On the morning of June 12, 1962, a guard on Alcatraz reached through the bars to shake a sleeping prisoner awake, and the man’s head rolled onto the floor.
It was made of soap, toilet paper, plaster and real hair swept up from the prison barbershop. Frank Morris and the brothers John and Clarence Anglin were gone.
For months they had scraped at the crumbling concrete around the air vents in their cells using sharpened spoons, covering the noise during music hour. Behind the wall was an unguarded utility corridor. Above it, on top of the cellblock, they built a secret workshop, and there they stitched and glued more than fifty stolen raincoats into life vests and a six by fourteen foot rubber raft. They climbed a ventilator shaft to the roof, slid down a pipe, and pushed off into San Francisco Bay sometime after ten at night.
No one ever saw them again. The FBI found a paddle, bits of raincoat and a wallet with family photos, and concluded the men drowned in the cold, fast water. But no bodies were ever recovered. The FBI closed its file in 1979. The U.S. Marshals never did. Their warrants stay active until the men would turn ninety nine.
In 2013 a letter arrived at a San Francisco police station. It began, my name is John Anglin, I escaped from Alcatraz in June 1962, yes we all made it that night, but barely.
You can see the Rock from half the Bay Area, and I never look at it without thinking about that raft.
Is it possible that three bank robbers beat the one prison that was built to be unbeatable.
Drowned in the bay, or died free as old men?
