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This is retrieved
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Ty Conn
MASTER JAIL BREAKER MEETS
END OF THE LINE
By Gary Dimmock
TORONTO -- In the end, there
was nothing romantic about Ty Conn's flight from justice.
Not his bloodied T-shirt that
lay on the floor of a filthy basement apartment, flies swarming
around. And not the grief-contorted face of his mother emerging
from this city's morgue after nodding before the body of her
dead son.
The mother of the fugitive
bank robber hopes the story of her son, particularly its ending,
will help others from straying into a life of crime.
Mary Chamberlain, a bus driver
in Belleville, will never shake the look of fear in her son's
face when he visited her small, tidy apartment the morning after
scaling the walls of Kingston Penitentiary.
Behind the modern-day Houdini
and good looks, polite bandit of the headlines, stood a frightened
32-year-old man raised in prisons since age 16 and now on the
run.
``There was never this idea
that he was going to move somewhere and live happily ever after,''
Ms. Chamberlain said yesterday. ``There was nothing wonderful
about any of it. We knew all along that it was serious. You can
never imagine how afraid another person is,'' she said.
Her son, career bank robber
and noted escape artist, was so afraid of staring down 47 years
that he shot himself to death as heavily-armed, commando-trained police
closed in Thursday night.
They told him to surrender
and that they didn't want to hurt him. Under no circumstances,
he said, was he going back to the toughest prison in the country.
The well-mannered and educated
convict often said prison offered him little hope of turning his life
around.
Prison officials noted his
above-average intelligence, evidenced by a series of 1995 tests,
but he said they still treated him with little respect, and promised
him no semblance of a future.
Sadly, his mother said it was
his famed exploits on the run that prompted officials to open doors --
even the warden, Monty Burke, pledged to help him change his
life.
``Those opportunities only
came in the last couple of weeks. Before that there was nothing
for him. It was a dead end.''
In the presence of her other
son, Max, Ms. Chamberlain seemed remarkably philosophical for
a grieving parent.
``I truly hope that a positive
light comes from all of this. That's what we all want -- something
positive. If his story can touch someone, even if it's someone
we don't even know, then that will be positive,'' she said.
The dead fugitive's brother
Max also hopes another's life will turn for the better once they
realize the life of a romantic gangster is bound for certain
failure, or in this case, even suicide.
For two weeks, he and his family,
worried about Ty Conn's next day at large, a team of OPP detectives
tracking his every step -- from his secret visit to his mom's,
to boosting a car, stealing a shotgun and then robbing the same
bank he held up after escaping Collin's Bay Penitentiary in 1991.
Then, on Thursday night, they
tracked him to a filthy basement apartment in a quiet, tree-lined
Toronto neighbourhood. He had been staying at the flophouse with
two women, one of them a part-time stripper and ex-girlfriend.
Both women have befriended inmates in the past, once winning
the heart of a Toronto Jail inmate who wrote in an April love
letter, ``Will you marry me, Bunny?''
A series of handwritten prison
letters litter the floor, strewn with piles of clothing and garbage.
A pair of men's running shoes, presumably worn by Ty Conn, had
been placed upside down on a kitchen table, on it a black address
book and cigarette rolling machine. In the bedrooms, mattresses
were plunked on the floor.
Neighbours who met Mr. Conn
over the past week were struck by his politeness, thought nothing
of his ever-present duffel bag and never connected him to his
prison mug shot featured daily in newspapers.
The fugitive, considered cunning
on both sides of the law, had altered his appearance by shaving
his head and wearing blue-coloured contact lenses.
Sometime on Thursday evening,
a recently-paroled inmate and acquaintance of both Mr. Conn and
his ex-girlfriend tipped the police. Minutes before a police
tactical unit surrounded the two-storey home, it is believed
the same man alerted tenants in the upstairs apartment to get
out.
``Do me a favour, get out of
the house,'' the man told tenant Pam Houston, who, after rushing
out her two children, aged 6 and 10, peered into a basement apartment
window, yelling, ``What's going on?''
There was no answer. Minutes
later, police were pleading for Mr. Conn to surrender. He requested
to speak to a CBC-TV journalist he had met five years ago, but
got an associate producer on the line instead.
It was during this conversation,
that Mr. Conn, after weighing more years of bleak prison life,
shoved a gun into his chest and squeezed its trigger.
Mr. Conn found life behind
bars so difficult that he had been seeing a prison psychiatrist
to help him cope. He told parole board members in 1995 that he
never expected to be released and submitted
no supporting plan.
He had been transferred to
Kingston Penitentiary from Millhaven Penitentiary in May 1998
after prison officials learned his life was apparently in danger.
Mr. Conn, spending his hours reading everything from survival
guides to banking industry reports, had fully expected his stay
at Canada's most sinister prison to be temporary. A plan to transfer
him to a less forbidding institution in the fall was cancelled
after prison intelligence reports showed another inmate would
have made his presence difficult.
Some seven months later, Mr.
Conn, who was serving a 47-year sentence for a series of armed robberies,
some staged after escaping prison, took matters into his own
hand, and concentrated less on dull routines and more on breaking
out.
His escape was all the more
daring for the prison's chief intelligence officer had warned
about his plan as early as six months ago.
It is an escape that has earned
his name and his homemade scaling gear a place in the prison
museum. Mr. Conn, who prided himself on
the fact that he never
injured anyone else during his crimes, had begun writing his
autobiography in recent years. It is an account of a 16-year-old
boy, after years of foster homes, started robbing banks like
the old-fashioned gangsters he idolized. It is also a story he
will never finish.
His shooting death and the
events leading to it are now the focus of Special Investigations
Unit, a civilian-led agency that probes any death during a police
action.
Reading was one of Mr. Conn's
passions and he spent hours upon hours in prison poring over
what books he could get his hands on. So
important was reading that
during his last flight from prison, again
surrounded by police, he
peacefully gave up on the condition that his glasses, which he
had broken, get fixed.
He wanted to be sure that when
back behind bar he could see his books.
Those who want to send his
grieving family flowers are asked instead to donate to the Kingston
Penitentiary library.
``We wanted something that
would be beneficial to the inmates.
That's what he would have wanted,''
Ms. Chamberlain said.
Her fugitive son who charmed
the nation will likely live on in legend, larger perhaps in death
than in his daring, yet sad life.
(This report first appeared
in the Ottawa Citizen, currently the most influential newspaper
in Canada.)
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Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell
