Daring Capers: True Crime Stories SHEP DVD

Through dramatizations, news footage and interviews with witnesses and law enforcement officials, Daring Capers takes you down the moral low road into the enticingly dangerous, devilish world of the criminal.

A Great Escape

When Franz von Werra, a German fighter ace in World War II, was shot down over England and taken prisoner in 1940, he vowed that he would get away. Arrogant, cunning and intelligent, von Werra successfully arranged and executed a daring escape from Swanwick prison camp. Six weeks after his arrival, he and four others crawled to freedom through a tunnel they constructed. Dressed as a Dutch pilot, von Werra found his way to a nearby airfield and was grabbed, frantically trying to start the engine of a parked Hurricane.

The recaptured von Werra was put on a ship headed for a Canadian POW camp, but the distance did not discourage this determined prisoner. He made a perilous leap from the transport train before it reached the prison camp and pushed his way across the icy St. Lawrence River to the then neutral United States. He did finally reach German soil, but three months later, while leading a patrol of fighters off the coast of Holland, his aircraft experienced engine trouble and plunged into the sea. No trace of von Werra, or his aircraft, was ever recovered

Plunder Under Ice

Albert Spaggiari was a cavalier, stylish and successful bank robber. With his hand-picked group of international thieves, Spaggiari, in 1976, spent two months digging a tunnel under the streets and into the impregnable vault of the Societe Generale bank of Nice, France. In a single weekend, they took 10 million dollars and left behind a fortune in cash and jewels. Their maddening Wail of taunts and clues baffled, humbled and embarrassed police in a dozen cities. Captured, only to bound out of the courtroom window in the middle of his trial, Spaggiari became a kind of folk hero.