In the year 1946 from May 2 to May 4, one of
the bloodiest escapes in history was attempted at the prison nicknamed Hellcatraz. One of
the six escapees has purposefully starved himself and is able to squeeze through bars to
give him access to a gun gallery. Now armed, the prisoners force guards to open up the
isolation cells. What ensues is “The Battle of Alcatraz”, a furious fight that ends with
two officers dead and 14 officers wounded. Three prisoners are also killed, and two are
later executed for their participation in the battle. What could have driven men
to become so desperate and so violent? This is what we’ll try and figure out today.
That wasn’t the first escape attempt from the prison that even the most hardened criminals
feared, and it wouldn’t be the last, in spite of the fact that trying to get out
of Alcatraz was an extremely deadly ambition. Even if the prisoners did get to the beaches
surrounding the fortress of Alcatraz, there was every chance their dead bodies would end up being
scooped out of the frigid waters sometime later. We’ll come back to these insane escape
attempts, and perhaps one that was successful, but first we need to ask ourselves this:
If trying to escape statistically gave the prisoner a good chance of being shot or
designated “missing and presumed drowned”, why did they keep trying? What
was so bad about Alcatraz? Long before this place was called the
“end of the line” for difficult criminals, it was used as an army barracks and then a
military prison. In 1934, it became the property of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, with the
authorities hoping it could contain some of the most vicious and difficult criminals in the USA.
From 1920 to 1933 the country had experienced a devastating rise in crime because of a
hare-brained thing called the Prohibition, with crime rates going up in 30 major U.S. cities
by 24 percent. This war on one of the most popular drugs wreaked havoc on society, and then if things
weren’t already bad enough, starting in 1929 and lasting for a decade, was “The Great Depression.”
It was a bad time to be American if you came from one of those places they called
the other side of the tracks. So, this was the climate when Alcatraz Federal
Penitentiary first opened its doors to who the authorities said was the worst of the worst, the
criminals that were almost beyond rehabilitation. These were the folks that were
labeled “the incorrigibles.” If you were a criminal back then and deemed
a menace to the prison where you were already incarcerated, one day you could have
been knocked up early in the morning and told you were getting a transfer.
After that, you’d have been taken to a specially-designed train coach where you were
shackled and handcuffed with a bunch of other prisoners, not to mention surrounded by
around 60 FBI agents and U.S. Marshalls. All you would have known is that this
was big, something big was happening, but you’d have no idea you were being
taken to a hellhole like no other. At a place called Tiburon just north of San
Francisco, you’d have been taken by barge to San Francisco Bay. Never in your life would you
have seen so many armed guards, although almost every prisoner with you has a solid reputation
as being what the authorities call an “agitator.” It’s at the bay you catch your first
glimpse of the warden and his assistants, who due to their stern reputations and dogged
toughness have been nicknamed “iron men.” Once on the island, these men march you and the
others single file to where you are stripped and searched, after which you’re given a number
and told which cell block you’re going to. For you, it is Cell Block B, although at some
point during your stay you’ll likely in up in Cell Block D, the dreaded isolation block. You
walk into your cell and feel a sense of dread, measuring 5 feet by 9 feet (1.5 meters
by 2.7 meters) and fitted out with one steel bed and one steel shelf. Your entire
worldly possessions amount to a toothbrush, some tooth powder, two towels, and a cup.
What’s strange is the silence, a very eerie silence. You’ve been told not to speak,
but it is just strange that no one is. Your last prison was nothing like this.
Things become a bit clearer when you read the book that’s been given to you, entitled
“REGULATIONS FOR INMATES U.S.P., ALCATRAZ.” Inside, you read that your life won't be hard
with a good conduct record and a good work record. In section 5 it says, “You are entitled to
food, clothing, shelter, and medical attention. Anything else that you get is a privilege.” And
let’s just say they are deadly serious when it comes to taking your privileges away, which is
one reason why people will soon be literally dying to get off the rock of Alcatraz.
