THE TEENS WHO TOOK THE TOWER
Forty years ago, a minor prison break escalated into one of New Zealand’s biggest armed standoffs. It culminated with two escaped juvenile prisoners holding three hostages at gunpoint in the control tower at Dunedin Airport. It was thought to be the first time in the world an airport was held up by a hostage crisis. Using archival material and fresh interviews, Michael Wright explores the remarkable story. THE SIEGE
The kid with the shotgun had a decision to make. He had one accomplice at his side and four unarmed police officers in his sights. The six of them were standing on a street in suburban south Dunedin, behind two empty police cars. Residents, in pyjamas and robes, watched on from their front yards.
The teenager had the gun trained on the cops, but behind the officers was the full force of the Dunedin armed offenders squad, with many more guns trained back at him. He’d lost his getaway car and the safety of darkness. It was nearly 6am on December 19, 1979, and the kid – 18-year-old escaped juvenile prisoner Murray Sharp – needed a way out.
As the sun rose behind him, he pointed the 12-gauge shotgun at Constable Dave McMillan and motioned towards a patrol car.
‘‘You’ve got five seconds to get into the car and start it up,’’ he said. McMillan did as he was told. He took back the car keys from Sharp and got in. The 23-year-old constable should have finished his shift an hour earlier, but instead he was going to drive Sharp and fellow escapee Terry Taituha anywhere but here.
McMillan got in the driver’s seat and started the car. Taituha slipped into the passenger seat. He was 16, powerfully built and angry. Another cop had cracked him over the head with his baton and opened up a nasty head wound. McMillan didn’t say it, but he was relieved Taituha wasn’t the one with the gun.
Sharp got in the back behind Taituha. He was smaller and calmer than his accomplice. He pointed the shotgun at McMillan’s back. The constable was nervous. He turned to face Sharp. ‘‘Look,’’ he said, ‘‘We don’t want any accidents.’’ He asked Sharp to take his finger off the trigger. Point the barrel somewhere else. Sharp had no problem with that. He nursed the gun on his lap. McMillan pulled out on to the street.
As the patrol car headed down Cavell St in south Dunedin, a cavalcade of police vehicles followed. They kept their distance. No-one had any idea yet where they were going or what they were doing, least of all Sharp and Taituha. McMillan drove aimlessly around the streets of Andersons Bay for a while and eventually ended up on Main South Rd, heading out of town.
His captors talked about what to do next. One thing was for sure: they weren’t going back to the borstal (juvenile prison) in Invercargill they’d escaped from the day before.
Then, a plan. They told McMillan to keep driving. All the way to Dunedin Airport at Momona, about 30 kilometres away. They were going to steal a plane and fly to Australia.
THE ESCAPE
Invercargill borstal was a relic of a bygone age. An Edwardian-era system of punitive youth detention operating on the pretence of reform and education.
The Otago Daily Times visited the site in 1919 and declared it ‘‘a commodious building’’. By 1936, the Invercargill MP William Denham observed in the same newspaper that the atmosphere at the institution ‘‘resembled that of a gaol rather than a place of reformation’’. Despite changing times, the old name – borstal – stuck until 1979.
On December 18 that year, four youths were working in the garden of the borstal farm: Sharp, Taituha, 18-year-old Rex Tukuafu and 19-year-old Ken Georgeson. The garden was at the back, where security was low. Sometimes there were no guards around at all. Prisoners worked on a basis of ‘‘semi-trust’’.
The foursome had hatched an escape plan. They knew a borstal employee who lived nearby would be working and that his house was empty. After a head count late in the morning, no-one would be looking in on them for at least an hour.
Once that ‘‘muster check’’ was over, Tukuafu, Georgeson, Taituha and Sharp simply walked off the farm. They stole a
Vauxhall Victor from the employee’s garage, and a shotgun and ammunition from inside the house. Then they piled in the car and headed north, up State Highway 6. At Winton, they stole petrol. At Queenstown, Sharp tested the shotgun by unloading a few rounds at a rubbish bin. It worked.
They abandoned the Vauxhall at Cromwell, stole another car, a Valiant VC, and headed for Dunedin. They stopped at Roxburgh, broke into the Grand Tavern and stole a keg of beer, which they placed on the back seat. As they drove off, they realised they had no way of drinking the beer, so they stopped again to steal a crate of milk bottles from the side of the road. By the time they reached Dunedin, all four were drunk.
THE STANDOFF
Constables Dave McMillan and John Esdaile had nearly finished their shift. It was 5am on December 19. The pair had clocked on at 9pm the night before. They were ‘‘South I’’ – the southern incident car – one of three that patrolled Dunedin overnight. Both men were young and relatively new to the force. McMillan was 23, Esdaile 20.
As they headed down Queens Dr, near St Kilda Beach, they noticed a Valiant VC parked on the side of the road. It didn’t look right. At 5am on a Wednesday, the streets of south Dunedin were all but deserted. Shift workers and milk trucks, that was about it. Here was a parked car with four young men sitting inside.
