Original subtitles

I had no idea that my whole world was going to be turned upside down.

It was corruption. I knew I was being set up.

I did not touch these drugs. I did not have anything to do with these drugs.

Knife fights were a daily event.

Killing was a way of life.

In my mind, there was always only one thought.

Escape. Escape.

Escape. It's early in August of 1985.

I'd just turned 32.

I was the proprietor of the Kathmandu Writing Academy.

Cheryl was my wife of 16 years.

I thought I was blessed.

I had the world at my feet and I had a life that most people don't have.

There's a saying that today's king can be tomorrow's goat.

And I didn't realise that tomorrow was fast approaching.

There was my wife, my daughter, Doggie and myself.

Doggie was a guy that I met in Kathmandu who first came around to rent horses to

go on trips.

He'd just become a friend, you know. The friendship slowly grew over the years.

Doggie's business was an antique dealer. He used to smuggle them out of the

country. But not wink -wink, you know.

What he did to get them out was none of my concern.

We arrived in Bali at about 11 o 'clock at night.

So we went through the customs, immigration, jumped into a taxi and

Ubud where we were to stay.

We were staying at a place called the Fibra Inn.

There's nothing that was unusual with the trip. Everything seemed normal.

We got to where we were going to stay.

Doggie went straight to his room.

We put our luggage in.

We put my daughter to sleep.

And then Cheryl and I sat out on the balcony.

We were talking about the beauty of Bali, the beauty of the sky that night.

And we had a little bit of a chat, wound down from the flight, and went to bed.

I had no idea that...

that my whole world was going to be turned upside down.

We'd only been in bed for about no more than an hour.

The door was just kicked in.

Without any warning, these guys were bursting through.

And I thought, these guys are coming in to rob us.

My first thought was to defend myself.

my wife and my daughter.

And they've pushed me against the wall, and then they're pointing guns at me.

There's an avalanche of feelings that go through you.

One is fear, one is shock, one is disbelief, and one is

the fascination of, like, looking at a gun, thinking, if it does go off, will I

see the bullets come out?

And then I heard my wife scream.

At first the screaming had me making these mental pictures of someone hurting

her or attacking her.

What's happening?

It's okay.

Take some money.

Nobody needs to get hurt.

Nobody needs to get hurt.

There was my wallet over there. There was my passport there. Take it all.

Don't hurt anybody.

It's okay. It's okay. It's okay.

Take what you need.

And then this quiet gentleman walked in.

Well, he said, my name's Captain Somerjee.

We don't want your money.

You are the police.

And we've come to arrest you.

OK, then, I believe these are policemen. Now, what is the problem?

And he said, we'll talk about it at the police station.

And they just put me away.

The first thing that went through my mind is there's been a mix -up here.

They've obviously come into the wrong room and have arrested the wrong person.

I was confident that I'd done nothing wrong.

They're going to take me to the police station, they're going to realise your

mistake, and they're going to have to run me back.

I thought the whole thing would be sorted out in a matter of hours.

Once we arrived at the police station, I seen Doggie.

I thought, what is he doing here? What am I doing here?

What is happening?

And he shook me and said, I don't know, I don't know.

So I went into a room

and I said, and I said, what's that?

And then the policeman played this little pantomime, you know.

Oh, okay, name.

And then the pantomime went on.

And once we'd filled out the form, they put fingerprints on the back of the form

that we had just filled in.

I had not the slightest inkling of why I was being arrested,

why I was being fingerprinted.

We were taking it to ourselves.

There was no mats, there was no seats, there was no mattresses, it was just

dirt, grot, filth.

But my surroundings didn't bother me at all compared to what was going through

my mind.

Why am I here? What's happened?

Where's Cheryl? Is she safe?

Those few hours seemed to be the longest hours.

At about 10 o 'clock they came to my cell.

And they took me back up to Udward.

I thought, what could this be? Could it be a dead body up there? Could there be

gold up there? Could there be, you know, a million things could be up there.

I had absolutely no inclination as to what was waiting for me.

