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Prisons and probation

Interview
'You start getting bitter': what I learned
from 43 years in prison
Simon Hattenstone and Eric Allison
John Massey, the UK’s longest-serving prisoner, talks about his
four escapes and how the prison system has changed

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 John Massey, outside Pentonville prison in London where he carried out an escape in 2012. Photograph: David
Levene for the Guardian

Sat 28 Jul 2018 05.00 EDT

765

J
ohn Massey sits in a cafe called the Breakout, opposite Pentonville
prison in north London. It’s six years since he broke out himself,
scaling the nearby prison wall with a makeshift rope and hook. He
was 64. Scotland Yard warned the public that the convicted murderer
was potentially dangerous and should not be approached. Two days later, he
was caught and sent back.

But in May this year, Massey was released; after nearly 43 years in jail, he
was the UK’s longest serving prisoner. Today, over a breakfast of bacon and
bubble and squeak, he stares at Pentonville’s walls with a mixture of relief
and nostalgia.

Massey’s is an astonishing story – one of criminality and violence, regret and

loss, humour and chutzpah, love and loyalty. This is a man who escaped

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 prison or breached licence conditions four times, in order to be with relatives
who were very ill. He paid for it by serving more than twice his original
sentence.

One night in 1975, Massey was in the Cricketers pub in Clapton, east London,
when a friend (also called John) became involved in a brawl with a bouncer,
Charlie Higgins. Massey claims that his friend was stabbed in the eye with a
broken bottle. “We were on our way out when all the trouble started. We
heard these terrible, piercing screams and I looked round and thought,
‘Where’s John?’ and he was in the middle of it. We had to go in and get him.
We took a few whacks with baseball bats and dragged him out. My
overwhelming memory of that evening is horror. Seeing my friend’s face
with his eye hanging out. People can’t do that to another human being. I was
really full of hatred and, before it could fizzle out, I went and done the deadly
damage.”

First, Massey and another friend took the injured man to hospital. “We had a
local place where we had guns stored,” he says. “As soon as we dropped him
off, we got tooled up and went back.” Massey comes to a stop. Eventually he
speaks: “Obviously I wish we hadn’t, but there we go.” Massey shot Higgins
in the chest at point-blank range with a sawn-off shotgun. At the age of 26,
he was sentenced to life for murder; the judge recommended he serve a
minimum of 20 years.

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 John Massey: ‘When people get a kicking at football, it’s hysteria – you can’t stop it. It was like
that. All you can do is curl up in a ball and try to weather the storm.’ Photograph: David Levene
for the Guardian

Today, Massey is accompanied by his sister, Jane, 10 years younger but a

dead ringer for her brother. She listens as he talks about the murder, and how
he has changed over the years. “You mellow as you get older, and obviously
you have regrets,” Jane says. “He was young and stupid. It was a moment of
madness and you can’t turn back the clock, unfortunately.” She often thinks
of the life he could have had – as a cabinetmaker or teaching carpentry in
college, “because his woodwork is second to none”.
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 Their father was a well-regarded builder, known locally as
Jack the Plasterer, who also ended up in jail for stealing
lead from a church roof. Massey’s mother struggled to
raise their six small children alone, and young John was
Guardian Today: taken into care. “I remember it clear as day,” he says. “My
the headlines, the mum was walking along a country road in Henley-on-
analysis, the
debate sent
Thames. We got to this house and a skinny, tall woman
direct to you came out with a starched wing collar. They had a little
Read more
discussion and took me into the garden, and there was
this brand new shiny red tricycle with a little boot on the
back. So I’m riding merrily around the garden and next
time I turn around, my mum’s gone. I screamed blue murder.”

From a childhood in care, Massey moved to an approved school (because he

was badly behaved), then to a borstal, because he’d started stealing, and
finally prison. Despite his skill as a carpenter, he was more committed to
crime and became an armed bank robber.

When he was sent to prison, Massey’s two oldest sisters, Jackie and Sue, who
had no criminal record, were sentenced to three years for harbouring him in
their homes. Jackie’s young son was severely disabled, while Sue had three
children, and Massey felt he owed them. Then, a few months into his
sentence, his younger brother Terry killed himself. “It battered our family,”
Massey says. “I could have saved him if I’d been there. You can’t say
goodbye, and it hurts for the rest of your life.” He promised himself that, if
his family were in trouble, he would, somehow, be there for them.