You learn that you’ll be working hard, and anything that gets in the way of
that is a very serious offense. In fact, many things seem to constitute a serious offense,
from mere loitering to loaning things out, especially gambling or talking back to the guards.
The book explains that the morning bell goes off at 7 am, after which you will get ready and be
standing by your cell door facing outward at 7.20 am. No noise is permitted, not even a whisper,
and don’t dare look to your side once you’re out of the cell. You will walk to the dining hall in
single file. You cannot chat with other prisoners, and you should not switch your place in the
line. Do NOT, it says, “indulge in horseplay.” Damn, you think, are they serious about
this? Then you read in capital letters, “YOU MAY BE STOPPED AND SEARCHED AT ANY
TIME. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO CARRY CONTRABAND.” But things get a bit better, or at
least if you don’t break the rules. There is a movie day twice a month and if you’re
especially good you might be allowed to play sports in the yard, at least after you’ve finished
your 30 day quarantine period when you arrive at Alcatraz. Just get your work done, eight hours
a day, five days a week; keep your cell clean, don’t talk when you’re not supposed to,
and you’ll get some of those privileges. So far, Alcatraz just sounds
like a really strict prison, but some of the things we’ve just mentioned
drove some of the prisoners half-mad, and sometimes seriously, medically mad. They
really weren’t supposed to talk in their cells, ever, or at least when one warden was in
charge. That total silence was deafening, and if anyone was caught trying to whisper
a message to another prisoner they could end up losing their privileges or even a trip
to D Block, the home of the notorious “Hole”. The only time they could talk except from when
they were out in the yard was when they were eating, and this living half their life in silence
wasn’t easy at all. The good news is the food was pretty good, with one of the wardens once saying
if a prisoner gets the right food he’ll be much more useful at work and less prone to acting out.
This was on the menu for one Alcatraz breakfast: oatmeal, milk, sausage, fried potatoes, toast and
coffee. For dinner they got bean soup, roast beef and veg. For supper they got pork and beans,
salad, spiced apples, more coffee and bread. The prisoners got some recreation time in the
yard on weekdays, although just a few minutes. On Saturdays and Sundays, they got a
good chunk of the morning in the yard and a couple of hours in the afternoon.
It was the same with public holidays. On top of that, many prisoners who didn’t
break the rules got to use the public library, with the average Alcatraz prisoner
getting through 70 to 100 books a year from a stockpile of 10,000 to 15,000. So, it
wasn’t all bad news getting sent to Alcatraz. One year after the prison opened
its doors to around 240 prisoners, the Bureau of Prisons issued a report saying:
“The establishment of this institution not only provided a secure place for the detention
of the more difficult type of criminal but has had a good effect upon discipline in our other
penitentiaries also. No serious disturbance of any kind has been reported during the year.”
Ok, so why did this place become known as “Hellcatraz”, that’s what you want to know.
Well, first of all, there was what the Bureau of Prisons was saying and what the
prisoners said. The writer of that report we just mentioned must have decided to skip
the guard brutality part of life in Alcatraz. As you know, if prisoners toed the
line they were paid back in privileges, but you haven’t heard about what happened
when someone didn’t toe the line. If you think breaking the rules wasn’t easy to
do, just imagine having to stay silent for hours on end. Imagine staying silent when a guard has
his knees in your back, and another is pummeling you over the head. Imagine trying not to speak
when some dude is trying to extort you. Or, just imagine keeping quiet when you just
need to hear a voice when you are at your lowest depth and there’s a guy next door to you.
