3 – Escape From Alcatraz
If committing the crime and disappearing from view is darkly impressive, then making an escape while already incarcerated is extraordinary, to say the least. On top of that, throw in escaping from the most secure prison on Earth – not to mention one of the most notorious – and you have something particularly outstanding on your hands. While one should not get carried away with lionizing the perpetrators of such a daring breakout – they were convicted criminals after all – the act itself is more than a little bit impressive. As prison breaks go, few can match that enacted by brothers Clarence and John Anglin and Frank Morris when they did the unthinkable and got out of Alcatraz prison in June 1962.
Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary was considered near impregnable and certainly the most secure facility in the United States. It was situated on an island in San Francisco Bay, a mile and a half from the shoreline and surrounded by waters that were cold, choppy and often rumored to be infested by sharks. (The truth was that the majority of sharks in the bay are harmless, though few inmates knew this.) From its inception in 1934, the prison on Alcatraz Island was a point of no return for the most unruly and infamous inmates, those whom the Federal Government considered having little to no chance of rehabilitation. In fact, the guards that watched over the prison received little by way of rehabilitation training: they were picked because they were tough and could stand up to the level of inmate that would be in their care. While many of the myths surrounding the harshness of conditions that have been perpetuated by Hollywood are just that, life on the island prison was undeniably harsh and escape near impossible. 36 prisoners are thought to have got out of the prison proper in the three decades that it was in use, of whom the Anglin brothers and Frank Morris are among the only 5 still unaccounted for.
Check this out: Life for the Prisoners of Alcatraz in Photos.
The brothers themselves undoubtedly deserved to be in the prison. Though their crimes were usually without violence – they claim never to have used a weapon more threatening than a toy gun – they were arrested on a string of bank-robbing charges in 1956 and were doing twenty years for it when they were transferred to Alcatraz in 1961. They bought their ticket to the island via a long history of attempted escapes at the Atlanta, Georgia penitentiary at which they had previously been held. Frank Morris was an armed robber with a penchant for breakouts and had already been successful with one, earning a place at Alcatraz after he was recaptured following an escape from jail in Louisiana.
The ruse by which the June 1962 escapees made their move was ingenious. Over six months’ worth of nights, the four conspirators – another man, Allen West, was due to escape too – painstakingly crafted a ventilation shaft into a tunnel using discarded cutlery and a drill made from an old vacuum cleaner. Once they had widened it to the point where they could get out, they then built a boat in a cubby hole on the top of their cell block, stitched together from raincoats and made watertight using steam pipes as a heat source. All the while, Frank Morris played the accordion to disguise the noise of the work they were doing.
When the time came for the breakout, their method of avoiding detection was similarly inventive. They used dummy heads made of papier-mache like mixture of soap and toilet paper to give the impression that they were asleep in their cells and buy a little time. Their disguise in place they exited their cells – Allen West was unable to open his tunnel – and make their way up to the roof, down a ventilation pipe to the ground, over two 12 foot barbed wire fences on down to the waters of San Francisco Bay. All the while, the guards were never alerted and thought the three to be safely asleep in their beds. They managed to inflate their makeshift raft with a bellows fashioned from an accordion and set sail to freedom.
The disappearance of the Anglins and Frank Morris, however, had only just begun. Their escape was far from over but the facts hereafter are very sparse. They were aiming for Angel Island, some 2 miles away, according to fellow conspirator Allen West, but a thick fog and the freezing water conditions would have made life difficult. That said, the Anglins were both renowned as strong swimmers – they had spent summers as children playing the icy waters of Lake Michigan – and were more than capable of making it out. No physical evidence of the brothers or of Frank Morris has ever been found, though remnants of the boat washed up on Angel Island a few days later. While the FBI said that it was theoretically plausible but not likely that the escapees made it to freedom, they kept searching for 17 years until closing the case at the end of 1979. The US Marshals Service, tasked with locating those who escape from federal prisons, has never given up the search.
Anglin family members were regularly quoted in the press as believing that the brothers were still alive. In 2015, a TV documentary showed them with Christmas cards that were written by the brothers and a family friend, who had known them since childhood, claimed to have seen the Anglins in Brazil from the time of the escape until the late 80s, going so far as to produce a photograph of himself purportedly with the pair. The case remains open and with the participants now – if alive – well into their eighties, it seems likely that it will never be resolved.
You May Also Interested: Most Notorious Alcatraz Inmates.