THREE MURDERERS ESCAPE

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 86, 2 July 1927, Page 13

THREE MURDERERS ESCAPE

ONE RECAPTURED IN BED One of the murderers who escaped from Belfast Gaol recently was recaptured in bed in Belfast. He was William Gonlon, a United States citizen, who is believed to have been the directing brain of the escape. For some days a thorough watch had been kept on certain districts in the Falls Road area of Belfast, where a suit of prison clothes and three cars were discovered last Tuesday.

Conlon was traced to a house in Leeson Street, in the Springfield Road area, a working-class neighbourhood with rows and rows of two-storey houses. Cordons were drawn round the street, which was closed at both ends by parties of constabulary, while other police were posted to prevent any possibility of escape by the back, or through houses on the opposite side of the street.

It was about 5 o’clock when the house was entered by a small force of constables. who, going upstairs, found Conlon asleep. He wakened to find himself surrounded, and at once realised that resistance was useless. He was permitted to dress himself, and was then taken off to the cells.

Conlon was one of three men sentenced to penal servitude for life for the murder of William McDowell on

September 3, 1920. Of the three convicts still at liberty, two received life sentences for complicity in the same

crime, while the third, Edward Thornton, was sentenced to twelve years for cutting a girl’s throat in a train.