Pod Insights ABC Rewind 01 | Ray Denning | Breaking out About this episode The story of one of Australia's most misunderstood criminals. After a traumatic childhood, Raymond Denning jumps from 'juvie' to jail. When an escape attempt goes wrong, a prison warder is critically injured and the finger is pointed at Denning.
Transcript 4,218 words · 13 speakers
0:00 Speaker 00 My name is Raymond John Denning and I am a prisoner.
0:06 Speaker 00 The whole system is based on secrecy so that only one side of the story ever gets out.
0:16 Speaker 01 Hello, Hilary Harper with you, moonlighting from my regular gig on History Showcase, to bring you Rewind, and the first in a two-part series about the turbulent life of Raymond Denning.
0:29 Speaker 02 Raymond Denning: A dangerous animal on the run or a victim of the system? Hear his side of the story, the side you won't read about in the papers, 8.30 tonight on Doublelift.
0:41 Speaker 01 From an early age, Ray found himself on the wrong side of the law. His criminal career included robberies and the theft of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
0:51 Speaker 02 He's said to be the most travelled prisoner in the state, so hated by prison warders that he's been shifted constantly between prisons.
0:57 Speaker 01 He had numerous pen pal love interests, and he escaped from jail multiple times.
1:03 Speaker 02 According to official police statements, Raymond John Denning is public enemy number two, and quote, "an extremely violent criminal".
1:11 Speaker 01 Ray Denning's story is intertwined with the evolution of our juvenile justice system, with police corruption, and with Australia's prisoners' rights movement.
1:21 Speaker 02 But behind all the Ned Kelly PR lies a man convicted of a crime that has earned him life imprisonment.
1:29 Speaker 01 In part one, you'll hear audio archives that Denning himself recorded from his prison cell. Here is producer Mike Williams in conversation with author and historian Mark Dapen. And a warning, the story begins with a graphic description of self-harm.
1:46 Speaker 03 Ray Denning was just a kid when his dad went to prison. He moved around a lot with his mum and sister Charmaine.
1:52 Speaker 04 We never was in one permanent place, nothing we could call home, nothing we could call a family, never made friends, we just had each other.
2:01 Speaker 03 Ray's mum remarried, a man known as Mr Right. For three months they lived in a house with a white picket fence in Windang, near Wollongong. But this was just a glimpse of a life that was never to be.
2:14 Speaker 02 Then comes the event which turns Denning's head inside out.
2:18 Speaker 03 It was 1961, Denning was 10 years old. His dad was just about to be released from prison and he wrote a letter to Ray's mother.
2:26 Speaker 05 He's angry because he's been divorced while he was in jail.
2:30 Speaker 03 Author and historian, Mark Dapen.
2:32 Speaker 05 And the tone of the letter may have been, "I'm coming out and I'm coming for you."
2:37 Speaker 03 Ray's mother doused herself in kerosene and lit a match.
2:43 Speaker 05 Running around the house trying to pull herself out, but really succeeding.
2:47 Speaker 04 She rolled on the bed, the beds were on fire.
2:50 Speaker 03 Ray's sister, Charmaine, remembered it vividly.
2:53 Speaker 04 Raymond was standing on a chair, I can remember that, trying to find the key.
2:57 Speaker 05 Because there was only one door to the house, the kids couldn't get out any other way. She couldn't get out, she could only go out in one direction.
3:05 Speaker 04 Find the key, get out, get out, get out.
3:10 Speaker 05 Her burns were so bad that she was taken to hospital and she died three days later, I think.
3:19 Speaker 04 And then all of a sudden, we just had nothing. We didn't even have each other because we were separated.
3:24 Speaker 03 Charmaine and Ray went to different aunts.
3:33 Speaker 03 As a teen, Ray was picked up for a petty crime, spent the night in custody. He believed he was left there because his adopted family was in no rush to come get him.
3:42 Speaker 05 If you were to put yourself in his position, I would have felt abandoned, punished and abandoned.
3:53 Speaker 03 Mark Dapen is the author of Public Enemies. He says that first night Ray spent locked up was significant.
