The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (7 page)

One of the other prisoners who had been incarcerated at Ham with Louis, his valet Charles Thélin, had finished his five years’ imprisonment and was now permitted to go into the local town, St Quentin. The plan therefore was that Thélin would ask permission to head into St Quentin, and would then head back to prison after hiring a cab. When he left, Louis, dressed as a workman, would exit alongside him. This would mean that the guards’ attention was on Thélin, not the “workman”, and hopefully not draw any attention as he made his way down the road.

Everything was made ready for the morning of Saturday 23 May 1846. A disguise had been smuggled in for Louis, and he was all set to change into it when he was told that some friends whom he had met in England had arrived to see him. Their arrival was quite fortuitous in one way: Louis was able to borrow their courier’s passport, on the pretext that his valet was about to make a journey. Otherwise plans were put on hold until Monday, since Louis needed to be sure that there were sufficient workmen around the place that one of them leaving wouldn’t be so noticeable. To ensure that there were, Thélin asked if they could build him some shelving.

On the morning of Monday 25 May, Louis, Dr Conneau and Thélin waited impatiently for the workmen to arrive. The one guard they really didn’t want to be on duty had been placed in front of Louis’ door overnight: he had a bad habit of keeping a close eye on all of the workmen, interrogating them about their activities as the day progressed. Chances were he wouldn’t be relieved until 7 a.m., much later than Louis wanted to leave his departure. However, by luck, the previous day, the shift pattern had been changed, and this particular guard went off duty at six.

The workmen arrived at five, as normal, and were inspected as they entered the castle. Louis’ disguise was as a joiner, but, at least initially, there weren’t any among the working party. He also had prepared a special pair of sabots, the wooden shoes which the workmen normally wore: these would boost his height by four inches, adding to the disguise. However, the workmen weren’t wearing them that Monday.

The combination of the two setbacks was enough to persuade Dr Conneau to counsel delaying the escape attempt. The point of no return would come when they shaved off Louis’ distinctive moustache: if they didn’t proceed with the plan, and the Commandant spotted Louis’ lack of hirsuteness, he would immediately become suspicious.

Louis wasn’t going to give up his hope of freedom. He ordered his valet to remove the moustaches, and packed the few items he was taking with him: a small dagger, a package containing two letters from his mother, and one from his uncle Napoleon in which he told Louis’ mother that he hoped Louis would grow and “make himself worthy of the destinies which await him”. He then put on the rest of his disguise: a dirty shirt and pair of trousers, a blue linen apron, a long black-haired wig, and a bad cap. His hands and face were painted with red and black, and then, after a cup of coffee, Louis donned his sabots, put a clay pipe in his mouth and prepared to leave.

At 6.45 a.m. Thélin called the workmen over and invited them to have their morning drink, which got them out of the way. He then went down the stairs, where one of the workmen had been repairing the balustrade. Two guards were stationed there as normal; Thélin distracted one of them so that he couldn’t see who else might be coming down the stairs. He chatted with the guard, who wished him a pleasant journey – Thélin was carrying a coat, and had explained he was collecting Louis’ dog to take him for a walk.

Louis exited from his room, and picked up a plank, which he placed on his shoulder before going down the stairs. The other guard moved back out of the way of the plank, which Louis had positioned so that his face wouldn’t be visible. He followed Thélin and the first guard towards the two wicket gates, and passed through them into the courtyard without incident. As Louis crossed the courtyard, a young locksmith’s boy ran across, apparently about to start a discussion with him. Thélin intercepted him, and sent him back upstairs before he could talk to Louis.

No one else gave Louis more than a brief glance. When he accidentally dropped his pipe in front of a soldier, the guard simply continued pacing up and down. He then passed various officials, as well as over a dozen guards who were lounging around outside the guardhouse. Thélin followed close behind, now with Louis’ dog eagerly bounding along beside him.

The guards at the first gate eyed Louis a little suspiciously, but they weren’t sufficiently worried to cause an alarm. Louis walked through the gate, with Thélin close behind. Just one more gate to go – but as they approached it a pair of workmen were entering the fortress. As they came closer, the other workmen were surprised that they didn’t know Louis, but then as their paths crossed (and Louis was beginning to worry that he was about to be discovered), one of them said, “Oh, it’s Bertou!”

