The Ones Who Escaped From Alcatraz

It's Thursday, June eleventh. Sixty four years ago today, three men crawled through holes they'd spent months carving into the back wall of their cells, climbed to the roof of the most secure federal prison in the United States, slid down a bakery smokestack, inflated a raft made from over fifty stolen raincoats, and paddled into the San Francisco Bay in the middle of the night. Nobody saw them leave. Nobody has seen them since. The FBI says they drowned. Their family says they didn't. A letter surfaced in 2013 from a man claiming to be one of them, saying all three made it, barely. Alcatraz was built to be the one prison nobody could escape from. On the night of June 11, 1962, three bank robbers with spoons and raincoats proved that wrong. Whether they survived is the part nobody can agree on. Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary opened in 1934 on a twelve-acre island in the middle of San Francisco Bay, about a mile and a half from the city. The location was the point. The water around the island is cold, rarely above fifty five degrees, and the currents are strong and unpredictable. The prison was designed for inmates the federal system considered too dangerous, too famous, or too escape-prone for anywhere else: Al Capone, George "Machine Gun" Kelly, Robert Stroud, the "Birdman of Alcatraz" (uh-KAT-raz), who actually kept his birds at Leavenworth, not Alcatraz, because Alcatraz didn't allow that kind of thing.

Over its twenty nine years of operation, thirty six inmates were involved in fourteen separate escape attempts. Most were caught immediately. Several were shot. Two are believed to have drowned. None were ever confirmed to have made it off the island alive. That was the whole point of putting a prison on a rock in the middle of a freezing bay: even if you got out of your cell, the water would finish the job.

Frank Morris arrived in January 1960. He was a bank robber with an IQ reportedly above 130 and a history of escaping from other prisons. John Anglin (ANG-lin) arrived later that year, and his brother Clarence followed in early 1961. All three knew each other from previous stints at other federal facilities. They were assigned to adjoining cells on the B Block. A fourth inmate, Allen West, joined the conspiracy. Morris, described by the FBI as the most intelligent of the group, took the lead in planning what would become the most elaborate prison escape in American history. The cells at Alcatraz had small ventilation grilles at the back wall, about six by nine inches, that opened into an unguarded utility corridor running behind the cell block. The grilles were set in concrete that decades of salt air had been slowly weakening, which is an irony worth appreciating: the bay that was supposed to make the prison inescapable was also quietly destroying its walls. Using sharpened spoons from the mess hall and a drill improvised from a motor they stole from a vacuum cleaner, Morris and the Anglins slowly widened the vents until the holes were large enough to crawl through. They worked at night during the designated "music hour," when inmates were allowed to play instruments. Morris played his accordion while the others drilled. The music covered the noise. During the day, they hid the holes with cardboard painted to match the cell walls. The guards, conducting visual checks through the bars, never noticed.

Once through the vents, they could access the utility corridor and climb a series of pipes to the top of the cell block, an unoccupied space that became their workshop. Over several months, they assembled their escape equipment up there: a six-by-fourteen-foot inflatable raft made from over fifty raincoats stolen from the prison workshop or donated by sympathetic inmates, glued and stitched together with contact cement. They built wooden paddles. They made life vests from additional raincoats. And they built the dummy heads.

The heads were made from a mixture of soap, toilet paper, concrete dust, and plaster, shaped into lifelike faces, painted with flesh-tone pigment stolen from the prison art supply, and topped with real human hair swept up from the barbershop floor. Each head was placed on a pillow in the inmate's bed, arranged under the blankets to look like a sleeping man. Under the dim lighting of the nighttime cell block, from the angle of a guard walking past the bars during a count, they were convincing enough to fool multiple checks.