Soon after it was opened, critics of Alcatraz were saying this was a project that just couldn’t
work. One of them called the place “the great garbage can of San Francisco Bay, into which every
federal prison dumped its most rotten apples.” He, like others, said when you dump a lot of
desperate and broken men in one place, something sinister will start to happen. Alcatraz, they
said, is a pressure cooker, a human time bomb. Even though the population was usually only 260
to 275 people, and it rarely went above 300, you have to remember that this one percent of the
entire US prison population at the time was often a violent bunch. The way to fix this, according
to the authorities, was stricter measures, but these were men like Cool Hand Luke
in that you just “couldn’t reach” them. One of them was Robert Stroud,
aka the “Birdman of Alcatraz.” Prior to arriving at Alcatraz, he’d murdered
a prisoner in another prison and later killed a guard. This guy spent 54 years in prisons in
total, 42 of which were in solitary confinement. In prison, he taught himself a lot about birds
and actually became a fairly well-respected ornithologist, although he didn’t
actually keep birds in Alcatraz. In his former prison, he wrote the book
“Diseases of Canaries”, but now in Alcatraz, and because of his violence, it was
decided the way to rehabilitate him would be to deprive him of the things he most
treasured. This was the Alcatraz way, and there’s a good argument to suggest it doesn’t work.
Stroud had run away from home at age 13 to escape a very violent father. He was
obviously traumatized, and it was in prison where he seemed to get even more violent, so the
authorities deemed him one of the incorrigibles. He was no doubt a dangerous prisoner, but you
have to ask if the treatment he got at Alcatraz was a good thing. This was a man who was later
called a “brilliant self-taught expert on birds, and possibly the best-known example
of self-improvement and rehabilitation in the U.S. prison system”, but that all
stopped at Alcatraz. Instead, he was called a psychopath and kept well away from birds.
If the silence was deafening in the normal cells, the isolation block was like living in outer
space. There were 36 segregation cells, as well as solitary confinement cells. These were called “The
Hole.” Here prisoners often spent a grand total of 24 hours a day locked up, sometimes in the dark.
Yep, not even one hour out on most days, but they at least were taken to the yard at
some point in the week. When that happened, the only other people in the yard were the
guards. If they were following orders not to make chit-chat with the prisoner, that man never really
got to talk with anyone. This is how you make men insane, which doesn’t sound like rehabilitation
or such a good thing for when some prisoners are released back into the public sphere.
While in the hole, they didn’t receive visits from the outside, unlike prisoners
in other blocks that got one visit per month if the warden had granted them one. Even then,
the prisoners and the visitors weren’t allowed to touch each other and were not supposed to
talk about current events or life in the prison. The former prisoner Jim Quillen has
written about Alcatraz and the Hole, and he didn’t have much good to say about
both. He was sent to Alcatraz in 1942 after not exactly being a model prisoner at San
Quentin. In his book “Inside Alcatraz” he explains the reason why people were sent there, saying:
“Rehabilitation was not part of the Alcatraz vocabulary, or ever considered. The institution
was there for the purpose of proving to unruly prisoners that they had reached the ultimate
termination of their undisciplined way of life.” On the day he arrived, he was greeted
by a straw mattress and a dirty pillow. He couldn’t believe how quiet it was, but
did say he kept hearing whispers of the word “fish.” Apparently, prisoners were excited
that some fish had come into the prison. On that first night, he wasn’t undressed
and in bed as fast as he could have been. The guard walked up to his cell and said, “Get
undressed right now or you’ll get to see what the hole feels like.” In the end, Quillen
did spend time in the hole. That consisted of 24 hours a day in the pitch black. Food was
shoved in now and again, and aside from the sound of scurrying rats there was total silece.
This is what Quillen said he did to keep sane: “When I’d go in the Hole, what I used to do was
I’d tear a button off my coveralls, I’d flip it up in the air, then I’d turn around in circles,
then I’d get down on my hands and knees and I’d hunt for that button. And then when I found
the button, I’d stand up and I’d do it again.” Other reports say men were sometimes beaten
before they were stripped of their clothes and thrown onto the cold floor. They were given
no toothbrush or soap, although once a week a guard might appear and throw cold water over the
prisoner. This was all designed to dehumanize the man, to make him feel like an animal.
In the worst of the cells, known as the “Oriental” there was a hole in the ground
through which the men could pee and defecate, which gave the place the smell of a
sewer. They didn’t poop that often anyway, seeing as the only thing they were given to eat
was slices of moldy bread along with some water. It wasn’t easy to stay out of the hole,
never mind how good a person’s record was. As one former prisoner explained, “Men go
slowly insane under the exquisite torture of restricted and undeviating routine.”
