Slim keeps scribbling across his page. He drags on his smoke and his cheeks compress and I can see the shape of his skull, and his short back and sides with a flat top haircut makes him look like Frankenstein’s monster. It’s alive. But for how long, Slim?
‘Slim.’
‘Yes, Eli.’
‘Can I ask you a question?’
Slim stops writing. August stops too. They both stare at me.
‘Did you kill that taxi driver?’
Slim offers a half-smile. His lip trembles and he adjusts his thick black spectacles. I’ve known him long enough to know when he’s been hurt.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, dropping my head, placing my pen’s ballpoint back on the letter page. ‘There’s a feature in today’s paper,’ I say.
‘What feature?’ Slim barks. ‘I didn’t see anything on me in The Courier today?’
‘Not The Courier-Mail. It was in the local rag, the South-West Star. They had one of those “Queensland Remembers” yarns. Huge piece it was. It was about the Houdini of Boggo Road. They talked about your escapes. They talked about the Southport murder. It said you could have been innocent. It said you might have gone away for twenty-four years for a crime you didn’t—’
‘Long time ago,’ Slim says, cutting me off.
‘But don’t you want people to know the truth?’
Slim drags on his cigarette.
‘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