Lucy
At around 9am, on the morning of 25 March 1999, at Sydney’s Bankstown Airport, a woman named Lucy Dudko climbed into the passenger seat of a white Bell 47G helicopter that she'd chartered the day before, buckled herself in and nodded to the pilot that she was ready to go. Dudko had chartered the ride a couple of days prior, ostensibly to take a sightseeing flight over the Harbour Bridge Track, part of the development that housed the stadium and village for the upcoming 2000 Sydney Olympics.
Pilot Tim Joyce was used to these flights, which were becoming increasingly common. Curious sightseers, both Australian and from overseas, paid good money - $360 an hour in this case - for a spin around what was already looking set to be a momentous Games. Dudko, 41, fitted the sightseer profile well, certainly nothing out of the ordinary for a busy and experienced helicopter pilot like Joyce, who nonetheless noted that his new passenger seemed a little more nervous than some, but again fear of flying was hardly unusual. Dudko, a Russian-Australian born in the Soviet Union, with an accent to match, (later dubbed ‘Red Lucy’ by the press) was a librarian by trade and looked like one too. But the bookish spectacles, smart clothes and neatly-done hair, couldn’t disguise the fact that she was a strikingly good-looking woman. Nervous she may have been, bookish she may have appeared but Lucy Dudko’s demure outward demeanour belied an inner steel and resolve that was about to propel her into the history books - and Australian folklore - in a way few could have predicted.
Lucy Dudko’s demure outward demeanour belied an inner steel
As Joyce’s Bell 47 rose from the helipad at Bankstown, and slowly turned to point in the direction of Circular Quay and central Sydney, Dudko knew that, with a flight duration of less than five minutes, she did not have long to act. If there was fear or doubt in Lucy Dudko’s heart at that moment, she did not show it. And with the flight now underway, Dudko acted, and what she did next would not only make headlines around the world and completely change the course of her own life, it would enter the annals of criminal history too.
As Joyce focused on the flight he was surprised, to say the least, when his polite and bookish lady passenger produced a handgun, pointed it at the startled pilot and said, ‘This is a hijack’.
The Day of the Helicopter had begun.
John
About 25 km away from the drama unfolding in the skies above Sydney, in the exercise yard at Silverwater Correctional Complex, a maximum security prison, inmate number 116059, John Killick, looked to the skies and waited. Killick, 57 at the time and on remand, was already one of the country’s most notorious criminals. A prolific and determined armed robber, he had been bursting through the doors of high street banks for over 30 years, largely as a means of feeding his raging gambling habit. A rough and tragic childhood, with his mother committing suicide when he was just 17, after being repeatedly assaulted by his father, had left Killick with a simmering resentment towards authority and the banks who had foreclosed on his family home. Finding it difficult to earn a crust in his preferred career as a writer, he had turned to crime, gaining notoriety early on by becoming the first person in Australia to steal decimal currency from an Australian bank, a dubious accolade he acquired after holding up the Canley Heights branch of the ANZ bank in 1966, wearing a clown mask and brandishing a rifle.
Ever keen to outwit the agents of law enforcement, Killick was also the man at the centre of the ‘Perfect Alibi’ case, where - confusingly for everyone concerned - he was convicted of a bank robbery in Adelaide whilst at the same moment reporting to a police station in Sydney.
John Killick, police mug shot.
But more than just a man who gambled away fortunes and robbed banks to pay for it, John Killick was, and remains, a compelling individual. Courteous, intelligent and with a working-class Aussie edge to his voice, Killick gives me the sense of someone who is thinking a few steps ahead of you, or of being in possession of useful information that you are not - which in both instances is almost certainly the case. However it is, if anyone gave the lie to the notion that bank robbers are mere thugs and vandals, that person would be John Killick. A writer by trade with published articles under his belt, Killick had left school without completing his education, but in possession of a literary sensibility and personal insight not often found, or at least not revealed, by many of those who choose a life of crime as a career.
Polite and approachable, as a younger man Killick had a physicality and watchfulness that spoke of too much time in jail. ‘Gentleman’ John Killick was nonetheless respected as decent, resourceful and honourable - not to mention being a prison chess master that all other inmates wanted to beat but usually couldn’t.