Having lost one son, Massey’s parents were terrified John would kill himself
in jail. Instead, he says, he felt emboldened. “I thought, ‘I’m not going to kill

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 myself, but it would be legitimate for me to die in
'In 1975, the combat, as it were.’ So I fought back, which was
British penal system kind of stupid, but it got me peace in the end.”
was based on
brutality and The violence dished out to prisoners in the 1970s
and 80s was extraordinary, Massey says. “In
ignorance. They
1975, the whole British penal system was based
only employed ex
on brutality and ignorance. They only employed
squaddies as screws' ex-squaddies as screws: hobnailed boots, bulging
muscles with tattoos. Everything was force.”

More than once, Massey says, he believed staff were going to beat him to
death. In one prison, a red light was kept on all night to torment him. “I
asked them to turn it off. They went, ‘No, you’re cat A [high-security]. But I
was cat A at my previous prison and I never had a red light on. I just worked
myself up and said, ‘If you don’t turn it off, I’ll smash it’ and they said, ‘Crack
on.’ So I smashed it and they called the heavy mob in. They said, ‘We’ll be in
in a minute and we’re going to break your back.’ They never stopped coming
in. They filled the whole cell.”

Football violence was then at its peak and Massey says the guards reminded
him of hooligans. “When people get a kicking at football, it’s hysteria – you
can’t stop it. It was like that. All you can do is curl up in a ball and try to
weather the storm.”

He decided there was only one way to survive: meet violence with violence.
“In Wormwood Scrubs, they used to creep about at night in carpet slippers,
picking someone to sneak in on. I could hear them because I was in the seg
[segregation unit] – the most vulnerable place, because it’s sheltered from

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 everybody else. After the first time they beat me up badly, I was terrified. But
it never happened again, because I could hear a pin drop, a rustle of paper, at
a hundred yards. I was like a cat. When I heard them coming, I’m up and
behind the door with a table leg and all of a sudden I hear one whispering to
the other, ‘Oh, that’s Massey, drop him out, he’s a lunatic.’ And they moved
on.”

Shortly before Massey’s 20 years were up, in 1994, he was told he would not
be released. He had hardly been a model prisoner, but he felt he had done his
time, acknowledging the murder and the huge suffering he had caused
Higgins’ family. He decided to take matters into his own hands. When he was
granted a home visit to see his father, who was recuperating from a stroke,
he slipped away from the two officers sent to guard him; the four of them
were in the pub – his father in his wheelchair, the prison staff playing pool –
when Massey escaped through a toilet window. He headed to Spain via a car
boot, a contact’s private plane and a night at the George V hotel in Paris.
(After his first restaurant meal out of captivity, Massey called over the maitre
d’ to tell him the food was fine but required a little more cinnamon.)

In Spain, Massey lived as a free man for nearly two years. “All the family
came over regularly. One Christmas we had nephews, nieces, grandnephews,
grandnieces – it was wonderful.” His girlfriend gave birth to a son, whom
they lost to cot death at four months. They began drinking heavily. “I went a
little bit crazy. We both did.”

One day, they were in a bar in Fuengirola and his girlfriend was crying. “It
was deserted except for three guys at the corner table. She went to the ladies
to clean herself up. She had to pass these three English guys, who were
making comments, pissed. They said, ‘Who’s upset you, darling, that cunt

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 over there?’” Massey says one of them hit him on the head with a bar stool
and that he fought back. He was convicted of grievous bodily harm. It didn’t
take the Spanish authorities long to discover he was on the run. The British
wanted him back, but the Spanish refused to deport him back to a life
sentence (there is no equivalent in Spain). After a year of legal wrangling, he
was returned to the UK.

Massey has nothing but praise for the Spanish justice system. “They’ve got a
completely different attitude. Once a year, they choose a few prisoners out of
the whole population and pardon them as a gesture of goodwill. You’d never
get that in a million years over here. And you’ve got conjugal visits, so you
can increase your family while you’re doing time. If your wife’s been nicked
with you, you can even stay in the same cell. Anything they can do to keep
the family together. Over here, it’s the opposite. If you were born in London,
they’ll put you up in Durham.”

Massey claims the Spanish agreed to deport him only on the proviso that he
could not be returned to a life sentence. “I had to go to the biggest court in
the land, in front of three judges. They decided they could circumnavigate
their constitution by putting a provision in the extradition warrant.” He has
no copy of this warrant, and is desperate to get hold of one; if Massey
breaches his current licence conditions – if he is late for an appointment, or
argues with his probation officer – he could still be recalled to prison on a life
sentence. “And I cannot get within 100 miles of getting a copy. They block
me at every twist and turn, because if I got it ratified, everybody would get
what I got.”

