Alcatraz, known as ‘The Rock,’ top example of the most menacing prisons in the world, was not built to let its prisoners plan an easy escape. As many as 36 inmates had attempted an escape in Alcatraz’s history, but none succeeded or survived, until June 1962.
Three men made history by planning and executing a great escape from ‘The Rock’. They plunged into the San Francisco Bay and their further whereabouts were lost in those tumultuous waters, bringing the investigation process to a dead-end.
A mysterious letter received by the police rang the bells again and forced FBI to re-open their case file in January 2018. What was the letter all about that created such an unrest in the authorities?
The First Contact
It was a routine workday at San Francisco Police Department when a shocking letter was received. It read: “My name is John Anglin. I escaped from Alcatraz in June 1962 with my brother Clarence and Frank Morris.”
This letter was received with equal shock and doubt. Alcatraz escape case was an unsolved mystery, and police had closed the case by saying that all the escapees died in ice-cold waters of the bay. Did police lie to cover their incompetency to solve the mystery or was the letter a prank? It was hard to figure out if there was an ulterior motive for sending such a letter.
The Letter Raised Many Questions
Alcatraz incident left almost all levels of law enforcement look dumbfounded and clueless for decades. But a letter came that stirred the soup again and promised answers to gaping questions. Answers about what really happened on the night of escape, and what happened hence forth.
The letter was received by San Francisco Police Department in 2013, but had not been disclosed for many years after. It contained such information that would ring alarms at the FBI and case may get re-opened. So it did in January 2018. What was special about this case or that letter? Why was police playing on a back-foot?
The Impossible Escape
The toughest prison of the globe was also the most notorious until it was closed in 1963. Maximum security and fool-proof design built for secluding the worst of criminals from society was impossible to escape.
Though, it doesn’t mean people won’t try to escape. Many gave it a ‘do or die’ chance, and guess what? No one could ‘do’ it and everyone who tried did not make it out alive for 29 years of Alcatraz’s history.
That raises a curiosity how could those three pull it off in June 1962? Question lingered on until the letter catalyzed the re-investigation.
Escape Plan That Worked
This impossible prison nulled every escape plan that was fabricated in the past. Many took that chance and played the dice of fate, but the numbers never rolled in their favor. Out of those who took the risk, 23 were caught, six were shot, two drowned and another two were listed simply as “missing or presumed drowned”.
But the escape plan that worked was really simple. However, the means to do it would be nearly impossible and demanded team-work, trust and a lot of coordination.
They knew that they weren’t the first ones to give it a shot, and because of that the security was more alert and aware of such notorious plans being executed. It made the chances of escape even narrower.
The First Chapter
Four inmates, rotting in neighboring cells, had had it enough and thought of devising a daring plan to re-write the history of prison escapes.They were Frank Lee Morris, Allen West and the Anglin brothers, John and Clarence Anglin. They spent a lot of time planning and modifying their escape strategy and finally they were ready to take the risk.
John and Clarence Anglin shared their prison time in Atlanta with Frank Lee Morris and became acquaintances. When they met again in Alcatraz, they could build that mutual trust and gather courage to do what has never been done before.
Frank Lee Morris
Frank Lee Morris was a cunning, skilled and highly intelligent criminal mastermind with a history of prison escapes. His tragic life story started when he was 11 years of age, and he jumped from foster home to foster home which made him independent and enhanced his survival skills.
But Morris wasn’t the kind whom tragedy will turn into an artist or poet. Morris lived by his own rules. He Wass 13 when he first got convicted of a crime.
People used to see him as a very smart kid and thought he would leap for greatness. Well, things don’t always pan out as planned, and the great Morris left his mark in the history pages as the ringleader of the great escape from Alcatraz.
Seasoned Criminal
Frank Lee Morris’s name was hushed in several prisons in multiple states of the US. Finally, he landed in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, nicknamed as ‘Alcatraz of the South’. But Morris impressed even the police by managing an escape from there too.
