The Great Jail Break

Behind the turreted greystone walls of Birmingham's Winson Green prison, the night guard made his regular 15-minute check, looking through the "judas hole" in the door of the maximum security cell where the lights burned all the time. He was satisfied to see the prisoner lying under his blanket, eyes closed, chest gently rising and falling. It was 3:04 a.m. and all was quiet.

But the prisoner was not asleep. Ten minutes later, onetime Bookmaker Charles F. Wilson, 32, was free and away, leaving behind 29 years and eight months of a 30-year sentence. He was one of the twelve men jailed for the greatest cash theft of all time, the $7,369,000 robbery of a mail train a year ago. The Great Train Robbery was followed fittingly last week by the Great Jail Break, for it had all the qualities of the robbery--good intelligence work, the right equipment, a daring team to do the job, and a superb plan.

Escape Committee. The incentive was that only $942,000 of the loot has been recovered, and Wilson surely knew how to lay his hands on much of the balance. Presumably promised a piece of the cash, an underworld "escape committee" reportedly had been planning the break for months.

The criminals planned so well that they knew even the one precise moment during the night when the guard would be alone. Just as he was making his round, a team of probably three men was propping a ladder against the 20-foot wall outside. Swinging down inside on a rope ladder they had brought along, the determined crew dashed across 20 yards of open space and up the steps to the rear of cell block B.

They had a key that opened the heavy, studded oak door, and another key to unlock the steel grill barrier just inside.

Climbing a flight of stairs to Wilson's floor, the gangmen were ready for the guard when he walked by, and they coshed him just hard enough to keep him quiet during the getaway. With that, the men whipped out a third key to open Wilson's door. Incredibly, it was a copy of one always kept in a safe in the chief guard's office, and made available only on a guard's written signature. Wilson quickly changed into the civilian clothes they had brought him. Then they made off as they had come, without having awakened a soul.

Nearby Plane. When the guard came to a few minutes later and sounded the alarm, the usual massive police search was set in motion: roadblocks throughout the area, a special alert at airports and docks, lightning raids on London's underworld haunts, but in the first few days they turned up nothing. Wilson had vanished, perhaps in the car that had parked near the prison that night, perhaps in the light plane seen on a field six miles away. One popular theory put Wilson in Eire, where he might be taking advantage of the fact that its extradition agreement with Britain had recently expired.

Appalled, the British government kept the search going anyhow, and at the same time opened an investigation into the baffling question of how security at Winson Green had so easily been breached. An initial conclusion: officials were so intent on preventing prisoners from getting out that they had never even considered the problem of someone breaking in.

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