One Last Escape

Campsite Media.

Roger's second book, Bingo, wasn't supposed to be a big undertaking. Most of the material for Bingo was already written in his original Go Boy manuscript and was set aside for book number two. The idea was that his sophomore effort was going to ride on the coattails of the runaway success of Go Boy and hit bookshelves within a year or two at most, But Bingo didn't launch until seven

I dedicated this book to the most important person in my life, my sister Sue. He never abandoned me. People read Bingo, and after people read Go Boy, they say to me, how did you survive twenty four years in prison under all those circumstances? And it's because of my sister Sue.

Roger told people it took so long because by writing about the Kingston pen Riot, he was forced to revisit the grizzly scenes that haunted him. Or perhaps it was just that his life was so full. Now, it's one thing to write a book when you're locked in a prison cell quite another when you're an overnight celebrity with more money and attention than you'd ever dreamed of. Like the famous boxing quote from Marvin Hagler, it's tough to get out of bed to do road work at five

Well.

He was visiting me one time in Cornwall and as we were outside talking away, I start noticing his arm kind of curving and his hand heading more upward towards his waistline. And I didn't say anything at first, and then seemed to go back down. And then I noticed this happened a few times, so I said to him, Roger, just look at your hand where it is right now. He had no idea that it was coming up in a curve and he said, oh, isn't that funny? I said, yeah,

So he went in for a series of tests and a physical examination, and the issue was clear.

I was diagnosed.

I got a physical problem.

Now I was dagnosed to having parkinson disease.

He was very bluntly told. The doctor said, oh, well, yep, you got Parkinson's.

Roger had finally built a comfortable life as a writer. But what would this mean going forward.

I was in Roger's place in Ottawa and his left hand was trembling. And he saw me.

Notice this is David Schleike, Roger's longtime friend and writing mentor.

And I said, Roger, what is that because it wasn't his right hand, and he said, oh, I can still type. That's exactly that moment he said, oh I can still type, and but his hand was trembling. He said, well, it's probably Parkinson's because he'd been for a diagnosis, and but that's the first time I saw it. But he expressed it in terms of I can still type.

Roger was never much of a typist anyway, so he tried to carry on as if there was no issue.

He was having a hard time with the keys. He was finding that he was, you know, hitting different keys that he did not mean to hit left hand. He ain't to say letter all the time, so that became quite an issue for him. You know, that was kind of quite an adjustment.

At the doctor's appointments, Roger started to learn about Parkinson's, that it's a neurodegenerative condition that effects one in five hundred people in Canada. It felt like random bad luck, something he'd had his fair share of. But when he learned that there seems to be a correlation between between head trauma and Parkinson's diagnoses, and that emotional trauma can affect the symptoms severity, he stopped thinking of it in terms of luck.

He talked about how the tremors were inevitable because he had been beaten so much and hit about the head, and that it was a result of abuse.

Looking back over his life, you could say he had enough violent stories to fill a best selling book or an eight part podcast about it.

After surviving the pedal system. I had to come down with it, but I'm handling that very very well.

Roger was encouraged by Muhammad Ali's journey with Parkinson's, seeing that he was able to still live a fulfilling life with the disease.

Well, if he could handle it, I can.

You know he wasn't going to He just wasn't taking a back seat to it, that's for sure.

As the symptoms progressed, he would stubbornly keep riding his bike everywhere, even on days when his tremor was an eleven out of ten. Here's Roger's nephew, Todd.

He was so proud that he was still riding a bike. He gets on this bike, this two wheeler, and starts riding it. And this guy has Parkinson's disease and he can barely walk, and he's riding a bike and he's going down hills and We're like, oh my god, what does he doing.

He's going to kill himself.

You could try tying a piano to his back. He was still biking to the store if he needed something. Eventually, he wound up in the hospital after a bike crash, and then he started having violent falls unrelated to the bike, But the biggest concern wasn't with how his body seemed to be betraying him. It was with how the disease was affecting his mental state. And his riding.

Bingo brought back some enthusiasm, and then the Parkinson stuff took the steam out of him for a while.

Some people with Parkinson's experienced feelings of distraction or disorganization and struggled with finishing tasks, and these were things that Roger struggled with to begin with.

It took him.

Longer to get things done. Eventually, it fixed your memory.

A lot of things he was lost.

His writing wasn't working, his public addresses weren't working because he couldn't speak very well because of the disability that was accruing from Parkinson's.

It was attacking him. Whether he liked it or not, it was coming at him.