‘Gentleman’ John Killick was respected as decent, resourceful and honourable
Despite his many redeeming features, John Killick’s chosen career had gone a long way to both defining and ruining his life, whilst compromising the safety and wellbeing of others. By Killick’s own estimation, armed robbery is, by any measure, an act of violence. It not only seeks to steal, but more damagingly it brings menace, fear and a frightening physicality into the lives of innocent people caught up in the event. It is, most often, a crime committed by men who are, in the moment, both desperate and dangerous and prepared to use - or at least threaten to use - serious violence to achieve their end. It is, as Killick himself has acknowledged many times since, the wrong thing to do, and no answer to whatever the problems are that beset a man’s life. ‘I deserved to go to jail’, he says. In an interview with Channel 7’s Spotlight programme, Killick agreed that, if he felt guilty about anything, then terrifying innocent people was top of the list. Speaking to the Daily Mail years later, Killick said:
'It's not you against the bank. The bank doesn't really exist to that extent. It hasn't got any feelings. You're dealing with the people inside and some of those people are going to get traumatised,' he said. 'So I accept that and that's why I accept that we [bank robbers] do get big sentences ... but they will never justify to me why I get four times longer than a paedophile.'
That Killick was to go on and become one of Australia’s most respected crime writers, charity fundraisers and a leading voice for compassionate penal form is a testament to the depth and complexity of the man, and to see that remorse is a thing that you do, rather than just a thing that you say. To hear him speak today is to hear a good-humoured, peaceable and obviously intelligent man, with a rough laugh and a sense of self-deprecation, remorse and wistful regret for a complicated and imperfect past.
But thoughts of literary success, respectability - and indeed regret - were all far in the future on that spring morning in Sydney in 1999. For as the inmates at Silverwater jail took their one daily chance of exercise - laps around the oval, scratch games of footy - their routine was suddenly startled by the clatter of powerful rotors above them, and the unreal, once-in-a-lifetime sight of a helicopter circling and descending slowly into the prison yard.
As everyone - guards and inmates alike - watched in astonishment, Prisoner 116059 began walking slowly towards the descending helicopter and then, with other inmates now cheering him on, broke into a sprint.
Lucy and John
Lucy Dudko had first met John Killick at a Sydney party in 1995. Her, the Russian immigrant and bespectacled librarian. Him, the notorious bank robber, gambler and long-time convict. To say they made an ‘odd couple’, is to stretch that observation to its fullest extent. And yet, a couple is what they were to become, almost immediately embarking on an illicit and passionate affair, with Dudko abandoning her scientist husband and throwing in her lot with a professional criminal, driven by a ferocious gambling addiction and a powerful contempt for authority and the system. Whatever they had together is personal, and not for this article, but clearly it was a strong bond. Would you hijack a helicopter for someone?
Lucy Dudko, courtesy Getty Images
However it was between John and Lucy, planning for the escape had been detailed, a necessary provision for what was clearly one of the most daring - some might say reckless - Australian criminal endeavours of the post-war era. Throughout the escapade, according to Killick, Dudko hadn’t flinched once. Instead the pretty and demure Russian librarian displayed a calm and ruthless resolve to get the job done. The ‘job’ being to rescue her lover from a maximum security prison, complete with armed guards, ready to shoot. This latter factor worried Killick more than anything else. He had gone to some lengths to ensure that no one would be shot, or shot at, that day. The firearms used by himself and Dudko had been deactivated and were unable to perform their primary function of propelling a bullet at someone else. For all her loyalty and willingness to participate in the hijack, Dudko remained a ‘civilian’, which is to say, not a professional criminal. To ensure that she didn’t accidentally discharge a weapon and commit an even more serious crime, and to protect any other person caught up in the event, Killick had ensured the weapons he provided (they were hidden in a secret stash in Sydney) couldn’t fire. Nonetheless, even a hobbled gun can menace the person it’s pointed at, something pilot Tim Joyce found to his cost, and the law makes no distinction between a weapon that can fire and one that can’t, when used in the context of a crime.
Would you hijack a helicopter for someone?
