The men who broke out of Alcatraz with a spoon

On June 12, 1962, three men escaped from Alcatraz, so that they never see it again. The final destination of Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers remains a mystery, but the ingenuity and determination of their daring escape, of what was the safest prison in the United States, continues to captivate. Two years later, the BBC returned to the crime scene.

In May 1964, the BBC Panoramas Michael Charlton made “the most feared trip in the criminal world” through the agitated waters of the San Francisco Bay to see the infamous island of the Alcatraz prison. Nicknamed “The Rock”, the federal penitentiary had the heroes some of the most dangerous criminals in the United States. It was considered an impregnable fortress. But in the early hours of June 12, 1962, three men achieved what was impossible: they escaped.

Alcatraz had originally accumulated a strong naval defense to protect the entrance to the bay. Duration The Civil War of the United States, due to the isolation of the island, the steep cliffs and the rapid and cold currents that surrounded it, the captured Confederate prisoners were heroes heroes there. At the beginning of the 20th century it was rebuilt as a military prison. In the 1930s, while the United States tried to deal with unbridled organized crime that flourished the prohibition of duration, the Department of Justice did. Soon the most fearsome convicts of the Federal Penitentiary System began to arrive. Among his most famous inmates were the notorious gangsters Al Capone, Mickey Cohen and George “Machine Gun” Kelly, as well as the convicted murderer Robert Stoud, who would later be better as the “Alcatraz bird man.” “Men too vicious and problematic to be heroes in an ordinary prison,” was the way Charlton of the BBC expressed it.

Four years before Panorama traveled there, Frank Lee Morris had arrived on the island. Orphan at the age of 11, and convicted of his first crime at the age of 13, Morris had spent or his life inside and outside of varial correctional facilities. Considered highly intelligent, he was an experienced criminal, with a charging sheet that covers from drug possession to armed robbery and, perhaps more markedly, leaves the prison. He had his leg in the rock in January 1960 after his escape from the penitentiary of the state of Louisiana. As soon as he arrived in Alcatraz, it was the way of thinking about how he would go. He joined him in his cell block by the brothers convicted with Banks John and Clarence Anglin and all west, who had an inmate in Alcatraz since 1957. All men met since the previous periods in prison together, and spread to Ating on one side to another at night.

When the BBC charlton visited the site, a year after its closure, it was very aware of the formidable reputation of the prison by the unrelated guards, the harsh conditions and the marine winds that the convicts had to endure. “A wind without figures that never seems to stop, however and resonates in the bars,” he said. “Built on the passages of a strong old … today’s foundations of Alcatraz are rotting and breaking.”

With Morris taking the lead, the four prisoners began to invent an elaborate and bold plan to escape. Approximately a period of several months, men moved away from the concrete damaged by salt around the air ventilation under their sinks. Using the dining room’s snoring metal, a drill made of a vacuum cleaning engine and discarded saw blades, dug into a public service corridor without surveillance. To mask the noise of the drill, Morris would touch its duration of the accordion, the daily hour was left aside when the music touched the prisoners. Once they had created a hole large enough to crawl to the corridor, they rose to the empty upper level of the cell block and established a secret workshop. To hide the cell wall holes, they created false grills of Paper Maché of the magazines of the prison library. Once they were in their workshop, they dedicated themselves to building an improvised 6×14 feet improvised rubber raft and the life advantages made of more than 50 stolen waterproofs. To seal the rubber, they melted it with the hot steam pipes of the prison. Then they turned a concertin into a tool to inflate the raft and fashion palettes of the plywood.

But while working, they needed to hide their absence of the guards who periodically made night checks. Then, they sculpted Papier-Mâché versions of their soap heads, toothpaste and teeth paper. To look more realistic, they used the real hair of the floor of the barber of the prison and painted them in tones of meat using stolen art supplies. These would like to stand in their beds, with packages of clothing and towels under their blankets in the form of bodies so that they seem asleep. While they worked on their improvised escape team, they were also looking for a way out. Using plumbing pipes as steps, 30 feet (9.1m) climbed and opened the fan at the top of an axis. They made a false bolt of soap to keep it in place.

