The Real Story of the Prison Break escape
Escape from Alcatraz: The Real Story of the Infamous 1962 Prison Break.
Alcatraz Escape - June 11, 1962
A U.S. Coincidentally, a police report revealed that a blue Chevy with three men in it ran another car off the road in Stockton later that night.
Frank Morris was smart (with a tested IQ of 133), too smart to brag about the escape afterward.
The Anglin brothers, however, were maybe more liable to let their whereabouts slip.
In 2015, a photo emerged of the brothers standing next to a termite mound outside Rio de Janeiro, taken by a family friend in 1975.
A History Channel documentary revealed how the U.S. They couldn’t possibly have escaped the “inescapable” maximum security island. It also went on to explain that Morris died in 2008 and Clarence in 2011. I escaped from Alcatraz in June 1962 with my brother Clarence and Frank Morris. They waited for phone calls on birthdays and interviewed family members repeatedly. Over six months, they built an inflatable raft and life vests out of pilfered raincoats. Frank Morris was smart enough to physically ready himself for the one-mile swim over the six months or more he spent preparing for his bid for freedom.
The idea that the swim is impossible or that you’ll get eaten by sharks was merely a myth concocted by the prison officials to dissuade inmates from attempting it.
They may not have even needed to swim anyway — they had a fully inflated three-man raft to sail away on. You must live every minute looking over your shoulder. Inside the packet there were photographs of the Anglins and their friends and family, along with a list of names and addresses. In the coming days, a paddle and a rubber packet were found off the island’s shores. They concluded that the photo was taken in 1975, and that there was a high likelihood that the men photographed were, in fact, Clarence and John Anglin.
It doesn’t take an expert to see the likeness, particularly in the features around John Anglin’s mouth on the right.
The FBI had long suspected Brazil as a destination for the escapees. Together, they paddled out into the dark, cold night.
From this point, there are very few facts anyone agrees on. It also shows how the currents move back around toward Angel Island, which explains why their raft did end up there (despite the FBI’s initial claims, more on that later).
Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers were probably cracking beers under the moonlight as they drifted toward freedom that night, thinking — this would make a great movie one day.
So why do some people (ahem, in this newsroom) insist that they drowned, when there is zero proof of death?
Two in three bodies from suicides from the Golden Gate Bridge are recovered. You can’t let up for a moment. They made paddles to row with, dummy heads to buy them time, and they dug and dug.
During the daily hour when inmates were allowed to play instruments and sing, the men used the cover of that cacophony to scrape through the backs of their cells. It’s hard to believe that they would leave their only keepsakes — treasured enough to carefully seal into a waterproof bag — behind willingly.
Assuming the escapees did drown, there is then the question: Why did no bodies ever wash up? FBI files show the agency consulted with CHP and the Marin County coroner, who handled suicides at the Golden Gate Bridge. The letter, reportedly written by John Anglin (who was 83 at the time), stated that Morris and the brothers “barely” made it to shore on the night of their escape. If word spread that three men had successfully gotten away, it would almost certainly lead to closure of the expensive, controversial penitentiary.
As soon as the jail break was revealed in the media, stories circulated that this could spell the end for the prison island, and the FBI needed to quell that narrative.
“The brothers Anglin and Frank Morris are not the kind of chaps you’d want your sisters to marry,” San Francisco Examiner columnist Bob Considine wrote as the manhunt was underway, “But if their escape hastened the day when the cells and dungeons of Alcatraz are uprooted and transplanted somewhere else the bloodhounds should be called off, and the men permitted to join Edward M. Built over months with 50 raincoats meticulously glued together in their secret workshop.
They also had oars, which they probably didn’t even need, according to this incredible modeling of the currents that night from PBS, highlighting the likely trajectory of the raft. From there, all they had to do was climb to the roof, remove the bolts from a ventilation shaft, and crawl to freedom.
About 10 p.m., authorities believe that the men disembarked from Alcatraz’s northeast shore. Marshal reveals that, contrary to the original version of events, a previously unseen FBI report stated that the escapees’ raft was found on Angel Island, and a car was stolen in Marin County — a blue 1955 Chevy. Their hometowns were watched for decades by law enforcement. As far back as 1965, they investigated a rumor that Clarence Anglin was living there. Once through, they had access to an unguarded utility corridor. CHP told the FBI that with an outgoing tide, like on the night of the men’s escape, suicide jumpers were “rarely recovered.”
As grim as it is to consider, a shocking number of bodies are never relinquished by the bay. On June 12, 1962, an Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary guard on his morning rounds noticed three inmates had not woken from their slumber. It was considered so significant that bureau agents went to South America to find him.
The documentary also exhibited Christmas cards with handwriting matching that of the Anglin brothers sent to their family in 1965, and a deathbed confession from a sibling, stating that the brothers had remained in contact from 1963 until 1987.
Anglin brother's
And finally, just two years ago, KPIX got their hands on a letter originally sent to the SFPD in 2013. The Brazil photo is hardly definitive, especially considering it came from an ex-con whose own family said they’d never heard of his connection to the Alcatraz escapees.
Even if the men had gone home, it doesn’t sound like they were particularly welcome. A sighting that night of a blue Chevy, occupied by three men, angrily driving a car off the road in Modesto was investigated, too. Every name and address on the Anglins’ list was investigated. Bay Area coroners told the FBI that the bay’s cold water sometimes prevented bodies from bloating and floating to the surface.
Then, there is the final, perhaps most compelling, reason to suggest the men died: They’ve never resurfaced.
