Alcatraz prison was and is one of the best known in the world. It was a maximum security prison where they took very dangerous prisoners or that generated many conflicts in other normal prisons. It was an impregnable fortress on an island and many have been those who have tried to flee from it without success, even perishing in the attempt. But what nobody knows is that one day in June 1962, there was an escape of three prisoners that could be fruitful.
The letter In January 2018 the San Francisco Police Department received a shocking letter. They did not know if it was an absurd joke or if it was real, but they could not ignore it as if nothing, they had a duty to investigate it in case it was true what that surprising note said. This forced an investigation to be reopened together with the FBI. The letter began by saying: "My name is John Anglin, in June 1962, my brother Clarence, Frank Morris and I escaped from Alcatraz ..."
An unexpected turn Everyone at the police station was stunned. Was what that letter said was real? For years the case of the three men who escaped from Alcatraz has been a mystery to the police and to the people. At that time the guards declared that that night the three brothers died in the icy waters while trying to escape. So who was that letter from? Was it fake? Did the guards lie? Perhaps now the whole truth of what happened that night would be revealed.
A stronghold Alcatraz was designed so that no one who entered there could leave. It was an impregnable fortress and anyone who tried to escape died trying. There they held the most dangerous criminals in the world, those who were dangerous even to other criminals. So the slightest possibility that three of those criminals could have been free since 1962 was a fact that no one liked or thought about. That letter was to be taken very seriously. The truth is that it was actually received in 2013 but it was not until 2018 that the police gathered enough evidence to reopen the case.
The escape Many inmates had tried this before and none were able to escape from Alcatraz prison. They devised all kinds of stratagems and plans to achieve it but no case was successful. Except, it seems, this one by the Anglin brothers and Frank Morris, how would they do it? Would they have someone from within on their team? The master plan was premeditated and more than studied but they risked being shot or drowned ... perhaps anything was better than being in there.
Who were The Anglin brothers, John and Clarence along with Frank Morris were serving life sentences at Alcatraz for murder and multiple armed bank robberies. Before reaching Alcatraz, they were together in an Atlanta jail from which they were transferred for bad behavior. There was a fourth man, Allen West, with whom they planned the escape. The four men had adjoining cells and they spent a lot of time together planning everything.
Frank Lee Morris Frank Lee Morris was orphaned at the age of 11, since then he was bouncing from one home to another, no one loved him because of his bad behavior and he committed his first crime at age 13. Since then, his criminal record has not stopped growing and growing, armed robberies, assaults, drug trafficking, etc. He has been through many prisons until he ended up on Alcatraz. He was the mastermind of the escape, he devised absolutely everything with his brilliant mind, since Frank had an IQ far above average. He really was a genius, but he misinvested his greatness.
Recidivist Frank committed all kinds of crimes before reaching Alcatraz, violent robberies, drug trafficking, assaults and a long etcetera. For all this, he stepped on many different prisons in different States of America, and from one of them he managed to escape. They did not catch him and he was in hiding for a decade without committing a crime, but it seems that Frank had it in his blood and he could not avoid robbing a bank again. From there, they locked him in Alcatraz, what they did not know is that from there he would also escape.
John and Clarence Anglin John and Clarence Anglin were two brothers in a family of 14, born in Georgia and later moved to Florida with the whole family to work as temps in the fields with their parents. From a very young age, they began robbing gas stations and later banks. They have been through the Florida jail and the Atlanta jail, where they met Frank Morris and Allen West. The four were transferred to Alcatraz together. The team was already complete
Survival Skills From a very young age, they have been able to take chestnuts out of the fire by themselves. In such a large family, everyone had to work and contribute their bit, either in the field or at home doing the chores. John and Clarence have always been the rebels of the family and they went their way. When the family went north to pick cherries, both brothers would escape to Lake Michigan for a swim. This made them great swimmers, what they did not know is that this would help them later escape from the most hermetic prison in the world.
The Full Team The four criminals coincided serving sentences in a federal prison in Atlanta. Each had their own abilities and all four had matched each other perfectly. The best thing he had was the brain described as super gifted by Frank Morris, with an IQ of 133 and which the same police called "Artist of escapism", since he had already achieved it on 2 other occasions. The group devised a plan to escape from Atlanta but this time they were caught and sent to Alcatraz. From there they would devise a new plan to escape from what is known as "The Rock"
Materials Needed It was time to begin collecting the necessary material to carry out the plan. They had to be very meticulous in their actions, stealthy and skillful so as not to arouse suspicions among the guards or among other inmates who could sneak in. They began to save all kinds of instruments that came to their hands doing jobs in the prison factory such as hooks, picks, pieces of raincoats and even hair from the barbershop ... Why would they want hair?
Rompers Everything had to be perfect and calculated with great precision since Alcatraz was not like other prisons. They did not beat around the bush there and if you tried to escape you would receive a guaranteed bullet. For this reason, no one should be suspicious and when leaving someone should take their places in bed. Someone or something ... The four prisoners were taking hair from the barbershop to make some dolls with plaster of the wall and water! They would leave these dolls in their beds and if someone looked out they would think they were still there.