3:59 Speaker 05 Perhaps that causes a psychological wound that is difficult to solve. If you think, "I'm in this situation which is frightening and no one's coming to help me, and my mum burns to death."
4:15 Speaker 05 It would be hard not to sympathise with someone who is essentially a helpless child.
4:22 Speaker 03 Ray didn't last at his aunt's place.
4:24 Speaker 04 Raymond was very unhappy there, he wasn't happy at all. Felt out of place, didn't feel like he was in a family, started to get into trouble then. Didn't know what to do with himself and at the age of about 13 or 14, he took off. He was by himself and has been by himself ever since.
4:42 Speaker 05 He apparently lived with two, what used to be called working girls, in the cross.
4:54 Speaker 06 Before I was 15, I knew all the city of Sydney and had girlfriends. So I went to live with a couple of girls at the cross and that's where my real life of crime started.
5:02 Speaker 03 He wrote.
5:03 Speaker 06 Crime was the only way I knew that let me be with my friends 24 hours a day. There was a great excitement out, stealing cars, robbing shops.
5:11 Speaker 05 And plunged into the juvenile justice system, eventually arriving at Mount Penang.
5:20 Speaker 03 Mount Penang was a juvenile correction centre near Gosford, Central Coast, New South Wales.
5:26 Speaker 05 What an institution like Mount Penang does, in a way, offers a form of stability for them. And I think that's the, if there was any kindness behind the thinking, that's where it lay.
5:39 Speaker 03 Stability came at a cost. The 500 odd kids were kept in line with military style discipline. The punishments there are totally senseless. Kevin Storey was at Mount Penang a few years before Ray. He described the cruelty, the disproportionate punishments. There's no sort of education facilities there, it was mainly work and discipline. That sort of doesn't make you too keen on the system. As well as that, juvenile detention gave the boys a network.
6:07 Speaker 05 It was really a trade school for them.
6:09 Speaker 03 Slowly, progressively, you just progress from that system to a worse system.
6:13 Speaker 05 You learn to do break and entry. You do your breaking entries, you get pinched for that, you go into adult jail. Adult jail, you learn how to do an armed rob.
6:23 Speaker 03 Ray said that 75% of the boys he met in Mount Penang, he'd later meet in jail. His first stint came young. After Penang, he went to juvie in Perth and wound up in Adelaide, where he got picked up for vagrancy.
6:36 Speaker 05 The ultimate injustice, I suppose, in the life that has, seems at no stage to have been easy. Vagrancy, the crime of having no money, the crime of being poor, the crime of being neglected, the crime of not having parents who can look after you.
6:58 Speaker 03 While in South Australia, his network grew. He meets a guy called Roy the Rat Pollitt. They decide to do armed holdups when they get out, and they did. Roy got caught, so Ray held up a bank to get bail money for Roy, then he got done too. He went to jail in Parramatta, but he wasn't planning on sticking around.
7:20 Speaker 05 He became involved at some level in an escape attempt.
7:27 Speaker 03 In 1974, Ray Danning and three other prisoners were working on a construction job within the jail. The job was overseen by a civilian tradie called Willie Carl Faber.
7:38 Speaker 05 Who was specifically employed to teach the prisoners construction skills. Four of them tried to escape by taking either a makeshift ladder or the materials to build a makeshift ladder from the builder's hut. While they tried to rob the hut, the overseer was bashed over the head with a hammer.
8:03 Speaker 05 He was left lying in a pool of blood. A terrible assault on a man who was not among the prison officers, who was either hated or feared by the prison population, simply a guy who was doing his job, trying to help.
8:25 Speaker 03 After the escape failed and Willie's assault was investigated, the finger was pointed at Ray Denning.
8:32 Speaker 05 Denning always denied doing this, always.
8:36 Speaker 00 I told the police I know nothing about this and I fully maintain my innocence. I then asked if I could ring a barrister. This was denied.
8:46 Speaker 03 Ray explains how the next day, he was working early, tied up and sent to Grafton Prison.
