Desperate criminal vaulted off a 6m balcony, to find a toilet

Wednesday 16 January 2019

A man has been sent to jail for five years after he managed to escape law enforcement custody at the Princess Elizabeth Hospital, giving him the chance to run to a toilet to pass drugs out of his system before he could be stopped.

Adam Wardrop, now 48, was being held under arrest at the PEH while they waited for him to have a bowel movement.

He had been X-rayed and two foreign bodies were identified in his bowels, which were suspected to be drug packages. But the court will never be 100% sure what he had internally concealed, because he managed to flush them down a toilet. They were not recovered.

Nonetheless, he will be behind bars for five years for perverting the course of justice and escaping custody, a sentence that the Royal Court said was harsher than what he would have faced for being involved in the importation of drugs.

Wardrop was taken to the PEH on September 26, the incident where he escaped took place on the 28. 

He was under arrest while being held at the hospital between September 26 and 28, 2018, with officers supervising him while they waited for him to have a bowel movement over the course of those two days.

To help speed this process up, they were encouraging Wardrop to eat, drink, and exercise. And while initially he wasn't very cooperative - at first refusing food and staying laid down - he was eventually walked up and down a hospital corridor with officers at either end. He did the same on the second day, and said the exercise was making him feel better, before he suddenly broke into a run.

The corridor Wardrop was exercising in had a mezzanine balcony overlooking another part of the hospital, which he ran towards and vaulted over, falling 6m to the floor below. Officers pursued him down the stairs, but before they could catch him, Wardrop had locked himself inside a nearby toilet. HSC staff tried to use a key to get in to the bathroom but it didn't work. When officers broke through the door, they found Wardrop covered in his own excrement, washing his hands. The toilet had just been flushed.

He was re-arrested and taken back to the room, where he was X-rayed again, with no sign of anything unusual in his system. A search of the drainage systems was also made but nothing was found. He was then charged with perverting the course of justice. 

Wardrop first encountered the Guernsey Border Agency at the White Rock Ferry Terminal. 

Wardrop was initially arrested on 26 September at the White Rock Ferry Terminal, after arriving in the island on a ferry. He was taken aside to speak to customs officers about why he was visiting the island, and while he was "confident and talkative", he also spun a number of contradicting stories. One thing that caught officers' attention was the fact he only had around £3.00 on him and no debit or credit card, so they asked how he planned to fund his stay. Wardrop said he was coming to the island to look for work driving a forklift, and he would earn money that way.

The customs officers swabbed Wardrop's jacket and took a urine sample. They found traces of opium, cocaine and THC - an ingredient in cannabis - and asked him to explain. Officers then conducted a strip search, and found nothing, so they asked Wardrop if he had internally concealed anything: his response was that he was "nearly 50, so not that stupid".

To be sure, however, Wardrop was then taken to the PEH, at which point he became very emotional, and given an X-Ray, where they identified the two foreign bodies. 

Wardrop is now at Les Nicolles Prison, where he's serving a five year term for perverting the course of justice. 

A builder from Brighton, Wardrop has 23 previous convictions, including a three year prison sentence in the UK for possession of cocaine and heroin. 

The court heard from Defending Advocate Liam Roffey that his client had been addicted to heroin for most of his life, and was always struggling to get clean - he had started using drugs at just 13 years old. There had been a 10 year period of his life where Wardrop was clean and started a family though, that gave the court a glimmer of hope, but when sentencing, Deputy Bailiff Richard McMahon said they had to treat offences of this nature "most seriously".

"The fact you had so little money on you leads us to believe that you were expecting to make money in Guernsey by selling what you had," he said.

"We are satisfied that you were delaying the inevitable while you worked out how to do what you did. Perverting the course of justice is always a serious offence, and the court has been deprived of certainty. What you did was stupid and dangerous, and you have no respect for those who enforce the law." 

Pictured top: Inset Adam Wardrop, who was 47 at the time of the offences, and the PEH.