DARING ESCAPE FROM PRISON.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXI, Issue 2504, 28 July 1888, Page 6 (Supplement)

DARING ESCAPE FROM PRISON.

Edward Wicks, a notorious character, who had been locked up for assaulting the polico, made a daring escape from the Warrington police cells. He was confined in a nell next to the day yard, into which he was allowed to go at will. Shortly after dusk it was ascertained that he had escaped. He had wrenched a plunk bod, twelve feet lonir and weighing three hundredweight, from its fastenings, and dragged it from the cell. Then, placing it against a wall twenty feet high, he managed to climb to tho top, whence ho dropped into tho street and tfot clear away. Later in tho evening the police surrounded a house in which tho man was known to be hiding. An entrance was effected, and it win "then found that tho prisoner had, by means of a ladder, taken refuge in an attic, drawing tho ladder up after him. Standing on tbo trap-door, he defied the police to take him. After some difficulty, tho police burst the trapdoor open with a pole, and the prisoner then surrendered. Tho river Mersey runs past the back of the house, and the prisoner's friends had arranged to take him off in a boat as soon as it beoame sufficiently dark. Wicks was brought before the magistrates, and sentenced to three months' imprisonment, with hard labour.