We got to the Fibre Inn.

Doggy was standing outside of it.

I know that I'm innocent.

I know I've done nothing wrong.

Has he done something? Has he done something that somehow is affecting me?

What's happening here, mate?

What's happening? And again he said... I don't know anything, mate.

I don't know anything.

If you've done something wrong, mate... Don't drag me in.

No, don't drag me in.

I've got a lot to lose here and I've looked over at my family.

Captain Somergy along with a number of other police, they've got these statues

out and they're laying out on the veranda on the porch.

And he said to me, What do you know about this?

Never seen this statue before.

Never seen this statue before.

And he said, don't fool with me, don't kid with me, don't play games.

These statues were filled with hashish.

The minute he said hashish, he thought of Doggie.

I know that Doggie was a smoker.

So I thought, well, this is Doggie's story here. This is Doggie's problem.

But at the moment...

There's nothing I can really do about it. Doggie's right here with me.

And I thought to myself, well, I've never seen this before.

I've never touched this before.

There's no way that this can be tied in with me.

I'll get this all sorted out.

So once we got back to the police station, my wife came.

She looked just so fresh, so new, so clean, so radiant.

I thought, well, I'm such a lucky man, you know.

I said, what's happening here? And she said, I don't know, but Doggy has been

released.

And I think they're going to take you in and release you now.

And I thought, well, this is great.

I was elated.

Because I did not touch these drugs. I did not have anything to do with these

drugs. I am going home.

They took me in to talk with Captain Thummergy.

And I was 100 % confident I would be released and I would be on a plane going

home, getting out of that place, getting out of that hellhole, and leaving this

nightmare behind.

He said, this is your house.

We found it.

Now you are going to be charged.

There's a number of ways we can get out of this.

You can give me your traveller's checks.

You can give me your watch.

And we can make this a very small problem.

Or we can make it a big problem.

I was absolutely flabbergasted.

But then I thought, this whole thing is a set -up.

And in the back of my mind, I thought, how did Doggie walk?

You know, did he pay the money?

And I said, you want me to sign over traveller's checks to you so I can evade

prosecution, charges, something that I haven't done?

I mean, this is not mine. This is not right.

There's no way that I'm going to bow down and cop this corruption. I won't

these buggers.

In hindsight, if I'd known what I would have lost, lose my family, lose so much

more, I would have given them everything I had without any qualm.

I was locked up then for the next couple of days until the Australian Consul

came.

Hello, Chris.

He said to me, we've been informed that you're going to be charged with

importing hashish.

And I said, on what grounds? What evidence?

And the consulate told me that they found your fingerprints all over the

hashish.

I knew that this was an impossibility.

It was an impossibility.

So I said to the consulate, I said, look, is there a way that we can re...

Check this. We can re -examine this fingerprint thing because my

can't be on these things. It can't be.

So they took samples of my fingerprints and they sent them to a laboratory.

A week later...

The tests, when they were completed, they were negative.

They are not your prints on the hatchet.

They said these are not the same fingerprints that were found on the

They made a mistake with the cards.

And the card that had Doggie's name and all his particulars on, the policeman

put my fingerprints on his card and put his fingerprints on my card.

The fingerprints that were found on the statues belonged to Dobby.

I was over the moon. I was elated. I was just absolutely rapt.

This was the thing that they were holding me for. They'd made a mistake.

Now they've got to see that they've made a mistake and I'm free. So everything

is sweet.

And I believed that they would probably release me in the next day or two.

But things didn't turn out that way.

He explained that the police aren't prepared to release me.

They don't want to lose faith.

They don't want to lose faith, was his own words.

At that particular time, Indonesia was very hard on drugs, and death sentences

were common, life, 20 years.

There was a good chance that they would put me up for an execution.

I was angry.

I was upset.

I was scared.

I'm scared that I was going to go to jail for something that I hadn't done.

I'd lose my life, lose my family, because that was

the ultimate thing to me.

What was at stake was my life, was my freedom.

I thought, I have to do something really, really radical.

