Scotland’s infamous prisoners
Jailbird Leitch spent 34 years hatching legendary plans to escape Scotland ‘s prisons but at age of 50 he used the ‘filth of his life’ to teach kids not to make his mistakes
HIS jailbird escapes earned him the nickname the Saughton Harrier.
But to those who knew him, William “Sonny” Leitch became “the rebel who found a cause” before his death this year.
People in Craigneuk, Wishaw, knew the 85-year-old as the reformed prisoner who used his life of crime to try to deter local youngsters from the same fate.
Leitch was born into a respected family and he liked to tell people he earned his nickname during World War II when the village was being shelled. The youngster was curious and had to be coaxed away from the live explosives with calls of “Sonny, sonny” by Lord Belhaven, whose ancestral seat was once in the village.
In total Leitch spent 34 years “on a tour” of Scottish prisons for convictions ranging from car theft and serious assault to armed robbery.
He’s gone down in history at Edinburgh’s Saughton prison as the man who scaled a wall and broke out of the seemingly inescapable fortress.
It was 1967 and Leitch was going through a divorce. He was desperate to see his children so he hatched a plan that was as ingenious as it was daring. He discovered a group of runners, the
Saughton Harriers, regularly trained near the prison and thought he could time his escape to when they passed outside.
He scaled the 50ft wall in his prison-issue boilersuit, peeled it off to reveal track gear underneath and joined the Harriers.
His freedom didn’t last long as he was soon recaptured but his new name stuck – he was now the Saughton Harrier.
His next daring escape came in 1981 when, upon hearing his father was seriously ill, he decided he was going to leave Craiginches prison in Aberdeen.
The only way he could do that was by using two planks of wood to scale the wall but he didn’t bank on the 40ft drop on the other side. Luckily for him, his fall was cushioned by a rhubarb patch.
Other cons dubbed him Danger Man for his escapades.
Perhaps his thrill of escapes came from his teenage past when he decided to desert the Royal Navy at 16 while his ship HMS Consort was docked in Sandakan, Borneo, so he could celebrate Hogmanay with the crewmates already ashore. He
once said: “It was 1953, Hogmanay, and the rest of the crew were more or less ashore, and I thought, ‘ Well, I’m not having it’, so I dived into the Sandakan river and swam to the opposite bank.’’
For six months, he lived with the Dayak tribe of northern Borneo, where he lived on a diet of monkey and snake before he was captured and sent to a military prison in Kuala Lumpur.
There, deep in the jungle, Leitch came up with a plan with five other inmates to escape.
He recalled how he was the first to go over: “I pulled the grills off and got out into the camp. I was on the perimeter wire when the floodlights and everything went on and the wire got shook about like a baby’s rattle with Sten gun fire.
“They had been tipped off there was an escape in progress.
“I wasn’t injured but I was like a spider stuck to the fence. When there are bullets rattling about your ankles and there is no place to go, you freeze.
“So that was that, they put me into a concrete bunker and left me there for 90 days. Looking back, the concrete bunker is akin to a cell in Peterhead.”
When he finally came back to Scotland at the age of 21, his freedom was brief. Allegations of car theft saw him banged up in Barlinnie for 90 days.
He later said: “When I went into Barlinnie you weren’t allowed to talk, you had to speak out of the side of your mouth when on exercise and there were screws at that time saying, ‘Ah, you are on the road, you are on the road’.’’ That road lasted until
Leitch was 50, and a stint doing illegal bare-knuckle fighting in Edinburgh to raise money for football strips for kids and an afternoon tea for pensioners showed him his future.
He realised his life of crime could be put to good use and he devoted his time to volunteering at a youth centre in Craigneuk.
Leitch didn’t pull his punches with the kids who came through the doors and told them about his prison life in the hope they would see that the path he had chosen was the wrong one.
“At 50, I thought if I can do something with the filth of my life, then I can do something for these kids,” he said.
In April this year, the Saughton Harrier and Danger Man “crossed the bar” for the final time, but he left his mark on prison history and, in his own words, the “angels with dirty faces” he mentored over the years.
The wire got shook about with Sten gun fire SONNY LEITCH ON HIS BID TO ESCAPE MILITARY PRISON