8:51 Speaker 00 Don't look up, otherwise I'll smash this guy. I was then in the mood and I was felt again until in a semi-state of consciousness.
9:02 Speaker 05 But the consensus among prisoners in the underworld is that he did in fact do it.
9:13 Speaker 03 Willie was severely injured but didn't die. His quality of life would never be the same though. For this, Ray was given a life sentence, another 13 years. The incident made Ray a deeply unpopular prisoner within the system.
9:27 Speaker 05 The prison service was never, ever gonna forgive Denning for that.
9:37 Speaker 03 What was significant to Denning during the escape assault investigation was that for the first time, he was verballed.
9:44 Speaker 05 The statement that he gave, admitting his part in the escape, was invented.
9:52 Speaker 03 But who'd invent a statement, a document where the alleged criminal conveniently admits to their crime?
10:00 Speaker 05 Before DNA evidence, before CCTV cameras...
10:04 Speaker 07 This man is, as they say, helping police with their inquiry.
10:08 Speaker 05 It was actually quite difficult to gather evidence against professional criminals.
10:14 Speaker 03 And if a telephone book couldn't encourage a confession, no matter.
10:18 Speaker 07 There was always verbaling or dropping a brick.
10:21 Speaker 05 And the police would confess for him, make a record of interview, essentially a work of fiction.
10:26 Speaker 07 You'd sit down at the typewriter and as we used to say, "Once upon a time there were three bears and now there's thousands."
10:33 Speaker 05 And then at the end of this notional interview, the guy would refuse to sign the statement, sign the record of interview, just because I want to make trouble for you boys, or I don't need to sign it, you've heard it all already, I've said it, I never sign anything.
10:49 Speaker 07 Even Roger Rogerson says it goes on. It was all done in the interest of truth, justice and...
10:56 Speaker 03 And, hmm, how's prison Roger?
10:59 Speaker 05 And yet that record of interview would be presented before the courts, the magistrates and judges who would have heard virtually the same story, almost word for word, time and time again, and who accepted it time and time again.
11:23 Speaker 03 Ray Denning ends up in Maitland jail. In the 70s, it was common for prisoners to get shuffled around New South Wales prisons. Ray seems to always be on the move though. He's reunited with his old mate Roy the Rat Pollock. He also catches up with a mate by the name of Billy Sutton.
11:39 Speaker 05 Billy Sutton was the shower sweeper at Maitland, the head shower sweeper. Sweeper is a position of some responsibility.
11:48 Speaker 03 A responsibility Billy was willing to abuse.
11:53 Speaker 03 This was the beginning of the Maitland crew, that were brought together by their shared interest in one thing: breaking out.
12:06 Speaker 05 Above the cubicles, there was a ventilation shaft, for some reason painted red, as if, in case you're wondering where you might escape from, there's that red thing up there, that could be this bet, mate.
12:20 Speaker 05 They'd set all the showers on hot and close the door so it's like a steam room.
12:27 Speaker 03 Denning, Sutton, Roy the Rat and others loosen the shaft. They use a rope of knitted blankets to get up the narrow shaft and...
12:37 Speaker 03 They're onto the roof.
12:39 Speaker 05 Once they were on the roof, because of the architecture of Maitland Jail, they couldn't actually be seen by the guard tower.
12:46 Speaker 03 Classic blind spot. Meanwhile, downstairs...
12:49 Speaker 05 Prison officers open the door and they're just...
12:53 Speaker 05 This steam blows into their faces. What's going on? What's going on? Where have they gone?
12:59 Speaker 03 They're lowering themselves down the face of Maitland Jail with a rope made of bedware. And then...
13:08 Speaker 03 They were out.
13:11 Speaker 03 The group split into two. Ray, Billy and Roy the Rat hijacked a car. The cops pursued. When they got to the Hunter River, they jumped out. Ray and Billy swam across the river. Roy couldn't swim, so he just ran down the banks. Ray and Billy then found a farmer's car in a paddock. The farmer was there working.
13:28 Speaker 05 So they took the Holden and drove for the road. The farmer saw them and took off in...
