Alcatraz 1962: The Escape as the FBI and Marshals Record It

On the morning of 12 June 1962 the bed check at Alcatraz counted three sleeping men who were not there. Frank Morris and the brothers John and Clarence Anglin had gone out through the backs of their cells, up to the roof and into San Francisco Bay on a raft of raincoats, leaving plaster heads on their pillows.

Sixty-four years later the United States Marshals Service still lists all three as wanted, on warrants dated 11 June 1962, and describes their hair as "gray/partially gray". This is the escape as the two agencies that investigated it record it, with the later claims marked for what they are.

Who they were

The Marshals' wanted pages give the sentences that brought them to the island. Frank Lee Morris, born in Washington in 1926, was sentenced on 19 September 1956 to 14 years for a bank burglary in Slidell, Louisiana; he reached Alcatraz in January 1960 after repeated escapes from other prisons. John William Anglin, born in Georgia in 1930, got 10 years on 10 February 1958 for an armed bank robbery in Columbia, Alabama; his brother Clarence, a year younger, got 15 for the same robbery. The three had adjoining cells. A fourth man, Allen West, was in on the plan.

The plan, from the FBI file

The FBI's account, built from the evidence and from West, who talked once he was left behind, begins the previous December, when one of the men found some old saw blades. With those and a drill made from the motor of a broken vacuum cleaner, each man bored closely spaced holes around the air vent at the back of his cell until the whole section of wall came away, hiding the hole behind a suitcase or a piece of cardboard.

Behind the cells ran an unguarded utility corridor. From it they climbed to the top of the cell block and set up a workshop, keeping watch through a home-made periscope. More than fifty raincoats, stolen or donated, became life preservers and a rubber raft six feet by fourteen, its seams stitched and then sealed against the prison's hot steam pipes, a method taken from magazines found in their cells. They carved wooden paddles and turned a musical instrument into a pump. Thirty feet up, they pried open the ventilator at the top of the shaft and held it in place with a bolt made of soap.

The heads were plaster, flesh-coloured paint and real human hair. The one in Morris's cell, below, has a broken nose: it rolled off the bed and hit the floor when a guard reached through the bars and pushed it.

The night of 11 June

West had not finished removing his grille and stayed behind. The other three gathered their gear in the corridor, went up and out through the ventilator onto the roof, slid down the bakery smoke stack at the back of the cell house, climbed the fence and launched from the north-east shore. The FBI's file stops there; everything after it is inference.

What was found

Within two days a packet of letters belonging to the men, sealed in rubber, was pulled from the bay. Then came pieces of wood shaped like paddles, scraps of inner tube, a home-made paddle on Angel Island and a life vest washed up on Cronkhite Beach, north of the Golden Gate. No bodies, then or since.

The FBI gave four reasons for its conclusion that the men drowned: the cold and the currents; no reports of the stolen clothes and car the plan called for; families without the means to help; and seventeen years without one credible sighting. It closed the case on 31 December 1979 and handed it to the Marshals, who keep it open "in the unlikely event the trio is still alive".

The record, year by year

Dates from the FBI's case page, the Marshals' profiles and the reporting listed below.

The Marshals never closed it

In 2009 Deputy Marshal Michael Dyke showed NPR a stack of folders of tips: the men farming in Alabama, Clarence calling at a house where a little girl lived. "There's an active warrant," he said, and the Marshals do not give up on one.

The best-known claim came in 2013, in a letter to San Francisco police: "My name is John Anglin, I escape from Alcatraz in June 1962. Yes we all made it that night, but barely." The Marshals compared the handwriting and called the result inconclusive. In June 2022 their Northern District of California released a forensic artist's age-progressed portraits of all three and asked for tips; Morris would be 96, John Anglin 92, Clarence 91.

Could the raft have made it?

The one new piece of evidence since 1962 is a computer model. Olivier Hoes and Rolf Hut of Delft University of Technology and Fedor Baart of Deltares, working on flood risk in the bay, rebuilt the tides of that night and launched fifty virtual rafts from Alcatraz every half hour. Leaving between 11:30 and midnight, a raft rides the ebb to the shore just north of the Golden Gate, near Horseshoe Bay, and the debris drifts to Angel Island, where the FBI found it. Paddle for Angel Island, as the men meant to, and the current takes you to sea.

In August 2015 the three scientists glued 35 raincoats into a raft and made the crossing themselves in about ninety minutes, for the PBS film Alcatraz: Escaping the Rock. Their conclusion was careful: "a real possibility that they escaped alive", not proof. Our reading of the record is the same. The FBI's four reasons still stand, the letter is unverified, and the only honest heading for this case is open.

Why it is still told

Three men with spoons and raincoats beat the one prison built to be unbeatable, and nobody can say what happened next: the shape of a perfect story. Two British cases on this site end the same way, with the record stopping where the legend begins: the Great Train Robbery of 1963 and the Brink's-Mat gold of 1983. If you want to draw an escape, our guide to storyboarding a heist shows how to pace a plan, a night and an empty cell.