Satisfied that he and Lucy weren’t going to kill anyone, Killick had also turned his attention to the only people in the equation willing and able to shoot and kill: the correctional officers at the jail, who in Australia are armed, poorly-trained, and trigger-happy. New South Wales law does indeed allow correctional officers to shoot at escaping prisoners (see my article ‘The Killing of Dwayne Johnston’), but Killick had also learnt that shooting at a helicopter, for instance, was forbidden by the Geneva Convention, on the grounds that such an act may also be endangering the life of a hostage. I looked this up, and it would appear the case that under the provisions of the Geneva Convention (IV) relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons, shooting at civilian hostages is indeed a breach of international law. Further to this, Killick had also ensured that, whilst in the exercise yard, he was in the company of cellmate Paul Bennett - ‘a shifty piece of work’, according to Killick - who nonetheless happened to be an experienced helicopter pilot. Discovering this some time before, Killick had persuaded a compliant corrections officer to transfer Bennett into his cell, where he was promptly if subtly grilled about helicopter operations and protocols, by the strategically-minded Killick. Bennett had, for instance, told Killick about the transponder fitted to helicopters which, if activated, would relay the exact position of the helicopter as an SOS signal to watching flight controllers on the ground. This advice proved vital as, upon being hijacked by Dudko, pilot Joyce had indeed quietly tried to activate the transponder, but forewarned of this possibility, Lucy had shouted, ‘No transponder!’ at the pilot, causing him to stop the procedure, and leaving him alone in the sky with a hostile woman armed with a submachine gun and a determined look on her face.
Pilot Tim Joyce with his Bell helicopter
A gambler through and through, Killick said of this good fortune:
‘Sometimes when you gamble for big stakes and the odds are against you, fate steps in and deals you an ace.’
Not only did Bennett unwittingly provide Killick with details that would prove critical to the escape’s success, he was also - unbeknownst to him - slated as the back-up pilot in the event that Tim Joyce managed to get out of the machine after landing, and run for it. Listening to John tell me this story, I shook my head in astonishment. This guy really did have all the bases covered.
This guy really did have all the bases covered
Back in the exercise yard at Silverwater, John Killick had by now climbed aboard Joyce’s helicopter, taken the gun from Dudko and advised the pilot of his limited options: ‘Hi mate’, he said in Australian fashion, ‘I’m a lifer. You can make a lot of money out of 60 Minutes or you can be dead. Your choice.’
Remaining calm under this immense and unforeseen pressure, and perhaps not thinking of money to be made from the media, Joyce replied, ‘Don’t worry mate, I’ll get you out of here.’ Killick was impressed. ‘I liked him’, he said later. ‘He was cool under pressure.’ But, as with many things in life, particularly when it comes to life or death gambles, not everything is fated to slot neatly into place. Presumably unfamiliar with the terms of the Geneva Convention, a corrections officer on the ground now began firing at the ascending helicopter, one bullet missing Tim Joyce by a few centimetres, another hitting a critical cable, which could easily have brought the flying machine crashing to the ground. But again, good fortune, in the form of two very tall trees at the end of the exercise yard gave the chopper a shield from further bullets, and the hijackers and their hostage were underway. The escape, from hijack to landing in a remote field, where Tim Joyce was left tied up but unharmed, had taken about two hours. At 9am John Killick had been in a maximum security prison serving a life sentence. By 11:15am, he was in a motel room with his lover, on the run maybe, but a free man nonetheless. Between the two of them, they had just pulled off one of the most daring and audacious prison escapes of the century.
45 Days Later
John Killick woke in the darkness of the early morning. Still on the run, he and Lucy had booked a cabin in a tourist park, and changed their appearances, dying hair a different colour, wearing caps, laying low and so on. At about 2 o’clock in the morning, in the hypnotic state between sleep and wakefulness, he was having a dream, a booming voice echoing through his mind as he tried to wake, but as the waves of sleep cleared, the booming voice, magnified by a loudspeaker, repeated and continued and his heart sank:
‘John Killick, Ludy Dudko, this is the police. The place is surrounded. Come out with your hands in the air.’
Killick, caught completely unaware of the impending arrest, later wrote that his feelings at that moment were the same to those he’d had, many years before, when he was told that his mother had killed herself.
The days of John and Lucy, Bonnie and Clyde, Red Lucy and Gentleman John, the days of wild gambling and armed robbery, the day of the helicopter, all came down to this moment, and the stark choice faced by outlaws down the ages: surrender or die. Unwilling to involve Lucy in any kind of gunfight or desperate breakout, Killick chose the former. It later transpired that they had been given away to police by an accomplice involved in events, who gave an accurate description of their current appearance, which had appeared on the media and was recognised by the manager of the tourist park.