I heard that there was a Swiss guy that had gone crazy while he was in police

custody. And they put him in a mental institution for two years. And after two

years, they released him and sent him back to Switzerland.

So I thought, well, I'll just get myself committed to an asylum.

I couldn't just go crazy overnight.

So what I did is I slowly built up to it.

The place was littered with bugs and rodents of every type.

I used to put little bits of rice down so that when the cockroaches came, you

know, I could feed this one, I'd feed this one. And I got to name them all.

Now I'm building up myself to go crazy. I'm building myself up to make everyone

believe that I'm mad.

I said to my wife when I got the visit one day, She's looking at me and she

said, I'm trying to get you out, darling.

I've got this organised and that organised.

And I said, OK, darling, I've got lots of friends here.

And she started to back off, thinking there's something not quite right here

with my husband.

And I realised I could see in her eyes that she was starting to doubt my

And I was playing with the cockroach and then Captain Summerjack came up behind

her and stood behind her.

And then I grabbed the cockroach and I bit through it.

I gave it a couple of chews and swallowed it.

And I looked straight at my wife and her face dropped.

I smiled and swallowed the cockroach.

Get him in the...

Being false to her, it hurt me in many ways.

But I knew that I had to keep that facade out.

Both to keep everybody else believing I was crazy, and for her own safety.

She believed I was crazy.

The police believed I was crazy.

The embassy came and visited me.

And they said I was stark as... One evening, the police just...

open the cell, come running in, and then stab me in the bum with syringe.

And I just went out to it.

When I first came to after that, I had no idea of where I was, and I wasn't too

sure of who I was.

This was probably where I was trying to get.

Is this a hospital? Is this the asylum?

Have I got where I want to go, and do I really want to be here?

All the inmates, all the patients, they never actually lifted their feet when

they walked, but they shuffled.

And the shuffling is a side effect of the drugs that all the prisoners were

given.

So what I had to do was follow suit and act just like them and do everything

that they did.

If I wasn't shuffling, if I wasn't giggling, if I wasn't twitching and

things that all the other prisoners are doing, then obviously I'm not taking my

medication.

And if I couldn't trick them to believe that I'm taking the drugs, then straight

away they go, well, he's not mad.

It was a very thin thread.

That kept me tied to the real world.

And the longer I stayed in that institution, I knew that the thinner and

that thread would get.

So I had to get out pronto.

And it was just a stroke of luck that Doggie turned up.

I heard you're going crazy.

I was amazed.

I don't know how he got back in the country. He just appeared in the asylum.

I was in that place because of him.

What do I do? I want to kill this guy.

Do I want to punch his face in?

I'm going to get you out of here, mate.

I've come to get you. I've come to help you.

I've come to get you out.

He said to me... Check it out.

It's that wall there. And I said, yeah.

If you can get over that wall, I could be waiting there with a motorcycle.

You'd be on that motorcycle and then we'd just trade to the airport with a

passport.

He said, okay, I'll be here tomorrow morning at 10 .30. And he said, you'll

when I'm here because I'll be on the bike and I'll go beep, beep, beep, beep,

beep, beep, beep.

The minute you hear that sound, mate, you'll kick your ass over that wall.

and we'll be gone, and you can say, bye, bye, bye, Barley.

And I thought, sweet.

Good morning.

I believed that Doggie came back because of genuine guilt,

that he found it difficult to look himself in the mirror and shave, knowing

that I was the scapegoat, that I was serving time for a crime that he

Gerald paid a bribe to the nurse to let me out of the film to take me into the

exercise yard.

She said, I want to read the Bible to him.

I remember I was watching her read it and I looked up at her and I could see

young girl I first fell in love with.

She looked me in the eye.

And she said, you're not really mad, are you?

When I heard that horn, the first thing that ran through my mind was freedom.

I'm gone.

And I ran straight up the drainpipe and I was up there like a rat.

I pulled myself up along the gutter.

I ran across the apex of the roof.

And as I was running across the roof, the roof was bending, bowing.