He tried different treatments, but every time something seemed to be working, it suddenly would stop.

This was something he couldn't take control over. This was something he couldn't run from.

Five years had slipped by since I was first diagnosed with Parkinson's.

These are Roger's words read here by our actor.

My head tremors were getting worse, and my body would shake so dramatically that when I rested my arms a table, all the dishes would clatter. Sometimes my voice was so soft and slurred that I was always asked to repeat myself. It took enormous effort just to talk and walk and think. My writing and lecturing dribbled to a standstill as I was now too jittery to sit still. The lights were on, but no one was home.

The speaking gigs with the Solicitor General fizzled out, and the Big Go Boy film adaptation that he talked about for many years never made it to production. All Roger really had left to lean on were the two books of fiction that he signed on to write. He initially seemed rejuvenated to pivot finally from memoir to fiction. Finally he would be free to stop immersing himself in the past and free to craft whatever he wanted. But every day seemed to be harder than the last.

After years of being on the outside, and I think medical problems that he developed in his later years, the parkinson and pain, and he started self medicating, which was a real slippery slope for him.

Roger had always prided himself on his ability to abstain from alcohol and drugs for years and years of enduring what he endured and keeping the company he did, he somehow had managed to never touch the stuff. But one day Roger's friend David came over to work on his latest book with him when he was surprised to see that Roger was using cocaine.

He'd have lines on his table when I got there sometimes, and he knew I wouldn't blow the whistle on him that he had it.

Roger claimed that he was only using a small amount and was only taking it as medicine.

It really helped with the tremors. That it really helped with the pain of the tremors and the discomfort and imbalance of the tremors.

Roger wrote about this time later in life.

My medications were no longer cutting through the pain. I was at my wits end when one day I was introduced to the Deadly Lady in White. Cocaine was a very expensive powder, and I absolutely hated the idea of using narcotics for relief, but it worked. I was no longer writing in agony. All of my parkinson symptoms would instantly disappear. I felt I was a whole man again. Yet I was a babe in the arms when it came to dope.

Sometimes I'd arrive at his place and he'd be just buzzing, and you could tell he had, you know, taken some lines prior to my arrival. It helped him forget, you know that, he said, I know my days are numbered. He said to me more than once. I don't want to die wiggling. He didn't want to be a wiggling drooler.

Despite all of this, Roger did manage to finish his two books of fiction, but his novels titled Jojo and Dream Caper didn't do what he'd hoped they would, and so, through the combination of his work struggling the Parkinson's and the growing cocaine habit, Roger entered a new era in his life where everything started to spiral.

Roger gave me a call, and with Roger, it's always rushed. Oh my gosh, her, yep, right now, he needs it. He needs it like yes they I remember. It was a nicy stormy day, nothing but black ice all over the place. The town was just shut down with ice. But he needed one hundred dollars and I had been ill at home. I had a fever. Whatever wasn't up to par, and I said, I don't even think I

He told her that he had a very important meeting in Toronto that he needed to get to.

He said, I've got I've got to meet the publisher. I got to be up there.

Sue looked out the window at the frozen streets with a grimace, and then she did the thing she'd done her entire life. She showed up for her brother.

And I did, carried my sorry body out the door and drove on the black ice and went to the bank and deposited one hundred dollars.

For our confused gen Z listeners. They didn't have banking apps at the time.

And that was on a Friday.

And then a few days later, Sue and some of her and Roger's other siblings met up for their weekly cup of coffee at Tim Horton's.

So I walk into Tim's and everybody's saying to me, did you hear about Roger? And I said, what do you still get that not in your stomach when somebody says Roger, because you think, oh my, what happened.

Tuesday, March thirty first, nineteen ninety two, at around five point thirty pm, a gunman wearing a Richard Nixon mask walked into a Zeller's department store in downtown Ottawa. He grabbed a stock boy and demanded to be taken to the store safe, but all that they could produce was two bags of rolled coins, so the gunman grabbed a child's knapsack from a luggage display, filled it with the loot, and began marching the stock boy across the store, pressing

Myself and my partner were patrolling in the Center Town area of Ottawa which the call came in.

This is Dwayne Raymond. At the time, he was a staff sergeant for the Ottawa Police broadcast.

So there was a robbery the Zellers. The robbery had occurred, the suspect had left the Zellar store. I believed somebody had followed him from the Zellar store and had called.

The eyewitness said he saw the robber board a public bus nearby. The bus was moving through the downtown core and was right near the Canadian Parliament buildings when the cruisers eventually pulled it over. Dwayne and his partner cautiously approached the bus when suddenly he was stopped in his tracks.