Louis was free. While Thélin headed into Ham to fetch a cabriolet, which he was going to drive himself, Louis started to walk towards St Quentin, still carrying his plank, as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Louis had reached the cemetery of St Sulpice, around two miles from St Quentin, when he heard the sound of an approaching cabriolet. Louis was about to throw his plank to the ground when he heard a second cabriolet approaching from St Quentin; Thélin slowed down to allow this one to pass him, and Louis maintained his disguise until it was well out of sight. He then got rid of the plank and his sabots, then mounted the cabriolet, and took the reins.

When the two men reached St Quentin, Louis hopped down from the cabriolet, returning the reins to Thélin. Louis went round St Quentin, to wait for Thélin on the other side. Thélin meanwhile went to collect a fresh carriage and horses; he was also able to scrounge some breakfast for his master. By 9 a.m. Thélin had collected Louis and they, accompanied by the dog, reached Valenciennes by 2.15 where they were picking up a train to Brussels. At 4 p.m. they got on the train. From there it was an easy route, via Brussels and Ostend, back to Britain.

Louis’ unorthodox departure wasn’t spotted for nearly twelve hours. The governor kept sending for him, but Dr Conneau replied that Louis couldn’t be disturbed, since he had taken medication which made him drowsy. Eventually the governor lost patience, and came over to Louis’ rooms. When he entered the bedchamber, he discovered a dummy in the bed – but by that time, Louis was already far across the border. Conneau was given three months’ imprisonment for aiding the escape; Thélin was condemned in his absence to six.

Louis never got to visit his father; the older Louis died a month after the flight from Ham. He stayed in Britain until after the revolution in February 1848 which removed Louis-Phillippe from the throne of France. He stood in the direct elections for the presidency of France in December that year and won a landslide majority. Three years later, he became dictator, and a year after that, on 2 December 1852, he became Emperor Napoleon III, ruling France until he was captured at the Battle of Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. He was held captive in Germany for six months before being exiled to England, where he died in 1873. One of his lasting legacies to France: the establishment of a penal colony in French Guyana, which has come to be known by the title of its smallest component part – Devil’s Island. Its inhabitants were not given the opportunities to escape that Louis himself had used.

Sources:

Briffaut, F.T.:
The Prisoner of Ham
(T.C. Newby, 1846)

Simpson, Frederick Arthur:
The Rise of Louis Napoleon
(Frank Cass & Co. 1909)

The Free Lance-Star, March 19, 1912 “Louis Napoleon’s Escape”

There are quite a few prison breaks that have entered mythology – from the exploits of Papillon Henri Charriere, to the prisoner-of-war escapes involving the Wooden Horse or gliders from Colditz Castle. But not that many have inspired a pageant. The escape from the Lincoln County Courthouse of Henry McCarty, otherwise known as Billy Antrim, Henry Antrim, Kid Antrim, Billy Bonney and William H. Bonney, but renowned as Billy the Kid, was first memorialized in a pageant in Lincoln County, New Mexico, in 1940, with many of the actors direct descendants of the participants in the bloody shoot out. The pageant continues to this day.

Billy the Kid has become the stuff of American legend – in addition to multiple written retellings of his story, there have been songs (notably by Billy Joel), and even a ballet dedicated to the cowboy who was only twenty-five when he died. Born around 1856, his first escape from custody supposedly occurred in 1875, a year after his mother’s death when he was mostly working as a general labourer and cowboy. According to legend, at that time, the Kid was still using the name of Henry McCarty (he started calling himself Antrim, after his stepfather, shortly after this incident), and was arrested initially for stealing two pounds of butter from a ranchman living near his home in Silver City, New Mexico. He was released when he promised to behave better, but shortly afterwards he stole $70, a not inconsiderable sum, from a Chinese man, known as Charlie Sun, in Georgetown. This time he was thrown into jail by Grant County Sheriff Harvey Whitehill.

