42 Facts About Roger Caron

At the time of publishing, Caron was 39 years old and had spent 23 years in prison.

Roger Caron was born in 1938, to extremely poor parents Donat and Yvonne in Cornwall, Ontario, Canada.

Roger Caron was a quiet and secretive child who liked to keep to himself and pass the time by taking apart clocks.

Roger Caron's sister Suzanne was born in 1939; younger brother Gaston followed in 1944.

Later, a parish priest was able to help Roger Caron fend off his nightmares.

Roger Caron told the priest he had accidentally broken the hand off a large Saint Joseph statue in his house while playing, thinking Saint Joseph's vengeful spirit was choking him in the night.

Roger Caron gave Caron a silver medallion to wear around his neck and said Saint Joseph would be his protector from now on.

Roger Caron's nightmares disappeared and he continued to wear the medallion through adulthood.

The family's house was raided numerous times by the local police until Roger Caron's father struck a deal with a local officer who would warn them when a raid was coming, for 25 dollars a week.

Donat would chuckle at having outwitted the law , all while young Roger Caron sat by observing everything, wondering what was "right" and what was "wrong".

Around age eleven, Roger Caron began having altercations with his father's drunken "customers".

In one instance, a man killed Roger Caron's pet rooster claiming it was an accident.

Roger Caron flew into a rage and had to be physically pulled off the man.

Roger Caron cites this as the time when he began feeling as if he were a bad seed.

Roger Caron felt a tremendous drive to do something shocking.

When Roger Caron got into trouble, his older stepbrothers would hold him down while his father mercilessly whipped him.

The police arrived, and Roger Caron made a daring escape, darting between an arresting officer's legs.

The class waved goodbye as Roger Caron rode away in the motorcycle's sidecar, remarking how he "felt like [John] Dillinger".

At the court appearance, Roger Caron was let off with probation and a stern lecture by the judge.

Roger Caron would appear quiet and easygoing on the surface but would launch into a full-blown rage if pushed.

At fifteen, Roger Caron had built a lengthy arrest record topped off by stealing the town's cache of Dominion Day fireworks and three kegs of gunpowder with two other boys.

At age sixteen, on September 8,1954, Roger Caron tripped the alarm at a sporting goods store.

Roger Caron is rumoured to have two children, a son born circa 1958 and a daughter circa 1960.

Roger Caron successfully eluded the stalking prison guards and fled, not fully aware of how bleak his life would become over the following decades.

Roger Caron was recaptured three days later and sent back to the Ontario Reformatory in Guelph, this time as a member of the general population.

Roger Caron successfully broke out of thirteen prisons and jails, more than any other criminal in Canadian history, exploits he covers in vivid detail throughout the book.

Roger Caron described a power struggle between MacKenzie, who wanted to surrender to save lives after it was made clear that the Crown had rejected most of Knight's demands vs Beaucage who wanted the uprising to end in a bloodbath.

Roger Caron wrote about Beaucage's demands that: "What was building up inside the dome was a mass suicide pact orchestrated by the insane element".

Roger Caron wrote it was the Solicitor-General, Jean-Pierre Goyer, who was responsible for Knight losing control after he gave a speech saying that the government would not negotiate with Knight, which the other inmates such as Beaucage were aware of by listening to their transistor radios.

Roger Caron eventually won a contract with Correctional Services Canada to give motivational talks to inmates and was considered a rehabilitation success.

However, on April 1,1992, Roger Caron robbed a Zellers department store in Ottawa.

Roger Caron was denied bail and held until his trial in 1993.

Later, Roger Caron was sent to the Brockville Psychiatric Hospital for another attempt at a competency test.

Roger Caron again tried to escape through a window but was caught and placed in a padded cell.

On July 15,1994, while imprisoned at the Joyceville Institution, Roger Caron married Barbara Prince, a legal secretary from Ottawa he had been dating prior to his latest incarceration.

Roger Caron suffered two heart attacks and underwent open heart surgery on December 2,1998 to have a triple bypass performed.

Roger Caron was paroled on December 10,1998, partially due to his health, and moved to Barry's Bay, Ontario to be closer to his new wife's family.

Roger Caron stands five foot eight inches tall and would have been 63 years old in 2001.

The number of robberies was reduced from fifteen to five and on March 3,2005 Roger Caron was found not guilty on all charges.

At 67 years old, Roger Caron was released from Maplehurst Correctional Complex in April 2005 and had been living as a free man in Barry's Bay with his wife, Barbara.

Roger Caron subsequently lived alone in a retirement home in Plantagenet, Ontario.

Roger Caron died on April 11,2012, one day before his 74th birthday, at the Sandfield Place Nursing Home in Cornwall, Ontario.