine yards. I think the height of these things must have been about 12 yards high, certainly much higher than it was. And it had barbed wire at the top that was tied to insulators. So that means it was electrified.
The bus drove over a moat so that it was, I don't know how far this moat went across, probably about 25 feet. It seemed to stretch in every direction to the corners and then turn. The bus bumped over some more walls and more doors and we're all herded off. And yet, when we finally went off the bus and sitting in a little street, it seemed relatively quiet.
even though it was only about 4 o'clock, 4.15 in the afternoon, and that's because the prison day had ended. I mean, as we know, even in the West, a prisoner's life revolves around a single shift of the guards. There are some people who are out late doing various jobs or some activity, but generally speaking, The day ends early, doesn't it? And it's no different anywhere around the world.
All of us are pushed off, told to get naked, squat on the floor, put our clothes in front of us, and wait for the searches and inspections. I mentioned before that the trustee system works in extraordinary ways there. The guards are outnumbered by prisoners probably at least 500 to 1.
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