‘Can I ask you a question, kid?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you think I killed him?’
I don’t know. What I know is nothing killed Slim. What I know is he never gave up. The darkness didn’t kill him. The cops didn’t kill him. The screws didn’t kill him. The bars. The hole. Black Peter didn’t kill him. I guess I’ve always figured if he was a murderer then his conscience might have been the thing that killed him during those black days down in the hole. But his conscience never killed him. The loss, the life that might have been, never killed him. Almost half his life spent inside and he can still smile when I ask if he’s a murderer. Houdini was locked in a box for thirty-six years altogether and he came out alive. The long magic. The kind of magic trick that takes thirty-six years for the rabbit to stick his head up out of the hat. The long magic of a human life.
‘I think you’re a good man,’ I say. ‘I don’t think you’re capable of killing a man.’
Slim takes his smoke from his mouth. He leans across the table. His voice is soft and sinister.
‘Don’t you ever underestimate what any man is capable of,’ he says.
He leans back in his chair.
‘Now show me this article.’
QUEENSLAND REMEMBERS: NO CHANCE TOO SLIM FOR THE HOUDINI OF BOGGO ROAD
He was regarded as the most dangerous prisoner in the British Commonwealth, the master escapologist they called ‘The Houdini of Boggo Road Gaol’, but Arthur ‘Slim’ Halliday’s greatest trick would be walking out of prison a free man.
A church orphan who lost both his parents at the age of 12, Slim Halliday began his predestined life of crime when he was imprisoned for four days for jumping trains en route to the shearing job in Queensland that might well have kept him on the straight and narrow. Halliday was a seasoned 30-year-old conman and housebreaker by 28 January 1940, when he made his first escape from Boggo Road Gaol’s notorious Number 2 Division.
SLIM’S PICKINGS
Houdini Halliday conjured his first magic escape by scaling a section of the prison wall that became known as ‘Halliday’s Leap’, an observation blind spot invisible to guards in surrounding watchtowers. Despite public criticism over the strength of prison security after the one-man escape, this section of the prison wall remained unchanged.
It was little surprise to the Brisbane public, then, when it was revealed that in a subsequent escape, on 11 December 1946, Halliday climbed over a corner wall of the prison workshops, a mere 15 yards from the now mythical ‘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 cell was his pyjamas and slippers. Two officers escorted him everywhere. His studies were cancelled. Additional locks were fitted to his cell, D9, and additional locks were fitted to D wing. Boggo Road’s Number 5 yard was converted to a maximum security yard where Halliday could move at daytime within the confines of a steel mesh cage. Only on weekends was a single prisoner allowed inside the cage with him to play a game of chess. He was not allowed to speak to other prisoners for fear he would pass on his endless escape strategies.
On 8 September 1968, Brisbane’s Truth newspaper reported on Halliday nearing the age of 60 with an article headlined: ‘BROKEN KILLER TALKS TO NO ONE’.
‘The gleam has gone out of