Massey was finally released from Sudbury prison in Derbyshire to a

probation hostel in 2007. A few months later, he was told his father was

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 dying in hospital. When he asked for an
'I’m not anti extension of his curfew to stay with him, it was
authority. I’m not an refused. He stayed at the hospital anyway, until
anarchist. I believe his father passed away four days later. Massey
in the rule of law, gave himself up and was sent back to prison.
otherwise there
It was another two and a half years before he was
would be complete
granted open conditions again, at Ford prison in
chaos' Sussex. Then, in May 2010, he discovered his
sister, Carol, was terminally ill. Refused
permission to visit her in hospital, he walked out
of the gates and stayed with her until she died two weeks later. This time, he
did not give himself up but went to live at his mother’s house in Camden,
north London, waiting for “the knock on the door”. It eventually came 10
months later, and he was returned to jail – this time, the closed, category B
Pentonville.

Is Massey as anti-authoritarian as the prison authorities say? “I’m not anti-

authority. I’m not an anarchist. I believe in the rule of law, otherwise there
would be complete chaos. I’m anti-hypocrisy.” What does he mean? “Well, I
said to one prison governor, ‘What if a member of your family had just been
in a road accident and was in intensive care, and your boss says, “Hold on, I
can’t spare you”?’ And he said, ‘I’d say, bollocks, I’m leaving.’ I said, ‘Exactly!
So what d’you have me down for?’”

In June 2012, Massey was told his mother had an aggressive brain tumour
and was near death. If he were to reach her in time, this escape had to be
more audacious than the previous three. And it was: at 64, he went over the
wall.

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 ***

We pay the bill and leave the Breakout. Massey looks healthier than when we
first met him a few years ago. My colleague Eric and I were helping
Pentonville prisoners produce a newspaper, Voice Of The Ville, and Massey
turned up to a class, pale and gaunt.

Today, he takes us round the back of the prison to show us how he escaped.
A row of terrace houses – staff accommodation – lines one side of the wall.
Massey was working in the gym and escaped using netting from a five-a-side
goal to make thin but strong rope. He says he was hurt by reports that he had
worked in the gym only as part of an escape plan. “They’ve always tried to
say that, that I’m manipulative and scheming. But I was building a new
woodwork shop where you could teach people the basics in carpentry,
plumbing and electricity, and it was actually the gym that headhunted me. I
renovated all the machines, otherwise it would have cost them seven grand.
I never even thought about escaping, at first.”

That changed when he heard his mother was ill. He knew from a stint in
Pentonville in the 70s that there was a padlocked hatch in one of the toilets
that led to the roof. He undid the padlock and hid in the gym. At 6pm, he
opened the hatch, climbed on to the roof and went over the wall.

Massey is staring at that very wall as we talk. “I released the rope too soon. It
got twisted around my wrist and as I tried to loosen it, it just slipped all the
way down. I fell 20ft.” He looks up at the barbed wire at the top. “It looks
high now. I’m terrified of heights. But when you’ve got a job to do, it’s do or
die.” He broke his foot as he hit the ground. “I almost landed at a screw’s
feet. He was walking home. His eyes were like saucers. ‘John, what the fuck

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 are you doing?’ ‘Sorry, mate,’ I said, ‘I ain’t got time to rabbit’ and I flew for
the next wall and straight over. Just froze, he did.”

Massey spent a couple of days with his mother, then moved to Kent, where
he was caught. “I was in a house where the people had just gone on holiday,
thinking I was safe. I was watching Wimbledon on the telly when the doors
burst open. So I must have been grassed.”

As he talks, a woman emerges from a house behind the prison’s wicket gate.
“What are you doing?” she asks Massey.

“I escaped from here in 2012 – oldest prisoner ever to climb that wall.”

She looks closely at him. “‘Oh my goodness,” she says.

“I know your face,” Massey says. “You were on A wing?”

“Yes, I’m a psychologist. Hello, John, you all right?”

“I’m not on the run. I was released a few weeks ago.”

“That’s good to hear,” she says.

He shows her his copy of the local paper, which has a story about his release.
“Nice to see you out,” she says.

‘Nice to see you.”

Has she got time for a group photo? “No, I’d better not,” she says. “Take care
of yourself, John.”

“And you.”

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 She leaves. For a moment, it looked to me as if Massey might get arrested for
trying to break into Pentonville prison.

***

When Massey was recaptured, the prison authorities were furious. He was
sent to the high-security Belmarsh jail, where he says he was given a tough
time. “One governor said, ‘You have upset a lot of people, Massey.’ I said, ‘It’s
nothing personal. I just wanted to see my mum.’ The governor said, ‘You
ruined a lot of lives.’ Some people got the sack because my escape was made
during a security audit.”