13:37 Speaker 05 Perhaps not hot pursuit, perhaps in cool pursuit. Unfortunately, it turned out his Holden was a little bit faster than his tractor and 10 metres from his gate. He lost them.
13:49 Speaker 03 Didn't matter. The pair were picked up in nearby Raymond Terrace by a police roadblock.
13:55 Speaker 05 And taken back to Maitland Jail where they were, you know, probably bashed for 90 minutes of freedom. They had several more years added to their sentences.
14:07 Speaker 03 Ray and Roy the Rat appeared before the court.
14:11 Speaker 05 Denning was, well, quite reasonably asked to answer to the name of Raymond John Denning, his birth name, but he refused to do so on the grounds that he was now a Lob Sang Rampa and possessed of the spirit of a Tibetan monk.
14:29 Speaker 05 A Lob Sang Rampa wasn't a Tibetan monk. He was a fraud, a guy who wrote a great many books, claiming to have spent a life in a Tibetan monastery, but in fact, lived in Plymouth, I think, in England. In order to visually display his adherence to Tibetan Buddhism, Denning had shaved his head. Politt had also shaved his head and said he was also one with the spirit of the dead Tibetan.
15:01 Speaker 03 They weren't.
15:06 Speaker 05 Denning eventually was transferred to Katingal.
15:11 Speaker 08 He described the building as "an electronic zoo", "inhuman, ill-conceived and expensive".
15:17 Speaker 03 Katingal was this high-security section within Long Bay Jail, and construction for it was completed in 1975. One year later, the Nagel Royal Commission, which looked at violence within the prison system, began. The Commission was sparked after earlier riots in Bathurst. On the eve of the Nagel Inquiry, prisoners from Grafton's notorious track swing were moved into Katingal, and this included Denning. This new prison had a solution for violence between prisoners and officers.
15:49 Speaker 08 It was designed to house 40 prisoners in four-by-two-metre cells, where they spent 11 hours a day.
15:56 Speaker 05 Katingal was supposed to be escape-proof. It looked like a sort of over-ground submarine. The only view from your cell was a slit in the doorway through which you could see the clock.
16:08 Speaker 08 The only natural light in the building was from the barred roof in the exercise yard, which was too small for prisoners to exercise properly.
16:15 Speaker 05 There was opposition to Katingal right from the word "go". The Builders' Labour Federation opposed it.
16:22 Speaker 09 Could you stop the prison officers from using CS gas?
16:26 Speaker 05 Prisoners' rights activists opposed it. At least one bomb was found on the site.
16:31 Speaker 09 I mean, exactly who are running these jails? It seems, as all the prisoners feel, it seems that the screws are running our jails.
16:37 Speaker 08 But the major problem with Katingal arose from the concept of isolation, the plan to minimise contact between prisoners and between prisoners and officers.
16:46 Speaker 05 The number of altercations between prisoners and guards collapsed because they couldn't even get to each other. It was extremely boring. It was very hard to tell what time of day or night it was. Everything was done for the prisoners.
17:01 Speaker 08 The chief medical superintendent for the department... Said that confinement in this environment for more than a year would be detrimental to a prisoner's mental health.
17:10 Speaker 10 It should be ripped down, it's a waste of time, it's a waste of money. In human life, it's just tragic, it's ruin, man.
17:19 Speaker 03 Bernie Matthews ended up being the longest-serving prisoner at Kittingel. Years later, he reflected back on the experience.
17:26 Speaker 10 What did it do to your head in there? Uh, well, that's how it got to you. With a physical beating, you can see the bruises. Where the place like that, you can't see the bruises, but you know it's affecting you. You know it's damaging you, but you don't know how and to what extent.
17:41 Speaker 05 And because there was no useful way to spend their days, some people's minds began to kind of give way.
17:49 Speaker 03 On the same corridor as Ray, is a prisoner by the name of Russell Cox. He'd been sent to Kittingel after a recent unsuccessful escape attempt.