Frank was serving 10 years in prison for bank robbery in Louisiana’s highest security prison. He had other plans though, so he escaped. This alarmed and shocked the law enforcement authorities and they were determined to bring him back. After a year, Frank was caught again while committing a robbery and this time, aware of his notorious nature, he was put in the real and infamous Alcatraz.
Brothers of ‘The Rock’
When Frank landed in Alcatraz or ‘The Rock,’ he realized this time he wouldn’t be able to pull it off alone. He needed a strong plan and a strong team. That’s when he met John and Clarence Anglin, brothers who were serving their time at ‘The Rock’. Along with the Anglin brothers, another inmate named Allen West was made part of this escape team by Frank.
The Anglin brothers hailed from Georgia and moved to Florida with their family for work. Their parents were seasonal farm workers and they had to go wherever it took them looking around to earn bread and butter. Anglin brothers were just two out of 13 children and every June the entire family would go north for cherry picking. This really did come handy in order to escape from Alcatraz.
Skilled Criminals
John and Clarence Anglin were as thick as thieves while they were growing up. Their bond only became stronger with time.When their family used to go north for cherry picking and occasionally they would go to Michigan. During those seasons, the brothers would impress everyone with their swimming skills while they would have fun in the Lake Michigan.
This skill came in handy for the duo in later years. Anglin brothers started robbing banks together and were arrested for robbery in 1956. But it was just the beginning.
Official Escape Team
While Anglin brothers served their time in Atlanta Penitentiary, they made a numerous failed attempts to pierce through the prison walls. This frustrated the authorities and to teach them a lesson, they were transferred to Alcatraz, a maximum security prison. Thats where they met Frank Lee Morris.
Frank was the main mastermind behind the Alcatraz escape and along with a fourth member named Allen West, the group had a high collective escape experience. They believed that together they would be able to pull it off. After all, a plan is as good as its team.
Tools of Escape
Alcatraz prison, famously known as ‘The Rock,’ wasn’t just a penitentiary for dangerous criminals but also for non-violent criminals. That means the guards will pay slightly less attention to non-violent criminals.
To add on, The Rock was also a factory. This worked in big favor for the team. Inmates worked in this factory and thus it happened to have resources in substantial amounts. The prison also served the US military, making furniture, clothes and shoes. Arranging tools of escape became an easy task.
Escape Props
Alcatraz was an impenetrable prison and the prison guards weren’t kind souls. Any attempt to escape was always blocked with bullets shot to kill. It goes without saying that to do the impossible, planning would need to be very complex and ingenious. Once the plan was drafted, the team began to put it into action slowly and cautiously.
The team planned to leave behind human like dummies in their prison cells to fool the guards. In order to succeed in finding a way to get off the island and out of the prison, they would have to avoid a way to avoid the guards. Leaving dummies behind was a great idea as it would reduce doubts.
Plan Of Action
Each team member was assigned their own responsibilities. The first and foremost was to get out of their cells on the night of escape. The Anglin brothers were assigned the task of making dummy human heads to leave behind in their empty beds.
They cleverly crafted the pieces of art using soap wax, toilet papers and real human hair stolen from the barber shop in Alcatraz. Morris on the other hand modified an accordion-like instrument to inflate the raft and life vests.
Escape Begins With Digging
The team worked synchronously to make tools, dig out of their cells and unscrew bolts on the vents. They skillfully stole spoons from the cafeteria and wood from the workshop to make picks and wrenches.
They made it a routine from 5:30 PM until about 9 in the night to work on chipping away holes in their cells, large enough for a person to crawl through. Vents in their cells were removed and they used picks to chisel the holes larger.
Aging Alcatraz
Alcatraz was an old prison. It had already deteriorated and was crumbling at many places. Saltwater that ran through the shower and dishwashing pipes ultimately corroded them to leak into prison walls, working in the favor of escape team.
Saltwater eroded the cement as well, which over time became crumbled and loose. The water was kept slightly warm to avoid criminals from getting used to the cold water such as the kind in the San Francisco Bay.
Music Hour
Why did the guards not hear all the banging and chipping while they were building their escape route? Well, the modern prison reform laws in early 60s allowed prison inmates to play music in a specific hour of the day. The jails are not built acoustically, which resulted into a noisy cacophony throughout the prison campus.
