Did the escapees survive?
50 years later, mystery endures DECLARED DEAD
Fifty years ago, on the night of June 11, 1962, the three convicts were locked down as usual. Guards walking the tier outside their cells saw them at 9:30 and checked on them periodically all night, looking in at the sleeping faces, hearing nothing strange. But by morning, the inmates had vanished, Houdini-like.
Guards found pillows under the bedclothes and lifelike papier-mache heads with real hair and closed, painted eyes. Federal agents, state and local police officers, Coast Guard boats and military helicopters joined the manhunt, scouring the prison complex on Alcatraz Island, San Francisco Bay and Northern California.
A crude raft was found on a nearby island. But the fugitives were never seen again. Federal officials said they almost certainly drowned in the frigid 10mile -wide bay, their bodies swept out to sea.
The notion that Frank Lee Morris and brothers Clarence and John Anglin successfully escaped from the nation’s most forbidding maximum security prison and are still alive has been a tantalizing possibility for a half- century now.
In its 29 years as a federal prison, from 1934 to 1963, no one is known to have made it out of Alcatraz alive. Forty- one inmates tried. Of those, 26 were recaptured, seven were shot dead, three drowned and two besides Morris and the Anglin brothers were never found.
Had they survived, the three men — all bank robbers serving long terms — would be in their 80s now. Their breakout has been analyzed in countless articles, four television documentaries, a 1963 book by J. Campbell Bruce, “Escape from Alcatraz,” and a 1979 movie of the same name starring Clint Eastwood as Morris.
Federal officials said Morris had an IQ of 133, surpassing 98 percent of the population. He was jailed in Florida and Georgia, and while serving 10 years for bank robbery escaped from the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Then, captured in a burglary, he was sent to Alcatraz in 1960 for 14 years.
The Anglins were born in Donalsonville, Ga., John on May 2, 1930, and Clarence on May 11, 1931. The two brothers became inept burglars and were imprisoned in Alabama, Florida and Georgia, where they tried to escape repeatedly. Seized after a 1958 Alabama bank holdup, they were sent to the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kan., and later to Alcatraz, John under a 15-year sentence and Clarence a 10-year term.
Housed on a tier near one another, Morris and the Anglins began planning the escape in late 1961. One and perhaps two other inmates were involved.
Behind their row of cells was a narrow, rarely used utility corridor for heating ducts and plumbing pipes. With spoons from a mess hall and a drill improvised from a vacuum cleaner, they dug through thick concrete walls, enlarging small, grille - covered air vents to squeeze through into the utility corridor. The work was concealed with cardboard and paint, and the noise by Morris’ accordion playing.
With absences timed for the guard patrols, they created a secret workshop atop their cellblock. There, they created an inf latable raft of rubber raincoats held together with thread and contact cement, plywood paddles, plastic bags crudely turned into floating devices and dummy heads of plaster and toilet paper, made realistic with paint from prison art kits and hair clippings from the barbershop.
They stole a small accordion-like concertina from another inmate to serve as a bellows to inf late the raft . Finally, they climbed through the utility corridor and up a shaft of pipes and ducts to the roof, where they cut away most of the rivets holding a large ventilating fan and grille in place. Dabs of soap substituted for rivet heads — a little artistic touch, should
Morris and the Anglin brothers were officially declared dead in 1979, when the FBI closed its books on the case.
But it was reopened by the U.S. Marshal’s Service in 1993 after a former Alcatraz inmate, Thomas Kent, told Fox’s “America’s Most Wanted” that he had helped plan the breakout but had backed out because he could not swim.
Kent said Clarence Anglin’s girlfriend had agreed to meet them on shore and drive them to Mexico. Officials were skeptical because Kent had been paid $2,000 for the interview. Nevertheless, Dave Branham, a marshal’s service spokesman, said, “We think there is a possibility they are alive.” anyone notice.
On the night of the escape, only one thing went wrong: Allen West, a fourth inmate who had planned to join them, had trouble opening the vent at the back of his cell and was left behind. He later gave investigators many details of the escape.
The next day, searchers found remnants of the raincoat raft and paddles on An- gel Island, two miles north of Alcatraz and just a mile from the Tiburon headlands of Marin County, north of San Francisco. They also found a plastic bag containing personal effects of the Anglins, including a money- order receipt and names, addresses and photos of friends and relatives.
Emphasizing their belief that the escapees had drowned, officials said there had been no nearby robberies or car thefts on the night of the escape.
Alcatraz was closed 1963.
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