On the night of June 11, 1962, inmates Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin escaped from Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, the maximum-security prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, California, United States. Having spent six months preparing their breakout, the three men tucked papier-mâché model heads resembling their own likenesses into their beds, broke out of the main prison building via ventilation ducts and an unguarded utility corridor and departed the island aboard an improvised inflatable raft to an uncertain fate. A fourth inmate, Allen West, failed to escape with Morris and the Anglins and was left behind.
Hundreds of leads were pursued by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and local law enforcement officials in the ensuing years, but no conclusive evidence has ever surfaced regarding the fate of Morris and the Anglins. In 1979, the FBI officially concluded, on the basis of circumstantial evidence and a preponderance of expert opinion, that the three inmates likely drowned in the frigid waters of San Francisco Bay while attempting to reach the mainland. The U.S. Marshals Service case file remains open and active, and Morris and the Anglin brothers remained on its wanted list until September 2026.
Numerous theories of widely varying plausibility on the fates of the three fugitives have been proposed by authorities, reporters, family members and amateur enthusiasts, with circumstantial and material evidence continuing to surface, stoking debates as to whether the inmates may have survived their escape.
Notable previous escape attempts
Prior to the June 1962 escape, two inmates, Theodore Cole and Ralph Roe, escaped Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary in 1937; they vanished into the bay and were unaccounted for, though officials presumed them drowned. Inmate Aaron Burgett drowned during an escape attempt in 1958.
Inmates
Frank Morris
Frank Lee Morris (born on September 1, 1926 – disappeared on June 11, 1962) was born in Washington, D.C. He was born to a woman named Clara, a runaway who refused to remain home in his youth. His mother bestowed upon him the name of a civil engineer whom she claimed she had married, but who admittedly was not his father. Morris was placed in a foster home, then an orphanage, where Clara visited him twice a week. Morris was not close with his mother, who had uncontrolled rages and never gave him proper attention. Morris was described as affable and quiet, but by age 6 would steal small change from a teacher's desk and rifle through children's lunch boxes. These actions occurred after visits from Clara. Morris would later say his parents had died in 1937.
Orphaned at age 11, Morris spent the rest of his childhood in foster homes. He was convicted of his first criminal offense at age 13, and by his late teens had been arrested for crimes ranging from narcotics possession to armed robbery. Later, he was arrested in Miami Beach, Florida, for grand larceny, auto theft and armed robbery. He reportedly ranked in the top 2% of the general population in intelligence, as measured by IQ testing (133).
Morris served time in Florida and Georgia, then was sent to the Louisiana State Penitentiary to serve ten years for robbery and possession of marijuana. In April 1955, he escaped from Louisiana Penitentiary with fellow inmate, William Martin; the two hitchhiked and were picked up by an African American farmer, then were let out at an oil refinery on the outskirts of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The two inmates spent a few months in New Orleans, cased a bank in the nearby town of Slidell, then headed north to Kansas City, Missouri, where Morris was recaptured while committing a burglary with a third partner, Earl Branci, one year later. Morris was sent to Alcatraz on January 18, 1960, as inmate number AZ1441.
John and Clarence Anglin
John William Anglin (born May 2, 1930 – disappeared June 11, 1962) and Clarence Anglin (born May 11, 1931 – disappeared June 11, 1962) were born into a family of thirteen children in Donalsonville, Georgia. Their parents, George Robert Anglin and Rachael Van Miller Anglin, were seasonal farmworkers; in the early 1940s, they moved the family to Ruskin, Florida, 20 miles (32 km) south of Tampa, where the truck farms and tomato fields provided a more reliable source of income. Each June they migrated north as far as Michigan to pick cherries. Clarence and John were reportedly inseparable as youngsters; they became skilled swimmers and amazed their siblings by swimming in the frigid waters of Lake Michigan as ice still floated on its surface.
Clarence was first caught breaking into a service station when he was fourteen years old. He and John began robbing banks and other establishments as a team in the early 1950s. They claimed that they used a weapon only once, during a bank heist–a toy gun.
On January 17, 1958, John, Clarence and their brother Alfred robbed the Bank of Columbia in Columbia, Alabama, making off with US$19,000. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) captured them and all received thirty-five-year sentences, which they served at Florida State Prison, Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary and then Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. After repeated attempts to escape from Atlanta, Clarence, assuming a prerogative of the warden, tried to ship John out of Leavenworth; he cut the top out of a big bread box and bottom out of another. John sat in one, and Clarence set the other on top, then packed in loaves of bread. A truck was ready to haul John and the other boxes to a prison farm when a supervisor, suspicious of the size, discovered them. John and Clarence were transferred to Alcatraz. John arrived on October 24, 1960, as inmate AZ1476, and Clarence on January 16, 1961, as inmate AZ1485.
Allen West
Allen Clayton West (born March 25, 1929 – died December 21, 1978) was born in New York City. He had picked up a slight southern accent while living in Georgia. West was arrested over twenty times throughout his lifetime. He was imprisoned for car theft in 1955, first at Atlanta Penitentiary, then at Florida State Prison. After an escape attempt from the Florida facility, he was transferred to Alcatraz in 1957 to serve ten years for auto theft and became inmate AZ1330. He arrived for a second term in 1958 as AZ1335. His violent and aggressive reputation made him unpopular with Alcatraz guards. He was imprisoned in isolation and assigned to work as a maintenance orderly as punishment.
