FRANCE: Slippery Stick

Thin, sad Burglar René Girier was a slippery one, no doubt about it. Because of his attenuated form they called him René the Stick, and truly it sometimes seemed as though René could slip through holes that would stop a toothpick. In 1942 the Vichy police had picked him up for robbing a farm, and René had skipped across the border into occupied France. The Germans picked him up there and sent him to a labor camp in Berlin. Two weeks later he had escaped again and was back in Paris.

In 1946 the French police arrested René once again. Locked up in prison, he feigned insanity and was ordered transferred at once to a psychiatric hospital at Villejuif. He walked out of the hospital with no trouble at all.*

Three years after that, René Girier was picked up once again. This time he was tossed into sturdy Pont L’Eveque Prison. Five days later, he departed without ceremony by climbing over the wall.

Last September René was arrested on charges of robbing a mail truck, holding up a jewelry store and various other crimes. “I’ll be seeing you at Christmas time,” he told his wife confidently as they carted him off to the Sante Prison. Soon afterward he reported sick.

Last week prison officials put René and another prisoner into a tiny compartment in a type of prison van known as a “salad basket.” With two armed guards sitting in the central aisle outside René’s cell and another riding up front, the salad basket started off to the hospital prison at Fres-nes. They were in sight of the hospital when one of the guards looked back and saw a man rolling in the road behind. “Stop!” he called to the driver, “you’ve hit someone!” The van pulled to a halt. The guards leaped out, carefully locked the door behind them and ran toward the injured man. As they neared, he stood up and fled. “Ah, well,” said one of the guards, “he couldn’t have been hurt much.”

They went back to the van. Before resuming the journey they made a routine inspection of the small compartment in which their prisoners were supposedly locked. In the floor they found a small, carefully sawed hole through which René the Stick (and his friend) had once more slipped to freedom. Remembering that promise about Christmas, the gendarmes rushed to René’s apartment and arrested his wife Marinette.

-Still at large in New Zealand last week was Convict Cecil Gurr Otto who also escaped duress by walking out of a hospital. Two years ago Otto had murdered a woman, and in remorse tried to commit suicide. He succeeded only in blowing half his face away. Sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder, Otto was sent to a hospital near Christchurch for plastic surgery. Authorities put him on his honor not to escape. Last fortnight, equipped with new, nearly healed features, he simply walked out of the hospital. New Zealand police admitted that recapture would be difficult. The only pictures they had of Otto showed his old, pre-surgery face.