Three men escaped Alcatraz with dummy heads - and vanished
In 1962 a guard's flashlight fell on three sleeping inmates. They were papier-mache heads, and the men were already gone.
Alcatraz, the federal prison on a cold, current-ringed island in San Francisco Bay, was built to be inescapable. Then, on the night of 11 June 1962, Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin put that reputation to the test.
Over months they widened the ventilation holes at the backs of their cells, scraping at the crumbling concrete with sharpened spoons and a crude drill improvised from a stolen vacuum-cleaner motor. They hid the growing openings behind painted cardboard grilles, then climbed into an unguarded utility corridor and up to the roof. In their beds they left papier-mache dummy heads finished with real hair, so convincing that a guard’s head count passed without alarm. To cross the bay they had stitched together a raft and life vests from more than fifty stolen raincoats.
A fourth man, Allen West, was meant to go too but couldn’t break through his own vent in time and was left behind — later giving investigators much of what’s known about the plan.
The three were never seen again. In 1979 the FBI concluded they had most likely drowned in the frigid bay, but no bodies were recovered and the case file stays open. Threads keep it alive: a 2013 letter purportedly from John Anglin, a 2018 family claim of survival, and a 2003 MythBusters test suggesting the raincoat raft could actually have made the crossing.
They remain the only Alcatraz inmates to escape and never be found.
Sources & references
2 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 2 independent sources.