When I first saw him on the bus, I'm like, I recognized this person, and it clicked because it was not that many years beforehand that I had seen him. I was introduced to Roger through his book Go Boy In. That was a mandatory reading where, of course I took it at Algonquin College in Ottawa in nineteen eighty six, and stood out to me as a story of just overcoming everything that he had done and had been through.

At that point, even just these few years later, Roger looked much different than Dwayne remembered.

There was a frailty to him, and he did make a statement to us that all right, all right, you have me and I have Parkinson's. So we took control of him on the bus. The two of us escorted him together, obviously to ensure that he didn't try and run away from us, and then put him into our police car. Had a conversation with regards to what his rights were and the fact that what he was under

So I was at the time, I was doing my masters in.

Toronto, Roger's nephew Todd, and I was.

Just listening to the radio and the I think it was like the twelve noon news came on and.

Carol was arrested yesterday near this downtown department store.

A few minutes earlier, a gunman wearing a Halloween mask robbed the store and briefly held a store clerk cost it. After the whold up, Carl made his getaway on a transit bus.

Roger Carroll, you know, famous Governor General as Award winner, just been arrested for robbery in Ottawa, and my heart just sank. It was it was just it was one of the worst things that I think I had ever heard in my life. You know, my uncle, who I had always looked up to, who was bigger than life me, you know, a celebrity, seemed to have been a success,

Sue found out from one of her siblings what had happened.

And I was devastated. It was like, it was such a blow. It was such a blow. At the moment, I was very angry at him, extremely angry, and the person I should have been angry at was myself.

Sue wasn't mad at Roger about the one hundred dollars. She was mad that, after a lifetime of loyalty and encouragement and love, that he could just call her up and take advantage of her like that.

And as the old saying goes, the straw that breaks the camel's back, that was it. I said, I am finished. It's like a piece of me died right there. So I thought, You'll never never pull that on me again, never, never. I couldn't believe that he did that to me.

Roger found himself behind bars for the first time in over thirteen years, and it was just like old times. He was immediately caught trying to pry open a window covering and was sent to a different prison, where he quickly got into a fight with another inmate that left him with a broken hand. Roger wrote about what happened next in the afterward to the final printing of Go Boy.

One night, I attempted to escape through one of the windows in the men's room. I was caught and placed in a padded room by the orderlies. While one of them came in to give me my medication. I again tried to make a break for it. I failed and wound up in court Rockville for attempted to escape and assault. I picked up another nine months of time. In autumn of nineteen ninety three, at the age of fifty six, I was sentenced to eight years of imprisonment for the robbery charge. After a very lengthy.

Trial, Roger was transferred to Hull, Quebec, the same town he'd lived in when he was first paroled when Goboy came out, but this time instead of the halfway house. He was in maximum security when one night, the guard who was supposed to be watching Roger fell asleep.

So I took my chance and in darkness, scaled the old concrete wall, ripping my hands and torso to shreds as I tried to untangle myself from the coils of razor wire. Unknown to me, the guards were holding a union meeting that night. It looked like a nighttime football game, with me at one end of the yard and thirty or so guards at the other end advancing on me. I was a bloody mess as I jumped from the high wall to the roof in a very dramatic display

Sue fully stopped talking to Roger in the aftermath of his relapse as robber. When Roger got married during a stint in prison, Sue was not there. She continued to meet up with her other siblings for their weekly Tim Horton's coffee, like they always had. Some of the siblings did a better job of keeping track of Roger than others, but he was no one's favorite topic of conversation because

And they said, aren't you coming? And I said no, no, And it was very easy to say no. It's just my heart was saying no. And they said, oh, okay.

So they went.

But when they came back, Gaston looked shaken and he said to Sue, you.

Know what, you were smart not to go. I said, yes, Oh what happened? Well, he said, the good news is he's got a roof over his head and they're feeding them and he gets medicine. The bad news is, I don't even think you knew me.

And this is when something changed in Sue.

So I thought, okay, I better check into this. So I made a call to the establishment and they said, oh, yes, we've got him here whatnot? And he falls a lot, and when he's not falling, he's sleeping. So I thought, hmmm, it was the start eat at me. So I take the bull by the horns and I thought, I'm going to go and see him. So I drove myself to Plantagenet. When I saw him, he was sleeping in a wheelchair

The two of the caught up over a shared treat. Roger had been living there for a while and he said that everyone there was pretty nice, but the big problem he'd been having lately was with gravity.

