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Chapter 1: What challenges did David McMillan face while in Klong Prem Prison?
Prison escapes have been taking place for as long as prisons have been around. In fact, one of the earliest prison escapes on record was back in the 13th century, when a Welshman was imprisoned in the famed Tower of London. He would craft a makeshift rope from bedsheets and cloths. Lowered from a window, he'd climb down.
One of the world's most famous prison escapes was that of brothers John and Clarence Anglin and Frank Morris. Three men who had escaped from the world's most secure prison in 1962. The famous Alcatraz.
Forbidding Alcatraz Prison, from which no man has ever been known to escape, has its name for impregnability at stake. A daring break for freedom by three convicts triggers a manhunt through the caves with which the rock is riddled and throughout the entire San Francisco area.
The escape had many elements that would capture the world's interest. The sheer planning alone was quite ingenious. The three men would make dummy heads of themselves, made from plaster and real hair. They'd place them in their bunk so as to fool the guards who would make regular rounds during the evening.
They'd escape through vents in the cells, scaling up pipes and out of a ventilator grill on the top of the prison. Then they'd make their way down the building, climbing the prison fence and to the water's edge. The water being the frigidly cold San Francisco Bay. It was then a 1.25 mile or 2km swim to shore.
They'd stolen 50 raincoats in which to construct a raft in order to assist them with the swim. But it's what happened next that is likely the reason this escape has become so famous around the world. Because to this day, no one knows if those men ever made it or not. These three men were the only ones to ever successfully escape from Alcatraz.
And David Macmillan is still the only Westerner to successfully escape his prison. The infamous Klong Prem Prison, also known as the Bangkok Hilton.
Two o'clock's come and I'm still working away on one bar. It might be fine during the day when you can make a bit of noise. My name's Jack Lawrence.
Welcome to Wanted.
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Chapter 2: How did David plan his escape from the Bangkok Hilton?
But when they went back to him, all he did was leech them of the money and hand them over to the authorities when they finished. The guards didn't like the idea of them escaping and took such a dim view of it. They even had their picture on tuk-tuk drivers all around town with a reward offered. Police are not involved at this stage, or really never.
And they didn't treat them too well when they got brought back in. I saw them down at our building's coffee shop, as they like to call it, around the banyan tree. telling people what had happened to them. And their legs were in heavy elephant chains, but all mangled and scarred. Imagine some angry kid in McDonald's scrunching up a bunch of drinking straws and throwing them on the ground.
That's what their legs looked like. So I had a task of trying to explain to my Swedish friend how this wasn't such a bad thing. So around the little art shop, my office, at lunchtime that day, I said, Stanley, hey, you've got to meet a couple of guys who've just come in. There's a row there. But clutzes, they look a bit rough. I mean, guys didn't like them getting out.
You can imagine iron bars on their legs and all that threw rocks on them. Hell, it was lucky one could get some water and feed the other or they wouldn't be with us today. But glossing over that, no, we have a bee plant stand. We have a place to go. We have plants. He just, that was it. He bailed out of that. He didn't want to come along.
Before plan B, it was time to put into action plan A. At midnight, David got started on his escape and instantly realises this is going to be harder than he thought.
And it was all different than I expected. Two clocks come and I'm still working away on one bar. It might be fine during the day when you can make a bit of noise, but it was like, I don't know what, the single stroke of that tungsten teeth across the ancient bower after midnight when we first started was like some nightmare giant violinist scraping catgut across a raspy surface.
It really resonated in the wrong way. We had to slow down a bit. I left him to it because I knew I'd need my energy later. One of the bars was cut through, and, oh, at the first cut, it sprang away from the rest of itself. Like, it was under so much stress for 50 years, being as the building had collapsed, and this was going to be some job.
About halfway through the other end of that bar, and it's coming up at 3 o'clock in the morning. Let's go back to the next day, and I don't know. No, no, no, no. I knew. I looked at Mirage and I thought, he will squeal his head off because he knows what happens to people in the scape. He'll break a leg down there.
And as for my head butler, well, of course, he was perfectly loyal, but he just couldn't be busting with pride, wouldn't he? And I'll tell you why I know he would have been like that, because just as I was a little later on when I'm getting ready to climb out this thing, tiny opening that's been left there. I turned around and there's my master butler over in the corner.
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