It looks like Henri Charrier, aka Papillon, escaped from Devil’s Island but wound up being imprisoned again in Venezuela before being freed by judicial means.
Have there been any escapees from prison who died free (let’s assume they weren’t re-captured and then later freed at the end of their sentence)? Let’s exclude escaped POWs from this conversation, and let’s also exclude escapees whose death was directly related to their escape (died fleeing police in a car chase; shot by guards; etc.).
I nominate Frank Morris who, along with the Anglin brothers, famously escaped from Alcatraz and was never heard from again. I met an ex-Alcatraz inmate at Alcatraz and he said the he believes they lived; he said the Anglins were from the swamps of Florida and it’s likely the three made their way to Florida, disappeared into the swamps and lived off the land. If Morris is still alive he’d me in his early 80’s.
From this article, thousands of prisoners escape every year. Over the past 50 years, that number is probably in the hundreds of thousands. The chances that every one of them were recaptured seems very, very remote.
On another note though-
Holy cow. 2 percent is a lot. Thats some pretty lousy imprisoning there.
If you’re asking about federal prisoners however, it might be possible that no one ever escaped without recapture, from that article only ONE person out of a possible 120,000 escaped from federal prison in a 4 year period as of 2001, and he was recaptured. Now thats pretty good imprisoning.
Though he’s still alive at 87 and so one can’t quite say with certainty, it’s likely that the Soviet spy George Blake, who escaped from Wormwood Scrubs in 1966, will be a high-profile example of someone succeeding in doing so. Of course, he’s a somewhat special case in that once he reached the USSR his whereabouts were well known, but he was beyond the reach of the British authorities.
In another UK case, Ronnie Biggs could have presumably remained free in Brazil if he hadn’t voluntarily returned to the UK to give himself up after 35 years. Again his whereabout were eventually completely unconcealed, but he could not be extradited.