So he starts showing me his legs, which was absolutely terrible, great big scabs from falling. He had a carpet in his room, a small area carpet falling, so it's like rugburns. So anyway, this shook me up big time.

Sue did her best to just enjoy the company of her brother and keep things light. But once she got back into her car, she knew what she had to do.

And I thought, there's no way. There's no way I'm leaving him there. There's just no way.

It was like the switch that had turned off, and Sue finally was flipped back on. When she got back home to corn Law, she immediately hit the pavement.

I did my legwork and I visited three four establishments in Cornwall because I wanted to see them for myself, and I knew the waiting list was at least two years everywhere, so I went and presented myself to each place, and I said, you know, you get used to seeing me, because you're going to see a lot of me.

We all need a sister like Sue.

Just within the month, we got him into Sandfield Place, which is a very nice nursing home, wonderful staff, very patient and good with Roger and funny. So we used my elder brother's car and I drove his car and he came with me and we went to get Roger. So one more time, we're taking Roger home.

First introduced to Roger's story where my friend Rob slid me a copy of Go Boy across a table in a cafe, and Rob was introduced to Roger's story back when he was still a kid in the eighties.

I actually picked up a copy of the book at the library. I didn't know anything about it. I think the cover caught my attention and so I took it home.

Rob was immediately grabbed by the action of the book, the bank robberies, the fights, but most of all, the prison escapes.

Where I'm from in Kingston, Ontario, basically it's a prison city.

It framed out his bedroom window was one of the very prisons from Go Boy.

From my house growing up, I could see Colin's Bay pen attention, and they call it Disneyland because that has this sort of big castle looking thing out in the front. So it was just it's always been in my backyard.

Rob would read about the escapes in Go Boy again and again, and when he'd glance out the window toward Colin's Bay, raw up an escape plan for Roger. In his imagination.

If he could get over that back wall, through the farm field, over the train tracks, through the conservation area, he could come up from the bottom of what my street was and go up my hill. I could leave snacks out on the side. I had this all map that, and I'd written it out, and I had a little map and all this kind of stuff.

When Roger's second book, Bingo came out, Rob was such a well known fan of Rogers someone got him a signed copy.

It was autographed, and honestly, I thought it was like Wayne Gretzky, he had written a hockey stick for me. Like it was like it was the coolest thing ever.

Rob eventually went off to film school, graduated, and then, like all Cinophiles from that era, he got a job at Blockbuster Video. When one day Rob thought, I wonder where I could find a copy of the Go Boy movie. He'd never seen it, but he remembered vaguely reading a news story about how there was this big budget film adaptation in the works. So he searched the Blockbuster catalog and the library.

I started looking for it. I couldn't find it anywhere.

So one day he called up the publisher of the book and.

I said, where could I see the movie of this book? And he's like, well, there is no movie.

How could there not be a movie. Rob's like, it's one of the most cinematic books I've ever read.

And I said, if someone was to make the movie, how would you go about doing that? And he said, actually, Roger holds the film rights to this. So that was my introduction of like, oh, so it's available and I'm a new film school graduate and oh maybe this has actually got a good plan.

So Rob thinks, great, I'll just get in touch with Roger.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, Roger had been he has sort of been getting in trouble in and out of trouble later on in his life.

And he was currently serving time in prison. So Rob's like, I'll just give him a call in prison.

Growing up in prison, I should have known how to worked, but I didn't, And so I phoned the institution that he was in, saying, basically, hi, is Roger there? You know? Can I speak to Roger care on please? And they're like, we're not running a hotel here, sir.

But then a short time after that I.

Got to collect call, but my wife picked it up and then she comes and says, and we just had our babies were quite young at the times, like newborns. And she goes, I don't know what project are you working on, but why are we going to collect calls from prison?

So that started it. Roger continued bouncing around to different places, both in and out of prison, when finally the timing worked out so that Rob could go and meet him and his wife, Barbara, not knowing what sort of condition he'd find Roger in.

I knew he had Parkinson's disease, and I knew that his voice was quite raspy and stuff, and I d heard interviews that he'd done, but I didn't really know what to expect when we saw him. So me and some friends at the time I went up to visit Roger. We came in and out of nowhere, like Roger just I don't know why, but it's like he wanted to show me that I still got it. And so he goes, I can bench press one hundred pounds, and I'm sure

Rob was thrilled to discover that Roger was still Roger.

And then when he was done, He's just sort of stands up and I was like, Hi, I'm Rob. That visit was amazing.

