The Night Three Men Vanished From Alcatraz
On the night of June 11, 1962, Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers slipped out of Alcatraz on a raft of raincoats — and were never seen again.
The guards called it the Rock, and the government called it escape-proof. On the night of June 11, 1962, three inmates set out to prove everyone wrong — with spoons, raincoats, and fake heads.
Frank Morris was a career bank robber with a history of escaping from other prisons. In Cell Block B of Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, he was housed near brothers John and Clarence Anglin, fellow bank robbers he had known from earlier stretches. Together they hatched a plan of astonishing patience: over roughly six months, they would dig their way out of the most secure prison in America.
Behind their cells ran an unguarded utility corridor, three feet wide. Using sharpened spoons — and a drill improvised from a stolen vacuum-cleaner motor — the men chipped away at the moisture-softened concrete around the air vents beneath their sinks. They worked during the prison's music hour, when accordions covered the scraping sounds, and hid their progress behind painted cardboard grilles and false walls.
Up on the cellblock roof, concealed by sheets hung over the sides, they ran a secret workshop. From more than fifty stolen raincoats they sewed and glued an inflatable raft, plus life vests and paddles. They crafted decoy heads from soap, toilet paper, and concrete dust, topped with real hair from the prison barbershop and painted with stolen art supplies — and tucked them into their bunks each night to fool the headcounts.
On the night of June 11, they squeezed through the vents, climbed the utility shaft to the roof, made their way down to the shore, and launched the raft into the black water of San Francisco Bay. A fourth conspirator, Allen West, never made it out — he couldn't widen his vent in time and was left behind. The escape went undiscovered until morning, when a guard reached into a bunk and a dummy head tumbled to the floor.
The manhunt was enormous: the FBI, the Coast Guard, the military, and local police all joined in. Debris from the raft washed up in the days that followed, but Morris and the Anglins were never found — alive or dead. In 1979 the FBI closed its case, concluding on circumstantial evidence that the men had likely drowned in the bay's frigid, current-swept waters. The U.S. Marshals Service never agreed, and its case file stayed open.
Why it matters: for nearly three decades, Alcatraz had been marketed as the prison no one could escape — and three men with spoons and raincoats punctured the myth in a single night. (The prison closed the following year, in 1963.) The 1979 film Escape from Alcatraz, starring Clint Eastwood as Morris, turned the trio into folk heroes. More than sixty years on, the question visitors ask most on the island is still the same: did they make it?
Photo: Ralf Baechle, CC BY-SA 4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).