Finally, on the night of June 11, 1962, they were ready to launch their ingenious plan. Leaving the fictitious heads in their beds to deceive the guards, Morris and the two Anglin brothers dragged through the holes in the cell walls. West’s escape was rugged when he couldn’t get out of his cell in time, so others left without him. They climbed to the ceiling of the cell home, ran into it, carrying their improvised boat, in view of the Guard Tower, they knocked down an outer pipe, crossed the prison court, climbed two 12 -foot spikes wire fences (3.7 m) and staggered a embankment to the edge of the northeast of the island. On the edge of the water, they inflated their boat and disappeared at night. The alarm was that it was the next morning, when the lure heads were discovered.

The island was also home to the families of the guards who worked in prison. Jolene Babyak’s father, who was acting in Alcatraz at that time, caused the alarm. “When I woke up, the siren was still going. It was very penetrating, extremely noisy, it was horrible, it was quite scary,” he told BBC Witness in 2013. “I was surprised that you know him, and my first thought was that it cannot be an escape attempt and, of course, it was.”

The prison came into immediate blockade with an intensive search for all buildings, including the accommodation of prison officers. Meanwhile, Jolene’s father launched a massive human hunt with hundreds of application personnel of the law that widely seeks the surrounding area for days. On June 14, the Coast Guard found one of the prisoner’s palettes. The same day, the workers found a package of the personal effects of the Anglins, sealed in the rubber. Seven days later, some remains of the raft were washed near the Golden Gate bridge and was discovered the next day of homemade life investigations. But the three fugitives never saw each other again.

Althegh The prisoners escaped from the prison, the authorities concluded that they must have perished in treacherous waters trying to leave the island. That was undoubtedly the opinion of Wilden Richard Willard’s prison when the BBC interviewed him in 1964. “Yes, we are short of some, but they do not boast of that. In other words, that supposedly all that is the scathing in the streets of procedures today that boast of having escaped from Alcatraz,” he said. “Why am I so sure? Do you listen to the wind, right? And you see the water? Do you think you could do it?”

The Alcatraz prison closed in 1963, a year after the escape of men. In part, this was due to its determining structure and the expense of handling it, but the serious prison regime also had a long -legged subject or controversy. Already in 1939, American attorney general Frank Murphy had tried to close it, saying: “The entire institution leads to psychology that builds a sinister and vicious attitude among prisoners.”

Over the years, the prisoners, were killed or mutilated, unable to face unwavering conditions, already measured in the 1960s, the United States looked towards the rehabilitation of inmates instead of only their punishment.

As for the three escaped, despite the fact that the bodies are not found in the Bay, in 1979 they declared dead dead. The FBI closed its case and became responsibility to the service of US sheriffs.

But speculation about its destiny has never decreased. The same year they declared themselves dead, the movie Escape from Alcatraz was released with Clint Eastwood portraying Frank Morris. And from the moment of their escape in 1962, there were reports of supposed views of men and messages from them.

In 2018, the San Francisco Police revealed that they had received a mysterious letter five years before, from someone who claims to be John Anglin. The letter said “Alcatraz escaped in June 1962. Yes, we all did that night, but just!” The letter argued that men had lived in secret, with Frank Morris dying in October 2005, and Clarence Anglin in 2008. The author of the letter said he now wanted to negotiate his surrender in exchange for cancer treatment. The FBI evaluated the letter, but could not verify whether it was authentic or not.

The case is still open for the US sheriff service. As a recent 2022 axis, he launched updated images of how the three Misraz prisoners would see now, while attracting any information about them, hoping that he can finally put the mystery in bed.

This article was originally published on June 10, 2024 and has been republished.

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