Ingenuity And Dexterity And it is that when one wants something, one manages in any way to get it. They made the dolls in the most realistic way possible, using pieces of plaster from the wall, toilet paper, wax, and water, plus real human hair stolen from the barbershop. They built an inflatable raft with pieces of raincoat glued together and modified an accordion to be the inflator. A whole display of manual skills. Each had their mission and their tasks were perfectly distributed among them.
The First Works Everything was ready to begin the work to escape from La Roca. Each of the members of the escape group removed the cover of the ventilation duct and began to dig with picks or whatever they had on top to enlarge the hole and sneak each one through the duct of their cell. Every night, very stealthily, they repeated the same operation until the hole was big enough to get into.
Bad Conditions In Your Favor There were many conditions that worked in favor of the four prisoners and that is that the prison was already very old and was quite run down. Being located on an island above the sea, humidity and saltpeter were very present everywhere. Sea water was used for showers and to clean with the consequent deterioration of pipes and walls. It was easy for them to dig as the walls had become brittle and were falling apart on their own.
Music Teacher The excavation work was not done at night as it usually appears in the movies, no, it was done in the middle of the day, since at night the noise of scratching and removing debris would be heard too much. They worked during the day but how did they do it so as not to be discovered by the noise? Well, very simple, the prisoners were entitled to one hour a day to listen to music or play an instrument. Well, Frank Morris played the accordion at full volume for an hour while his cronies dug.
The Gallery Behind Just behind their cells there was a series of galleries that were not used and that could lead them without much problem directly to the roof of the prison. They only had to go through the wall of their cell through the hole they had dug in the ventilation ducts. Once there they would only have to climb three floors stealthily to reach the top and from there access the roof.
The big day The most desired moment had arrived, for months they had been digging in the wall to make a hole large enough to fit through there, they had also made a raft and some life jackets with raincoats and raincoats to avoid drowning in the icy waters of the river. sea. A very hard work that was finally going to pay off. If they could get to the third floor, there they could access the roof.
All prepared It was time, everything was ready to start the escape, everyone had to give themselves a signal in code that meant that their hole was ready and they could leave that night. The four criminals gave each other the respective signal and the escape began. Everything was planned to the millimeter, they had calculated everything so that nothing failed, once they were out of the cell they did not know exactly what they were going to find but before they got there, something failed ...
Fears and Insecurities The plan was underway, when the lights went out they had to wait exactly one hour for everyone to be sleeping and they would go out through their respective holes. They were a moment of great tension and insecurity since everyone who had tried before them had died in the attempt. In Alcatraz the guards did not beat around the bush and if they saw you running away they would shoot you without thinking. That was why they were very nervous and scared but he had a life sentence, and it was well worth the try.
Something is wrong They had all made their respective signal that they had finished their hole to escape. The moment arrived, the lights went out and after an hour the escape began. John, Clarence and Morris left without any problem, they were already on the other side and only West was yet to appear, but something was wrong ... West did not appear, they did not understand what was happening and after waiting a few minutes, they decided to leave him behind. Apparently West thought his hole was big enough for him but he had miscalculated and it wouldn't fit.
Sacrifice for Others West could have started digging what was missing from the hole quickly but then he would give himself away and betray the others, so he did nothing, resigned himself to having done it wrong and stayed in his cell. On his part, it was very hard for the rest of the team to leave one of their own behind, but what could they do for West? The smart thing to do was get out of there as soon as possible.
Leaving at last The remaining three of the escape team began to climb the gallery pipes to reach the ceiling, it did not take much work. Once upstairs they had to open a skylight window to go outside, once outside, they had to go through the entire roof of the prison without making a single noise until they reached the exterior pipes that lead to the ground. They descended through them and once down they positioned themselves strategically so as not to be seen and to be able to inflate the raft to leave the island.
Escaped It wasn't until the morning that the alarm was raised when three prisoners were missing. By then John and Clarence Anglin and Frank Morris might already be miles apart and no one had noticed that they had escaped. Fran Morris, the aptly named "Artist of Escapism" had done it again, and also had been crowned with the escape from the toughest prison in the world and from which no one had ever managed to escape.
Did not give up Despite being left behind, Allen West did not give up and began to dig when he calculated that his companions would no longer be in danger, he finally managed to get out of there but unfortunately his companions had already left on the raft and jumped into the sea without her it was to die for sure. So he gave up and turned around, he returned to his cell as if nothing had happened, assuming that he was going to be there for life, and also now without his companions, with the uncertainty of whether they managed to escape or they would be dead.
Alarms Sounded In the morning all the inmates of the jail awoke from a boat upon hearing the deafening alarms. The news had already been given that three prisoners had escaped. The guards turned the entire prison upside down looking for them in case they were still inside. All this of course, without success. When they realized that there was one who did not succeed, they interrogated him until they got all the information, Allen West collaborated and told the agents everything.
