Escape from Alcatraz: What Happened in June 1962

Alcatraz was built to be the prison nobody left. It sat on a rock in San Francisco Bay, surrounded by cold water and strong currents, and it held men other prisons could not. On the morning of 12 June 1962, three of its cells contained nothing but dummy heads.

Frank Morris and the brothers John and Clarence Anglin had vanished. More than sixty years later, nobody knows for certain whether they drowned in the bay or lived out their lives somewhere else. It is one of the great unsolved stories of American crime.

The prison on the rock

The federal penitentiary on Alcatraz Island held some of the most troublesome prisoners in the United States. Its isolation was its main defence: even a prisoner who got out of the buildings would face more than a mile of cold, fast-moving water before reaching land.

That is what made the plan of June 1962 so audacious. The men did not just have to get out of their cells. They had to leave the building, cross the island unseen and then survive the bay.

Months of preparation

Over months, the men worked on the ventilation openings in their cells, widening them with improvised tools. Behind the cells ran a utility corridor, and from there they could climb to the top of the cellblock, where they set up a hidden workshop.

There they built what they needed: a raft and life preservers, made partly from prison raincoats. A fourth man, Allen West, was part of the plan, but on the night itself he could not get out of his cell in time, because hardened cement blocked his way. He was left behind, and he later told investigators much of what is known about the plan.

The dummy heads

The escape depended on the guards not noticing that anyone was missing. So the men made dummy heads, with real hair, and left them in their beds under the blankets. In the dark, on the night count, they looked like sleeping prisoners.

One of those heads, made by Frank Morris, survives, and it is the second picture on this page. It is a strange, almost comic object, and it worked: the escape was not discovered until the morning of 12 June.

The night of 11 June

On the night of 11 June 1962, Morris and the Anglin brothers crawled through their widened vents, climbed to the roof and slid down a kitchen vent pipe to the ground. They crossed two fences and made their way to the northeast shore of the island.

There they inflated their raft and launched into the bay. That is the last moment anyone can be sure of. After that, the story becomes a matter of evidence, inference and argument.

What was found

The search that followed found a paddle near Angel Island, and life vests that washed ashore or were picked up in the water nearby. No bodies were ever found. In 1979 the FBI closed its investigation, concluding from this circumstantial evidence that the three most likely drowned in the bay.

The U.S. Marshals Service never closed its own case, and it remained open into the 2020s. A 2003 episode of MythBusters and a recreation in 2025 both concluded that the escape across the bay was possible, which keeps the question alive.

Claims of survival

Over the decades, a series of claims have suggested the men made it. They include a deathbed confession in 1993, a 2011 documentary about a stolen car, and a letter disclosed in 2018 that was said to be from John Anglin; tests on the letter were inconclusive.

In 2015 a documentary presented photographs from the Anglin family that appeared to show the brothers in Brazil years later. Officials disputed them. None of these claims has settled the case either way, and the most careful conclusion is still the simplest: nobody knows.

The end of Alcatraz

Alcatraz closed as a prison in March 1963, less than a year after the escape. The escape did not close it on its own, but it became the most famous chapter in the prison's history, and the island is now visited by tourists rather than guarded.

In 1979 the story reached cinemas as Escape from Alcatraz, starring Clint Eastwood as Frank Morris. How true stories are changed when they move to the screen is a subject we look at in the best comic adaptations, and how an escape plan can be laid out scene by scene is shown in our guide to storyboarding a heist.

Why it still fascinates

The escape has everything a great true story needs: patient planning, homemade tools, a clever trick, a night of danger and an ending without an answer. Unlike most crimes, it has no clear victim, which may be why so many people quietly hope the men made it.

It also belongs to a family of stories about people who refused to accept that escape was impossible, from prisoners to explorers. For another, with a much clearer ending, read our story of how all of Shackleton's men survived.