From improvised disguises to razor-thin gaps in prison walls, these are the daring true stories of inmates who refused to stay behind bars. We look at the shocking ingenuity, risky plans and sheer determination behind some of the world’s most unbelievable jailbreaks.
Choi Gap-Bok
There are many health benefits to yoga, including increasing flexibility – which was handy for inmate Choi Gap-Bok as it helped him escape from his South Korean prison! The 64-year-old, who was arrested in September 2012 on suspicion of robbery, used his two decades of yoga training and a lot of ointment to squeeze through the food slot in his detention cell at a police station in Daegu.
It took him just over 30 seconds to slip through the gap that measured 15x45cm. Gap-Bok was 50 years old at the time.
“He escaped from the prison cell in less than a minute after moving flexibly like an octopus,” a police investigator told The Korea Times.
To hide his escape, Gap-Bok also tucked his pillow under a blanket on the cell’s bed to confuse the guards into thinking he was sleeping – just like he’d seen in the film The Shawshank Redemption.
After six days on the run, he was recaptured on a rooftop about 30km away and put in a cell with a smaller food slot.
Sarah Pender
When Sarah Pender was sentenced to 110 years behind bars in 2002 for killing two of her flatmates, she knew she “didn’t want to die in prison”.
So in August 2008, after her appeals were exhausted, Pender, 46, escaped Rockville Correctional Facility in Indiana with the help of an officer and an ex-cellmate.
“I had no hope left and I chose to create my own justice,” wrote Pender, who was nicknamed “the female Charles Manson”, in a 2014 essay.
Once on the run, Pender fled to Chicago, where she lived under the alias Ashley Thompson and worked as a cost estimator. But her new life came crashing down when her story was featured on the show America’s Most Wanted – which led to her being identified by a neighbour and arrested again in December 2008.
Since returning to prison, Pender has maintained her innocence and is fighting for a new trial.
Jason Melbom
A chair was all Jason Melbom needed to scale the fence and escape Sydney’s Long Bay Correctional Complex in August 2023. Once free, Melbom, 46, went on a burglary spree – stealing a knife, a car and cigarettes from multiple homes near the prison.
But things escalated when he assaulted a woman at her Little Bay home. After he broke in, the victim, who can’t be identified for legal reasons, tried to flee, but Melbom violently assaulted and restrained her with a laptop cord, before stealing her car, then abandoning it a few doors down the road.
There, a blood-covered Melbom confronted a woman unpacking groceries in her driveway and forced her to drive him to a park 40 minutes away.
“I saw blood on him, so I was quite scared,” the driver recalls.
“He told me he had just got out of jail. He did tell me he wouldn’t hurt me as long as I did what he told me to do.”
Once Melbom exited her car, the woman managed to escape while he broke into two more houses, stealing a pair of Ugg boots and the keys to another car, before finally being arrested once more. In April this year, Melbom – who was already serving a 22-year sentence for serious offences and was almost due for parole at the time of his escape – was sentenced to eight years for the rampage, with a five-year non-parole period.
Taking Melbom’s remorse into account, along with his struggles with substance abuse and mental health, judge Tom Jones backdated the sentence, making him eligible for parolein 2029.
Parkhurst Trio
On 3 January 1995, Andrew Rodger, Keith Rose and Matthew Williams teamed up to escape HM Prison Parkhurst on England’s Isle of Wight. Masterminded by Williams – an attempted bomber who was serving a life sentence – the trio managed to craft a replica of the prison’s master key out of scrap metal from the facility’s workshop.
And with the help of an improvised ladder they’d built under the noses of the prison guards, they escaped to a nearby town, where they aimed to hotwire a plane in order to fly back to the mainland. But after complications starting the aircraft, the plan was abandoned and they holed up in a garden shed.
Five days later, the trio was caught when an off-duty prison officer recognised them and they were all given an additional two years in jail.