Lied West told the agents all the details of the plan, that they would go to the island of Los Angeles in the raft, there they would steal clothes and a car and then they would separate. But officers did not report any vehicle theft in the days after the escape, so one in two, either West lied in his statement, or the three inmates had failed. At that time, a Federal investigation was opened to clarify the facts and find the fugitives.
Hot showers During the time they spent in prison, they realized that the water in the showers was much hotter than usual, and it was all designed on purpose so that the inmates were not used to bathing in cold water in case they escaped. The water in the California bay was very cold and the distance would prevent them from reaching the shore without first dying of hypothermia. During the investigation, several of the three prisoners' belongings were found, but not their bodies.
Investigation Closure After many years of investigation, without any type of relevant evidence, no one could find any clue or any body or the escaped prisoners, in December 1979, 17 years after their escape, the FBI closed the investigation concluding that the prisoners had been drowned in the bay of California. What nobody knows is that there are indications that this was not the case and the three managed to escape.
Letters To your Family For years, the Anglin family claims to have been receiving anonymous letters and postcards. Researchers and experts have collated the handwriting on these letters and postcards and determined that the handwriting is theirs. In them, the place of referral or anything similar is not specified, so it is not known if they really belong to the Anglin brothers. In 2015, History Chanel released a documentary about the Alcatraz escape with the help of the Anglin brothers' nephews, who were trying to find their uncles.
Confessions Before the release of the documentary, the family was discouraged from continuing to search for the prisoners as the burden of the law could fall on them even though the case was closed, but the family did not give up. Another proof that the group managed to escape is the confession made by one of the 12 Anglin brothers on his deathbed, claiming to have had contact with his brothers until 1987. They even had a photograph of them in Brazil, which was examined by experts and concluded that it was most likely them.
Where were you? But although there was evidence that they were alive, the whereabouts of the three fugitives was a mystery that was finally revealed in the letter that John Anglin wrote to the police in 2013 and that caused the case to be reopened. In it, Anglin assures that he was in many places but most of the time he lived in Seattle, that Frank Morris was buried in Alexandria under another name and that his brother had also died. In that letter he also explained that he was very ill with cancer and that he would give himself up in exchange for medical assistance.
I was next door One of the most shocking things about the letter is that John claimed that his last years until the day of writing the letter, would have been living in California, he was right in the State where he escaped and no one had noticed, but of course, they had passed Many years old, John was 88 at the time and would be an old man who no longer had anything to do with the young criminal who achieved the feat of escaping from Alcatraz.
He proposed a deal John Anglin claimed that he was very ill with cancer and proposed a deal to the police to give him medical assistance. In the letter he said that if they assured him that he would only go to jail for one year and they gave him medical assistance, he would tell them exactly where he was. But the agents had to first make sure that the letter was real and was not a joke. The matter was serious and should be previously investigated.
Inconclusive The letter was automatically sent to be examined in search of any trace of DNA or fingerprints, and the writing of that letter was also checked against other letters that the prisoner wrote during his time in prison. After many tests, the content of the results was revealed and they determined that they were not conclusive. The FBI gave no further explanation and it could not be verified whether the letter was actually from John Anglin.
Without truce As the results were not conclusive, the letter was not validated and it was published in many newscasts that it was false, but it seems that the letter led to the investigation into the whereabouts of the three prisoners and that the police finally found him. place where John Anglin died at 99 years of age, but this is just urban legends that run around. There is no legitimate evidence that this was so.
Five years later The alleged letter from John Anglin was received in 2013, but this was not known until 5 years later when the police decided to make it public and aired it on television on a CBS channel in San Francisco, the KPIX. But why had the police been hiding it? Could it be that they really found John thanks to the letter and deceived him and did not accept his treatment? Or that they published it when John finally passed away and they knew exactly where he was? All of this will always be an unsolved mystery.
Unknowns With the technological advances, a series of studies were made of how the three prisoners could have escaped and if they could have survived in the conditions of the sea that night and with the homemade utensils they carried. The study concluded that the currents that night would have been very favorable for the three prisoners and that it was highly probable that they had survived. They even made simulations of what they would be like at that time, in case someone saw them.
Closing Alcatraz Alcatraz prison, known as "The Rock" was closed just a year after the escape of John and Clarence Anglin and Frank Morris. The last man to leave there was Jim Albright, who gave an interview for a local San Francisco channel in which they asked his opinion about whether they had survived or not. Jim said it was clear to everyone at Alcatraz that they had drowned and that the letter was from someone desperate for medical treatment.
Day by day Nowadays Alcatraz prison has become a tourist attraction due to the amount of legends and stories that are told about it, it has even been taken to the cinema on numerous occasions and even the story that we have told has its own movie entitled La Leak, starring Clint Eastwood. Today the truth about what happened that night and whether the three fugitives survived or not is still unknown. A story that will stay told forever.
