Prisoner reveals how he broke out of jail with self-made tools and a ...
John Massey outside Pentonville Prison
HOW a prisoner serving a life sentence managed to escape over the walls of Pentonville Prison can now be revealed – more than 10 years after the jail break.
John Massey, who served a total of 43 years behind bars, broke out of the Victorian prison on Caledonian Road after being refused parole, and was then turned down a compassionate visit to say goodbye to his dying mother.
In a new book, Mr Massey, from Kentish Town, describes how he formed an ingenious plan that saw him spend weeks hiding in a loft space, digging his way through mortar round a locked and barred skylight using self-made tools, before making his way across the prison roof and clambering over the wall using a rope fashioned out of a football net.
His breakout garnered national headlines and he was apprehended following a massive manhunt after a week on the run in Kent – where he had fled to pay a last visit to his ailing mother.
Mr Massey, a prolific bank robber in his youth who was convicted of murder in 1975, told the : “I ended up serving twice than what the judge recommended – and there came a point where I wasn’t getting parole because of a broken system operated for private firms making a profit out of so-called justice, stuck in prisons not fit for purpose, and for what often felt like pure vindictiveness.”
Mr Massey who was finally released in 2018, has been working on his book for five years and covers from his childhood in Kentish Town to being one half of a bank robbing duo the police dubbed Laurel and Hardy – and his life as an armed criminal. Mr Massey was convicted of the murder of Charles Higgins, a bouncer at a club on Hackney, in 1975.
He has long maintained the killing was an accident, caused by a faulty gun and that he had no intention of harming Mr Higgins.
The courts found otherwise and Mr Massey embarked in a journey of incarceration that took him behind the walls of almost every prison in the UK stretching over four decades.
He said: “For years I had completed the minimum sentence the judge said I had to serve, kept out of trouble, completed the course I had to complete – but I never got parole. I was left with little choice but to take the matter in to my own hands.”
Mr Massey had earned the role of a gym orderly, and staff at Pentonville had turned to him for a series of building projects and maintenance jobs.
It was as he built new office space in the gym that he noticed a false ceiling that had not been installed when he served time at the prison many years before.
This gave him the chance he had been looking for.
“I thought if I could get up among the rafters, I could possibly find a way out,” he said.
Using tools he had fashioned from gym equipment he could take with no one noticing, Mr Massey spent six weeks chipping away at the mortar around a concrete skylight – and then finding a way to move the loosened covering, giving him access to the roof. And as the book reveals, this was not his first prison break.
John Massey as a young man
In the early 1990s, when he original sentence was finished but parole was not in sight, he managed to give two wardens the slip on a rare home visit to Lyndhurst Hall in Kentish Town, to see his father at who was unwell.
Mr Massey made it from Kentish Town to the south of Spain without being caught – and lived for four years on the run, before being eventually returned to London and prison.
As well as describing how he escaped, Mr Massey reveals what life is like on the inside – including spells at high security prisons including Belmarsh.
He added: “I’ve seen how the justice system performs. I have seen how it doesn’t work first hand.”
Locks. Bolts and Bars by John Massey, published by the History Press, is out this week.
