“THE ESCAPOLOGIST” MAKES HIS THIRD GETAWAY AT SYDNEY

Grey River Argus, 22 August 1949, Page 4

“THE ESCAPOLOGIST” MAKES HIS THIRD GETAWAY AT SYDNEY

Hundreds of Armed Police Searching The City (Rec. 10.30). SYDNEY, August 21. Hundreds of armed police are now searching Sydney for two men, who broke of the Long Bay Gaol on Satmrday. They are Darcy Dugan, aged 29, and William Cecil Mears, aged 28, who were on remand on charges of carrying weapons, assaulting an elderly woman, and robbing • her of £l2O. Bail was refused when they were remanded to appear at Paddington Court on September 2, and the men reached Long Bay Gaol about noon yesterday. Before the police search, they were placed in the reception room. The men tore an iron bolt from a door leading to an adjoining lavatory ceiling. Climbing through the roof, they dropped to the top of a high wall, facing Botany Bay, and then they leaped thirty feet down into a garden patch. This wall from which they leaped faces open country stretching from the prison farm across scrub lands to the Botany Cemetery and the suburb of La Perouse. The police believe that the men coolly boarded a tram and journeyed into' the city. Darcy Dugan is known to the police as “The Escapologist”, and he has twice previously escaped from custody. He made his first break on January 2, 1946, from a police prison van, when he and another prisoner forced open the ventilator of a “Black Maria”, in which they we're travelling to a police station, and then climbed on to the roof, from which they dropped, unharmed, as the van went on at 25 miles an hour. They were recaptured seven weeks later. On March 4, 1946, Dugan was one of thirty prisoners being brought from Long Bay Gaol to the Darlinghurst police station in a prison tram. Dugan cut a hole in the roof of the tram, and then he escaped with another prisoner. They were recaptured the following night, after a search in which three hundred police took part.