The wardens sometimes weren’t even the biggest problem. Such was the case
of a prisoner named Rufe Persful. In the early 1900s, this man became a convicted
killer. When he spent time at Arkansas State Penitentiary on the prison farm, he was handed
a gun and told to shoot any inmates trying to escape from the farm. Such were the times. He
apparently shot and killed a few prisoners, while maiming others. This job didn't
do much for his popularity in prison. So, when he later ended up in Alcatraz you could
say he didn’t have the best of reputations among the prisoners. What’s strange is that even
with all those strict rules, it is said that other prisoners had many opportunities to
bully Persful to the extreme. This no doubt happened most of the time in the yard.
Not only that, but the conditions of Alcatraz had a profound effect on Persful’s
mental well-being. He was beaten senseless whenever prisoners got close to him, and so
the prison decided the best thing for him was to stay in the confinement cells. This made
him the most guarded prisoner in Alcatraz. Then in 1936, he wrote a letter to James A.
Johnston, the prison warden, and asked for a transfer. This was not forthcoming, and Persful
was told he’d be staying in his solitary hell. No sooner than he got out of solitary he
managed to get his hands on a prison ax, which he used to cut off his fingers,
apparently grinning like a mad man as he did so. He was finally diagnosed as being partially insane
after complaining of seeing an alligator in his cell. But then after again being bullied and
beaten badly at the prison, he was transferred. He later actually requested to be sent back
to the hole at Alcatraz after getting beaten up in his new prison. As the story goes, he
was beaten for the rest of his stay, but he was never arrested for committing a crime again
after getting out. He died an old man in 1991. His story just goes to show how Alcatraz was
designed not to rehabilitate but to break. Now we need to talk about a convicted
killer and bank robber named Henri Young. Young was a violent man, becoming known as
a bank robber who was quick to use extreme violence on his hostages. He also became
one of the biggest names that ever went through the doors at Alcatraz. There is a movie
centered around him called “Murder in the First”, although the depiction of Young
being a nice, non-violent guy is certainly not true in the slightest.
Some things are true, though, such as this. On January 13, 1939, Young and four
other prisoners named Arthur Barker, Rufus McCain, Dale Stamphill, and William
Martin tried to escape. It didn’t go too well for the criminal quintet, and Barker and
Stamphill lost their lives after being shot. The movie also correctly depicts Young
stabbing McCain less than a year later, causing an injury that proved to be fatal.
He never said exactly why he did it, but his attorneys tried to fight his case by saying his
time in solitary confinement had driven him to the edge of madness. Alcatraz found itself on trial.
Young described his time in the hole, a period of months – not years as the movie says. He wrote:
“You are stripped nude and pushed into the cell…There is no soap. No tobacco. No
toothbrush…You have no shoes, no bed, no mattress-nothing but the four damp walls
and two blankets. The walls are painted black. Once a day I got three slices of bread—no—that
is an error. Some days I got four slices.” This wasn’t a good look for the authorities,
although the jury ruled in favor of the prison when the case went to trial. The warden said the
sadistic behavior that Young talked about just didn’t happen, and a man named James V. Bennett,
the Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, wrote in 1941 that the awful conditions
of Alcatraz were grossly exaggerated. Part of his long statement read:
“I have visited Alcatraz frequently as have various members of our staff and know
personally most of the inmates, including Young. As a matter of fact, I have on several occasions
personally interviewed Young and done everything possible to obtain his cooperation. I have never
found or had called to my attention any authentic case of brutality or inhumanity at Alcatraz.”
So, did Alcatraz really deserve the nickname of Hellcatraz?
To answer that, we need to hear more from former prisoners, and there is no one better
to ask than a man named Alvin “Creepy” Karpis. He was one of the many gangsters that came to the
public eye during the Great Depression in the USA, although he was only one of four men
who did enough crime to get himself on the FBI’s “Enemy Number 1” list. The others
were the prolific criminals, John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Baby Face Nelson.
