Hunted: The Kevin Barry Artt Story

Book excerpt: On Sunday, 26 November 1978, two IRA gunmen kicked in the front door at 8 Evelyn Gardens in Belfast, the home of Maze prison official Albert Miles. They executed Miles in front of his family and vanished into the night. In 1983 twenty-four-year-old Catholic taxi driver Kevin Barry Artt was convicted and sentenced to life for Miles’ murder, falsely named by an IRA member-turned-jailhouse-informant. On his way to the Maze in handcuffs, Artt resolutely professed his innocence. Six weeks into his life sentence, he escaped in one of the most daring and notorious prison breaks in history, fleeing to California and going underground. The epic legal saga that followed spanned one ocean, two court systems and nearly three decades, as Artt was relentlessly pursued by the British government, aided by the US Department of State and the FBI. Dan Lawton discovered the vital piece of evidence that caused the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal to throw out Artt’s murder case in 2020, and in Hunted, he has forensically chronicled Kevin Barry Artt’s surreal story of survival and redemption.