In June of 1962, four inmates attempted the impossible with their Alcatraz escape. Today, their fates remain unknown.
Anthony Morgan/Alamy Stock PhotoAlactraz Prison, a nearly inescapable facility also known as The Rock, which closed in March 1963.
Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary always had a reputation for being impossible to escape from since its creation in the 1910s. That’s because, with its high walls and armed guards, as well as its location 1.25 miles off the coast of San Francisco, no one had ever escaped from the daunting prison.
But the 1962 Alcatraz prison escape showed that while the odds of escaping were slim, they were not impossible. Frank Morris and John and Clarence Anglin, using papier-mâché heads to trick guards into believing they were asleep, managed to escape Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary in the dead of night before vanishing like shadows.
Officially, the three men were never seen again. The FBI and local law enforcement spent years trying to track them down, to no avail. Countless theories were put forth about what could have happened to the escapees. Perhaps, some suggested, they had simply drowned while trying to swim to Angel Island. Others claimed they had seen the men in places like Brazil, Maryland, and Florida.
After 17 years though, the FBI had to close its file on the Alcatraz escapees, and to this day, no one is quite sure of what happened to Morris and the Anglin brothers. But we do know how they managed to pull off their daring escape.
Alcatraz, The Nearly Inescapable Maximum Security Prison
Wikimedia CommonsAlcatraz Federal Penitentiary with Angel Island in the background.
To understand just how insurmountable the task of escaping from Alcatraz was, it’s important to know about the prison’s history. Before Alcatraz housed a prison, the island, just off the coast of San Francisco, served as a military fort dating back to the 1850s. Then, in 1910, the U.S. Army constructed a military prison on the island.
20 years passed, and on October 12, 1933, the United States Department of Justice took over the building, modernizing the structures and increasing security to use the island as a maximum-security prison. Since the island was surrounded by water, and since the currents around the San Francisco Bay are strong, those in charge of the prison believed it was effectively inescapable. For a time, it was considered the most secure prison in the United States.
And it seemed, for a time, that their assumptions were correct. Prior to 1962, 12 escapes were attempted at Alcatraz, and none of them were successful. In these instances, the prisoners were either recaptured, shot, or drowned in the San Francisco Bay.
That changed, however, on June 11, 1962, when inmates Clarence Anglin, John Anglin, Allen West, and Frank Morris made the most daring attempt to escape the prison island.
How Frank Morris And The Anglin Brothers Escaped Alcatraz
Public DomainFrank Morris, the ringleader of the Alcatraz escape.
Their caper began months earlier when the escape plan was hatched by Frank Morris, a career criminal who had become involved in burglary, armed robbery, and drug dealing as a foster child in Washington, D.C. Morris was the leader of the group, considered among the top two percent of the prison population in intelligence according to IQ testing at the time.
It was Morris who assembled the other co-conspirators for his plan. He enlisted John and Clarence Anglin, a pair of brothers from Georgia who had been robbing banks together since they were children, and Allen West, a car thief from New York.
Public DomainClarence Anglin.
Morris brought these men together to enact his daring plan. Over six months, the four men used stolen saw blades and spoons, as well as an improvised drill made from a vacuum cleaner, to gradually widen the ventilation ducts in their respective cells.
Public DomainJohn Anglin.
They worked at night, using Morris’ accordion playing to hide the noise of their drilling. During the day, they concealed the holes they’d made with cardboard painted the same color as the walls of their cells.
Widening these grates gave the prisoners access to an unguarded utility tunnel that ran behind the cells. There, they stored their true masterpiece: a six-by-14-foot inflatable rubber raft made out of 50 raincoats that were stolen or donated by other prisoners.
Benlechlitner/Wikimedia CommonsChiseled air vent in one of the cells on Alcatraz that led to the utility corridor.
While they constructed the raft in the utility tunnel over a period of months, the conspirators concealed their absence from their cells by fashioning convincing dummy heads and placing them on their pillows in their beds while they worked. The heads were made out of a papier-mâché like material formed from soap and toilet paper, and painted in a lifelike manner.
When all their preparations were complete, the prisoners made their escape.
They exited their cell and filed into the tunnel, all except West who was unable to remove the grill covering the ventilation shaft when it became stuck and was left behind.
Federal Bureau of InvestigationThe dummy heads created by the prisoners during their escape from Alactraz prison.
The remaining three men then climbed, with their raft, through a ventilation shaft connected to the utility corridor to the roof of the prison. They then slid down a pipe and hopped two 12-foot tall, barbed wire laden fences, to make their way to a blind spot for the guards, where they inflated their raft. At some point after 10 p.m. that night, the prisoners embarked on their improvised raft to a fate unknown.
The Aftermath Of The Alcatraz Prison Escape
Guards at the prison only discovered the disappearance of Morris and the Anglin brothers the next morning, thanks to the dummy heads they had left in their cells. From questioning West, police discovered that the escapees planned to sail to Angel Island, an inhabited island in the San Francisco Bay less than two and a half miles away.
Bettmann/Getty ImagesChiseled air vent from within the utility corridor.
Three days after the Alcatraz escape, the coast guard found one of the men’s paddles floating in the Bay. On June 21, they discovered shreds of raincoat material on Angel Island Beach. This discovery supports the possibility that the men survived the escape attempt.
However, FBI investigators at the time concluded that due to the strong currents and unfavorable weather conditions in the Bay that night, it was unlikely that the men had survived. They closed their file on the escaped prisoners in 1979, believing that the men likely died at sea. Many others dispute this opinion, however, and maintain that the three men successfully escaped the prison.
Experts and computer models have proven that it is possible that the men could have survived, though it would require a number of factors to have been in their favor.
F. BaartMap of the San Francisco Bay showing prevailing currents the night of the escape.
These include the Anglin brothers’ two sisters, who came forward in 2012 to claim that they had received a phone call from John Anglin shortly after the escape as well as a Christmas card from him later that year.Another of their siblings, Robert, confessed at his deathbed in 2010 that he had been in contact with John and Clarence from 1963 until approximately 1987.
The family says that the brothers escaped to Brazil, where family friend Fred Brizzi met up with them at one point in 2012 and even produced pictures of them in the country.
Wikimedia CommonsThe photo alleged to be of the Anglin brothers in Brazil in the 1970s.
The FBI has denied the veracity of these claims and states that it is unlikely the men in the photograph are the Anglin brothers.
As for the mastermind behind this caper, Frank Morris, a man claiming to be his cousin came forward in 2011 saying that he had met with Morris in San Diego after the escape, but the authenticity of this claim is unknown.
What is known is that one night in 1962, these men attempted the impossible, and may have even succeeded.
After learning about the escape from Alcatraz prison, go inside Alcatraz with these 44 historic photos of America’s most notorious prison. Then, read about the women who escaped prison, only to be arrested at escape room.
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