These men were career criminals. Marshal Service keeps an open file on the escapees. When the Examiner interviewed the Anglin parents after the escape, Mrs. Gilbert in Brazil.”
The journalist’s words were uncannily prophetic. With all evidence suggesting the men paddled off Alcatraz about 10 p.m., that small window gets even smaller.
Experts at the time also agreed. Although the popular imagination may side with their survival, the evidence does not.
Through the years, experts have studied the San Francisco Bay’s tidal patterns for clues. But the license plate was never confirmed to be the same vehicle and, if you were three of the most famous escaped convicts in America, would you start a road rage incident to draw attention to yourself?
The Anglins and Morris had their faces in every newspaper in America and possessed a relatively small circle of known contacts. In order to pull off an escape at all, they would have had to rob someone or something once they made it to land.
They left Alcatraz with little more than the highly conspicuous prison clothes on their backs. In fact, that number is probably higher — the Bridge Rail Association estimates that 1,600 people have jumped to their death from the bridge over the years and 1,400 bodies have been recovered, yet none of our three inmates’ corpses was ever found.
From the prison cleaners to the guards to Warden Olin G. It seems unlikely they suddenly and seamlessly integrated into a world that had, for their entire lives, marginalized and incarcerated them. CHP statistics from 1960-62 recorded 30 suicide jumps from the bridge. First, Andrew the romantic, followed by Katie the cynic ...I’m not claiming that I could swim from Alcatraz to dry land, but I definitely could.
A woman who sells warranties in a car dealership in Burlingame has done it 1,000 times.
A 9-year-old swam to the island and back again in 2016.
In fact, after our three escapees definitely did it in 1962, another inmate, John Paul Scott, successfully made the swim in December that year, naked, without a raft, in much colder temperatures, only to be found on the beach in San Francisco (before being returned to the island).
Even without the adrenaline boost of guard rifles aimed at your back, thousands of people have swum from Alcatraz safely to land.
And our inmates, all in their early 30s, could swim.
As kids, John and Clarence Anglin became strong swimmers in the frigid waters of Lake Michigan, where they spent every summer picking cherries. It will be closed only when they each turn 99. Not only would the prison be closed shortly after the incident, two of the escapees would make it to Brazil (more on that later).
Evidence of a long-presumed FBI cover-up was confirmed in a National Geographic documentary in 2012. Yes we all made it that night but barely!”
An FBI examination of the letter and handwriting led to an “inconclusive” result.
Even if the letter, the Christmas cards and the Brazil photo are all false (but really, look at that photo people), to assume that the inmates drowned in the same mile of water a 9-year-old can swim, based on a false FBI cover-up and not much else, would be foolish.
The inmates escaped Alcatraz, but you can’t escape the facts, Katie.
three Alcatraz inmates, buoyed by their wits and determination, making a prison break against all odds. When he pushed at the sleeping frame of one man, his head rolled off the bed. Others become entangled in debris and sink. They found that there was only one window — between when the rushing tide would have sucked them toward the Golden Gate Bridge and the moment that tide started pushing back into the bay — that was viable for survival. Since their early teens, they’d been in and out of prison. The most complete study in recent memory was done by scientists at Delft University who used computer modeling to replicate the currents the men would have experienced that night in 1962. Marin police weren’t sure when the car was stolen — it could have been days before the escape. Anglin said she hoped her sons were caught and pointed out that at least 10 of her other children turned out “good.”
In order to disappear, you must abandon every vestige of your former life forever. Although it’s been suggested the men stole a blue Chevy in Marin, that evidence is circumstantial. Marshals service hired an expert to compare physical features and measurements shown in the photo to what they knew about the Anglins in 1962. Only 17 bodies were ever located. Friends, families, hobbies, haunts. If alive today, Morris would be 93, John Anglin 90 and Clarence Anglin 89.
Two SFGATE writers with wildly different views on the infamous night, give their takes on what happened next. No bodies surfaced, but neither did any sightings that led to arrests. I’m 83 years old and in bad shape. If they let the water take them, they would have ended up at the Marin Headlands (as it did when the Mythbusters guys successfully re-created the attempt in 2003), or under the bridge, where they could have jumped out for a short paddle to Horseshoe Bay. An additional 12 suicides were suspected but no bodies were ever found in those cases either. This is exactly what happened. Some are simply swept out into the Pacific, a needle in a giant watery haystack. If John and Clarence Anglin and Frank Morris managed to pull off that for nearly five decades, then they truly earned their freedom. Edward Schultz, a hydraulic engineer who was then the director of the Bay Model, told newspapers the most likely possibility was that “they would have been carried out the Golden Gate.” Struggling with a makeshift raft would have further complicated their battle against rushing tides and icy water, all done in the disorienting pitch black of night.
The Delft model proposed that any debris from the escape would likely have washed up on Angel Island. It was a dummy.
Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin — three career criminals with prior prison break — had escaped sometime during the night of June 11. To this day, the U.S. To seal the seams, they pressed the coats against hot steam pipes. An inmate accomplice told authorities they planned to break into a store in Marin to steal street clothes; no such robbery was ever reported. For nearly 60 years, it has remained Alcatraz’s greatest mystery. That time was just around midnight. It was a plan months in the making.
Scheming began when the men were assigned adjacent cells in December 1961, and took full advantage of Alcatraz’s aging facilities and lax security. The letter read, in part:
“My name is John Anglin. Blackwell (who was on vacation at Lake Berryessa at the time), it was in everyone’s interest at Alcatraz to spread the word that the three men surely drowned. I have cancer
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