Prison break in San Francisco, California
In June 1962, inmates Clarence Anglin, John Anglin, and Frank Morris escaped from Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, a maximum-security prison located on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, California, United States. Late on the night of June 11 or early morning of June 12, the three men tucked papier-mâché model heads resembling their own likenesses into their beds, broke out of the main prison building via ventilation ducts and an unguarded utility corridor, and departed the island aboard an improvised inflatable raft to an uncertain fate. A fourth conspirator, Allen West, failed in his escape attempt and remained on the island.
Hundreds of leads were pursued by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and local law enforcement officials in the ensuing years, but no conclusive evidence has ever surfaced favoring the success or failure of the attempt. Numerous theories of widely varying plausibility have been proposed by authorities, reporters, family members, and amateur enthusiasts. In 1979 the FBI officially concluded, on the basis of circumstantial evidence and a preponderance of expert opinion, that the men drowned in the frigid waters of San Francisco Bay without reaching the mainland. The U.S. Marshals Service case file remains open and active, and Morris and the Anglin brothers remain on its wanted list.
New circumstantial and material evidence has continued to surface, stoking new debates on whether the inmates managed to survive.
Inmates.
Frank Morris.
Frank Lee Morris (born September 1, 1926) was born in Washington, D.C. Orphaned at age 11, he spent the rest of his childhood in foster homes. He was convicted of his first criminal offense at 13, and by his late teens had been arrested for crimes ranging from narcotics possession to armed robbery. He spent most of his early years in jail serving lunch to prisoners. Later, he was arrested for grand larceny in Miami Beach, car theft, and armed robbery. Morris reportedly ranked in the top 2% of the general population in intelligence, as measured by IQ testing (133). He served time in Florida and Georgia, then escaped from the Louisiana State Penitentiary while serving 10 years for bank robbery. He was recaptured a year later while committing a burglary and sent to Alcatraz on January 20, 1960, as inmate number AZ1441.
John and Clarence Anglin.
John William Anglin (born May2, 1930) and Clarence Anglin (born May11, 1931) were born into a family of 14children in Donalsonville, Georgia. Their parents, George Robert Anglin and Rachael Van Miller Anglin, were seasonal farmworkers; in the early 1940s, they moved the family to Ruskin, Florida, south of Tampa, where the truck farms and tomato fields provided a more reliable source of income. Each June they migrated north as far as Michigan to pick cherries. Clarence and John were reportedly inseparable as youngsters; they became skilled swimmers, and amazed their siblings by swimming in the frigid waters of Lake Michigan as ice still floated on its surface.
Clarence was first caught breaking into a service station when he was 14years old. The brothers began robbing banks and other establishments as a team in the early 1950s, usually targeting businesses that were closed, to ensure that no one got injured. They claimed that they used a weapon only once, during a bank heist – a toy gun. On January 17, 1958, brothers John, Clarence, and Alfred Anglin robbed the Bank of Columbia in Columbia, Alabama. All received 35-year sentences, which they served at Florida State Prison, Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, and then Atlanta Penitentiary. After repeated attempts to escape from the Atlanta facility, John and Clarence were transferred to Alcatraz. John arrived on October24, 1960, as inmate AZ1476, and Clarence on January16, 1961, as inmate AZ1485.
Allen West.
Allen West (March 25, 1929 – December 21, 1978) was born in New York City. West was arrested over 20 times throughout his lifetime. He was imprisoned for car theft in 1955, first at Atlanta Penitentiary, then at Florida State Prison. After an escape attempt from the Florida facility, he was transferred to Alcatraz in 1957 at the age of 28 and became inmate AZ1335.
Escape.
The four inmates all knew each other from previous incarcerations in Florida and Georgia. When they were assigned adjacent cells in December 1961, they began formulating an escape plan under the leadership of Morris. Over the subsequent six months, they widened the ventilation ducts beneath their sinks using discarded saw blades found on the prison grounds, metal spoons from the mess hall, and an electric drill improvised from the motor of a vacuum cleaner. The men concealed their work with painted cardboard, and masked the noise with Morris's accordion on top of the ambient din of music hour.
Once the holes were wide enough to pass through, the men accessed the unguarded utility corridor directly behind their cells' tier and climbed to the vacant top level of the cellblock, where they set up a clandestine workshop. Here, using over fifty raincoats among other stolen and donated materials, they constructed life preservers, based on a design Morris found in the March 1962 issue of "Popular Mechanics", with the article, "Your Life Preserver — How will it behave if you need it?". Morris found other ideas in magazines; resin to make a lamp shade in the November 1960 issue of "Popular Mechanics", and "Signposts of Water Safety" about channel buoys indicating course and navigation hazards, in the May 21, 1962, issue of "Sports Illustrated". They also assembled a six-by-fourteen-foot rubber raft, the seams carefully stitched by hand and sealed with liquid plastic
available in the shops, and heat from nearby steam pipes. Paddles were improvised from plywood and screws. Finally, they climbed a ventilation shaft to the roof and removed the rivets holding a large fan in place.
The men concealed their absence while working outside their cells, and after the escape itself, by sculpting dummy heads from a hand-made papier-mâché-like mixture of soap, toothpaste, concrete dust, and toilet paper, and giving them a realistic appearance with paint from the maintenance shop and hair from the barbershop floor. With towels and clothing piled under the blankets in their bunks and the dummy heads positioned on the pillows, they appeared to be sleeping.
