On the night of June 11, 1962, three inmates at Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary — Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin — carved through the deteriorating concrete around air vents in their cells using sharpened spoons and a homemade drill fashioned from a vacuum cleaner motor, climbed through a utility corridor, and slipped into San Francisco Bay on a raft built from more than fifty stolen raincoats, sealed with heat from a steam pipe. They left papier-mâché dummy heads, modeled with real hair from the prison barbershop, tucked into their beds to fool night guards. By morning, all three were gone, and despite one of the largest manhunts in FBI history, none of them was ever definitively found, alive or dead.
The official position, maintained by the FBI when it closed its active investigation in 1979, is that the men most likely drowned in the Bay’s frigid, fast-moving currents, and the case was formally handed to the U.S. Marshals Service, which technically keeps it open to this day, still fielding tips more than sixty years later. But the case has never been closed with certainty, in either direction. A raft-like piece of wood and paddle were recovered on nearby Angel Island, and personal effects washed ashore, but no bodies were ever recovered. In 2013, a letter surfaced claiming to be from John Anglin, alleging all three survived and asking for leniency in exchange for medical care — the FBI examined it and found the claim inconclusive.
A Cell Block That Won’t Stay Quiet
Alcatraz closed as a federal prison the year after the escape, and the island has drawn ghost stories since well before Morris and the Anglins ever arrived — guards and later National Park Service staff have long reported disembodied screaming from the old dungeon cells beneath D-Block, cold spots in the shower room, and the sound of a banjo, said to belong to inmate Al Capone, drifting from an empty cell where he once practiced. But cell block B, containing the escapees’ original cells and the vent shafts they carved through, has its own specific reputation among current park rangers and overnight tour staff, who have described unexplained tapping sounds from inside the walls — echoing, some say, the exact sound the men would have made scraping through concrete with sharpened spoons over the months it took to plan their escape.
Whether Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers built new lives under new names somewhere in South America, as their family has long insisted circumstantial sightings suggest, or drowned within hours of leaving their cells, Alcatraz has never given up the answer. The island keeps both mysteries side by side now — the men who may have beaten the inescapable prison, and the restless case file the U.S. Marshals still, technically, have never closed.