I can't turn back.

I have to carry on.

And all I could do was just hope that the roof would support my weight if I

faster.

And I could see Doggy on the other side of the fence.

And his face was glowing. He's got a smile, you know.

Come on, Daddy!

And then it went boom.

Straight through the ceiling.

I'm so heartbroken. I'm devastated.

It was so close.

I realised I was still back in the asylum.

And I realised that the block that I'd run across was the block where they kept

the... Homicidal maniacs.

And they're the ones that generally chained up to the wall.

These guys had never been looked after.

These people were forgotten souls.

These guys were reaching out towards me and they were grabbing me and then they

were trying to bite me.

They were either trying to eat me or trying to bash me to death.

Trying to pull, tear my hair out and scratch me.

It was a terrifying moment.

I realised that if they pulled me to the ground, I'd have them all overpower me

and anything could happen, so I tried to stay on my feet.

It was just punching them, kicking them and doing all in my power just to defend

myself, to keep myself alive.

And I was hoping and praying that the nurses would hopefully come in quickly

save me.

A lawyer said to me, there's 22

witnesses against you that have seen you with drugs.

then straight away I knew, well, there's no way I'm going to walk from this.

They want my head.

I wasn't going to get the death sentence.

So that was good in that respect.

I asked the judge, could you please explain how long is a life sentence?

And the judge told me that...

Life sentence in Indonesia is life.

I will never be released and I will die in prison.

When I first arrived at Krobacan prison, it was at night time.

I'm in a prison. I'm in an Asian prison.

This is not a monastery.

There's some tough boys here, and if I'm going to survive, I've got to be every

bit as tough as them.

I was not going to be a victim. I'm already a victim by being in that

So I'm not going to be a victim.

with these prisoners and with these guards.

I was there just, it wasn't even a week, a week and a half.

And I'd had some shoes that were sent in.

And a local prisoner named Chocolate stole them.

Once you're in prison, you have to change it in a heartbeat.

All your sensitivities, all the softness, all the gentle side of you.

You have to put that all away.

And remember that in this place, only the badasses reign supreme.

And if you want to survive, you have to be a badass.

So I just walked in there. I walked straight into the guy's cell. And then I

just grabbed him and slammed him into the bars. And just kept pushing his head

into the bar.

If someone robs you once, steals from you once, don't turn the cheek and do it

second time. You go in there and thrash the out of the guy.

I didn't worry about the food. I didn't worry about the other prisoners.

In my mind, there was always only one thought.

Escape.

Escape.

Escape.

I teamed up with an Australian guy called James Cook.

who was a good little fighter.

We referred to him as the Chook.

He used to be a boxer, and you could see that he could handle himself quite

well.

And the Don, he was an Italian guy, and he was serving 18 years for heroin.

And by taking the Chook and Don with me, that would throw more confusion into

the hunt.

Basic plan was to go over the wall.

We couldn't just simply build a ladder.

We had to build a ladder that was camouflaged.

And that ladder was camouflaged underneath a rabbit hut.

To get out of the country, I needed a passport.

And I also needed money.

And I had a friend.

that helped me get those things.

He helped me get money.

He helped arrange to rent cars, place them in certain places, get the keys,

then have them smuggled into the prison to us so that we had everything ready to

go when the time was right.

I had a female passport.

And to throw everybody off, I was going to leave the country as a female.

So I thought, what I'll do is I'll leave my moustache and beard on until when I

leave. Once I'm over the wall, then I'll just rip it off real quickly and then

just go through as a girl.

And they're looking for three male fugitives.

So that was my ace up the sleeve.

The night of our escape was a rainy night.

We were all dressed up in black, our faces were blacked out.

We cut through the bars and we went out the window.

My heart was beating like a drum and it was beating...

Like, poof, poof, poof, poof, poof, poof.

It wasn't fear, it was excitement.

It was the adrenaline of, I'm off, I'm going.

I'm leaving.

I'm escaping.