McMillan pulled up behind them and he and Esdaile got out. They got the driver back to the patrol car to run a check. He looked Polynesian but gave his name as David Harris. That was strange. As the two officers waited by the radio for a response, the driver jumped out of the back seat and bolted back to his car. The chase was on.
McMillan and Esdaile raced through the suburban streets after the fleeing Valiant. As they did, they got the results of their check: the car had been stolen from Cromwell the day before. They called for back-up.
Minutes later, on the corner of
Cavell and Magdala streets, the Valiant screeched to a halt. Four doors flew open. McMillan and Esdaile thought they were in for a foot chase, until all four occupants of the car turned towards them. One had a shotgun, which he pointed at McMillan. ‘‘Get out,’’ he said.
The two cops hesitated at first, but then complied. They didn’t really have a choice. Standing on the street in the early morning light at gunpoint, they weren’t sure what would happen next.
Then suddenly, their problem halved. Tukuafu and Georgeson decided to leave. They took the Valiant, but didn’t get far. The group had been using the empty milk bottles to siphon petrol and someone had mistakenly poured booze into the tank. Tukuafu and Georgeson only got a few blocks before they ditched the car and headed into the city.
That left two cops and two youths standing in the street. Then another patrol car arrived, carrying constables Graham Austin and Peter Williamson. Austin approached the others, drew his baton, and cracked Taituha hard over the head. Taituha reeled, but kept his feet. He was a big guy. The others called him ‘‘Ox’’.
Accounts of what happened next vary, but all agree on one thing: the gun went off. The official version is that, after the baton attack, Sharp and Taituha held all four officers at gunpoint and, while backing away to a phone box to negotiate with police, fell over each other, accidentally discharging the gun in the process.
A newspaper report at the time, though, quoted Esdaile as saying the shot was deliberate. A warning, ‘‘just to show they weren’t joking’’. A third version said the gun was retrieved from the car by Sharp only after Taituha was hit with the baton.
Whatever happened, it was a minor miracle no-one else was hurt because by now the cavalry had arrived: the Dunedin AOS, probably 20 officers with rifles. A cordon was established and a detective sergeant started droning into a loudhailer, ordering Sharp to drop the gun. Over and over again. Drop the gun, drop the gun. Esdaile silently cursed the guy.
Shut the f... up. Couldn’t he see he was making things worse? Taituha was already livid about being hit over the head and was demanding Sharp give him the shotgun. The four cops were pleading with Sharp, the level-headed one, to hold on to it, and now the booming voice was getting everybody worked up.
Sharp decided to change tack. He and Taituha needed to get out of this situation. As long as a bunch of cops were pointing guns at them, things weren’t going to go their way. They needed to leave but, with their ride gone, they had to improvise. They looked at the cops and told them to nominate a driver.
No-one volunteered. Of all the cops, McMillan had done the most talking. Maybe that was why they chose him. He was ordered into a patrol car and told to drive. As it pulled away, Esdaile breathed a small sigh of relief. But he worried what would happen to his partner.
Dave McMillan was thinking the same thing. At this point, the extent of Sharp and Taituha’s plan was just to be somewhere else. McMillan circled the nearby streets as his captors came up with the airport idea. He headed west through Caversham and on to Main South Rd. When he heard the rest of the plan, his heart sank. Sharp and Taituha wanted to steal a plane and fly away. Maybe to Australia. They would use the cop they had hostage as leverage.
None of that sounded good to McMillan. Two teenagers would just show up at a regional airport at 6am with a shotgun and a hostage, commandeer a plane and, presumably, a pilot and fly away to freedom? But he kept his thoughts to himself. His captors were yelling into the police radio to the convoy following them to drop back or the driver would ‘‘get it’’. He didn’t want to aggravate them further. As he drove out of the city, though, he couldn’t stop thinking about the terrible plan, the strong possibility that it would all fall apart, and that he would end up in a ditch.
THE TOWER
John Davis stood in the control tower at Dunedin Airport, getting more and more nervous. For the past 10 minutes the young air traffic controller had watched two young men hold a police officer at gunpoint on the tarmac below him. They’d tried to get into a couple of aircraft to no avail, and now they were out of options.
Forty police, nearly half of them from the armed offenders squad, had surrounded the area, put up a cordon, and now had their weapons trained on the two offenders.
But the young men made sure the cop they had hostage was always between them and the armed police. Now, the three of them started to move. They headed for the base of the tower, disappearing from Davis’ sight. Not long after, he heard the smash of breaking glass and footsteps coming up the stairs.
Dave McMillan’s mind was swimming. His captors’ escape plan had fallen apart. They hadn’t been able to get inside either of the planes they tried to break into. Out of ideas, they smashed the doors of the control tower and climbed the stairs, dragging McMillan with them. When they got to the top, two men – an air traffic controller and a meteorologist – were staring back at them.