What makes Karpis stand out is that he was the only one of them to be captured
and spend a long time in prison. In fact, his 26 years behind bars on the Rock made him the
longest-serving Alcatraz prisoner of all time. Karpis wrote about some of the people he’d met in
Alcatraz, saying that the legendary gangster Al Capone was often seen strumming his tenor banjo
during recreation time. He called Machine Gun Kelly a bigmouth and a compulsive liar and said
the famed Birdman of Alcatraz was a total maniac. What’s perhaps more surprising was his
unlikely friendship with a man he described as mild-mannered, lazy, and shiftless. That man
was none other than Charles Manson, whom Karpis taught to play guitar. This was the young Charles
Manson, a good few years before he started his murderous cult and, according to some researchers,
may have been part of the CIA’s MKULTRA program. Karpis wrote of this kid who just
couldn’t stop getting himself arrested: “The youngster has been in institutions all of his
life —first orphanages, then reformatories, and finally federal prison. His mother, a prostitute,
was never around to look after him. I decide it's time someone did something for him, and to my
surprise, he learns quickly. He has a pleasant voice and a pleasing personality, although
he's unusually meek and mild for a convict.” If that makes it sound like Alcatraz was a
place where people sat around singing songs and having fun, Karpis wrote time and again
about the brutality of the guards against people he believed just had a bad start in
life. He summed up his 26 years by calling them an “empty, futile experience.”
Karpus also talked about the riots, the day-to-day violence, the horrors of the hole,
and some of those very violent escape attempts. As you already know, some of them ended with
inmates as well as prison officers getting shot, but the question is, did anyone really
come close to getting off that island? We can tell you that any attempt to do that had
a significant effect on a man’s life expectancy. Take, for instance, the time in 1938 when a bunch
of men tried to escape during a prison workshop. That day, officer Royal Cline had for a brief
moment stopped watching the men to take an inventory of supplies in another room.
When he returned to the main workshop, Thomas Limerick, James Lucas, and Rufus “Whitey”
Franklin were in the midst of trying to get out of a window. They attacked Cline with a
hammer, which eventually led to his death. Their plan was to get on the roof and scale down
the building where they believed they could get their hands on a police boat, but officer Harold
Stites got to them before that and opened fire. Limerick died, and both Lucas and Franklin were
handed life sentences, as well as having to spend six years in the hole. Lucas is also famous for
attacking Al Capone, with the reason being that Capone refused to take part in a prison strike.
So again, when we consider this strike and the fact that prisoners were willing to risk
their lives or life sentences to escape, you can be sure that some of them really
believed that Alcatraz was a living hell. Both Lucas and Franklin were in for
bank robbery and car theft and had they not tried to escape they might have left
Alcatraz with much of their lives to live. As it turned out, Franklin died a
year after he got paroled in 1974. Lucas went on to work in the oil
business after he got out in 1970. He died in 1988, aged 86.
The very first person who attempted to escape from Alcatraz
was a prisoner named Joseph Bowers. Two years after being sent to Alcatraz in 1934 for
stealing some mail with a firearm in his hands, he ended up on the prison roof. As to why
he was there will always remain a mystery, with some reports saying he was trying to get
some food back that was stuck on some barbed wire. He’d apparently been feeding the seagulls.
But when the guard told him to get down, it seems Bowers didn’t do as he was told. He was shot and
fell 60 feet to the rocks below. There was no way he was surviving that. It was stated that Bowers
had lost his mind within the incredibly strict confines of the prison. He was described as a
“desperado and loner, unable to come to terms with the conditions of Alcatraz. Imprisoned
during the toughest and most strict era.” That’s one thing to note, there were four
wardens in total during the time Alcatraz functioned as a prison from 1934 to 1963, and
some of them were way stricter than others. From 1934 to 1948 the warden
was James Aloysius Johnston. Even though he was against barbarism, it’s this guy that came up with the
code of silence prisoners had to follow. He might have been against beatings,
straitjacket, and other sadistic measures, but it seems his very strict disciplinarian
attitude was too much for many inmates. Two prisoners named Theodore Cole
and Ralph Roe would have agreed. Both these guys were bank robbers and before
going to Alcatraz they’d attempted to escape from another prison, hence the reason they
were sent to the supposedly escape-proof rock. In 1937, they hatched their plan, and then on
December 16, they decided it was time to go. The conditions were both good and
bad for an escape. Good, because there was a thick fog that day over the bay, and
bad because in December the water is really cold. When a headcount was taken at 1.30 pm, it showed
two people less than expected. It was soon evident that these two had sawn through the cell bars,
scaled down a fence, and then forced open a gate with a wrench they’d stolen from the workshop.
