The Effect
It is the 3rd January, 1995, and an extraordinary escape is about to unfold at a high security, grade A category prison on an island in the English Channel.
The prison is HMP Parkhurst, a Victorian institution with a fearsome reputation, housing some of the most notorious criminals in the country. The Kray Twins, Moors Murderer Ian Brady, and the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe have all resided within its walls. And the prison’s fearsome reputation stretches even beyond its inmates. Dubbed ‘the Alcatraz of the UK,’ it is supposedly one of the toughest prisons to break out of, not only due to its formidable perimeter boundaries, covered in razor wire and surrounded by CCTV, but also because it is situated on the Isle of Wight, and so encircled by the powerful, deadly currents of the English Channel.
On this particular January day, as afternoon creeps towards evening and the winter light fades, a group of ten men are in HMP Parkhurst’s gymnasium for their hour of exercise, overseen by a handful of guards. There is nothing untoward about this scene, the men are simply working out, as they do every night, after which the gym will be locked up and the men given their supper.
But suddenly, a fight erupts in the gym, with men pushing and shoving, cursing and exchanging blows. The exercise instructor orders the room to be locked until the situation is dealt with, a while later opening it up again to let the men out. But neither the instructor, nor any of the other guards present, have noticed one crucial fact: whereas ten prisoners originally entered the gymnasium, only seven leave it.
Almost two hours after the fight in the gym, not one, not two, but three of the prison’s inmates are found to be missing, having somehow managed to scale both a twenty-foot solid metal fence topped with razor wire, and a twenty-four foot, tamper-proof wall.
And if that wasn’t remarkable enough, when the prison guards look for signs of a breakout within the actual building itself, they find… nothing. The escaped men have obviously made it through a succession of doors within the prison, and yet not a single key is found to be missing. Furthermore, when they are forensically examined, it is obvious that not a single lock has been picked.
The trio of convicts who have made their escape from HMP Parkhurst are identified as Matthew Williams, Keith Rose and Andrew Rodger. But who were these men, and why were they incarcerated there in the first place?
Whilst studying microbiology and genetics at the University of Leeds, Matthew Williams had been robbed, and decided to seek revenge on the group responsible. So he’d built a homemade nail bomb, and placed it under the bench known to be the regular haunt of the gang who’d robbed him. Thankfully, the bomb was discovered before it had the chance to go off, leading police back to Williams. As well as making and planting the bomb, Matthew Williams was subsequently charged with arson and administering poison, and sentenced to life in prison. Despite being twenty years younger than the two other men he’d escaped with, Williams was thought to be the mastermind behind the plan.
The second man, Keith Rose, was a former computer company director, imprisoned for two counts of kidnapping, possessing a firearm with intent to commit an indictable offence, and blackmail. Having amassed huge debts, Rose, disguised and armed with a sawn-off shotgun, had five years earlier forced his way into the home of a fellow businessman, handcuffed the man’s wife, and left behind a ransom note demanding £1 million for the husband’s release. Rose subsequently held the man, in a secluded spot on Dartmoor, for a total of five days; blindfolded, gagged, and with a noose tied between his neck and a nearby tree branch, before eventually being arrested.
The last of the trio of escapees was Andrew Rodger, a strong, bullish man - infamous amongst the prison residents for denting cell doors and bending his iron bed - who was in HMP Parkhurst having been convicted of murder. When, in 1986, he was caught stealing from a vending machine at a public swimming baths by the facility’s nightwatchman, Rodger apparently “went berserk”, bludgeoning the security guard to death with a crowbar. He, too, was sentenced to life.
So how did these three men actually manage to get out of one of the highest security, most formidable prisons in the British Isles, over those two perimeter walls and, more importantly, through all those locked doors?
Perhaps if, just weeks before that fateful night in early January, one guard in particular had been paying more attention, he would have noticed a very peculiar object sticking out of the door of the prison’s music room. A handcrafted key, bent and misshapen, protruding from the lock. But the guard had walked right past this key, and so it had gone totally unnoticed. Then, minutes later, the handmade key had vanished altogether. As if by magic.
But could this twisted, primitive object really have been behind such a seamless, high-stakes escape? And, if so, how?
