Prisoners Who Vanished From Alcatraz

On the morning of 12 June 1962, a guard at Alcatraz prison stopped at a cell and tried to wake the man sleeping inside. The sleeper did not stir. The guard reached through the bars and gave the head a push — and the head rolled off the pillow and landed on the floor with a crack. It was not a head at all. It was a dummy, and the real prisoner was gone.

That morning, America’s most secure prison discovered three prisoners had escaped in the night — out of their cells, off the island, and into the cold black water of San Francisco Bay. They were never seen again. This is the true story of Frank Morris and the brothers John and Clarence Anglin, who walked out of a prison built to be impossible to leave, then disappeared from the world.

The Prison Nobody Was Supposed To Escape From

Alcatraz sits on a bare rock in the middle of San Francisco Bay, and people called it “The Rock”. From 1934 to 1963 it was a maximum security federal prison, the place America sent the prisoners it most wanted to keep hold of — men like Al Capone and George “Machine Gun” Kelly, and men who had already escaped from other prisons.

The rules were strict, and guards counted the prisoners a dozen times a day. And even if a man somehow got out of the building, the island itself was a second prison: around it lay the bay, with freezing water, powerful currents, and more than a mile of open sea between the rock and the nearest land.

Plenty of men tried anyway. Between 1934 and 1963, 36 prisoners attempted 14 separate escapes. Nearly all of them were caught, or did not survive the attempt. The water, everyone believed, finished what the walls began. Then came the three men who made the whole country ask: what if somebody actually made it?

Three Men, One Plan

Frank Morris arrived at Alcatraz in January 1960. He had convictions for bank robbery and burglary, and a long history of trying to escape from prisons. The FBI describes him as a man of sharp intelligence, and he became the leader of the plan.

John Anglin was sent to Alcatraz later in 1960, and his younger brother Clarence followed in early 1961. The brothers were bank robbers who knew Morris from earlier prison stays. By luck or fate, the three men were placed in cells next to each other. A fourth prisoner, Allen West, joined the group.

They began laying their plans in December 1961, after one of them found some old saw blades. What followed was six months of patient, quiet, brilliant work — all of it hidden in plain sight.

Six Months Of Digging, Drilling And Sewing

Each cell had a small air vent in its back wall, covered by a grill. Night after night, the men attacked the concrete around those vents. They used crude homemade tools, including a drill they built from the motor of a broken vacuum cleaner, boring many small holes close together until a whole section of wall could be pushed out. The noise of the work was covered by the sound of prison music hour — Morris played an accordion. Each night they hid the damage with whatever they had: a suitcase, a piece of cardboard, painted false wall pieces.

Behind the cells ran a utility corridor that no guard patrolled. Once through their vents, the men could move along this hidden passage and climb to a secret workshop they set up on top of the cell block, taking turns to keep watch with a homemade periscope.

Up there, they built the tools of their escape. Other prisoners’ raincoats — more than fifty of them, stolen or donated — were stitched together and sealed with heat from the prison’s steam pipes to make life vests and a rubber raft about six feet wide and fourteen feet long. They carved wooden paddles. They turned a musical instrument, a concertina, into a pump for blowing up the raft. They even climbed the pipes to the roof vent, thirty feet up, and prepared it for escape night, holding it shut with a fake bolt made of soap.

And in their cells, they built their doubles. Each man made a dummy head — a papier-mâché-like mixture of soap, toothpaste, concrete dust and toilet paper, painted in skin tones and finished with real human hair swept up from the prison barber shop floor. On the night, those heads would lie on their pillows under the blankets, and the night guards, glancing in, would see three men sleeping peacefully.

The Night Of 11 June 1962

On the evening of 11 June, everything was ready. But the plan broke at the very first step for one man: Allen West could not get his vent grill fully loose in time. There was no way to wait. Morris and the Anglin brothers left him behind.

The three men slipped into the corridor, collected their gear, climbed out through the roof ventilator, and reached the roof. They climbed down by the bakery smoke stack, crossed the fence, and crept to the island’s northeast shore. There, in the dark, they inflated their raincoat raft and pushed off into the bay.

The guards discovered nothing until the morning bed check on 12 June — thanks to the dummy heads, which had bought the escapees the whole night. One of the heads even fell to the floor and cracked its nose when a guard pushed it, which is how the trick was found out. Allen West, still in his cell, soon told investigators the whole plan, which is why we know so much about how it was done.

What The Water Gave Back

The search was enormous, but the bay returned only pieces. Within two days, searchers recovered a packet of letters, sealed in rubber to keep it waterproof, that was connected to the men. A paddle like theirs was found floating near Angel Island. More pieces followed: bits of wood and rubber, and a homemade life vest washed up on Cronkhite Beach. Weeks later, a badly decomposed body in blue clothing resembling a prison uniform was found up the coast — but it was never identified, and to this day nobody knows if it was one of the three.