Morris played his accordion as loud as possible in order to cover up for all the banging, clanking and chipping sounds. Under the cover of music, they were able to dig holes which led to unguarded utility corridor with pipes leading up and down.
Easy Way To The Roof Top
The utility corridor looked like a jungle gym, out of the sight of prison guards. It was the place via which they wouldn’t expect anyone to plan an escape route. With holes in the cells wide enough, they would be able to easily climb 3 floors up to the roof top.
There were many shafts open to get onto the roof, many of which were cemented shut. But there was one which wasn’t, and all they needed was a wrench to open it loose.
Squeezing Through
Anglin brothers and Morris were able to burrow holes in the walls of their cells by May 1962. But they were barely big enough for them to squeeze their bodies through.
They made a raft and life vest by gluing and stitching raincoats together; almost 50 raincoats! Life vest and raft were extremely necessary do avoid drowning in ice-cold waters in the bay.
Waiting For The Signal
Allan West still didn’t finish his escape hole and others decided to wait for him once they were ready with their pre-requisites. The gang was ready to go at a moment’s notice. Finally in June 1962, that moment came, but did not go as planned.
On June 11, 1962, Allen West raised the signal that he is ready with a hole large enough for him to squeeze through it, but no one expected the unplanned turn of events.
The Action
After the lights were out, the gang was all set to break out of Alcatraz. How many would make it out alive, this was a worrisome question, but they did not have time to step back. Even the slightest hope of surviving the escape and be able to live free outside the prison walls was enough to push them into action.
Ready to do anything and pumped with adrenaline, they set their plan into action. Once the lights went out at night, they quickly set the decoys and get out of their cells according to the plan.
When Things Went South
The Anglin brothers and Morris faced little to no difficulty to get out of their cells, but Allen West was facing problems. Even though he thought the hole is big enough for him to pass through, he misjudged the size and West could not fit into it.
Frank Lee Morris tried to help West, but how far could he go. The cement just wouldn’t budge. The team had to decide quickly what to do as they had no time to waste. At around 9:30 PM, Morris wanted a glass of water and asked Morris to pass it to him. Few moments later, after thinking on their heels for the best possible scenario, they mutually decided that Allen West would have to be left behind! What a hard decision!
One Pal Behind
Leaving a friend and an important member of the team behind is a very hard call to make. Especially when your partner in crime has been working besides you for the same motive — to hope for freedom.Guess there were not many options left. Had they tried to make the escape hole big enough for West, they would have made too much noise and this escape plan would have gone into dirt in no time!
Allen West was a criminal, but he was a good team-mate. He sacrificed his chance of freedom and took one for the team. But this eventually proved to be a bigger than anticipated help. The raft would be lighter with three people than with four of them, making it a bit safer to escape. The group of three now started their climb up to 30 feet of plumbing in the utility corridor.
The Descent
After Morris and Anglin brothers made it to the roof with ease, they had even harder challenge staring them in the eye. Their hearts pounded as they continued to cross the 100 feet of rooftop before they started to descent. Three of them climbed down 50 feet of piping on the side of the building, reaching the ground.
They landed close to the shower area and snuck past the guards as silently as possible. They knew even one mistake may cost them their lives. After so much of careful planning and execution, they were able to outsmart the guards on duty, who were trained to keep a vigilant eye even on the smallest of movements. The escape-team finally made their way to the shore. They had to halt there as the raft and life vests needed to be inflated.
There Goes The Alarm!
This was the last sight of the escaping trio. No one ever saw Frank Lee Morris or John and Clarence Anglin again. They set off to cross the bay in their make-shift raft at around 11:30 in the morning, and none heard from them or about them ever again. Only in the morning their absence was noticed and they were declared ‘on the run’.
Next morning, everyone in Alcatraz woke up to the deafening alarms and blaring sirens. Most of the people got confused, as they were not used to such alarms. It was because nobody thought or attempted to escape from the impenetrable ‘The Rock’. Everyone was curious as to what happened there, only to find that three of the inmates actually pulled off the impossible.
