It has been 50 years since what could have been the only successful escape from Alcatraz – and the three fugitives remain wanted men. Brothers John and Clarence Anglin and fellow prisoner Frank Morris pulled off the great escape on June 11, 1962, and to this day remain wanted by authorities as their bodies have never been found. Alcatraz Island is located in the San Francisco Bay and was a federal prison from 1933 until 1963 for “desperate or irredeemable individuals”. Before the prison closed in March 1963, 36 inmates attempted to escape, but only the Anglin brothers and Morris managed to remain elusive to the authorities. The trio were all serving sentences for bank robbery, but it was the Anglins’ history of previous escapes coupled with a failed attempt to sneak Clarence out of federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas that got them sent to Alcatraz in 1960 and 1961.The men’s infamous escape has been made into a book and the 1979 Clint Eastwood film ‘Escape from Alcatraz’, in which he played the character of Morris. The US Marshals Service took over the manhunt from the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1978, and say the most convincing clues have included that the Anglin’s mother for several years received flowers without a card and that the brothers attended her 1973 funeral disguised in women’s clothes despite a swarm of FBI agents. The warrants on them will expire when each man passes his 100th birthday. They reportedly spent months using spoons and forks to dig holes in the crumbling masonry surrounding the air vents in their cells, eventually piercing the six and a half inch thick walls, before squeezing out through roof vents. They made mannequin heads out of paper paint and hair acquired from the prison’s barbers, which they left in their beds when they worked on the raft and on the night of their getaway. Replicas of the dummy heads still lie in their former cells.
‘Escape from Alcatraz’ still a mystery 50 years on
