First Line of Thought
After thinking about the kind of work that I would like to make for this project, I have been thinking about the narrative that I would like to explore around the picture making. My current thought is to create Tableaus using cinematic techniques, large scale images in big spaces. I use Dartmoor for quite a bit of inspiration and have created work there before, I know the location well and will start my visual exploration there. Dartmoor prison is not something that I know that much about and I am interested to find out a bit more about the prison and the people that have spent time in there. My first line of thought is to find out about the crimes that people did to end up in the prison. I would then like to explore how I can tell a part of their narrative through photography without giving away too much.
Frank Mitchell, or 'The Mad Axeman', flanked by two prison guards
Frank Mitchell, who had earned his “Mad Axeman” moniker after holding an elderly couple hostage with an axe, had been sent to Dartmoor for life.And yet despite his fearsome reputation and propensity for extreme violence, he was spirited off the moor 50 years ago – but would never be seen again.His disappearance, with the help of Ronnie and Reggie Kray, would spark the country’s biggest ever manhunt with 200 policemen, 100 Royal Marines and a Royal Air Force helicopter searching the moors.Mitchell escaped on December 12, 1966, while repairing fencing on the firing range at Bagga Tor with fellow prisoners.Supervised by just one prison officer, Mitchell walked off on the pretext on feeding some Dartmoor ponies.In fact, he was picked up by two men near Princetown and by the time the police were checking the road from Dartmoor he was eating steak in an East London flat.It would be the last time Mitchell, who would never see Christmas, was ever seen again. His body has never been found.His fate was finally revealed in a television documentary in 2000. The man who confessed to killing Mitchell – the Kray brothers’ sidekick Freddie Foreman – claimed he wrapped his body in chicken wire and threw it into the English Channel from a fishing boat off Newhaven, Sussex.Foreman told the documentary, The Krays – Inside the Firm, that just days after the Mitchell escaped, the brothers regarded him as “too hot to hold”.Mitchell, thinking he was being taken to spend Christmas with Ronnie Kray, was shot by Foreman and another man in the back of a van.
https://www.plymouthherald.co.uk/news/plymouth-news/most-notorious-prisoners-dartmoor-jail-444935
John George Haigh
More than half a century after he paid for his grotesque crimes at the end of a rope, John George Haigh continues to be a figure of dark fascination.If Haigh had simply left the bodies of his victims where he shot them or dumped them in a ditch, he might never have achieved the height of notoriety he still holds in the annals of criminal history.But the manner of his disposal of the evidence – dissolved in a tub of sulphuric acid and rendered to little more than a blob of fat – would etch his name into public consciousness.A serial fraudster, Haigh had been held at Dartmoor before he went on to kill.When he went on trial in July 1949 he wanted to be cast as an insane, perverted monster. But the judge and jury were not fooled. He was an intelligent man who killed not because of some deviancy or perverse pleasure but for money.The acid bath on which his notoriety was established was, in Haigh’s calculations, simply a foolproof means of disposing of the evidence.Haigh, who had a strict religious upbringing, his parents being members of a Quaker-like sect known as the Plymouth Bretheren, killed and disposed of Donald William McSwann, in the summer of 1944. His parents Donald and Amy McSwann followed a year later.Next, Haigh befriended Archie and Rosalie Henderson, whom he shot and killed in 1948 at a storeroom he rented at Crawley and where he kept his hideous acid bath.In February 1949 he shot wealthy widow, Olivia Durand-Deacon, aged 69. He was caught after trying to sell her jewellery later the same day.At his trial, Haigh confessed to three more killings, casual aquaintancies whose identities were never properly established. They also went into the acid bath.Desperate to escape the noose, he claimed to have drunk the blood of his victims immediately after shooting them, inviting the assumption that he must be insane.The jury took just 13 minutes to find him guilty of the murder of Mrs Duran-Deacon. Haigh was hanged at Wandsworth Prison on the morning of August 10, 1949.
https://www.plymouthherald.co.uk/news/plymouth-news/most-notorious-prisoners-dartmoor-jail-444935
“Mad” Frankie Fraser
Gangster “Mad” Frankie Fraser received a seven year sentence for the attack on the Comers, just one of several violence crimes for which he would serve 42 years in prison, some of it at Dartmoor.His involved in serious crime began during the Second World War when blackouts provided ample opportunity for thievery.In 1941, he was sent to borstal for theft and then got a 15-month sentence for shop-breaking. Conscripted a year later, he ignored call-up papers, deserted and carried on his life of crime.Having served two years for a raid on a jewellers, Fraser, who was certified insane during his jail term, went on to become bodyguard to well-known gangster Billy Hill. More bank robberies and more prison terms would follow.But the 1960s he was associating with Charlie and Eddie Richardson, gang rivals of the Kray twins.In the World Cup winning year of 1966, Fraser was charged with the murder of Richard Hart in London. The charges were later dropped but Fraser still got five years for affray.He also got ten years after the infamous “Torture trial” where members of the gang were charged with burning, electrocuting and whipping those found guilty of disloyalty. Fraser was accused of pulling out the teeth of victims with a pair of pliers.After his release from prison in 1985, Fraser became somewhat of a a celebrity, appearing on television shows and writing an autobiography. His one-man show, An Evening with Mad Frankie Fraser, toured the UK.He survived a shooting in 1991 outside a club in London. He was shot in the head from close range, losing part of his mouth in the incident. He didn’t discuss it with the police.Fraser died in November 2014 after complications during surgery.
https://www.plymouthherald.co.uk/news/plymouth-news/most-notorious-prisoners-dartmoor-jail-444935