The young outlaw was held in the Silver City lock-up, and complained to Whitehill that the jailer there was mistreating him, keeping him in solitary confinement and not allowing him to take any exercise. Whitehill therefore ordered the jailer to let the Kid out of his cell to wander around a corridor. The sheriff gave two different stories of what happened next:

In the version Whitehill passed on down through his family, Billy used the freedom he had been granted to reach a chimney. An accomplice on the outside had lowered a rope down inside the building, and the Kid was able to use this to get out. However, when he was interviewed by the
Silver City Enterprise
in 1902, Whitehill claimed that he arranged for Billy to be freed from his cell, but mistakenly, the future outlaw was left unsupervised. When Whitehill realized that there was no sign of the Kid, he raced outside the jail in search of him. A Mexican loitering nearby told him that a young man had come out of the chimney. Whitehill ran back inside the jail, and looked up the big old-fashioned chimney. Clearly visible were handmarks where the fugitive had clawed into the thick layer of soot which lined the chimney. Even though the chimney was only as wide as a man’s arm, the Kid had been able to squeeze his way through.

As Whitehill said to the
Silver City Enterprise
reporter, it was shortly after this that Billy the Kid “commenced his career of lawlessness in earnest”. He moved to Arizona, and after an argument got out of hand, he killed Frank “Windy” Cahill in what was described as a criminal and unjustifiable shooting in 1877. He then became part of a feud between cattlemen and merchants in the New Mexico area of Lincoln County. The Kid worked for English cattle rancher John H. Tunstall, who, together with Scottish lawyer Alexander McSween, were arguing with Lincoln merchants James Dolan and Lawrence Murphy. Tunstall was murdered in January 1878 by men working for Dolan and Murphy; the Kid and others in Tunstall’s employ swore revenge. Calling themselves “Regulators” they engaged in a vicious battle with Dolan and Murphy’s workers. After they killed two of their enemies in March 1878, they were declared outlaws.

Sheriff William Brady and Deputy George Hindman were both killed when they tried to ambush McSween, and a bounty hunter also fell to the Regulators. In July, matters came to a head with the Regulators trapped inside McSween’s house for four days. Even the army was unable to dislodge them, but when the house was set on fire, the Regulators ran for their lives. The Kid managed to survive; most of the others were shot as they fled. He and the few other remaining Regulators were outlawed for good.

Pat Garrett was elected as Sheriff of Lincoln County in November 1880 after promising to restore law and order to the area in the aftermath of the bitter feud. On 23 December, he captured Billy the Kid at Stinking Springs, four days after he and his posse ambushed the remnants of the Regulators at Fort Sumner. They were taken to Las Vegas, and then to Santa Fe, where they were held in the prison for the first couple of months of 1881. The Kid had no intention of remaining a prisoner, and started digging a tunnel, which was betrayed to the prison authorities on 28 February. As a result, he was placed in solitary confinement, and shackled to the floor of his cell by the local sheriff.

After an attempt to try him in the federal court for the murder of the bounty hunter, Buckshot Roberts, which failed when Billy’s lawyer pointed out to the court that the location of Robert’s death wasn’t federal land, the Kid was handed back to the territorial authorities (New Mexico didn’t become a state of the union until 1912). He was charged with the murder of Sheriff Brady, and after a one-day trial, was found guilty. On 13 April 1881, Billy the Kid was sentenced to be hanged exactly one month later, on Friday 13 May, in the town of Lincoln.

It took five days for Billy to be transported from Santa Fe to Lincoln, and his guards expected him either to attempt to get away, or his friends to try to rescue him. It was made abundantly clear to him that the first bullets fired would be at him, not his rescuers. In the event, the journey was uneventful, although the Kid was regularly taunted by one of the guards, Bob Olinger.

On 21 April, the Kid was escorted into his new home in the new Lincoln County courthouse, which had previously been the store run by his enemies, Murphy and Dolan. His guards were Olinger and Deputy James W. Bell, who were warned by Sheriff Garrett to watch their prisoner at all times, even though he was often chained to the floor of what had been Murphy’s bedroom.

A week later, Garrett was away from Lincoln collecting taxes (or possibly collecting timber to use for the Kid’s gallows). He had reinforced the instructions to Olinger and Bell, knowing that Billy would now be desperate to find a way to escape his fate. Olinger continued to taunt the Kid: the two loathed each other, because they had been responsible for the death of one of the other’s friends. Some reports even suggest that Olinger had drawn a line across the room, and warned Billy that if he crossed it, he would be summarily executed. Certainly, a contemporary witness described Olinger as “a big burly fellow, and every one that I ever heard speak of him said he was mean and overbearing, and I know that he tantalized Billy while guarding him, for he invited me to the hanging just a few days before he was killed. Even after he was killed I never heard any one say a single nice thing about him.”