In subsequent visits, Rob got to know Roger's family and his sister Sue, who, after they'd reunited, continued to look after her brother back in Cornwall.

He was in a nursing home. His health was really improving. It was amazing.

And one day with his camera, Rob tagged along for a drive with the two siblings.

We went for a drive literally down Memory Lane, and it was really nice because it was sort of brother and sister doing Remember Whens.

There's the church Roger used to sneak out of the woods where Roger would catch squirrels, the fishing spot where he'd hide from the truant officer.

And then at one point we were driving along, Sue and I both saw we were passing a TD bank and so Sue says, oh, Roger, don't get any ideas and he didn't see it at first, and he goes what And he looks over and he goes, oh, yeah, I've never done a TD and you could just see the wheels are really like Okay, I can still do this.

Driving around with Roger and Sue as they gently roasted each other in the way the siblings do. Rob was struck by this thought. In the grand spectrum of ways that Roger Kuran's life could have gone, even given everything that happened to him, this really was one of the best paths available. A journey of unbelievable highs in Lowes leading to a final chapter near his family, safe with lots of friends and lots of people to tell his stories to.

But he just seemed more calm and at peace. He seemed happy, which was which was nice to see one of Canada's most notorious criminals and one of its most celebrated authors has died.

He was seventy three. It's hard to accept that Roger Kuran eventually did die. It seems impossible that as his mortality closed in he didn't find another way out. I guess if it's possible for someone like Roger Kuran to die, it could happen to anyone.

Great.

This is Roger's niece singing at his memorial Roger's headstone that was picked out by Sue. Is in the shape of a hardcover book, and it reads on its cover Roger Goboy Koran, Governor General's Literary Award, nineteen seventy eight. He can go see it next time you're in Cornwall.

I think he'll be remembered in a loving way, and I believe that. I don't think. I don't think anyone that's known him will well think of him differently. We remember Roger because he was such a vivid character. And if you can say this about somebody who did the things he did.

He was a nice person. He was a nice company.

He was a good company to be around.

He was charismatic, he was full of energy. He was hyperactive essentially all the time. But it seemed like a very happy person. He seemed very positive, enthusiastic.

I always found something positive out of everything that was negative, no matter how negative, I'd manage to stubbornly to twist it around and find something positive out of it.

He would endure as the prison writer of his generation. The story he told was quite remarkable and quite unique, and it's a redemption tale. It had all those elements of vindication and success and defeating the very system that represses everybody. I think that's why it's so resonant.

I think my uncle Roger's story brought the light on what was happening in Canadian prisons at the time that ninety nine percent of the population knew nothing about. And I hope that some of my uncle's books helped reform prison policy and public policy in some way that has benefited prisoners.

Roger will be remembered for his moment in the limelight and his story about the power of the written word. But the thing that I'll never forget is his unest sable will. The world tried to civilize and change and control him, but he couldn't be contained. You could put him in a cell in a hole, but.

You couldn't capture him.

Walls couldn't confine him, Labels couldn't define him. His story proves that stubborn belief in yourself can get you anywhere. To hear of his prison escapes, his creative journey, and his insane physical durability forces you to rethink what is humanly possible. In Roger's world, it is possible to escape from an inescapable place. It is possible to turn a bag of jelly Beans into an award winning piece of

The most powerful message was that offenders aren't just defenders. You know, a person isn't a robber, a murderer, a thief. He's a human being that at some point in life did these things. But that's a small part of his life. He's much more than that. He's much more complex than that, and he or she also as far more to offer than that. And so the message really was that there's tremendous power in human beings.

If he was able to go to you know, cities across the country and speak to groups of kids, and if he and one or two kids in that audience who were on a slippery path, if you changed one life, I mean, that's that's huge.

He had a story to tell that it's a story that really catches you, and the people just got really caught up in the in the story. They just come away with wondering, you know, how did he get through that?

All that frustration, all that hate, all that voice within me to be heard, all came up that through my fingers, into the pan and into the book. And now that it's between the covers, I think of it as not my voice, but the voice of many other inmates and candidate.

Roger's story shows us that creativity can transform, you can transport, you can.

Be your escape.

And if creativity can't get you where you need to go, that's what the hacksaw Blade in your Shoe is for. Go Boy is a production from Campside Media in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Go Boy was written and hosted by me Sam Wellins. Our producer is Rob Lindsay of Paradox Pictures. Laine Rose is our senior producer. Sound design, mix and engineering by Garrett Tiedemant, Original music