On the night of June 11, sometime after lights-out at 9:30 PM, Morris and the Anglin brothers climbed through their vents for the last time, made their way up to the roof, slid down the smokestack of the prison bakery, scaled a fence, and reached the northeast shore of the island. They inflated the raft and launched into the bay. Allen West, the fourth conspirator, couldn't get through his vent in time. The concrete around his grille hadn't deteriorated as much as the others, and by the time he broke through, Morris and the Anglins were gone. He was left behind. He told investigators everything. He was never charged for the escape attempt, was transferred to other facilities, and died in a Florida state prison in 1978. The man who helped plan the most famous prison escape in American history spent the rest of his life inside the system. Clint Eastwood played Frank Morris in the 1979 film "Escape from Alcatraz," which is how most people know this story, though the real version is stranger than anything Hollywood wrote. The next morning, a guard doing the early count pulled the blanket on Clarence Anglin's bed and found a plaster head staring back at him. The prison went into lockdown. The FBI, Coast Guard, Army, and Navy launched a massive search of the bay, the shoreline, and Angel Island, which the escapees had reportedly planned to reach first before crossing to the mainland.

They found paddle-like pieces of wood and scraps of rubber in the water. A makeshift life preserver washed up on Cronkhite (KRON-kite) Beach in Marin County. A waterproof bag with personal items and photographs belonging to the Anglins was recovered near Angel Island. No bodies were ever found.

The FBI officially closed its investigation in 1979, concluding that the three men had drowned in the cold, strong currents of San Francisco Bay. It's a reasonable conclusion. The water temperature that night was in the low fifties. The currents can pull swimmers out toward the Pacific. Even trained open-water swimmers find the crossing difficult.

But in 2014, a team of researchers at Delft University in the Netherlands modeled the exact tidal conditions of the bay on the night of June 11, 1962. They found that if the men launched between 11 PM and midnight and paddled toward Angel Island at a pace consistent with a raincoat raft, the currents would have carried them north toward Horseshoe Bay in Marin County. The window was narrow, maybe thirty minutes, but within that window, the crossing was survivable. Outside it, they would have been swept toward the Pacific and almost certainly drowned. Whether they hit the window is something nobody knows.

But then there's the other evidence. The Anglin brothers' mother reportedly received flowers delivered anonymously, without a card, for years after the escape. Family members claimed the brothers attended her funeral in 1973, disguised in women's clothing and wigs, despite a heavy FBI presence. A photograph surfaced years later, allegedly showing John and Clarence in Brazil in 1975, looking tanned and relaxed. The photo has never been conclusively verified or debunked.

And then there's the letter. In 2013, a handwritten note was sent to the San Francisco Police Department's Richmond station. It read: "My name is John Anglin. I escape from Alcatraz in June 1962 with my brother Clarence and Frank Morris. I'm 83 years old and in bad shape. I have cancer. Yes we all made it that night but barely." The letter claimed Morris died in 2008 and Clarence in 2011. It offered a deal: "If you announce on TV that I will be promised to first go to jail for no more than a year and get medical attention, I will write back to let you know exactly where I am. This is no joke." The FBI tested the letter for fingerprints and DNA. The results were inconclusive.

The US Marshals Service, unlike the FBI, never closed the case. As recently as 2023, a deputy marshal working the file said he believed the men survived the crossing. The case remains officially open. If John Anglin is still alive, he's ninety six years old.

Alcatraz closed as a federal prison on March 21, 1963, less than a year after the escape. The official reason was the cost of operating an island prison where everything, food, supplies, fresh water, had to be shipped in by boat. But the timing was hard to ignore. The prison built to be inescapable had been escaped from, and whether the men lived or died, the myth was broken. Today it's a national park. About 1.7 million people visit every year. Most of them stand in the cells on B Block and look at the ventilation grilles. The holes are still there. So if this comes up in conversation, here's how to think about it. Alcatraz was a federal prison on an island in San Francisco Bay, designed to be inescapable. In 1962, Frank Morris and John and Clarence Anglin used spoons, a vacuum cleaner motor, an accordion for cover noise, dummy heads made from soap and real hair, and a raft stitched together from fifty raincoats to break out. The salt air that was supposed to protect the prison had been weakening the concrete for decades. A fourth conspirator couldn't get through his vent in time and spent the rest of his life in prison. No bodies were ever found. Dutch scientists modeled the currents and concluded the escape was survivable if they launched in the right thirty-minute window. A 2013 letter from a man claiming to be John Anglin said all three made it. The FBI says they drowned. The US Marshals have never closed the case. Alcatraz shut down less than a year later. The holes are still in the wall. You can go see them.

Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.