Over And Out
Though Allen was left behind, he still did not give up hope to see the sunlight without prison walls surrounding him. He continued to widen his escape hole so that it is large enough for him to easily pass himself through it. And he did succeed eventually, and ran after the other three.
West hurried up as much as he could, got out of his cell, climbed to roof top but by that time, the other three had already gone. He faced a life and death situation here, and he had a decision to make. Either he could jump in to the sea and try to swim to safety, which he feared he might not survive. The second choice was obvious: return to his cell and pretend nothing has happened.
Wait For The Sunrise
After critically analyzing every choice he had, he came to the conclusion that it will be best for him to return to his cell and wait for the sunrise. In the morning, it was discovered that three inmates had escaped, and sirens were sounded and entire prison was under search radar.
West decided to cooperate with the authorities. He told them that the escaped inmates planned to head to Angel Island, and once they were there, they would steal a car and some clothes before they all separate their ways. But how truthful was West in front of the authorities? Was that a lie? Guess we will never know!
Following Allen’s Information
When the authorities acted according to the information revealed by Allen, they fund that even after 12 days of their escape, there has not been reported even a single car robbery. What could this mean? Either they landed somewhere else, may be by mistake or on purpose, or Morris and the Anglin brothers did not make it out alive.
West told the authorities that he was the mastermind behind their escape plan. He told that he schemed every step of the genius escape, after which he was called in for investigation. Formal investigation was opened to look into whether the trio survived or not.
Ice Cold Waters And Red Hot Determination
Search parties scanned almost every part of their possible escape route and no bodies were found even after several long searches. Only their personal belongings were found floating in the waters if the bay next day. The temperature of the Bay water would have been around 50 to 54 degrees that night. San Francisco Bay is known for its chilly waters no matter what time of the year it is.
Human body has limitations to respond to sudden temperature changes. An adult male can survive for around 20 minutes in such cold waters before vitals start to deteriorate. But the inmates were not at all used to ice-cold waters as they were provided with warm water intentionally so that they don’t get used to cold water.
Direction Of Currents
About a month after the escape incident, a Norwegian freighter reported seeing a floating body in the San Francisco Bay, approximately 17 miles from the Golden Gate Bridge. He reported that the body he saw had clothes which were similar to the prison uniform at the Alcatraz. Due to delay in filing this report, the body was never found.
Years of investigation turned out to be fruitless and the FBI eventually decided to give it up. Finally, the investigation was closed down 17 years after the escape, on December 31, 1979.
It was concluded that the inmates wouldn’t have made it alive and were assumed drowned in the Bay.
However, the clues contrary to this assumption would pop up over the years and make the FBI look like noobs.
Merry Christmas!
Though they were declared dead, their families still received Christmas cards from the Anglin brothers and Morris in their own hand writing (many who knew them, confirmed this). In 2015, The History Channel revealed in a documentary, the further evidence of their successful escape based on those Christmas cards as proofs. But no one could determine the date of their delivery.
A photograph was presented by the Anglin family which showed the brothers were in Brazil in 1975. After forensic analysis of the picture, the report concluded that it was ‘more than likely’ that they were John and Clarence Anglin. However, this wouldn’t be the last development in the saga.
Close Contact
Eventually, one more piece of evidence emerged that pointed towards the possibility that the escape was successful. It was a deathbed confession by one of the Anglin siblings, Robert. He revealed that he was in contact with John and Clarence from 1963 through 1987 but eventually lost contact.
Anglin family members have been deterred from searching for their missing sibling in Brazil because the legendary escape from Alcatraz still remains an open Interpol investigation. If they were found, many questions would be answered, however the cost of which will be severe punishment.
Where On Earth Were Anglin Brothers
A letter arrived in 2013 which was allegedly from John Anglin, confirming and denying many rumors that were spread through decades after their escape. “Yes, we all made it that night but barely! … I’m 83 years old and in bad shape. I have cancer,” the letter said. “Frank passed away in October 2008. His grave is in Argentina under another name. My brother died in 2011.”
Further in the letter, the writer who claimed to be John Anglin revealed where he was hiding all these years since his escape from Alcatraz.