John Killick in custody after the escape
Tipped off by the manager, over 40 police officers, some armed with submachine guns, had stealthily surrounded the cabin, closing off all access points and blocking nearby roads. This time there was to be no escape. After what amounted to show trials for both, John Killick was sentenced to 23 years in jail for his part in the escape, with Lucy Dudko getting the maximum sentence of ten years. During their imprisonment, the two exchanged 5000 love letters. After their release, they were prohibited from seeing each other, with Dudko eventually returning to Russia and discovering solace in conversion to Christianity and the Bible. She doesn’t give interviews, and John advised me not to try and contact her. ‘No way’, he said simply.
John Killick was sentenced to 23 years in jail for his part in the escape
John Killick has been called a lot of things in his time, but being named in the press as a ‘criminal mastermind’, makes him laugh. ‘I’m not sure about that’, he says with a smile. ‘I robbed banks.’ For these crimes, and for having the audacity to humiliate the authorities by escaping so spectacularly from maximum security, John Killick spent over 30 years of his life in jail. He’s done his time, and his remorse is genuine. He pays it back by charity fundraising, supporting impoverished families in the Philippines, writing about his experiences, helping troubled young people avoid a life of crime, and working for compassionate penal reform in Australia, advocating for an emphasis on rehabilitation, not incarceration. It’s in this last capacity that I first encountered John, and I’m proud to work alongside him and our other colleagues, for the Australian Advocate for Prisoners and their Families, the largest social media support group of its type in the Southern Hemisphere, boasting nearly 20,000 members.
For the idle-minded, it’s easy to read the hyped-up nonsense in the media and see people like John Killick, and indeed Lucy Dudko, as reckless and dangerous, the worst people in society. But people are complicated, damaged and driven more by emotions than reason. That’s as true for all of us, as it is for any so-called ‘criminal’. What we do, what we fail to do, what we celebrate and what we regret are not things for others to judge without knowledge of the hidden motivations that drive us all. John Killick did a lot of wrong and dangerous things in his life, but he is still a decent and honourable man. Lucy Dudko should not have hijacked a helicopter and subjected the innocent Tim Joyce to the worst ride of his life, but she did it for love, and there’s an honour and loyalty in that that can’t be faulted.
Furthermore, and without wishing to generalise overly, somewhere deep in the Australian soul, there burns an outlaw flame. It was brought here by the First Fleet that began the colonisation of the country, and it remains today. If ever there was a keeper of that flame, then it’s John Killick, an outlaw for sure, but also a living testimony to the power of rehabilitation and simple human decency.
All these things put me in mind of the shrewd Australian author Clive James, who summed up the ‘convict legend’ of his country aptly, when he said this:
‘The problem with Australians is not that so many of them are descended from convicts, but that so many of them are descended from prison officers.’
Indeed, James’s words have real resonance even today, and they always have. Perhaps they also had resonance for a certain John Killick, although not the one I’ve been describing in this article. Delving into the archives, I discovered that on 07 September 1853 240 convicts transported on the prison ship Bardaster, arrived from Britain on Australian shores. One of them was named John Killick. Whether he was related to his modern namesake, the subject of this article, I have no idea. Neither is the crime for which he was transported recorded. However it was, another outlaw seed was planted into the consciousness and fabric of this country, whether the authorities like it or not. It’s what we do with that heritage that matters, and if we choose to embrace it, we can choose to reframe it too and turn it from misdemeanour and crime into a legacy of redemption, survival and honesty in a system that is quick to discard and imprison the rich heritage that makes this country what it is today. For me, decency lies in redemption, not in punishment. John Killick embodies that truth, and surely anyone with a sense of life about them would have to agree with this: the Day of the Helicopter was one hell of a ride.
The Bell 47G helicopter used by Killick and Dudko in the escape
You can read a full, and much better, account of John Killick’s escape from Silverwater in his own book about the events, The Last Escape. That book, and John’s current works, Outlaw and The Voice of a Survivor, are available from: www.johnrkillick.com
You can get involved with John Killick’s penal reform work, and read more about him, here:
https://pentridgevoices.wixsite.com/pentridgevoices
https://www.facebook.com/groups/AustralianPrisonerAdvocate
My thanks to John Killick and Tim Joyce for their help in preparing this article.