The thing was, that dense fog made it possible for them to do this without anyone seeing them.
Guards later found the wrench. They discovered footprints on the beach where
they’d landed, but after a long and hard search, they couldn’t find the men.
It was presumed that rather than make a raft of any sort they’d used stolen cannisters and tires
as floats, both of which the men had worked with in the prison. But, the tides at that time would
likely have carried then into the Pacific Ocean, and anyway, even if they were expert swimmers,
the 46 to 58 degrees Fahrenheit waters at that time of the year would likely have killed them.
Over the years, the FBI didn’t give up looking for these two men. There were some identifications
now and again from the public, and also a rumor they were living in South America, but if
they did indeed survive, we’ll never know. Others in time would also get into the
water but not escape, so the question is, is it possible to swim the 1.5-miles (2.4
km) to the nearest point to the bay shore? As any of you regular swimmers will know, that
is hardly a long distance for a good swimmer. People often swim across the English Channel,
which is 21 miles (33km) and 57 to 64 degrees Fahrenheit (14 to 18 degrees Celsius) in summer!
Well, people do swim from Alcatraz to the shore and they do it quite often. One website that talks
about this great swim had this to say about it: “Despite lore that swimming
from Alcatraz is dangerous, for experienced swimmers with proper support,
swimming from Alcatraz can be safe and fun.” Ok, so these people often wear wetsuits,
have a big meal in them prior to setting off and have a bunch of folks around them who will
help if they get in trouble, but what if escapees were strong swimmers, healthy, well-fed, and
maybe had some help with a raft? What if the conditions were pretty good the day they went?
Let’s also just recall here that the guards back in the day would love telling the story of
all those Great White sharks that inhabit the waters close to Alcatraz, but truth be known,
they very rarely swim close to the island and would certainly be a long way down on the
list of any rational thinking prisoner’s fears. Most people agree that with the cold and the
sometimes unpredictable movement of the water, you’d really have to be a good swimmer
to get to the other side. Also, you wouldn’t necessarily need a wetsuit.
Many that swim it now don’t bother with one. One of them just recently said this on
a web forum: “Alcatraz is an extremely fun swim. I encourage anyone to do it.” Still,
he also said time your swim right or you could end up getting carried out to sea. Another
swimmer who did it without a wetsuit said, “When I arrived to shore, it took me several
seconds to get my legs to work as they were numb.” He also said it was fun, but “never again.”
And get this, in 1959, prisoner #AZ 1403 did get to the shore on the other
side. His name was John Paul Scott. He got all the way to Fort Point beneath the
Golden Gate Bridge but it seems the swim had done him in. A bunch of teenagers found him
curled up in a ball suffering from hypothermia. Cops were on the scene in twenty minutes,
and he was soon back in Alcatraz. Apparently, he wasn’t such a great swimmer but also
had been helped a lot by a favorable tide. And this brings us to arguably the
best Alcatraz story of them all. On June 11, 1962, there was an escape like
no other. The men involved were Frank Morris, Allen West, and the brothers
John and Clarence Anglin. Morris had spent much of his youth in prisons, with crimes ranging from car
theft to drug possession. He escaped from Louisiana State Penitentiary while
doing time for bank robbery and in 1960 was sent to Alcatraz. Notably, his IQ was said to be 133,
in the 98th percentile for IQs. For those of you who don’t know what that means, it means only
two out of a hundred people have an IQ like his. John and Clarence Anglin were also career
criminals, but it is said during their robberies they always made sure no one got hurt.
