‘Halliday’s Leap’. Beyond the prison fence, he stripped off his cell garb to reveal the smuggled civilian clothes he was wearing underneath and caught a taxi to Brisbane’s northern suburbs, giving the driver a tip for his trouble.
After a frantic and widespread police manhunt, Halliday was recaptured four days later. Asked why he made the bold second escape, he replied: ‘A man’s liberty means everything to him. You can’t blame a man for trying.’
CYCLE OF A LIFER
Released in 1949, Halliday moved to Sydney where he worked for the Salvation Army before he began a roof repair business using sheet-metal skills he’d learned in Boggo Road. He changed his name to Arthur Dale and returned to Brisbane in 1950, where he fell in love with the daughter of a Woolloongabba snack bar operator. Halliday married Irene Kathleen Close on 2 January 1951, and the couple moved into a flat in Redcliffe, on Brisbane’s northern seaside, in 1952, mere months before Halliday made national headlines again when he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for the Southport Esplanade murder of taxi driver Athol McCowan, 23.
The case’s chief investigator, Queensland Police Detective Inspector Frank Bischof, claimed Halliday fled the scene of the McCowan murder and rushed to Sydney, where he was captured by police after shooting himself in the leg when his own .45 calibre handgun went off during a violent wrestle with a valiant Guildford storekeeper he was attempting to rob.
In a packed court, Bischof testified that Halliday confessed to the McCowan murder while recovering from his bullet wound in a Parramatta Hospital bed. Bischof claimed Halliday’s confession detailed how he slipped into McCowan’s cab in Southport that fateful night of 22 May 1952 and later held up the young taxi driver at a secluded spot at the Currumbin Lookout, further south. When McCowan resisted, Bischof claimed, Halliday battered the driver to death with his .45 calibre handgun. Bischof testified that Halliday recited a poem during his confession: ‘Birds eat, and they’re free. They don’t work, why should we?’
Slim Halliday, meanwhile, has vehemently maintained Bischof framed him for McCowan’s murder; the detailed confession – from its precise place names to its poetry – was, Halliday claimed, a figment of Bischof’s imagination.
The Courier-Mail reported on 10 December 1952, Mr Halliday ‘caused a stir in court when Bischof said Halliday had told him, “I killed him.”
‘Halliday sprang to his feet,’ the report stated. ‘And, leaning over the dock rail, shouted, “That’s a lie.”’
Halliday maintained that on the night of McCowan’s murder he was in Glen Innes in the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales, some 400 kilometres away.
Frank Bischof would go on to become Queensland Police Commissioner from 1958 to 1969, resigning amid widespread allegations of corruption. He died in 1979. Before being sentenced to life in prison, Halliday declared from the dock: ‘I repeat, I am not guilty of this crime.’
Outside court, Halliday’s wife, Irene Close, vowed to stand by her man.
BLACK DAYS IN THE BLACK PETER
In December 1953, after another failed escape attempt, Halliday was dropped inside Boggo Road’s notorious Black Peter, an underground solitary confinement cell, a relic harking back to Brisbane’s barbaric and bloody penal colony past. Halliday survived 14 days in searing December heat, sparking fierce public debate over modern methods of prisoner rehabilitation.
‘So Halliday has been given solitary confinement,’ wrote L.V. Atkinson of Gaythorne to The Courier-Mail on 11 December 1953. ‘The miserable caged wretch, for instinctively seeking his freedom, is to be penalised to the fullest, foulest extent of our medieval prison system? The principle of modern legal punishment cannot allow the infliction of human torture.’
Halliday emerged from Black Peter an urban legend. The schoolyard kids of 1950s Brisbane didn’t whisper tales of Ned Kelly and Al Capone over their morning tea Anzac biscuits, they told tales of ‘The Houdini of Boggo Road’.
‘His knowledge of buildings, rooftops and tools, combined with his viciousness and daring, make him the jail’s most closely watched prisoner,’ wrote the Sunday Mail. ‘Detectives who have known him through his years of housebreaking say he can climb walls like a fly. Probably, Halliday will never stop trying to escape. Police who know him say he will have to be watched every minute of his life sentence, which, if he lives to be an old man, means another 40 years at least of maddening existence behind the red brick walls of Boggo Road.’
For the next 11 years of his sentence, Halliday was strip-searched three times a day. The only clothing allowed in his