Killer memory key to prison break

Carolyn Wilkinson has written the biography of Daniel Heiss, explaining how he escaped from Darwin prison twice. Source: Northern Territory News

ONE of the Northern Territory's most notorious murderers escaped from prison by memorising every tooth on a cell key - and then copying it.

Daniel Heiss, who was serving life for killing a 22-year-old tradie, engaged guards at Darwin prison in small talk.

As they chatted, he made a mental note of the details of the master cell key hanging from every officer's belt.

Heiss filed a rough copy from a piece of metal, smothered it in Blu Tack and put it gently into a cell door to get a more accurate impression.

It took him more than three months.

The plan almost came apart when a known informer - known as a ''dog'' inside - saw him ''fiddling with a lock'' and dobbed him in to guards.

Heiss used the key to open his own cell and then free fellow murderer Shane Baker.

They got out of the prison complex by scaling three barbed-wire perimeter fences.

Baker suffered a bad wound going over the final fence and was recaptured within a few days.

But Heiss was on the run for 12 days.

Many rural women fled into town after it was reported he was living in the bush near Howard Springs on the outskirts of Darwin.

He was finally caught coming out of an empty house on Gunn Point Rd.

The dramatic story of the 1995 escape is told for the first time in his girlfriend Carolyn Wilkinson's biography Blood on the Wire.

''I wrote the book because it's a bit of Territory history,'' she said yesterday.

''The story of the escapes has never been told. Nobody knows what really happened.''

Heiss had escaped four years earlier by pretending to be seriously ill and using bedsheets and electrical cords to abseil to the ground from a secure fourth-floor ward at Royal Darwin Hospital.

He was caught the following day minutes after almost drowning in a mud pool.

Ms Wilkinson, a keen astrologist, was a childcare worker when she wrote to Mr Heiss after his second escape.

He was in the isolation block at Darwin prison.

''I wanted his birth time and place,'' Ms Wilkinson said.

''I wanted to know what was driving this man over the wire.

''I wanted to learn what was wrong.''

Her friendship with Mr Heiss has caused her anguish over the past 17 years.

''A lot of people who didn't truly know me were critical,'' she said.

''But I have got some support.''

Heiss, 48, was released in mid-2011 after serving 23 years for shooting dead Peter Robinson because he wanted his rifles.

He now lives on the outskirts of Darwin and works as a landscape gardener and artist.

For more see the Northern Territory News

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