We ran around to where the rabbit cage was, lifted off the roof of the rabbit

cage, which was actually a hidden ladder,

Then run to the walls with that.

Put that up against the wall.

And as the don started to go up the ladder, just at that moment, there was

crack which went right through the prison compound like a gunshot.

The ladder couldn't take their weight and broke.

And the chook, as soon as that ladder broke, he took off.

Everything went really, really quiet.

You could see the don hanging off the wires off the top of the wall.

And I said, oh no, we're caught here. You can't help but think.

But when he pulled the spotlight back, the don had climbed over and there was

nothing there.

So it was just perfect.

I raced over to where the ladder was.

And I thought, maybe I can use this to try and pull myself up into one of the

other watchtowers. I can jump straight over and drop over the other side of the

fence.

There was this adrenaline running through me. It was just thumping. It was

just... Straight up, just flicked myself straight into the tower.

And I remember standing in the shadow of the guard post.

And the guard came out.

My heart was thumping.

And then for some reason I got really calm.

There was a calmness that fell over me.

And he turned around and he walked straight past.

The little voice said, run.

Get over the wall.

Don't waste time.

Run. You're free.

Don's gone.

Chook's just vanished.

And I'm finally over the wall.

As I started to run, each breath was freedom.

I'm running, I'm running.

It was about 5 .30 when I finally got to the beach.

I was all dressed in black. My face was all black.

So I just ran straight into the water, ducked down, washed my face.

And then I came out of the water.

My face was clean.

My plans were to get my moustache off, get my beard off and change into some

girls' clothes.

so that I could wander down and get into my car.

When I've walked out of the sea, I've put my hand in the bag to grab the razor

blade.

But the razor blade, which I thought was also there, was missing.

So I went into the toilet in the shower room to this major hotel.

And I still had the tweezers with me.

I thought, well, you can pluck eyebrows, that's not a major thing, so I'll start

plucking the whiskers out of my moustache.

Everything was rushed, hurry, hurry, and I was just pulling hunks of whiskers

out until I pulled out, like I was pulling out bits of flesh too.

So that's when I decided that I'll just make my way to the car and try and cover

my face.

I had like a white Indian caftan style thing on and I had a belt.

I put the belt on my waist and it looked like a dress.

So I exited the women's toilet. I held a Bible up and headed down the

beach.

And I was quite comfortable.

Everything seemed to be rolling reasonably well.

And if anyone was watching,

It was just a tourist, another tourist.

And then just out of nowhere, this Indonesian guy has jumped up and he

would the pretty lady like to buy a statue?

And I've looked over the rim of the book and I've looked through it and I could

not believe who it was.

It was a prison guard.

And he's moonlighting, selling statues.

And I've gone, no, no, it's a prison guard. God, no, no.

And I thought, no, I can bluff this out. I can bluff this out. I'll just pull

straight past her and bluff this out.

And that would have been sweet.

But he reached over and

pulled the book down.

When he did that, then he seen my face.

And as soon as he seen my face, his whole expression changed.

And the look on his face was recognition.

And he's reached behind his back.

And once he's reached behind his back, straight away I thought he's pulling out

a weapon.

I hit him and dropped him.

And I thought, run as fast as you can.

There was this bang, bang, bang and it was bits of sand kicking up past my

So I started to zigzag down the beach.

But that's when a military police truck pulled up further up and all these guys

jumped out with their rifles and they started aiming at me and they started to

fire.

Soldiers in front.

I've got a prison guard at the back and I've got police on my right side.

So then I just turned and went straight into the water and just went under and

started swimming.

Take a big breath and go under, try and avoid the bullets and just swim, swim,

swim.

And I started trying, pulled my head up, that I could see an

outriggered canoe coming out towards me along with police.

And as I come to the surface, there was a whack on the back of my head and I

just blacked out.

Being recaptured, it was very dismal.

And they dragged me into one of the back blocks, the punishment blocks.

I knew what to expect. The guards had to beat the crap out of us to make an

example of us and use us as a deterrent to other prisoners that should they try

to escape, this is what you can expect.

