APPRAISER: I know everyone's been asking me, and at the table, all I wanted to say was, "What's in the box?"

HOST: In 2017, a guest headed to ROADSHOW in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, with surely one of the most bizarre items collectibles expert James Supp has ever unboxed.

APPRAISER (voiceover): I tend to specialize in the odd, strange and obscure things.

And it takes a certain kind of insanity, frankly, to talk about weird props or weird cultural pop icons from obscure things.

GUEST: I don't know if anyone has heard of Willie Sutton.

He was a famous bank robber, well-known bank robber.

He was also well-known for breaking out of prisons.

This was his that he used in an attempted breakout.

He had made this himself in prison.

APPRAISER: It is such a TV show and movie trope of prisoners, uh, making these fake dummy heads and dummy bodies to aid in their escape.

So they'll put together a bunch of pillows and put 'em in their bed while they try to escape.

Well, these are actually based on real facts, which is crazy to me.

And this particular escape head, uh, belonged to Willie Sutton, who was kind of a gentleman thief.

He had reportedly robbed over 100 banks.

He had escaped successfully from prison three times.

And this is a dummy head and dummy hand that he used in an unsuccessful escape from prison.

GUEST: Yes.

APPRAISER: And the prison was run by your grandfather?

GUEST: Yes.

After he was released, uh, from the Eastern Penitentiary, they sent it up to the Camp Hill prison where my grandfather was located, and then he simply kept it upon his retirement.

APPRAISER: Now, reportedly, what Sutton had done was over the course of several months, possibly even years, he made this false head using hair from the barbershop.

And this is actually real human hair.

Same with the eyelashes.

GUEST: As far as the plaster, I heard he went to the dentist a lot.

(laughs) APPRAISER (voiceover): This prison escape head was a masterwork.

If you look at pictures of Willie Sutton, this head really looks like him.

He fashioned this wonderful head.

And left it in his bed, left in the hand, clutching a corner of the bed sheet.

You know what happened that night when he tried to escape?

GUEST: Unfortunately, unbeknownst to him, two other inmates in another area of the prison also attempted to escape at that point, at about the same time.

And that set off all the bells and whistles and alarms.

He ran back to his cell.

APPRAISER: This escape attempt was in August of 1941.

GUEST: Yes.

APPRAISER: And it was just a few years later when he-- that-- managed to finally escape for several years.

And in 1950, he was actually the 11th person to be added to the FBI's Most Wanted list.

There's not a lot of these things that were used by prisoners to help them escape come up for auction.

Without the box and the provenance of the label on the box, it's just a creepy, plaster head.

We were able to give it a very conservative auction estimate of $2,500 to $3,500.

GUEST: Wow, that's nice.

That's very nice.

That's surprising.

APPRAISER: One of the cool things about it is we were able to find photographs of the escape head, the hand, being held by the superintendent of the prison.

We saw it photographed in place in Willie Sutton's cell.

You cannot get better documentation than that, and that is the kind of documentation we live for.

As an appraiser, we can't always be right.

We can give an opinion of value.

And with the Willie Sutton head, I will wholeheartedly admit I was wrong in the value.

That was way low; and over the last few years, I've often wondered whatever happened to the head.

And recently the owner sent us a couple of photos, and it looks like he's still having fun with it.

But I know that if it came up on the market today, it'd be worth far more than the $2,500 or $3,500 that I originally appraised it for.

It would be more in the $20,000, $25,000 range.