When Sarah Pender was sentenced to 110 years behind bars in 2002 for killing two of her housemates, she knew she “didn’t want to die in prison”.
So, in August 2008, Pender, 46, escaped Rockville Correctional Facility in Indiana with the help of an officer and her former cellmate, after her appeals were exhausted.
“I had no hope left and I chose to create my own justice,” Pender, who is also known as the “female Charles Manson” wrote in an essay published in 2014.
Once on the run, Pender fled to Chicago, where she lived under the alias Ashley Thompson and worked as an estimator.
But her new life came crashing down when her story was featured on the show America’s Most Wanted – which led to her being identified by a neighbour and arrested again in December the same year.
Since returning to prison, she has maintained her innocence, and has been fighting for a new trial.
But Sarah’s not the only one with a wild prison escape story – here’s some more of the world’s most daring prison escapes.
THE KOREAN HOUDINI
There are many health benefits to yoga including increasing flexibility, which was handy for inmate Choi Gap-Bok as it helped him escape from his South Korean prison!
The 64-year-old, who was arrested in September 2012 on the suspicion of robbery, used his two decades of yoga training and a lot of ointment to squeeze through the food slot in his detention cell at a police station in Daegu.
It took him just over 30 seconds to slip through the gap that measured just 15cm by 45cm.
Choi was 50 years old at the time.
“He escaped from the prison cell in less than a minute after moving flexibly like an octopus,” a police investigator told the Korea Times.
To hide his escape, Choi also tucked his pillow under a blanket on the cell’s bed to confuse the guards into thinking he was sleeping – just like he’d seen in the film The Shawshank Redemption.
After six days on the run, he was recaptured on a rooftop about 30km away, and put in a cell with a smaller food slot.
RAMPAGE IN SYDNEY
A chair was all Jason Melbom needed to scale the fence and escape Sydney’s Long Bay Correctional Complex in August, 2023.
Once free, Melbom, 46, went on a burglary spree – stealing a knife, a car and cigarettes from multiple homes near the prison.
But things escalated when he assaulted a woman at her Little Bay home.
After breaking in, the woman, who can’t be identified for legal reasons, tried to flee, but Melbom violently assaulted and restrained her with a laptop cord, before stealing her car and then abandoning it a few doors down the road.
There, a blood-covered Melbom confronted a woman unpacking groceries in her driveway and forced her to drive him to Beverley Park, about 40 minutes away.
“I saw blood on him so I was quite scared. He told me he had just got out of jail,” the woman told Nine News shortly after the rampage.
“He did tell me he wouldn’t hurt me as long as I did what he told me to do.”
Once Melbom exited her car, the woman managed to escape while he broke into two more houses and stole a pair of ugg boots and the keys to another car before finally being arrested.
In April this year, Melbom – who was already serving a 22-year sentence for serious offences and was almost due for parole at the time of his escape – was sentenced to eight years for the rampage, with a five-year non-parole period.
Taking Melbom’s remorse into account, along with his struggles with substance abuse and mental health, Judge Tom Jones backdated the sentence, making him eligible for parole in 2029.
PARKHURST TRIO
On January 3, 1995, Matthew Williams, Keith Rose and Andrew Rodger teamed up to escape HM Prison Parkhurst on England’s Isle of Wight.
Masterminded by Williams – an attempted bomber who was serving a life sentence – the trio managed to craft a replica of the prison’s master key out of scrap metal from the facility’s workshop.
And with the help of an improvised ladder they’d built under the noses of the prison’s guards, they escaped to a nearby town where they aimed to hotwire a plane in order to fly back to the mainland.
But after complications starting the aircraft, the plan was abandoned and they holed up in a garden shed.
Five days later, the trio were caught when an off-duty prison officer recognised them, and they were all given an additional two years in prison.