17:59 Speaker 05 Cox has a tremendous fitness ethic. There's 19 steps from one end of a corridor in Kittingel to the other, and every day Cox runs up and down, back and forth, up and down, back and forth. Even among a group of people for whom fitness exercise were pretty much the only recreation activity, Cox was considered a fitness fanatic. He's also a vegetarian, which people found astonishing. Like, a vegetarian wasn't a type of professional criminal, it was, you know, a type of woman, if anything. You know, how can a man be a vegetarian and a man in prison? It was just unthinkable. So Danny and Cox become friends, they sit together in a workshop.
18:41 Speaker 05 Eventually, they come to, I suppose, conspire together. The legend has always been Cox would go into the yard, and there's a blind spot in the yard that couldn't be seen.
18:58 Speaker 03 There's always a blind spot. They sort of designed the blind spot in.
19:02 Speaker 05 Hang on, if we don't put a blind spot in, they've got like no chance, it's not fair at all.
19:08 Speaker 03 It's like a cheat in the video game, you've got to put something.
19:11 Speaker 05 Where's the narrative arc without a blind spot?
19:14 Speaker 03 Cox would go into the blind spot in the yard, do a one-armed pull-up on the bar, then quickly hacksaw one of the roof bars.
19:22 Speaker 05 Just a little bit, then he drops. Cox has discovered, I don't think it was his hobby before, he's discovered in Katingal an interest in modelling. So he's allowed to have modelling paint to paint his model aeroplanes or whatever. This modelling paint, coincidentally, is the same colour as the bars on the roof of the Katingal yard.
19:47 Speaker 05 So, after he'd sawed a little way through a bar, he'd use his modelling paint to paint over the mark left by the hacksaw.
19:59 Speaker 03 The day of the escape attempt, Denning's sent back to Maitland for another trial regarding his last escape. On the way up there, he tries to, yes, escape. So, the guards catch on and they leave him in Maitland for the night. Now, Denning's gone from Katingal, no one knows when he's coming back. And Cox is worried a guard will discover that loose roof bar. By now, it's getting pretty loose. So he decides, now or never, he's going to escape solo. That day, he leaves his shoes in the yard on purpose, and at night, he asks a guard to go get them. The escape is on.
20:36 Speaker 03 He wedges a ping-pong bat in the fence and uses that to help him get up to the roof, pushes the bar out. He scales several more walls and fences with ease. This guy's fit. An officer takes a shot at him, but misses. The last wall is 2.5 metres high.
20:52 Speaker 05 He does that easily, considering everything he's done before. He's out, he's in Malabar, tries to flag down a cab, fails, runs off into the night.
21:04 Speaker 05 Denning, next morning, hears about it in Maitland, and apparently is furious that Cox has gone without him. Cox has also gone without the rest of the Maitland crew, who were, as I say, going back to court for their hearing. And there is talk that Cox has betrayed the underworld.
21:28 Speaker 05 Cox is in a strange position now. I mean, he's celebrated because he's escaped an escape-proof jail. You know, the cops describe it to the press as almost superhuman.
21:41 Speaker 03 Cox's escape was in 1977. A year later, he returned to Kittingale, entered the same way he'd escaped, but this time he brought guns, rope, dynamite. He was gonna free his mates. But, but, an early-rising neighbour spots him on the roof from her bathroom window. She calls the cops. Cox hears the sirens coming and he flees the scene before he has a chance to get anyone out. Didn't matter, though, in some ways, in the underworld, his legend grew and he regained any lost faith from his solo escape.
22:16 Speaker 06 Wednesday 15th of November 1978. We are robbed out of a lot of our fresh air time in the Circle. We are supposed to be let out of our cells at 8am, but we in the Circle don't get out until 8.30am.
22:29 Speaker 03 Denning remained behind bars. When Kittingale was shut in 78, he ends up back in Grafton.
22:42 Speaker 05 In 1978, Denning's life takes a turn for the worse. But not as badly, obviously, as the life of Willie Carl Faber, the overseer who was bashed over the head with a hammer during Denning's 1974 attempt to escape from Parramatta.
23:05 Speaker 05 Finally, after four years of, you know, living hell, the now epileptic Willie Carl Faber succumbs to his injuries and dies. This makes Denning the least popular man in the New South Wales prison system.