On the night of June 11, 1962, with all preparations in place, the men initiated their plan. West discovered that the cement he had used to reinforce crumbling concrete around his vent had hardened, narrowing the opening and fixing the grille in place. By the time he managed to remove the grille and re-widen the hole, the others had left without him. He returned to his cell and went to sleep.
From the service corridor, Morris and the Anglins climbed the ventilation shaft to the roof. Guards heard a loud crash as they broke out of the shaft, but nothing further was heard, and the source of the noise was not investigated. Hauling their gear with them, they descended to the ground by sliding down a kitchen vent pipe, then climbed two barbed-wire perimeter fences. At the northeast shoreline, near the power plant—a blind spot in the prison's network of searchlights and gun towers—they inflated their raft with a concertina stolen from another inmate and modified to serve as a bellows. At some time after 10:00p.m., investigators estimated, they boarded the raft, launched it and departed toward their objective, Angel Island, two miles to the north.
Investigation.
The escape was not discovered until the morning of June 12 due to the successful dummy head ruse. Multiple military and law-enforcement agencies conducted an extensive air, sea, and land search over the next ten days. On June 14, a Coast Guard cutter picked up a paddle floating about off the southern shore of Angel Island. On the same day and in the same general location, workers on another boat found a wallet wrapped in plastic complete with names, addresses, and photos of the Anglins' friends and relatives. On June 21, shreds of raincoat material, believed to be remnants of the raft, were found on a beach not far from the Golden Gate Bridge. The following day, a prison boat picked up a deflated life jacket made from the same material off Alcatraz Island. According to the final FBI report, no other physical evidence was found.
FBI agents surmised early on that the men had drowned. They cited the fact that "the individuals' personal effects were the only belongings they had, and the men would have drowned before leaving them behind." However, no human remains were found at the time.
On July 17, a month after the escape, a Norwegian ship, SS "Norefjell", spotted a body floating in the ocean from the Golden Gate Bridge. The ship did not retrieve the body and did not report the sighting until October. San Francisco County Coroner Henry Turkel cast doubt on speculation that it could have been one of the escapees, emphasizing the improbability that a body would still be floating on the surface of the ocean after more than a month; instead, Turkel proposed that the corpse may have been that of Cecil Phillip Herrman, a 34-year-old unemployed baker who had jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge five days earlier. Several coroners from neighboring counties challenged Turkel's opinion, stating that it was possible the remains belonged to one of the escapees.
FBI investigators announced their official position that, while it was theoretically possible for the men to have reached Angel Island, the odds of them having survived the turbulent currents and frigid waters of the bay were negligible. According to the final FBI report, West said that they had planned to steal clothes and a car upon reaching land, but no such thefts were reported in the immediate area.
Aftermath.
West was the only conspirator not to participate in the actual escape. He fully cooperated with the investigation and was therefore not charged for his role.
West was transferred to McNeil Island, Washington after Alcatraz was deactivated in 1963, then back to Atlanta Penitentiary. After serving his sentence, followed by two additional sentences in Georgia and Florida, he was released in 1967, only to be arrested again in Florida the following year on charges of grand larceny. At Florida State Prison, he fatally stabbed another inmate in October 1972. He was serving multiple sentences, including life imprisonment on the murder conviction, when he died of acute peritonitis in 1978.
On December 16, 1962, Alcatraz inmate John Paul Scott made water wings from inflated rubber gloves and swam from Alcatraz to Fort Point, at the southern end of the Golden Gate Bridge. He was found there by teenagers, suffering from hypothermia and exhaustion. After recovering in Letterman Army Hospital, he was returned to Alcatraz. Scott is the only documented case of an Alcatraz inmate reaching the shore by swimming.
Today, athletes swim the same Alcatraz-to-Fort Point route as part of two annual triathlon events.
Because Alcatraz cost more to operate than other prisons (nearly $10 per prisoner per day, as opposed to $3 per prisoner per day at Atlanta), and because 50 years of salt water saturation had severely eroded the buildings, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy ordered the facility to be closed on March 21, 1963.
The FBI closed its file on December 31, 1979, after a 17-year investigation. Their official finding was that the prisoners most likely drowned in the cold waters of the bay while attempting to reach Angel Island. They cited the remnants found of the raft, as well as the personal effects of the men, as evidence that the raft broke up and sank at some point and the three convicts succumbed to hypothermia, with their bodies swept out to sea by the rapid currents of the San Francisco Bay.
The FBI did hand their evidence over to the United States Marshals Service, whose investigation remains open. As Deputy U.S. Marshal Michael Dyke told NPR, "There's an active warrant, and the Marshals Service doesn't give up looking for people." In 2009, Dyke said that he was still receiving leads on a regular basis. The warrant will expire in 2030, when the missing men would be at least 100 years old.
In 2022, age-progressed drawings of the missing men were released by the Marshals Service through their Fugitive Investigations website.
Reported sightings.
In January 1965, the FBI investigated a rumor that Clarence Anglin was living in Brazil. Agents were dispatched to South America but found no direct evidence that he was there.
A man called the Bureau in 1967 claiming to have been Morris's