CHAINED MAN.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 67, 20 March 1937, Page 12

CHAINED MAN.

TERROR OF POLICE. "RUBBER-BONED HOUDINI." ARMED CORDON* ROUND CELL. Chained hand and foot and surrounded by armed guards, Arinand Spilers, the rubber-boned "Houdini of French gaols," last month faced the death sentence on a murder charge before the Pau Assize Court. Spilees, who was convicted of shooting a policeman and of committing seventeen burglaries, had escaped twice from Devil's Inland and four times from prison. He had also shown prison warders how he could escape. This so scared the authorities that, despite his protest that he had no wish to escape "just yet/' they at once doubled his guard day and night, surrounded the prison with a special cordon of police, and changed his cell every 24 hours —70 times in 70 days. Althcugh only 800 yards separated the prison from the Court, a cordon of police lined the street down which .Spilers was taken in a closed van under armed guard on the day of hi« sentence. Instead of waiting in the ordinary prisoners' ante-room he was chained to a warder in a room with windows bricked up, to which there was only one door, opening into a courtroom half full of armed police. Special precautions had been taken to exclude possible accomplices since he was said to possess remarkable power* of communicating with his friends. It was found that he wrote code letters from prison to members of his gang outside.