The atmosphere was strangely calm. Taituha was still agitated but Sharp, who had the shotgun, didn’t seem angry. He never pointed the gun at a hostage on purpose and, if the barrel strayed near anyone, he moved it away again when asked. When police established phone contact with the tower about 8.30am, the youths’ first demand was for food – depending on the account, it was either bacon and eggs or coffee and biscuits – which they duly shared with their hostages. They also agreed to release the meteorologist.
Still, McMillan couldn’t relax. Trying to look nonchalant, he picked up a copy of the Otago Daily
Times in the tower and began to read, but the words fell off the page. It was hot, too. The police had turned up the temperature in the tower to make everyone tired.
McMillan thought about Constable Paul Stevenson, one of the senior officers in Dunedin and a hostage negotiator. What would he do? McMillan didn’t wonder long: Stevenson was the one on the other end of the phone.
Sharp and Taituha had now renewed their demand for a pilot and an aircraft. They weren’t going back to Invercargill, they said. Stevenson tried to keep them calm. Even got the borstal superintendent on the phone to talk to the pair.
McMillan felt for them. They hadn’t meant to get into this situation and, despite everything, Sharp had been pretty sensible with the gun. Eventually he got on the phone to Stevenson and the older cop put him straight. He was going to have to snap out of it and talk the teenagers down. Most importantly, he was going to have
to coax the gun out of Sharp’s hands.
McMillan went to work. Simple stuff: Murray, there’s nothing that we can’t fix. We can work it out. If it goes any further you can probably guess the bottom line. Put the gun down so no-one gets hurt.
John Davis, the air traffic controller, helped. He’d been given the chance to leave too, but refused.
Flights to and from Dunedin were being diverted or cancelled, but Davis didn’t want to make the situation worse by leaving the tower. McMillan was adamant he was staying if Davis was, so now Davis was echoing him. A second calming voice. Put down the gun.
Sharp was reluctant. He didn’t want to get hurt if he surrendered. There were a lot of cops outside, no doubt less than pleased about what he and Taituha had done with their colleague. But McMillan got to him.
What the cop was saying was right. Also, something McMillan had kept repeating earlier while pleading with Sharp not to shoot had stuck: the constable had a wife. That detail rang in Sharp’s ears. He felt sorry for the guy.
After half an hour of talking, Sharp relented. There was no way out. He broke the gun into parts and handed it over. Then he, Taituha, McMillan and Davis trooped down the stairs.
Sharp and Taituha were set on by police dogs as they were arrested. That annoyed McMillan. He’d assured the young men they’d be safe if they gave themselves up. When he protested, one of the dog handlers looked at him. ‘‘This is not just about you, Dave,’’ he said, ‘‘This is about every cop in New Zealand.’’
After that, Sharp and Taituha were put in separate cars and taken back to Dunedin. It was just after 11am.
Dave McMillan had been at work for 14 hours and a hostage for nearly half that time, but his day was far from over. Back at Dunedin police station, he was interviewed for several more hours by Detective Constable Howard Broad – later the police commissioner – about his ordeal. He learned that Tukuafu and Georgeson had been picked up at a mall in central Dunedin. They stood out among the Christmas shoppers and someone phoned the police.
Finally, late in the afternoon, he went home. He had a lie-down then went out with a mate and got very drunk at the Prince of Wales hotel. The next day, a Thursday, he had a terrible hangover. On Friday he was back at work. He had one day off. His partner, John Esdaile, didn’t even get that.
THE TRAUMA
Three years later, McMillan was still a cop in Dunedin. He’d worked through the turmoil of the 1981 Springbok tour and was now based in the inquiry office – pulling files, interviewing people. Mostly on his own.
One day, he was in the training room at the station – a small, windowless box – when he started to sweat. He felt a sudden urge to get out, but there was no escape. He was sitting around a table with his colleagues and couldn’t get to the door. An inexplicable fear gripped him. It was his first panic attack.
After that, McMillan found he didn’t like confined spaces. Anything where there was no way out. The sweats would come first, then the racing heart, then panic.
It was strange. There was nothing obviously wrong with him. It was like his mind was taking over. Forcing the physical reaction.
The more he avoided triggering situations, the more the fear grew. He went to see the police psychologist. Talking through his experience, he slowly got on top of what he learned was his agoraphobia.
Today, McMillan is 63, 22 years retired from the police, and growing cherries in Central Otago. He still thinks about that day back in 1979.
He’s still close with John Esdaile too, and they catch up from time to time, compare memories of what happened. The psychological effects have lingered.
‘‘I think there’s probably a wee bit still there,’’ McMillan says of the agoraphobia. ‘‘I know what I’ve got to do if I get into that situation now. You can’t run away from it. You’ve got to confront it.’’
There’s one other thing McMillan still thinks about from that day. What happened to the guys who did it?
After the siege was over, he never saw them again. He thinks mostly about Murray Sharp – the kid with the shotgun. How calm he was, and how much worse the whole situation could have been if he hadn’t kept his head and then surrendered. He thinks about what he might say to the kid if they ever met again.
More than 200 kilometres away in Invercargill, back where it all started, Murray Sharp was wondering the same thing. Four decades later, both men were about to find out.