Police hunting suspected gunman-on-the-loose Omari Gordon will hopefully have already checked he isn't hiding at his mom's house.

But a tactic so simple proved a pretty clever one for Bermuda's infamous fugitive Troy Shorter, who sparked a massive manhunt after breaking out of Casemates maximum security prison in July 1991.

It was a full five months before Police finally swooped on murderer Shorter when they received a tip-off he was lurking in the attic of his mother's two-storey home in Euclid Avenue, Pembroke.

In that time, they'd put together an 18-strong search team, stuck a $20,000 price tag on Shorter's head and asked the public to carry photographs of him around in case they spotted him.

They had even interviewed his mother in the very house Shorter was hiding in.

But, showing how surprisingly easy it is for someone to go missing on an Island so small, all their best efforts had failed until Shorter's dramatic arrest in December 1991.

After finally being told of Shorter's whereabouts, Police spearheaded by Supt. Wayne Perinchief — now a Progressive Labour Party MP — descended on the property and found the killer in the dark in the ceiling.

Cornered, Shorter threatened to electrocute himself and then knocked a massive hole in the floor before crashing through to the lounge below.

Officers waiting downstairs pounced immediately and handcuffed him as, in the ensuing mayhem, Shorter's sister assaulted future Assistant Commissioner Carlton Adams with what one eyewitness describes as the biggest slap in the face he's ever seen.

Asked for a comment by a journalist as he was marched towards an unmarked Police car outside the house, Shorter's response showed that even 17 years ago Royal Gazette reporters weren't always flavour of the month.

"You're lucky I don't kick you in the face," was his message for the hack.

Neighbours later revealed Shorter hadn't even had to try that hard to avoid being captured.

"I saw him. He was on the balcony," one told this newspaper the day after his capture. "I didn't know it was him. He had much longer hair."

One neighbour claimed to know Shorter's mother lived on the street but thought that would be the last place he would hide.

Another said: "I was sitting on my porch at about 2 a.m. when I saw a person ducking behind a nearby wall. He ducked every time a car came by and eventually jumped over the wall and disappeared. I thought nothing of it."

Shorter's jailbreak — in which he clambered over two 20-feet walls and hopped on a bus — had been one of a string of embarrassments for the prison service.

Around the same time a prisoner escaped while being escorted to a fake dentist's appointment, another outran his guards after being taken to King Edward VII Memorial Hospital with a shoulder injury, and child killer Chesterfield Johnson had a fling with a prostitute while receiving counselling.

But probably the coup de grace was the 'Luscious Lollipops' affair, in which nude female strippers performed lewd acts including the limbo while wearing g-strings and took part in sex acts with members of the audience at a prison officers' recreation club event.

Shorter had originally been sentenced to death after a jury convicted him of coldbloodedly gunning down supermarket boss Roger Redman in 1986, although that sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by Governor Sir Desmond Langley.