Prisoner used laxatives and butter knife to escape
An Australian inmate who used laxatives to lose more than two stones in weight so he could squeeze through a hole in a prison wall had been frustrated by the indefinite sentence he was serving, a judge said today.
Robert Cole, 37, spent three days on the run from police in January after slipping his 8st 11lb frame through a 6-inch wide hole he had chiselled with a butter knife in the window frame of a hospital wing at Sydney’s Long Bay Jail.
Cole, who had been receiving psychiatric treatment, spent three weeks scraping the brickwork near the window bars to widen the space, the New South Wales state District Court Judge Roger Dive said.
Dive today sentenced Cole to two years and two months imprisonment after he pleaded guilty to a charge of escape. The sentence was backdated to his recapture on January 21.
When he escaped, Cole had been serving an indefinite sentence in the prison hospital after a jury found him not guilty of armed robbery in 2003 on the grounds of mental illness.
Dive accepted Cole was “very frustrated” at the time of his escape, as “he did not have a definite date of release and no apparent treatment plan”.
