It was fifty years ago Sunday that fourteen inmates escaped from the then-newly opened Millhaven Institution Maximum Security prison.
The importance of the event even inspired the Tragically Hip’s hit song “38 years old” released in 1990. It was July 10, 1972, though – not 1973 as in the song, when 14 inmates, not 12, cut a hole in the fence following an evening softball game.
The ensuing manhunt over the course of a few months still remains burned in the memories of many who remain in the area today.
Theresa Miller lived in a farmhouse near Napanee at the time with her children and when she saw her son bounding towards the house with a strange man just days after the escape, she knew it meant trouble.
“He got to the door. I tried to hold the door from the sun porch and he got it pushed open a wee bit and he said ‘I’m not going to hurt anyone, but I would like something to eat, please,” said Miller.
She found out later the man at her door was Richard “Buddy” Smith, convicted of seven counts of armed robbery.
She says he had been hiding in the barn on her property before being spotted by her son and his friend.
As her recollection goes – after feeding him sandwiches and pie, Miller snuck away to call the police. She says he took the phone away from her – and told the authorities that he was ready to go – and go he did, pie still in hand.
“When the police arrived they arrested him in our yard. My children and I all say he was arrested in the yard. There was stories he was arrested in the house and dropped his pie … When he got the handcuffs on him he gave a flick, flicked it up in the air and opened his mouth and caught it,” recalled Miller with a chuckle.
Just 15 years old at the time, local amateur historian Steven Silver remembers the time well.
“I was excited. I wanted to catch one of them so bad. I wanted dad to get me a .22 rifle and I could sit out– he says no, he says no guns, no nothing, he said if you see one of these guys, you call me or you call the police,” said Silver.
That’s because it was serious business.
Some among the group of escapees had convictions for murder, robbery, break and enter and most of them had multiple charges to their name.
“There was a sense of uneasiness , like, in any rural areas at all, it was ‘well, you hear any noise, could that be them?” he said of the community at that time.
A sentiment echoed by miller and her family.
“My children were… were so… they didn’t like to go to bed at night, for fear something would happen during the night,” she said.
It took until November that year to catch them all, the last of whom was Sreto Dzambas, caught and imprisoned in Yugoslavia.
Documentation says he escaped there in 1976, and was never heard from again.
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