Convict Frank Morris wrestled with the cover at the top of the ventilation shaft leading to the roof of Alcatraz while his heart was pounding. However, the wailing wind snatched it from his grasp and sent it clattering away from him.
The Anglin brothers, who were Morris’ fellow escapees on that chilly, foggy June 1962 night, listened in fear to the metallic ringing.
They were concerned that doing so would notify the prison’s watchtower guards, who would then turn their searchlights and weapons on them. The island’s lighthouse, which shone its eerie glow over their worried faces every five seconds, was the only source of illumination.
They continued the daring escape attempt, which was subsequently immortalized in the 1979 movie Escape From Alcatraz, starring Clint Eastwood as Morris, the mastermind behind the breakout, by timing their scramble across the roof such that they could only move during the gaps between flashes.
Officially, it was deemed a failure. Shortly after the men vanished, the waves washed ashore some paddle-like pieces of wood as well as two packets containing the Anglin brothers’ correspondence and pictures, which were sealed in rubber raincoat pieces to keep them dry.
This was interpreted as evidence that they had perished while trying to ride a small, improvised raft through the San Francisco Bay’s powerful and unpredictable currents.
Their bodies were never discovered, but this helped keep Alcatraz’s reputation as the unconquerable prison to end all prisons. It has long been hypothesized that the men may have purposefully left these personal items behind to persuade the FBI that there was no sense in seeking for the trio.
The U.S. agency tasked with finding fugitives, the Marshals Service, released age-progressed mugshots last week to honor the 60th anniversary of their abduction, giving further credence to that argument.
They would all be in their 90s by now, grey and wrinkly. However, a phone number for anyone who may help with this “ongoing inquiry” is listed next to their images, indicating that the authorities genuinely believe they may still be alive.
If these images were distributed in reaction to fresh information in this most enigmatic of instances, the powers that be have not said so.
But if the men are ever discovered, it would be an astonishing conclusion to the story, which began in January 1960 when Frank Morris, then 34, arrived at Alcatraz.
He was orphaned at age 11 and spent the rest of his youth in foster homes before starting a career in crime. He was a native of Washington, D.C.
He was already serving a ten-year sentence for bank robbery when he escaped a work group, earning him an additional 14 years on The Rock, often known as Alcatraz.
It was built with the intention of breaking the will of people who had caused disturbance in previous jails and houses numerous murders, rapists, and other dangerous criminals.
It accomplished this by putting them to the “crushing discipline” that author J. Campbell Bruce described in his 1963 book Escape From Alcatraz, which served as the basis for the Clint Eastwood movie.
In any American prison in this century, the rules may have established the most ruthlessly strict schedule, according to what he said.
The men were held in single cells that were 5 feet wide by 8 feet long and had bars at the front so that the roving officials could always see them.
They were sentenced to ten days in “the dungeon” of solitary imprisonment for even the smallest infraction of the rules.
They were shackled to walls painted inky black to heighten the gloom and subsisted on a diet of bread and water in this hellhole, which consisted of six wet and chilly subterranean cells, each sealed off from the outside by a hefty steel door.
The most well-known inmate at the facility, gangster Al Capone, is claimed to have broken down as a result of this treatment and become an uncontrollable mess. Men often fantasized about escaping Alcatraz, and Frank Morris was in a better position than most to accomplish so.
Three individuals who, like him, were imprisoned in Alcatraz after attempting break-outs elsewhere proved to be willing accomplices for the man, who was said to have an IQ of 130, placing him in the top 2% of the population.
One of them was Georgian car burglar Allen West, 30, who was housed in the adjacent cell. The Florida bank robbers Anglins were also involved. John, 32, and Clarence, 31, both men.
They weren’t particularly dangerous criminals—John had carried out all of his robberies with a toy gun—but Clarence had made four failed attempts to escape from other prisons, one of which involved John, and that had been reason enough to send them to Alcatraz.
There, Morris battled to keep them from blowing the cover during the protracted months of planning that preceded the escape.
No one was known to have successfully escaped the jail thanks to strong iron bars that were claimed to be impervious to any saw, armed guards in the watchtowers, and convicts who were counted a dozen times a day.
The men’s hopes, however, were located in a tiny utility tunnel that led behind their cells in block B.
It had a ventilation shaft inside of which the fan motor had been taken out years earlier. If the guys could only find a way into the passage and climb up the piping and gantries leading to the top, it would have been changed, as another prisoner informed Morris, giving them access to the roof.
