Escape From Alcatraz Redux Cathy Scott - Forbes
go to original June 18, 2012

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Five decades ago, three federal prisoners were locked down, just as they had been so many times before. But that night, they escaped in a ruse that has stumped U.S. Marshals ever since.

It was June 11, 1962, and the prison was Alcatraz Island, off the coast of Northern California in San Francisco Bay.

Inmate Frank Morris and fellow convicts, brothers John and Clarence Anglin, had pulled off one of the great escapes in U.S. history. Federal state and local law enforcement, Coast Guard boats and military helicopters joined in the largest manhunt since the Lindbergh baby kidnapping in 1932. They searched the prison complex on Alcatraz Island, the 10-mile wide bay, and the surrounding land, to no avail.

They had painstakingly made paper-mache dummies’ heads and fashioned them with hair from the prison’s barber shop. And they routed their escape via holes they dug, using spoons, in the walls of their cells. Pieces of a manmade inflatable raft and a still-usable lifejacket, from glued-together rubber raincoats, were found on nearby Angel Island. Also discovered, according to a National Geographic report, were muddy footprints leading away from the raft. The fugitives, however, were never seen again and their bodies were never found. They’ve been wanted by the feds ever since.

Rumors swirled for years – even though no one seems to know where it started – that the convicts would meet again on Alcatraz on the 50th anniversary of their great escape. If they survived, today they would be in their 80s.

On Monday, the Anglin brothers’ sisters, Marie Widner and Mearl Taylor, visited the former prison to commemorate the 50th anniversary. “I’ve always believed they made it,” Widener, 76, told reporters covering the anniversary, “and I haven’t changed my mind about that.” Also on the island dubbed The Rock were U.S. Marshals, just in case the trio decided to surface on the anniversary.

They didn’t.

Morris was considered the getaway mastermind. Federal officials said at the time that Morris had an IQ of 133, in the top two percent of the population. The trio were not violent offenders. They’d committed petty theft crimes as teenagers But it was a bank robbery that sent Morris to Alcatraz and an unrelated bank holdup in Alabama that landed the Anglin brothers on The Rock.

The brothers were declared dead in 1979. But the case was reopened by the U.S. Marshal’s Service in 1993 after a fellow inmate, Thomas Kent, told FOX’s “America’s Most Wanted” that he had helped plan the breakout and had planned to go with them. But he backed out because he couldn’t swim. “America’s Most Wanted” reported that Clarence Anglin’s girlfriend was scheduled to meet the three on shore and drive them to Mexico, prompting then US. Marshals Service spokesman Dave Branham to declare, “We think there is a possibility they are alive.”

And so it is that the convicts’ escape from Alcatraz Island remains an open case today. Alcatraz, which opened in 1934 and once housed mobster Al Capone and “Machine Gun” Kelly, was considered escape-proof. The 12-acre federal penitentiary, which ceased operating in 1963, is now a tourist attraction made even more famous by the mystery surrounding the escapes of Morris and the Anglin brothers.

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