I knew that I was going to get a thrashing, I knew I was going to get a

I knew I was going to get beaten bad.

I didn't realise just how bad the beating would be.

You think, well, this is it, they will beat me to death.

But I wasn't going to die there.

As the years progressed, and I only looked at myself as another prisoner,

dreamed in Indonesian, I thought in Indonesian, I only spoke in Indonesian.

Malang in Indonesian means adversity, unlucky, misfortune. So going into a

prison that has a bad name to start with, I wasn't expecting roses.

And I fought through a daily event.

Killing was a way of life. Every week prisoners were dying, getting killed.

They called me Monyet Puti or the White Monkey.

And being the white monkey, I had no gang, so I was no threat or danger to

anybody.

The assassins of Makassar had a really formidable reputation because they were

quick to kill.

The thing within the prison is if someone says, I'm going to kill you...

You don't worry about it.

If someone doesn't tell you he's going to kill you, he'll come and get you.

And that's what the assassins were known for.

They never warned you.

They just went after you and killed you.

And everything would have been good, only the head of the forces of Makassar

came into my cell one day and robbed me.

It was about six o 'clock in the morning.

I woke up to Mariso on top of me.

I could see the knife in Mariso's hand.

He's got the knife up in the air ready to push it down and he looked at my

and then at my eyes and then he was bringing it down.

I knew I had to get myself away from the death strike and I put everything I

could to push my body.

The knife then went into my chest.

It went down right through my lung and sunk into the hilt.

It was like somebody punching me really hard in the chest.

I reached up and I got my hand into his face.

And he started to scream and pull back.

And as he's pulled back, he's pulled me up on my feet.

And I was on my feet now and I thought, now I've got a chance, I'm on my feet.

I just ran out of steam, I dropped to my knees.

And I realised I can't breathe properly.

And I just blacked out.

I didn't know at the time, but I'd been stabbed in the eye, I'd been stabbed in

the lung, I'd been stabbed in the spleen, gallbladder and the intestine.

I'd been stabbed at 6 o 'clock in the morning.

At about 7 .30 they managed to get me out of the prison in the morning, get me

to the hospital.

And then once at the hospital at 9 o 'clock, the doctors declared me dead.

During that period that I was in the morgue, A death certificate was issued.

was given to the prison, and another one was sent to the Australian Embassy.

I could hear people talking. I could hear people moving.

So I was coming in and out of, like, a consciousness.

But it was like one minute I was in a cold, cold body, and the next minute I

was standing next to it looking at it.

And I kept saying to myself, cold is death, warmth is life, cold is death,

warmth is life. And I could feel the warmth coming up my arm, and then it hit

under the arm, and as the warmth, it seemed to explode under my arm, and I

like that.

And that's when they realised, at that moment, that I was still alive.

I wasn't ready to die. I wasn't afraid of death.

But I didn't want to be beaten.

And if I had let go, then it would have been weak on me of all those years of

fighting.

The beatings and the solitary confinement would have all been wasted

dead. A corpse can tell no tales, and I wasn't going to be a corpse.

They removed my spleen.

My gallbladder had been punctured.

I'd also lost sight of my left eye, so I was permanently blind in my left eye.

I'd been through hell.

I'd seen the other side. I'd seen the devil's face.

And now...

A whole new life is going to start for me.

One day, just out of the blue, the guards came in for myself.

He said, good news for you, you go home.

It was total shock.

It was total disbelief.

You know, I always swore to myself that I would escape this prison. I would

escape somehow, by hook or by crook. I would get out of the wall and be free.

I nearly cried.

But I couldn't cry in front of them.

I'd lost my innocence, my true innocence.

I think there was always a time before I went to jail that I always held

innocence and compassion for people.

It took me many, many years to build back my faith in mankind.

that as the years progress, all the anger that once dwelled within me

will leave and I can just fill my heart with a notion of patience and

understanding.

And I hope that one day the nightmares will stop.

And when that day comes, then I know that I'm fully back home.