Morris discovered a solution in the little air vent on the back wall of each cell, despite the fact that it looked impossible. The men used the time between 5.30 p.m. every evening when they were locked in their cells until 6 a.m. the next morning to improvise simple tools.
Among them was a DIY drill created using a broken vacuum cleaner’s motor. They did this by drilling a series of closely spaced holes all around the grilles to remove them.
Only during “music hour,” when prisoners were permitted to listen to the radio and play instruments—in Frank Morris’s instance, an accordion he had purchased especially so he could add to the din—did they work.
While one man worked, another utilized mirrors to look for approaching guards and whistled Home On The Range to signal the other to put down their tools.
The grilles were removed to show spaces that were just six by ten inches in size. Every evening they worked on them with spoons and nail clippers since they were far too small for the prisoners to fit through.
They had to create phony grilles in order to conceal their labor in the interim because the concrete walls they were chopping away at were eight inches thick and would require many painstaking hours to develop holes large enough to wiggle through.
Clarence Anglin convinced the guards to let him use a painting set by pretending to have a sudden interest in art. They used publications confiscated from the jail library to create sheets of cardboard that were then painted with black grids to simulate the genuine thing.
They appeared plausible enough at first inspection, especially when they were hidden by items like Frank Morris’ accordion case. He tied a line around it so that he could draw it back against the wall each time he entered the utility corridor.
The plotters then made copies of their own heads using their knowledge of papier-mâché. These would be put in their beds the night of the escape so it appeared as though they were still sleeping there.
Clarence Anglin, who worked in the prison’s barbershop, had little trouble getting actual human hair for the dummies, but he almost made a mistake when he requested the security personnel for flesh-colored paint for their skin.
He was working on a painting of a barn instead of a portrait, which could have easily raised suspicion. Frank Morris’ involvement was necessary for him to begin working on a portrait instead.
Anglin Senior, who was becoming increasingly brazen, wore the raincoats to his cell even though it was warm outside. He once made the mistake of wearing two, which resulted in a guard stopping him. The guard might have easily seen his weird double-up, but instead he let him to go.
Morris, who was assigned to the workshop where the brushes and brooms used by the prisoners on the cleaning detail were created, took several pieces of plywood and turned them into paddles.
These were hidden away in the utility corridor with the dummy heads and about 55 raincoats, ready to be used on the night of the escape on June 11, 1962.
They had been planning to leave their cells just after “lights out” at 9.30 p.m. for six months, but there was a last-minute hiccup.
Allen West had stolen some cement left by plumbers working in the utility corridor and made the hole bigger before reinstalling the genuine grille out of concern that his phony grille may be found during a random check.
He believed that the new cement would be simple to remove, but it adhered to him quickly and prevented him from escaping. The others left him behind as time passed, and when it was discovered in the morning that they had vanished, he was still in his cell.
The prison was placed on lockdown, but despite a thorough air and sea search, they had vanished.
They could only have exited the roof by sliding 50 feet down a drainpipe. Then, as a guard known to patrol the road below them at the time went by, they would have had to climb over a chain-link fence coated in barbed wire and down a plant-covered cliff while hiding their faces in the undergrowth.
They are said to have made their way to a cove close to the prison’s power plant, which is a blind area for the searchlights, where they inflated their raft using bellows taken from a concertina belonging to another convict before sailing to Angel Island, which is located a mile to the north.
By the time the alarm was sounded, the guys had a good eight hours’ head start on the law enforcement, and if all had gone according to plan, they could have easily made it to Marin County, which was three and a half miles away from Alcatraz on the other side of the bay.
Allen West is the only potential escapee about whose fate we are certain.
He was spared punishment in exchange for sharing every piece of information with the FBI. He was moved to several different jails until Alcatraz was forced to close the following year due to operating expenses.
He was incarcerated for life in 1978 when he passed away for fatally stabbing another prisoner.
If he had escaped from his cell that night in time, may he have lived in freedom?
We may never know, but the mother of the Anglins claimed to have received Christmas cards from both of her sons for three years after they vanished.
And even though FBI agents hid themselves among the mourners when she passed away in 1978, it was reported that two men masquerading as ladies attended her funeral.
More recently, two of the Anglin brothers’ nephews have asserted ownership of a picture of the brothers that shows them appearing much older than when they fled. Yet there has been no success in establishing the exact date of any of this data.
They should stay under the radar until their 99th birthdays if any of the males are still alive. That’s when the warrants for their arrest officially expire.
Until then, they remain fugitives from justice but also folk heroes of a kind — not because we condone the crimes which led them to Alcatraz but because of the ingenuity with which they escaped its immediate confines, whether or not they ultimately got away.