‘Duped by my bullshit’: Cameras capture jailbreak
Disguised as a prison guard, Damon Exley escaped from jail then abducted and raped a woman. His police interview reveals details Corrections didn’t know about when they did their review. reports.
Sexual predator Damon Exley sat calmly across the table from a detective in an interview room after he’d escaped from prison and abducted and raped a woman who had picked him up hitch-hiking.
It was the seventh time he had broken out of jail, and this time he had left a mother wondering if she was going to die.
Documents obtained by Stuff reveal what Exley, then 53, told the detective several hours after he was arrested on February 20, 2022 – including details of his escape from Rimutaka Prison that Corrections officials didn’t know about when they conducted their own review of how it had happened.
And newly released images show the moment Exley, once described as a “oneman crime wave”, drove to freedom in a stolen van while disguised as a prison guard.
Exley’s most recent time as a fugitive had come to an abrupt end outside a Masterton laundromat, after a woman alerted a customer that she was being held against her will by a man who’d raped her.
Two days earlier, he had escaped from prison while serving an open-ended sentence of preventive detention for a crime spree that saw him sail a stolen yacht across Cook Strait, and attempt to rape a real estate agent at knifepoint.
In the interview room at Masterton police station, Exley, also known as John Douglas Willis, told the detective that after 17 years behind bars, and repeated “knockbacks” by the Parole Board, he’d “had enough” and hatched a plan to bluff his way to freedom.
“It was quite brazen, and a lot of things could have gone wrong.”
He said the day before his escape he made a “dummy radio with antenna and ear phone cord” and stashed it under a plant pot in the prison nursery, where he was among a small group of low-security inmates allowed to work.
“[There was] a complete and utter failure of security, oversight and assurance by a range of staff.”
Corrections report
It was somewhat an “arts and crafts project”, Exley said during the interview. He did “a lot of painting for museums and places around New Zealand” and if questions had been asked “it could have been passed off as my continuing journey as an artist”.
The next day, February 18, 2022, Exley said, he went to work in the nursery as normal.
But shortly before 2pm he put his plan into action – grabbing the fake radio and a pair of Corrections-branded prison guard overalls from a laundry he was “in charge of” at the nursery.
After donning the uniform, he used a pair of “cutters” from the nursery to make a hole in a fence and entered an adjacent contractor’s yard, which was still inside the prison’s perimeter fence.
Exley told the detective he then posed as a Corrections officer, telling contractors he encountered that an inmate had escaped, and they needed to lock themselves in an office.
One was driving a white van used to transport labourers to the site, and left the keys in the ignition.
“They were duped by my bullshit,” Exley told the detective.
Once behind the wheel, he still had plenty of work to do to make good on his escape. His route to freedom meant he had to drive through two security checkpoints.
The first was known as South Gate, one of two entry points to the jail through the main perimeter fence, which was usually manned by two guards.
Exley found the gate wide open, and no-one came out of an office there to stop him as he drove by wearing a surgical mask. (An internal Corrections investigation later found the guards were huddled around a computer in the office looking at pictures of beaches, rather than monitoring the security gate. The gate should have been closed, but had been left open because staff said it was heavy and difficult to manage in high winds.)
He then drove along a road next to the perimeter fence for about 1km before he had to stop at a barrier controlling traffic in and out of external parking.
Elite guards from the prison’s site emergency response team were there searching vehicles entering the prison.
Exley stared straight ahead, his hands gripping the steering wheel.
But he didn’t have to wait long before the barrier arm lifted, without any questions being asked of him. “I just drove out”.
It was about 20 minutes before Corrections staff learned of Exley’s escape, and another 30 minutes before the prison was locked down.
By then, he told the detective, he was well on his way to Himatangi, on the North Island’s west coast, more than 100km away, where he hid the van in a secluded wilderness reserve.
Exley said that under the cover of darkness, he then walked south to Ōtaki, where he broke into a derelict old building and stole a high vis vest, a yellow-handled knife, a screwdriver, two first aid kits and a can of peaches.
After sleeping in the building for several hours, he wandered aimlessly around Ōtaki “dodging the police”, before taking shelter in the bush. By then, he said, it was raining heavily. Soaked through and cold, he began shaking uncontrollably, and decided to head out to State Highway 1 to try to hitch a ride.
Before 7am on February 20, 2022, he was picked up by a then-63-year-old woman who was heading home to Feilding after three days at an anti-mandate protest at Parliament.
The rest of Exley’s interview, which was released to Stuff by the courts, is redacted because it relates to his abduction and knife-point rape of that woman.
Her six-hour ordeal ended when she raised the alarm at the Masterton laundrette.
The incident sent shockwaves through Corrections, reducing some staff to tears.
The prison director at the time, Viv Whelan, on leave at the time, offered her resignation, but it wasn’t accepted.
Corrections’ deputy commissioner of men’s prisons Neal Beales previously told Stuff the jailbreak was the worst incident he’d experienced in his 32 years working in prisons here and abroad – and would be talked about by Corrections officers for years to come.
Beales led a wide reaching internal investigation into the escape, which found Exley had “manipulated” and “conditioned” staff, and exploited loopholes and poor practices to carry out his escape.
“[There was] a complete and utter failure of security, oversight and assurance by a range of staff,” an April 2022 report detailing the investigation’s findings says.
Given his history of escapes, and what the Parole Board described as a “breathtaking” decades – long criminal history, Exley should never have been deemed low security – a classification which gave him access to areas where he obtained the guard’s uniform and a tool to cut through a fence and launch his jailbreak.
While he’d indicated he’d only come up with his escape plan the day before, four phone calls he’d made from prison indicated he’d been scheming for weeks.
Beales’ investigation, dubbed an Operational Review, was unable to definitively identify where Exley got the uniform or cutter from.
Despite their suspicions, Corrections was unaware of what Exley had told police because they didn’t have a copy of his interview, and hadn’t requested it, Beales said this week.
“It would be unusual for us to do so, given the interview led to criminal charges and therefore there were potential disclosure issues.”
He said Corrections had “no information to suggest that Mr Exley fashioned a fake radio, nor that he has done any paintings that are on display in museums”.
“Corrections believes that Damon Exley is a highly manipulative person who has a propensity to alter the narrative to suit his purposes.”
Despite the horrendous consequences of the escape, no-one involved in the damning failings identified by the review was sacked. Three staff were sanctioned, while another quit.
Last year, when asked why no-one had lost their job, Corrections deputy national commissioner Brigid Kean said: “Our reviews of the incident determined that the escape occurred as a result of systemic failures. It was not the result of one sole cause, factor or person.”
During a meeting with the survivor in October, which was prompted by Stuff’s reporting of the case, Kean apologised to her and discussed “scope for compensation”.
As yet, no money has changed hands. The survivor told Stuff this week she still planned to take legal action against the department for its negligence.
In February, Exley was sentenced to a second indefinite term of preventive detention for the attack.