Australia’s most wanted man had been on the run for nearly eleven years, and on that December afternoon in 1988, it was a payroll delivery that finally brought him down. Russell Cox, the man who had broken out of the country’s most secure prison and evaded every police force in the nation, was sitting in a car park at Doncaster Shopping Town in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs with a violent accomplice, Raymond Denning. A security guard noticed the two men behaving suspiciously and called police. When officers arrived, Denning surrendered quickly, but Cox threw the car into gear and drove straight at them.
Police opened fire, shattering the windscreen and hitting the door and boot. Cox lost control and crashed into a brick wall. As he climbed out at gunpoint, he told the officers, “You blokes won’t believe who you’ve caught today. ” They did not.
Only after taking him to headquarters did they realize they had captured the man who had eluded them for ten years, eight months, and nineteen days. Russell Cox was born Melville Peter Schnitzeling in Brisbane in 1949. His family called him Tim, and he grew up in Balmain, a tough working-class suburb of Sydney in the 1950s, where men worked the docks and crime was a constant temptation. Police first met him at age nine, when he was charged with stealing a bicycle.
From there he moved through juvenile facilities and into adult jail in 1966 for stealing a car. One story, possibly apocryphal, held that his criminal life began after he won a raffle for a bicycle but was denied the prize because he had not been present for the draw, and stole a bicycle in retaliation. Court records show he appeared before the Ashfield Children’s Court for stealing three bicycles a year later and was committed to an institution where he remained until age eighteen. He spent most of his childhood in boys’ homes.
Forensic psychologists who later studied him believed he was brutalized and punished in those institutions and learned to defend himself with whatever means he had. He was intelligent, but without legitimate opportunities, he turned his energy toward crime. As a young man, Schnitzeling stepped up to armed robbery and reinvented himself as Russell Cox. He found mentors among the experienced criminals of Balmain and learned the trade.
Armed robbery is a violent crime, and for Cox it became more than a way to make money. It was an addiction. Criminologists describe men like him as sensation-seekers, people with naturally low arousal who need danger and risk to feel alive. Cox robbed banks not only because he needed the money but because the thrill itself was the payoff.
He became known as “Mad Dog,” though the nickname had little to do with his character. Melbourne journalist John Sylvester is often credited with the name, but retired detective Roger Rogerson insisted it came from senior detectives at the Criminal Investigation Bureau who were known for inventing colorful labels. Cox was not mad at all. Those who knew him described a cautious, careful, calculating man who could nonetheless commit gross acts of violence without hesitation.
The name stuck, but it was always more headline than reality. After a string of payroll robberies in Sydney’s industrial southwest and a raid on a Commonwealth Bank in Marrickville that netted thirty thousand pounds, Cox was caught and sentenced to fourteen years. He decided immediately that he would not serve his time. In 1975, he and two accomplices, Marco Motrick and Alan McDougall, attempted to escape from Long Bay Prison.
Cox had a Beretta pistol smuggled in. The three overpowered guards at the main gate, forced the officer in charge of the gun room to open the armory, and helped themselves to . 38 revolvers. They hijacked a five-ton truck and took a prison officer hostage, sticking a gun to his neck and forcing the main gate open.
Prison officers and police opened fire. Motrick was hit, and Cox was hit as well. A bread van entering the prison collided with their truck, and the escape collapsed. Cox and Motrick were wounded and needed medical treatment, but prison authorities were slow to provide it.
The delay caused uproar among the prison population, and there were threats of a riot unless the injured men were treated. Doctors intervened and saved their lives. Cox was convicted of attempted murder of a prison guard and attempted escape, and nine years were added to his sentence. He was transferred to Katingal, the new maximum-security unit at Long Bay, built to be escape-proof.
It was not. Cox smuggled in a small piece of hacksaw blade hidden in a belt he swapped while on escort at court. Each day, he climbed the grill work inside the unit and did chin-ups on the bars of the roof. While hanging by one arm, he made a few cuts with the blade, then covered his work and returned to his cell.
He had always been a fitness fanatic, running the length of his landing every evening, and that conditioning made the escape possible. Over weeks, he cut through the bars. When the final cut was made, he climbed onto the roof, jumped over the edge of the concrete bunker, scaled a four-meter wire fence, ran, jumped across, scaled another four-meter fence, and ran toward the brick perimeter wall. The officers inside could not get out in time to stop him.
Russell Cox became the first and only prisoner ever to escape from Katingal. He was Australia’s most wanted man, and police expected to recapture him within days. He remained free for eleven years. Cox was a master of disguise, able to change his appearance with different haircuts, facial hair, spectacles, wigs, and theatrical makeup.
He studied the art of disguise, and when police later searched a hideout, they found materials for wig-making and cosmetics. He moved effortlessly across state borders, from far north Queensland to northern New South Wales and down to Melbourne, always a step ahead. He was brazen enough to register for unemployment benefits at a time when government departments did not share information, and there is no doubt he collected the dole for at least part of his time on the run. About a year after his escape, Cox met Helen Dean, a young nurse from a respectable middle-class background.
She was related to Raymond Bennett, a serious Melbourne criminal, but her own life had been far more conventional. The two fell in love. Dean may not have known for some time exactly who her partner was, and when she learned the truth, it must have come as a shock. But she stayed with him, and their relationship was one of the great love stories in Australian criminal history.
Her nursing skills proved essential. In January 1983, Cox was staying at a suburban house in Mount Martha owned by Ian Carroll, one of Melbourne’s busiest armed robbers. The two men had a spectacular falling out. Shots were fired by both.
Cox was hit in the thigh, and Carroll was shot twice and killed. Police later found one of the largest illegal gun caches ever recovered in Victoria, hidden in the ceiling: handguns, shotguns, assault rifles, submachine guns, balaclavas, boiler suits, security guard uniforms, safes, police radio frequencies, and disguise equipment. Helen Dean, using her nursing training, removed the bullet from Cox’s leg. Within a day, he was up and running again.
Cox was charged with Carroll’s murder, but the charge did not survive committal proceedings. There was no evidence to substantiate a murder trial. Carroll’s death was ruled a case where it could not be proven who shot first. In 1988, Cox’s luck ran out in the Doncaster car park.
Denning, who had escaped from Goulburn prison, was given an indemnity against prosecution for crimes committed in Queensland in exchange for evidence against Cox. There were claims that Denning’s escape had been allowed deliberately to lead police to Cox, but police denied this and acknowledged the recapture was a fluke. Cox was charged with a string of armed robberies. Helen Dean was arrested outside the courtroom with a pen gun in her handbag and served six months in prison.
In prison, the former escapologist became a model prisoner. He mentored young offenders and took part in programs designed to deter them from a life of crime. The parole board heard powerful evidence that he intended to lead a normal, lawful community life. Even Stephen Tandy, the prison guard Cox had held at gunpoint during the failed 1975 escape, supported his release.
Tandy said Cox had become a much more mature and wiser person. On December 8, 2004, Russell Cox was released from prison after serving sixteen more years. He and Helen Dean, who had married during his long stretch, remained together. And in a final twist, Cox could never be convicted of his masterpiece.
The authorities had lost his prison file, and because the New South Wales government had never legally established Katingal as a prison, a judge ruled that Cox could not have escaped from a jail that did not legally exist. After eleven years on the run and a lifetime of crime, that was the one escape the law could never touch.