Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [53]
The last attempted escape of the year was wholly unsuccessful. In the early morning of 18th September 1871, William Heaps followed Patrick Burke’s methodology. He had managed to secret a small knife in his single room. He used it to saw first through a window bar in his room in Block 3, and then to take off the end of his wooden bedstead, using that as a lever to try and bend aside the weakened bar. The noise of wood splintering against iron alerted the attendants, who found that Heaps had failed to make much impression on the ironwork. What they did discover, though, was a pile of clothing readied for the escape, which Heaps had managed to hide together with the knife under materials that he used for painting. He was a talented artist, and had been allowed to paint in his room during the day. His requests to the attendants not to disturb his materials or finished works had been used as cover to conceal his contraband underneath them. Attendant Samuel Rawson – later to become Broadmoor’s Chief Attendant – was cautioned for his judgement and his lack of vigilance.
Heaps was twenty-four, of no fixed abode, and had been in and out of institutions since he was a child. Sentenced to five years for housebreaking near Gloucester, he had self-harmed in prison and come to Broadmoor a little earlier in 1871. He was a painter by trade, and so in the Asylum he had been set to work retouching the decoration. Despite his new surroundings, he continued to self-harm, and was also destructive, so when the Broadmoor doctors discovered that he was calmed by painting with oils on canvas, he was encouraged to spend more time at his hobby. After he was discharged in 1874, he maintained a rootless life, spending as much time in prisons or asylums as he did in wider society, and it was perhaps of little surprise when he arrived back at Broadmoor in 1888, five years into a ten year stretch for theft. This time he stayed for three years before he was discharged, apparently sane, to finish his sentence in Parkhurst. It was another false dawn: Heaps’s die had long been cast. The last time that Broadmoor heard of him, in 1897, he was back in a county asylum.
The escape attempts of 1871 had proved that any weaknesses in supervision by the staff might still be punished, even inside the more secure institution that Broadmoor had become. Orange appears to have placed little blame on his staff for these occasional incidents. The only edict issued from the Superintendent during the year was to remind his attendants of a regulation decreeing that whenever a patient had been granted more than one set of clothes, all but that in use should be locked away. This regulation had been introduced after David McLane’s flight in 1868; the only exception to it was within Block 2, the privilege block. No Block 2 patient ever troubled Victorian Broadmoor with an attempt to escape. There were systems in place to ensure constant supervision otherwise, and Orange obviously felt that the other escapes of the year had been down to unforeseen cunning rather than bad practice. A similar view would have been formed about the next example, some fifteen months after Heaps, when Thomas Cathie Wheeler succeeded in eluding the attendants.
Wheeler would become the last pleasure man in this story to try and escape. Born in 1824, as a young man he had shown no signs of mental illness. This changed when he was in his twenties, after he had travelled to South America and returned to England showing signs of profound character change. His family sent him first to Bethlem and then