John McVicar, armed robber turned writer and commentator who once broke out of an ‘escape-proof’ prison – obituary

John McVicar, who has died of a heart attack aged 82 while walking his husky dog, Lucky, was a former armed robber who in 1968 escaped from the high-security wing of Durham jail; he became “public enemy No 1” with a £10,000 bounty on his head, but preferred to describe his early career as that of “an honest bank robber”.

His first prison break had been in 1966, when he bolted from a coach carrying him to Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight and spent four months on the run. Two years later, by now an inmate of the “escape-proof” E wing at Durham, he prepared for his next break-out by doing weight-lifting exercises, earning himself the nickname “Mr Muscles”.

Over time McVicar carefully chipped his way through the wall in the prison shower room, painstakingly replacing each brick with a papier-mâché replica. On the night of October 29 1968, McVicar and two accomplices – Walter “Angel Face” Probyn, a fellow robber and prolific escaper known as the Hoxton Houdini, and Joey Martin, a convicted murderer – climbed into a ventilation shaft, crawled along it, entered the exercise yard and crossed the roof before lowering themselves down the prison wall.

Their disappearance was soon noticed, though Probyn and Martin were quickly recaptured. “Alarm bells were going, warders shouting and screaming, torches, that sort of thing,” McVicar recalled. “It was obviously going to be a hard go.”

As the police hunt got underway, he swam across the ice-cold River Wear before sleeping fitfully on derelict land. In the morning he kept off the roads, instead following the river and railway line, and eventually reached Chester-le-Street, seven miles to the north. From there he used a phone box to call friends in London, who picked him up three days later. “It was a great, great feeling that I’d done it,” he said. Meanwhile, James Callaghan, the home secretary, ordered an immediate inquiry.

While in Durham, McVicar had come to the attention of Laurie Taylor, now the presenter of Thinking Allowed on Radio 4, who was teaching sociology as part of a liberalisation programme. “The prisoners weren’t allowed notebooks and I wasn’t supposed to say anything that might, as they put it, touch on their lives,” Taylor recalled. By his next visit McVicar had absconded, which, Taylor said, “was a fairly dramatic way of avoiding my second lecture on the Protestant work ethic”.

McVicar quickly became a master of disguise. On one occasion, during a search of a house in south London, the police found no apparent trace of him, but a little old man, dressed like a tramp and leaning heavily on a walking stick, watched their search. The man, who limped off muttering something about the police, was later identified as McVicar. During this time he was “quartermaster” to a unit of armed robbers, taking care of their guns, ammunition and nylon-stocking masks.

Early in 1970 there were reports that McVicar had been murdered by criminal associates, but in November that year he surrendered without a struggle when two armed detectives burst into the flat in Blackheath, south-east London, where he had been living openly under the name of Squires. He had spent two years on the run, the longest period of freedom he had experienced since his school days.

He was sent to Leicester jail, where he took a degree in Sociology. Having served his time, albeit in instalments, he was freed on parole in 1978 and began collaborating with Taylor on In the Underworld (1984), a book written in dialogue form that offered a rare insight into organised crime in Britain.

Meanwhile, he revised his autobiography, McVicar by Himself (1974), which had been written and first published while he was in jail and smuggled out on scraps of paper. In it he described his criminal career as a “lamentable failure”, adding: “Whatever money I gained by crime I could have earned as a labourer in half the time I spent in prison.” He later wrote the script for the film McVicar (1980), starring Roger Daltrey of The Who and the singer Adam Faith.

Reinventing himself as a commentator on crime, McVicar wrote an article in Spiked magazine in 1995 incorrectly alleging that the athlete Linford Christie’s “remarkable physique, in regard to both its bulk and definition, is consistent with the use of anabolic steroids”. Christie, who won the 100 metres at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, sued for libel and was awarded £40,000 in damages, though the case had moments of levity such as when the judge Mr Justice Popplewell inquired: “What exactly is ‘Linford’s lunchbox’?”

McVicar also found a regular perch at Punch magazine, which commissioned a series of articles about the murder of Jill Dando in April 1999. He became obsessed with the case and, through a far-fetched set of links, concluded that Barry George was the killer, publishing a book, Dead on Time (2002), on that basis. George’s conviction was later quashed and he was acquitted at a retrial, after which McVicar rewrote the book as Who Killed Jill? You Decide (2006).

In his post-prison life McVicar found that life on the straight and narrow was not easy. In 1996 he appeared before His Honour John Baker after an altercation with a man in Battersea Park over their dogs. As often, the articulate McVicar represented himself and after his acquittal was praised by Baker for presenting his case “successfully, with great skill and ability”. Days later he received a card from one of his former prisons that read: “Sorry not to be able to welcome you back.”

John Roger McVicar was born in London on March 21 1940, the son of George McVicar and his wife Diane (née Huggins), who ran a newsagent’s in the East End; he had a sister, Janice. Their mother later described him as “difficult”, though by all accounts he was an able pupil at school and at 13 won the Essex junior chess championship.

Before long he was drifting into petty crime. “By the time I was 16 I was accepted as a member of a group of eight or nine young criminals,” he wrote, describing his bitterness that no adult intervened. “Anyone with a knowledge of the physical mechanism of crime and with the intelligence and training to relate his knowledge to my own career… could have exposed my criminality and crushed it.”

In 1956 he was sent to a remand home, from where he made his first escape. Five years later he was one of five men committed for trial at the Old Bailey on charges of attempted murder and causing grievous bodily harm. Press reports at the time described him as a florist.

After two years in borstal he graduated to armed robbery and in 1965 was jailed for eight years for robbing a jeweller of £1,900, assaulting two police officers and possessing an offensive weapon. On that occasion he was referred to as a car dealer. In February 1967 he was again jailed, this time for 15 years, for conspiring to rob an armed security van, and in July that year was given a further five years.

McVicar later ventured into business, as a publisher and as a travel agent. In 2003 he teamed up with the Marquess of Bath, better known for his harem of “wifelets”, to launch Artnik Adventures, offering package holidays in Bulgaria. Among the itineraries on offer were “shooting trips with John McVicar” and “courting and mating wilderness treks” with the Marquess.

During one of his jail breaks McVicar met Sheila Wilshire. They were married in 1972 while he was in Leicester Prison. The marriage was dissolved, and in 2012 he married Countess Valentina Artsrunik, a much-married Bulgarian society beauty who in 1997 had been cleared of murdering a jeweller in Virginia. She was the author of How to Join the Club of the Rich and Famous (2001). That marriage was also dissolved.

McVicar is survived by a son from his first marriage, Russell, who followed in his father’s footsteps: he served time for stealing a Picasso in an armed robbery, took a degree in jail and wrote a book, in his case about climate change. “He is ... getting back at me for not being around in his childhood when I was in prison,” McVicar told Radio 4 after his son escaped from police custody in 1993.

John McVicar, born March 21 1940, died September 6 2022