Escape
On January 30, 1960, Morris was moved into Cell No. 138 on outside B Block. West was his cellmate next door. West, who played with an accordion, was reportedly a compulsive chatterer; San Francisco Chronicle reporter John Campbell Bruce suggests that Morris likely did "not cotton his neighbor right off". Morris lost West for an indefinite period in late summer 1960, when West helped stage a fracas during a noon meal to draw the guards and gave an inmate named Wagstaff a free hand to stab another inmate at another part of the mess hall; West and Wagstaff went off to D Block. Morris may have encountered John Anglin when John came to Alcatraz in October, the two having known each other at Atlanta. When Clarence came along in January, the brothers occupied adjoining cells. Some accounts suggest that Morris and the Anglins had never known West before Alcatraz. Others suggest the four inmates all knew each other from previous incarcerations in Florida and Georgia.
There are conflicting accounts as to who masterminded the escape plan. Campbell writes that the plan was formulated under the leadership of Morris, saying that Morris had a conversation with a fellow prisoner in the brush shop, in which his fellow prisoner revealed that in 1957, Willard Winhoven (who was released in 1959 after serving twelve years for robbery), an inmate electrician, had removed a fan motor from a ventilation shaft to the roof on B Block and no replacement was made. The inmate teased Morris, saying "ask the bull [the guard] for the key". Morris waited until West was released from solitary confinement in early 1962, whereupon Morris ordered an accordion like West's, before telling the Anglins and West the escape plan. Under interrogation following the escape, West claimed that the escape was his idea, saying he been painting the prison roof in spring 1961 when he realized the ventilation shafts were a viable way out. In his account, West proposed the idea to the Anglins, who then included Morris in the plan. Prison officials were skeptical of West's claims, due to his background, and believed Morris was the mastermind. In his autobiography, Alcatraz: The True End of the Line, former inmate Darwin Coon claimed that John Anglin was the mastermind.
Over the subsequent six months, the prisoners widened the ventilation ducts beneath their sinks using discarded saw blades found on the prison grounds, metal spoons from the mess hall and an electric drill improvised from the motor of a vacuum cleaner. The men concealed their work with painted cardboard, and masked the noise with Morris's accordion on top of the ambient din of music hour. Once the holes were wide enough to pass through, the men accessed the unguarded utility corridor directly behind their cells' tier and climbed to the vacant top level of the cellblock, where they set up a clandestine workshop. Here, using over fifty raincoats among other stolen and donated materials, they constructed life preservers, based on a design Morris found in the March 1962 issue of Popular Mechanics. Morris found other ideas in magazines: resin to make a lamp shade in the November 1960 issue of Popular Mechanics, and an article about channel buoys indicating course and navigation hazards, in the May 21, 1962, issue of Sports Illustrated. They also assembled a six-by-fourteen-foot (1.8 by 4.3 m) rubber raft, the seams carefully stitched by hand and sealed with liquid plastic available in the shops, and heat from nearby steam pipes. Paddles were improvised from plywood and screws. Finally, they climbed a ventilation duct to the roof and removed the rivets holding a large fan in place.
The men concealed their absence while working outside their cells, and after the escape itself, by sculpting dummy heads from a hand-made papier-mâché-like mixture of soap, toothpaste, concrete dust and toilet paper, and giving them a realistic appearance with paint from the maintenance shop and hair from the barbershop floor. With towels and clothing piled under the blankets in their bunks and the dummy heads positioned on the pillows, they appeared to be sleeping.
On the night of June 11, 1962, after lights out at 9:30 pm, with all preparations in place, the four men initiated their plan to escape. As Morris and the Anglins set their dummy heads in place and left their cells for the last time, West discovered that the cement he had used to reinforce crumbling concrete around his vent had hardened, narrowing the opening and fixing the grille in place. From the service corridor, Morris and the Anglins, forced to leave West behind, climbed the ventilation shaft to the roof. Guards heard a loud crash as they broke out of the shaft, but nothing further was heard, and the source of the noise was not investigated. Hauling their gear with them, the three men descended 50 feet (15 m) to the ground by sliding down a kitchen vent pipe, then climbed two 12-foot (3.7 m) barbed-wire perimeter fences. At the northeast shoreline, near the power plant—a blind spot in the prison's network of searchlights and gun towers—they inflated their makeshift raft with a concertina stolen from another inmate and modified to serve as a bellows. At approximately 10:00 pm, according to estimations, Morris and the Anglins launched the raft and departed Alcatraz Island.
By the time West had managed to remove the grille and re-widen the hole, the others had gone. In the workshop, he found an unfinished pontoon, a plywood paddle, three life preservers, his own fake dummy head and an extra raft, partially finished, left behind for him. After poking his head out of the top of the shaft, startling seagulls on the roof, he froze for a terrified instant, before climbing back down the shaft and returning to his cell exhausted.
Investigation
The escape was not discovered until 7 am June 12 because of the dummy head ruse. After the wake-up bell, Officers Lawrence Bartlett and Bill Long tried to rouse the apparently sleeping Clarence Anglin, whereupon the dummy head fell onto the floor. Morris' and John Anglin's dummy heads were discovered shortly afterward. Military and law enforcement agencies conducted an extensive air, sea and land search over the next ten days. On June 14, a United States Coast Guard cutter picked up a paddle floating about 200 yards (180 m) off the southern shore of Angel Island, and workers on another boat found a wallet wrapped in plastic and bearing the names, addresses and photos of the Anglins' friends and relatives. On June 21, a life vest washed up on Cronkite Beach nearly three miles outside the Golden Gate Bridge. The following day, a prison boat picked up another life vest 50 yards (46 m) off Alcatraz Island, its strings still knotted at the back. Nothing else was recovered.