The fugitive who rose to fame for Australia’s boldest prison escape – aided by his helicopter hijacking girlfriend – has revealed a “falsity” in the infamous story. John Killick, now an 83-year-old author who says he’s had “nine lives”, spent his raffish younger years orchestrating bank heists out of anger at banks contributing to his mother's suicide as a kid. Killick's then-girlfriend, the Russian-Australian Lucy Dudko, hijacked a helicopter with a Tommy gun, which was conducting a tour of the Olympic Park site in the lead up to the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney. She coerced the pilot to land in the jail, pick up her boyfriend and fly away. The two were on the run for 45 days, fancying themselves to be like Bonnie and Clyde, before getting caught by the police. But now, the infamous criminal wants the public to know that one thing: he never physically injured anyone as a bank robber. Killick insists that he never shot and wounded a cop during a bank robbery two months earlier, despite media whispers that “repeat the falsity until it becomes fact”. He resents being lumped with violent criminals. “An off-duty cop chased me and threw rocks just missing my head,” Mr Killick said during an interview with news.com.au . “I fired two shots well over his head and one into the ground during the chase to scare him off. I was later arrested by other police.” Killick now accepts that two out of 12 people involved in a bank heist suffer long-term psychological trauma. “My mum killed herself when I was 17,” he said. "The banks foreclosed on our house when I was a kid, I thought it contributed to mum killing herself so my attitude was stuff the banks.” He’s been shot at nine times but has never been hit, so he considers himself a cat with nine lives. While in jail, Killick took to writing and has authored three memoirs: Gambling For Love, The Last Escape, and On The Inside. Now he gives lectures to law students, and wants his son to be proud. He worked to improve his conscientiousness while incarcerated and applied for parole, which was thwarted by a newspaper article that put him in the same category as murderers. Killick has been free for 11 years now and has had plenty of therapy. He’s reached a point of expressing remorse for his crimes, and is even bored of talking about his notorious helicopter escape, though feels it’s necessary for correcting fake news. “What I do want to do though is correct the part that is not fact but keeps getting copied from newspaper to book. Once I’m gone the reports are all there is and they will become the truth,” he said. “I never shot at anyone. The trouble is that when something like this happens and everyone is rushing to get the story, somebody hears something about and they repeat it … somebody writes something, and I don’t know who started it, but next thing everyone copies it. It goes everywhere, so it’s really hard to change it.” For the latest breaking news and stories from across the globe from the Daily Star, sign up for our newsletters .