What the search never found was the men themselves — alive or dead. No bodies were ever confirmed as theirs. No raft was ever recovered whole. The trail simply stops at the water’s edge.

Did They Drown, Or Did They Make It?

Here honesty matters, because nobody knows the answer. There are only two sides, and both deserve a fair hearing.

The FBI, which investigated for seventeen years, concluded that the men most likely drowned. Its reasons are strong. The bay’s currents are fierce, and its water is bitterly cold — around 50 to 55 degrees Fahrenheit — and the nearest shore was at least a mile and a quarter away. The plan, according to West, was to steal a car and clothes once they reached land, yet no such thefts were ever reported despite the huge publicity. If the families had helped them, investigators could never prove it — and the families seemed to have little money for such help. Above all, in seventeen years of searching, no credible sign of life ever appeared, in America or overseas. On 31 December 1979, the FBI closed its case and handed responsibility to the U.S. Marshals Service, which keeps the case open in case the trio somehow survived.

The other side points to what is missing from the drowning story: the bodies. Other Alcatraz escapees who drowned in the bay were eventually washed up and found. These three never were. Supporters of the survival idea note that the paddle and packet found near Angel Island could suggest the men got at least that far, on their planned route toward Marin County. It is possible. It has never been proven. Both endings remain exactly that — possible.

The Letter That Arrived 51 Years Later

The strangest twist came decades afterwards. In 2018, the FBI revealed that back in 2013, San Francisco police had received a letter from a man claiming to be John Anglin. The writer said that Morris had died in 2008 and Clarence in 2011, and that he himself was ill with cancer and wanted to negotiate his surrender in exchange for medical treatment.

It sounds like the answer to a fifty-year mystery. But honestly: the letter was examined, and its authenticity was judged inconclusive. Nobody has ever proven that John Anglin wrote it. It may be a genuine message from a dying fugitive. It may be a cruel or playful fake. Science could not decide, and so the letter joins the paddle and the packet among the clues that raise the question without ever answering it.

The Prison Closed, But The Mystery Never Did

Less than a year after the escape, on 21 March 1963, Alcatraz closed as a prison. Many assume the escape shamed it into closing — but the Federal Bureau of Prisons is clear that the decision had been made long before the three men vanished. Alcatraz closed because it was ruinously expensive: everything, including nearly a million gallons of fresh water every week, had to be brought in by boat, and running it cost nearly three times as much per prisoner as any other federal prison. It was cheaper to build a new prison than to repair the old rock.

Today the island belongs to the National Park Service and welcomes more than a million visitors a year, who walk past the three famous cells and stare at the vent holes and the dummy heads. The 1979 film “Escape from Alcatraz” made the story known around the world. But the ending of the real story is still unwritten. Somewhere — on the floor of a cold bay, or in a quiet life lived under another name — the last chapter of Morris and the Anglin brothers exists. After all these years, no one has found it, and no one can honestly say where it is.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did anyone ever successfully escape from Alcatraz? Officially, no escape was ever confirmed successful. In 29 years, 36 men tried in 14 attempts; most were caught or killed, and five were listed as “missing and presumed drowned” — including Morris and the Anglin brothers, whose fate was never proven either way.

How did the dummy heads fool the guards? Each head was modelled from a papier-mâché-like mixture, painted to look like skin, and topped with real hair from the barber shop. Placed on pillows with blankets pulled up, they passed the night-time checks and gave the men hours of head start.

What happened to Allen West, the fourth man? He could not loosen his cell vent in time on escape night and was left behind. Afterwards he described the entire plan to investigators, which is how the details of the digging, the workshop and the raincoat raft became known.

What did the FBI conclude? After seventeen years, the FBI concluded the men most likely drowned in the cold, fast-moving bay water, and closed its case on 31 December 1979. The U.S. Marshals Service took over and still keeps the case open.

Is the 2013 letter from John Anglin genuine? It has never been proven. The letter, revealed by the FBI in 2018, claimed Morris and Clarence had died and offered a surrender deal. Analysis left its authenticity inconclusive.

Can you visit Alcatraz today? Yes. The island is run by the National Park Service, opened to the public in 1973, and receives more than a million visitors a year. The escape cells and dummy heads are among its most famous sights.

Sources

• FBI, “Alcatraz Escape”: https://www.fbi.gov/history/cases-and-criminals/alcatraz-escape
• Federal Bureau of Prisons, “Alcatraz” (history and prison closure): https://www.bop.gov/about/history/alcatraz.jsp
• Wikipedia, “June 1962 Alcatraz escape” (investigation details and the 2013 letter): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_1962_Alcatraz_escape
• The picture on this page is an original illustration made for Talha M Blog.