One morning, Massey claims, he was in the exercise yard

when two men in paramilitary uniform approached him.
“They’re the dedicated search team, the elite squad. They
called me in for a cell search. When I got back, there were
‘If I’d known, I
might not have eight of them standing outside my cell. As soon as they
taken a life’: can got me in, they steamed in, hit me from behind first, then
prisoners defuse got me on the floor and carried on. They must have been
their own
disputes? beating me for five minutes. If it wasn’t for my experience
and my fitness, at my age, I don’t think I would have
Read more
survived.”

When asked to comment, a Prison Service spokesperson said: “A complaint

by Mr Massey was investigated by HMP Belmarsh, the police and the Prisons
and Probation Ombudsman, and no further action was taken.”

Still, Massey says prison is not as violent as when he was first locked up. He
was regularly beaten then, and chemically coshed. “Once, a doctor broke a

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 needle in me when I was struggling – like a horse needle. It doesn’t knock
you out, it just immobilises you. I remember lying on the floor of this padded
cell, staring up at the ceiling. I couldn’t drag my eyes off it.” What was the
justification? “Unmanageable. They wanted me in body belts, and if you
were struggling, everything had to be done by force.”

These days, he says, the brutality tends to be more psychological. Mental

health problems, self-harm and drug addiction have all increased. Ironically,
Massey believes this is due to the introduction of a zero tolerance policy on
drugs. He talks about a particular category A prison in the 70s: “The
governor was an Old Etonian sergeant major type. He’d walk around the
prison. That was when people were having a bit of puff. So he’d open the cell
door and there’d be six or eight people sitting in a cell laughing, the music’s
on, having a good time, nobody wanted to fight. He’d open the door and go,
‘Mmmm, smells interesting! Have a good evening, chaps.’ As long as you
weren’t smashing the gaff up or hurting people, he didn’t give a rat’s arse. He
ran a smooth prison.”

That all changed when mandatory drug tests (MDTs) were introduced in
1994, Massey says. “That’s when heroin started creeping in, because
cannabis stays in the system for 28 days and heroin only three. They started
going for heroin at weekends, when there are no drug tests. So there aren’t
enough smackheads outside, and you want to start creating them inside?
Now they want to stamp on the heroin, so inmates are on synthetic
psychedelic drugs like spice that don’t show up on MDTs. They lost the war
on drugs when they started it.” If government ministers really want to know
how to run a safe prison, he says, they should ask people like him. “Who’s

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 the expert: the man who’s done 43 years, or the man who’s done the fast-
track and read the textbook?”

Now that he’s been released, Massey has no

When you see the
intention of being recalled. He thinks he would
immensity of what have struggled to adapt to the outside world
you’ve done, the without the occasional taste of life on the
hugeness of what outside: “Having the odd break kept me sane.”
you’ve lost and
When he is allowed to leave his hostel, will he
destroyed, it
move in with his sister? God, no, Jane says. “It’s
smashes you to bits brilliant having him out, but that wouldn’t be
good for either of us. It’s important he has his
own little flat, because I don’t want to get on his
nerves and he doesn’t want to get on mine. He’s a messy bastard and I’m
tidy.”

Does Jane wish he’d quietly served his time and been released 20 years ago?
“Yes, 100%. But I knew his reasons.”

As for Massey, of course he has regrets, and none bigger than the night he
took the life of Charlie Higgins. “When you can see the immensity of what
you’ve done, the hugeness of what you’ve lost and destroyed, it smashes you
to bits.” He also has regrets about the way he behaved in jail. “There comes a
time when you start getting bitter and resentful, and you’re making them
right about the need to lock you up.”

The one thing he has no regrets about is escaping to see

his family when they needed him – even if the

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 consequence was an extra 23 years. “Soon after I saw
Why has serial
offender Terry Mum, she started losing her memory, so I got in at the
Ellis swapped a life right time. I had a few precious moments with her, and
of crime to go they can never steal those off me.”
straight?

Read more He is loving life on the outside. He is down at his local

gym every morning, where by chance he works out
alongside former head of the Crown Prosecution Service and shadow Brexit
secretary Keir Starmer. He recently spent an hour with Starmer, telling him
his story – and why he’s desperate to remain a free man. “I’m as determined
to stay out of jail as any man could be. I’m not going to live as long as I
served, and I’ve got a lot to repay people.”

If you would like your comment to be considered for inclusion on

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weekend@theguardian.com, including your name and address (not for
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Topics
Prisons and probation
Crime / Family / UK criminal justice / features

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