20 Famous Prison Breakouts Still Studied Today

In December 2000, seven inmates overpowered nine civilian maintenance supervisors and four correctional officers at the maximum-security Connally Unit in Kenedy, Texas. Stealing uniforms, cash, and 14 firearms, they drove away in a prison maintenance truck.

In February 1864, 109 Union officers escaped from Richmond's notorious Libby Prison through a 57-foot subterranean tunnel dug from a rat-infested basement. Armed only with broken pocket knives and chisels, 59 men successfully reached federal lines.

Richard Matt and David Sweat escaped the maximum-security Clinton Correctional Facility in June 2015 after cutting through cell walls with smuggled hacksaw blades. Following a three-week manhunt across northern New York woods, law enforcement killed Matt and recaptured Sweat.

Imprisoned under royal decree, Henri Masers de Latude spent months hiding inside the chimney of his cell to assemble a 300-foot rope ladder woven from firewood hemp and stolen shirts. In February 1756, he scaled down the fortress walls into the Paris moat.

Incarcerated under the burning lead-sheet roof of Venice's Piombi prison for affronting public morality, Giacomo Casanova smuggled an iron spike into a priest's cell. In October 1756, the pair tunneled through the ceiling panels and rowed into the Venetian lagoon.

In October 1973, a hijacked Alouette II helicopter landed in the exercise yard of Mountjoy Prison in central Dublin. As guards initially assumed the aircraft carried government defense officials, three Provisional IRA leaders climbed aboard and flew away before gunfire began.

In August 1971, activist George Jackson produced a smuggled Spanish Astra pistol inside San Quentin's maximum-security Adjustment Center, releasing 26 inmates and seizing control of the ward. Three correctional officers and three inmates died before Jackson was killed in the yard.

Awaiting trial in June 1981, eight republican prisoners produced smuggled handguns inside Belfast's Crumlin Road Gaol. Overpowering officers, taking their uniforms, and locking the governor in his office, they shot through the front gate into a waiting getaway car.

In May 1986, Nadine Vaujour took private flying lessons under a pseudonym and chartered a white helicopter over Paris. Hovering feet above the roof of La Sante Prison, she dropped a harness line to her husband Michel, who had forced his way up using painted nectarines as mock grenades.

Designated by the German military as an inescapable fortress for chronic escapees, Oflag IV-C at Colditz Castle witnessed dozens of ingenious breakouts between 1940 and 1945. British and French officers built hidden radio rooms, forged civilian documents, and constructed a two-man glider.

Shot down over Laos in February 1966, US Navy pilot Dieter Dengler spent months chained inside a bamboo cage. In June 1966, Dengler and six prisoners slipped their wooden restraints, ambushed their guards during mealtime, and navigated 23 days through dense rainforest to rescue.

In September 1983, 38 Provisional IRA prisoners seized control of H-Block 7 at HM Prison Maze, using smuggled guns with silencers to subdue guards. Commandeering the central food delivery lorry, they drove straight through the prison gatehouse in Britain's largest escape.

Serving a life sentence for hashish smuggling, Billy Hayes was transferred to the island fortress of Imrali in the Sea of Marmara. In October 1975, Hayes took advantage of a midnight storm to steal a maintenance dinghy, rowed across open water, and walked across the Greek border.

In June 1977, Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassin James Earl Ray and six fellow convicts staged a disturbance in the yard at Tennessee's Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary. Throwing a ladder constructed from plumbing conduits over the 14-foot wall, Ray evaded bloodhounds for 54 hours.

Incarcerated in the supposedly escape-proof Crown Point jail in Indiana, bank robber John Dillinger carved a toy pistol from a piece of scrap wood and blackened it with shoe polish. On March 3, 1934, he bluffed his way past 17 guards and drove off in the female sheriff's brand new car.

Acting as his own attorney during a 1977 pretrial hearing in Aspen, Colorado, Ted Bundy requested permission to conduct legal research in the courthouse library. Unshackled and left unguarded, Bundy jumped out of a second-story window and spent six days hiding in the Rocky Mountains.

Masterminded by Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, Allied POWs engineered three deep tunnels named Tom, Dick, and Harry beneath Stalag Luft III in occupied Poland. On March 24, 1944, 76 men crawled through the 30-foot deep shaft fitted with electric lighting and timber rail trolleys.

Confined in La Catedral, a luxury hillside prison complete with a soccer pitch and bar, Pablo Escobar learned the Colombian government planned to transfer him to a federal facility. In July 1992, Escobar and his bodyguards kicked through a weak plaster wall and vanished into mountain fog.

In July 2015, Sinaloa Cartel chief Joaquin Guzman vanished from his blind spot shower inside the maximum-security Altiplano prison. He climbed down a ladder into a mile-long ventilated tunnel engineered with electric lighting and a modified motorcycle mounted on tracks.

In June 1962, Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin squeezed through widened vent ducts behind their cells after chipping away crumbling concrete with sharpened spoons. Leaving painted papier-mache decoy heads in their beds, they launched a raft made of raincoats into the bay.