“This is the real and honest truth. I could tell you that for seven years of living in Minot, North Dakota and a year in Fargo," North Dakota until 2003. Parts of the letter were illegible but a report by the BBC interpreted the writing to say that he had lived in Seattle “for most of my years after the Escape.” The next piece of information in the letter proved to be a real bombshell.
No Place Like California
The police wondered if it really could be from John Anglin, who pulled off the most dangerous escape in the history of prison escapes in the first attempt itself. They weren’t sure. The letter supposedly from John Anglin ended by simply saying, “Living in Southern California now.” Could it be true? Could he be actually residing few hours away from San Francisco?
The writer of the letter, who claimed to be John Anglin, was in a very poor health and desperate to get help, even if it meant going back to the jail. After this, he tried to negotiate through the letter for an extremely unconventional deal with the law enforcement. What were his terms? Would it result into something?
Shaking Hands On The Deal
The letter read:“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 law enforcement decided to first investigate the letter itself before jumping on to thinking whether to make a deal or not. They looked into the details and tried to carefully analyze and extract as much information as they could from every facet of the letter.
Time To Verify
According to the US Marshals, the FBI lab examined the letter in detail to find any traces of DNA left on the paper, or fingerprints that could possibly be there along with doing the handwriting analysis. They compared the handwriting with the writing samples from all the three men while they were serving their time behind the bars. Results?
Local CBS television station in San Francisco, KPIX, which published the letter, reported: “the FBI’s results were inconclusive.” One of the station’s security experts deemed that the FBI’s response “means yes, and it means no, so this leaves everything in limbo,” in terms of the authenticity of the letter.
Restless Till ’99
The US Marshals Service accepted in the past that it was possible that three men survived the dangerous escape. After the letter was published in January 2018, a representative from the service told The Washington Post that they did not believe the legitimacy of the letter.
Also, according to the same article, “The Marshals Service has continued to investigate leads and said it will do so until the men are proven deceased, or until they turn 99.” However, when the FBI closed their investigation in 1979, they said that, “For the 17 years we worked on the case, no credible evidence emerged to suggest the men were still alive, either in the US or overseas.”
Response from the Marshals
The letter was publicly revealed after local CBS station in San Francisco, KPIX, revealed it copy from an unnamed source. A response statement by US Marshals followed this publication.
“There is absolutely no reason to believe that any of them would have changed their lifestyle and became completely law abiding citizens after this escape,” the statement read. Remember, the US Marshals were the only ones who left the case open and continued to investigate the case, so their opinion definitely carries weight. Will we ever know what really happened?
A Cold Case
Using modern day technology and computer models, in 2014, a research team managed to calculate that if those three inmates left around midnight, the water currents would have been working in their favor and they were more likely to have survived. What really happened?
“There’s an active warrant, and the Marshals Service doesn’t give up looking for people,” Deputy US Marshal Michael Dyke told NPR back in 2009. Indeed, there was more to be heard from the supposed people who managed to escape Alcatraz.
Last Man On Alcatraz
Jim Albright was the last guard to leave Alcatraz. In his revealing interview with San Francisco’s local ABC affiliate ABC7 in March 2018 in honor of the 55th anniversary since Alcatraz closed down; said that since he was there at the time of escape, he was asked whether he thought they drowned in the water or survived.
“It depends on whether you’re talking to me or you’re talking to their mother. I believe they drowned, I really do,” Albright said in the interview. In his opinion, the letter writer claiming to be John Anglin is simply someone trying to get treatment for his cancer and not the authentic escapee.
The Men Who Escaped
Did the inmates of Alcatraz actually survive the escape? The question still lingers on. The FBI could not conclusively say if the letter was actually from John Anglin. In case those three survived the escape, John Anglin would be 86 years old, Clarence would be 87 and Frank Lee Morris would be nearing 90 years of age.
It is still not clear if the law enforcement authorities contacted the actual writer of the letter received in 2013. But one thing is for sure, those three fabled escapees will still be held responsible for their crimes at least for a decade more, irrespective of their old age.
