The Alcatraz Escape

Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary was built on a promise: no one gets out.

Surrounded by freezing water and violent currents, the prison—known simply as The Rock—held America’s most dangerous and escape-prone criminals. Guards believed the bay itself was the final line of defence. Even if a prisoner made it past steel bars and armed watchtowers, the water would finish the job.

For decades, it did.

Then, in June 1962, three men vanished.

The Prisoners Who Studied the Walls

Frank Morris was not an ordinary inmate. His intelligence tested well above average, and he had escaped from other prisons before. That history is exactly what landed him in Alcatraz.

Brothers John and Clarence Anglin weren’t violent criminals, but they were relentless escape artists. Together, the three men were housed in adjacent cells—an arrangement that would later prove costly.

They noticed what others didn’t.

The concrete around the ventilation grilles in their cells was crumbling, weakened by decades of salt air. Using stolen spoons and a makeshift drill built from a vacuum cleaner motor, they slowly enlarged the openings. The noise was hidden by music from the prison band during evening hours.

This wasn’t desperation. It was patience.

The Illusion That Fooled the Guards

The escape hinged on one detail: buying time.

The men crafted dummy heads using soap, toothpaste, toilet paper, and real human hair collected from the prison barber shop. Painted and shaped carefully, the heads were placed in their beds beneath blankets, positioned to appear as sleeping prisoners during nighttime checks.

It worked.

For hours.

By the time guards realized something was wrong on the morning of June 12, 1962, the men had already disappeared into San Francisco Bay.

A Raft Made of Raincoats

Behind the cells, in an unused utility corridor, the men had been working on something even more audacious.

They stitched together more than fifty stolen raincoats to create an inflatable raft and life vests, sealing the seams using steam pipes to bond the rubber. They made wooden paddles and even designed a crude inflation system.

On the night of June 11, they climbed through the vent openings, scaled a ventilation shaft, crossed the cellhouse roof, and descended to the island’s northeastern shore.

Then they pushed off into the darkness.

No alarms sounded.

No shots were fired.

Alcatraz didn’t even realize it had failed.

What the Investigation Found—and Didn’t

Search operations began immediately. The FBI, Coast Guard, and local authorities scoured the bay for weeks.

They found:

• Pieces of rubber believed to be from the raft
• Scraps of wood from homemade paddles
• A fragment of a life vest washed ashore
• What they never found were bodies.

In 1979, after seventeen years of investigation, the FBI officially closed the case. Their conclusion was that Morris and the Anglin brothers likely drowned in the cold waters, overwhelmed by tides and currents.

But conclusions aren’t the same as proof.

The Evidence That Kept the Case Alive

The Anglin family never accepted the FBI’s findings.

They claimed the brothers sent Christmas cards for years after the escape. That their mother received anonymous flowers every Mother’s Day. That a photograph surfaced decades later, allegedly showing John and Clarence Anglin standing together in Brazil.

Frank Morris was never definitively linked to any post-escape sighting—but he was also never confirmed dead.

In 2013, the U.S. Marshals Service reopened the case, reviewing new leads and a letter allegedly written by Morris himself, suggesting he survived the escape.

The investigation remains open.

Escape, Death, or Disappearance?

Most experts agree the odds were against them. The water temperature, the currents, the time of night—it all pointed toward tragedy.

And yet, Alcatraz was wrong about one thing.

Three men did get out.

What happened after that remains one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in American criminal history.

Did Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers drown within minutes of freedom?

Or did they do the impossible—outsmart the prison, the bay, and the investigation that followed?

Alcatraz still stands silent in San Francisco Bay.

And it still has no answers.