The Method
As you might expect, a prison dubbed the ‘British Alcatraz’ was never going to be the easiest place to escape from. Situated on an island in the English Channel, teeming with guards and CCTV, the building was enveloped by a twenty foot steel fence choked with razor wire. And, if that wasn’t enough, there was also a second barrier surrounding the prison, a twenty-four foot wall topped by a dome specifically constructed to stop grappling hooks, spikes or ropes from being attached to it. But that didn’t stop Matthew Williams from attempting to devise a way out of the prison almost as soon as he arrived.
He communicated his intentions to fellow prisoner Keith Rose, and together the men began discussing their options. Rose told Williams he’d noticed something interesting about the prison’s locks; that recently they’d all been changed and colour-coded. While some of the locks were now green, others were red. Rose had spent several days walking around the prison, observing these changes, and had noted a further intriguing fact about the locks. Far more of them were red than green. So, if he and Williams could somehow get their hands on a key for the red locks, it could be used to access almost 95% of the prison.
After coming to this realisation, the men studied the lock on the door to the prison’s music room. It was a red lock, like most of the others, and it looked complicated. Despite this, Williams and Rose became convinced their best plan of action would be to create a replica key themselves, a key that would work all the red locks and, therefore, unlock 95% of the prison. Williams applied for a metalworking course in the prison workshop and, after examining the locks on the prison’s interior doors, and having memorised the keys the prison guards carried around with them, he managed to create a rough design. But carving a key’s exact replica was a time-consuming job, and Williams was forced to secrete his half-finished key and some metalworking tools on his person, to take them from the workshop and back to his cell to finish the job.
Over the course of several weeks, the men’s red-lock key took shape. It was during its first airing, when they tested the key in the door of the music room, that their homemade creation stuck and bent, almost blowing their plan altogether. But, luckily for the trio, the guard never noticed. As a result of this test, Williams modified his key, remaking it in steel, which was far stronger but also a much more difficult material to shape. Nevertheless, just a week later this new version of the key was ready to be tested in the music room door. When it successfully worked the lock, Williams was elated. However, the men next needed to find a way of negotiating both the twenty-foot razor wire fence, and the twenty-four foot dome-topped exterior wall that surrounded it.
Williams deduced that the only answer to these problems was to build a ladder. And that, in order to conceal such a large item from the guards, it would need to be constructed in sections that could be disguised as another object entirely, and also easily hidden. Unbelievably, as Williams and Rose began to craft their ladder, they told prison staff they were simply creating an innocent abstract sculpture of a snake. But they soon came to realise that building such a high ladder was a tricky and labour-intensive job, and that they had to recruit another prisoner to help them complete it.
Williams settled on Andrew Rodger, who despite having been sentenced for using a metal crowbar to bludgeon a man to death, had been appointed by HMP Parkhurst as one of the workshop orderlies, a position that allowed him access to the room and everything inside of it. The three men continued work on their so-called ‘snake sculpture’, for three weeks, hiding the connected sections of central heating pipes it was made from around the workshop for them to retrieve later.
After a little more planning, Williams, Rose and Rodger decide the best room to escape from is the prison gymnasium. And when the fight erupts on the evening of the 3rd January, they conceal themselves behind the exercise equipment until everyone else has gone, the guards never noticing that the ten men they started out with have now been reduced to seven. Once the others have left, Williams, Rose and Rodger emerge from their hiding place, exit the room using their homemade key, and head off towards the metal workshop in order to collect their ladder.
There, Rodger begins assembling the ladder, with Williams helping himself to the wire cutters and electrical flex he has concluded will be the perfect way for the men to lower themselves over the prison’s outer wall. Ten minutes after arriving in the workshop, the ladder is complete, and the trio proceed to the razor wire fence. The fence is not alarmed, and they cut through it relatively easily using the pilfered wire cutters and next proceed to the wall. But, having not been able to test it, the men have no idea how much weight their handmade ladder will actually hold. Will it be strong enough to allow all three of them to scale the wall? Either through engineering prowess or sheer luck, the ladder does indeed hold their weight, and Williams scrambles up it and lashes his electrical cable to the top, allowing the prisoners to abseil their way down the outer side of the wall.
Against all the odds, Williams, Rose and Rodger are free men. But their freedom was not to last long. Unfortunately for them, they hadn’t quite planned out the next part of the escape as flawlessly as the rest, and ultimately the men weren’t able to leave the island quickly enough to avoid detection. Following a tip-off from an off-duty prison officer, they were recaptured five days later, with all three being given an additional two year sentence for their breakout, one of the most remarkable feats of observation, memory and craftsmanship in modern prison escape history.
© 2025, Lora Jones. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited without written permission.