They weren’t violent criminals, just kids who’d grown up on those wrong sides of the tracks.
They also said when they held up banks, they only ever used a toy gun. That
didn’t matter to the authorities, and they were handed lengthy sentences when
caught. After some escape attempts at other prisons, they were subsequently sent to Alcatraz.
Even more notable is that when these two were kids, both of them were said to be outstanding
swimmers. Not only that, they at times astonished their friends by swimming great distances in
Lake Michigan when there was ice floating on the water. For these two, given conditions
weren’t totally against them, completing the Alcatraz escape swim would have been a breeze.
The guy named Allen West was also involved in the escape, but he didn’t get
too far on the night it happened. In short, these men spent a lot of time using
things such as spoons to dig out the cement in the walls where the vents were. They even
fashioned a kind of drill they’d made from bits of a vacuum cleaner. When the drilling happened,
someone played the accordion to mask the noise. Once they could get through the hole, they
managed to walk through a corridor and set up their own workshop in a closed-off space.
There, they used around 50 raincoats to make workable life preservers, and even their
very own six-by-fourteen-foot rubber raft. All this needed stitching and heating at the
seams, which was a lot of work but possible with steam from vents. It also took a fair amount
of intelligence, which they all seemed to have. And when they were working and missing from
their beds, it wasn’t a problem, because they’d made dummies to put under the blankets replete
with painted, human-looking papier-mâché heads. If you’re wondering how the hell
they blew up vests and a raft, they modified an accordion and used it as a pump.
But on the night they left, West discovered to his disbelief that some of the cement he’d
used around his vent had gotten too hard. He had to stay behind, but the rest of them took
their equipment and scaled down to the beach. That was it, they were gone, and because of
their dummy heads, the alarm wasn’t raised until the next morning. With pie now in its
face, the FBI ended up finding some personal effects and possible bits of the raft and life
jackets, but there was no sign of any bodies. And remember, these guys could swim!
It was also June, not the worst time to be in the water, even if the prison
purposefully made the shower water hot so men couldn’t get too used to cold water.
The FBI kept on looking for them and didn’t close the case until 1979. Again, there had been
sightings and lots of rumors of them being alive, but they drifted from the public consciousness.
Then in 2013, the FBI got a letter. They didn’t make that public for five years, though.
Part of it read: “My name is John Anglin. I escape from
Alcatraz in June 1962 with my brother Clarence and Frank Morris. I’m 83 years
old and in bad shape. I have cancer. Yes, we all made it that night but barely!”
It said Morris died in 2008 and Clarence in 2011. He also stated:
“If you announce on TV that I will be promised to just go to jail for no more than
a year and get some medical attention I will write back to let you know exactly where I am. I
am 83 years old and in bad shape. I have cancer.” The FBI didn’t bother with a reply, so we
have no idea if the letter was real. But what’s more shocking is what two nephews of
the Anglin brothers later said. They are Ken and David Widner. In 2016, they told The
Guardian they knew the brothers had survived. They said they had documents that proved their
escape was successful, including a photo. They also said they have a bad relationship with
the FBI and US marshals after years of harassment. They disbelieve that Clarence and John’s
brother was electrocuted while trying to escape Kilby Correctional Facility, years
after the brothers had left Alcatraz. Instead, they say he was probably beaten to death
during an interrogation, because he knew where the brothers were. “They knew he knew where they
were,” David Widner has said, “and the family really believe they beat him to death trying
to get him to tell them where those boys were.” One thing that is undeniable is men would
literally risk death to get out of that prison, even if the authorities often played down how
bad it was inside. But when it did close in ’63, it wasn’t because of human rights abuses, but
the fact it was too expensive to keep open. Now you need to watch a show about one
of Alcatraz’s most famous prisoners in “Machine Gun Kelly: The Life & Crime of
Public Enemy Number One.” Or, have a look at possibly the craziest prisoner ever in “Man
So Violent Even Other Prisoners Fear Him.”