23:23 Speaker 06 September 1978 was assaulted by at least seven prison officers.
23:28 Speaker 05 Denning is bashed. Quite brutally by a group of prison officers. And he protests, he, he's not having it anymore. He's tired of, of being beaten, you know, he's been stripped and beaten ever since he was a kid. He's had enough of it, he stands up for himself. He, he befriends a prison activist named Brett Collins. And he and Brett Collins eventually bring a case against prison officers for bashings.
23:58 Speaker 06 I believe that Mr Buckley knew by calling me a dog bastard in his usual aggressive attitude, he would get a reaction from me. Because the worst thing you call a prisoner is a dog.
24:08 Speaker 05 Denning starts to get some minor celebrity. He's good looking, you know, he's cute. And there's something quite attractive about the, the way he speaks. He's visited a lot in jail by a very large number of people. Uh, for once, I mean, women, uh, involved in the prisoners' rights movement. He's arguing that he got verballed over the initial prison escape attempt. You know, he says he wasn't there. And people, women largely, are happy, willing to take up his case. But it goes nowhere. And in the end, I think Denning decides he's got no choice but to escape.
24:53 Speaker 00 My name is Raymond John Denning.
24:58 Speaker 00 And I'm a prisoner. I have decided that the best thing I can do is make a tape.
25:06 Speaker 03 Just before he breaks out, he sends a tape to two double J's prisoner show.
25:10 Speaker 00 This is, the whole system is based on secrecy. Uh, so that only one side of the story ever gets out.
25:17 Speaker 03 They air it in full.
25:18 Speaker 00 Anyone that prepares to go all the way to improve things for their fellow prisoner will be classed as an intractable prisoner. And then the world is told, oh, this man's dangerous, this man's that, and this man's this.
25:35 Speaker 11 He was beginning to find his voice.
25:37 Speaker 05 I guess a dawn of literacy on somebody who was a semi-literary, largely uneducated child. And he also refines massively his writing.
25:52 Speaker 06 So we're told that when some prisoner tries to escape, that it's wrong, but that is the only natural thing to be expected. It is when there are no escape attempts that will prove to everyone that we are no longer human.
26:04 Speaker 05 When you've got a sentence as long as he had, why wouldn't you escape? There's no reason not to escape.
26:12 Speaker 06 Tuesday 26th of February 1980.
26:15 Speaker 05 Nothing to do in the rest of his life. You know, you might as well get out, even if you're just out.
26:20 Speaker 06 I've come up with a plan that has got me feeling the taste of freedom.
26:24 Speaker 05 For, you know, a couple of days. It's got to be about a couple of days than the couple of days in Grafton. I don't think he necessarily had any kind of plan. Just thought, well, I'm getting out.
26:41 Speaker 11 Other prisoners packed him into a rubbish box.
26:44 Speaker 05 And that box is put on a trolley and wheeled out to the incinerator under the supervision of a prison officer. Prison officer doesn't look in the box to see if there's a prisoner in it. He just leaves it at the incinerator, goes back inside, Denning opens the box and he's out, jogging down the road in Grafton.
27:12 Speaker 11 The tape you've just heard was recorded illegally in jail by Raymond John Denning before his escape from the maximum security jail at Grafton on April the 2nd. The Prisoners Action Group in Sydney and Women Behind Bars claim that police statements since then are designed to create a climate of public fear so that when he's eventually caught, he could be killed.
27:40 Speaker 01 Raymond Denning, Breaking Out, was produced by Mike Williams. The sound engineer was John Jacobs. Mark Dappin's book, Public Enemies, is published by Alan Ananen.
27:53 Speaker 01 Next time in Rewind, part two in the Denning saga.
27:57 Speaker 12 People began to forget about what Ray had been convicted of and they focused on the romance of his daring escape from prison and this cat and mouse game that he played with the police.
28:10 Speaker 01 Ray is on the loose, a media frenzy kicks off and the police are made to look like fools. I'm Hilary Harper, I'll catch you then.
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