As Trump calls for reopening Alcatraz, its most famous escape is still a mystery

By Andy Rose, CNN

(CNN) — Despite its reputation as ironclad, it was possible to escape Alcatraz. All it took was brains, guts and 50 raincoats.

On June 11, 1962, three prisoners – Frank Morris and brothers Clarence and John Anglin, all in their 30s – shimmied with a homemade raft through hidden holes in their cell walls, climbed through a ventilation duct onto the roof and bolted from the island fortress into the freezing, choppy waters of the San Francisco Bay.

The notion that the island prison is truly escape-proof is a key part of President Donald Trump’s proposal to reopen it more than 60 years after the Bureau of Prisons closed it for being too expensive to operate.

“Nobody’s ever escaped from Alcatraz,” Trump asserted Monday in the Oval Office.

But while Morris and the Anglin brothers were never found, fans of outlaw drama – and some of the prisoners’ own family members – are convinced they actually made it to shore and lived out their lives hidden from justice and the public eye.

“That case,” said Art Roderick, a retired US marshal involved in the investigation for nearly 40 years, “just never goes away.”

Getting to Alcatraz, then getting out

Morris and the Anglins ended up in America’s most foreboding prison for the most obvious reason: They were constantly trying to escape every other place they had been held, rap sheets in their FBI files show. Still, the federal complex in California known as The Rock broke neither their spirits nor their record.

“Well, they didn’t like being locked up,” said David Widner, 58, who has cowritten a book about his uncles’ breakout.

They also didn’t like being poor. The FBI documents show more than two dozen charges combined for the two brothers – who grew up in rural Georgia with a dozen other brothers and sisters – mostly for burglary and breaking and entering.

“A lot of it was just so they would have nice things,” Widner said. “They wanted better things that they didn’t know how to go about getting other than stealing.”

Clarence and John’s last theft was of a tiny bank in Columbia, Alabama, the records show. They were arrested five days later – along with their older brother Alfred – on the run in Ohio, netting them 15-year federal prison sentences.

The Anglins were transferred to Alcatraz following an escape attempt at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, which at the time was the largest maximum-security prison in the United States. Prison officials said Clarence tried to get out – with John’s help – by hiding inside two large metal breadboxes.

Clarence only got as far as the prison bakery before being caught, FBI records show, but it was the kind of creative solution that didn’t surprise the Anglin family. As children, the boys once figured out how to reuse a punctured tire by packing the hole full of moss, Widner told CNN.

When the Anglins were paired in adjoining cells at Alcatraz next to Morris – another prisoner sent to the Rock due to repeated escapes – another attempt seemed almost inevitable.

Escape: Rubber coats, sharpened spoons and fake heads

Based on the evidence they could gather, along with testimony from inmate Allen West – who was part of the conspiracy but said the three escapees left without him that night in 1962 – the Federal Bureau of Investigation pieced together an extraordinary plot accomplished slowly over six months:

• Rubber raincoats stolen from fellow inmates, glued together to make a raft – 6 feet by 14 feet – sealed with steam pipes
• A vacuum cleaner motor used to make an electric drill
• Filed-down spoons used as screwdrivers
• A concertina, a musical instrument similar to an accordion – and one of the few items used the men didn’t steal – converted into a bellows to inflate the escape raft; Morris, who investigators said had an IQ of 133, bought it with $28.69 from his prison trust fund

The most ingenious part of the men’s plan may have been using cement fragments, cotton, hair fragments from the prison barber shop, glue and paint to create three dummy heads. The improvised sculptures were crude and grotesque but just realistic enough at a distance to fool the night guards into thinking the men were sound asleep in their beds.

“My mom and the brothers and sisters always said they were the modern-day MacGyvers,” Widner remembered, recalling the TV show about a technical genius who uses found objects to construct whatever he needs to get out of tricky situations. “They could take nothing and make something out of it.”

Investigators agreed, according to an FBI case memo filed three days after the escape. The “work which the subjects performed in preparation for the escape is fantastic,” Special Agent in Charge Frank L. Price said.

Another factor working in the men’s favor was the prison’s deterioration. Plans were already underway to decommission the extraordinarily costly prison, according to Roderick, with Warden Olin Blackwell telling reporters it would take $5 million to get Alcatraz in proper condition, the equivalent today of $53 million.

“They weren’t doing any repairs at the time,” the retired marshal said, and the Bureau of Prisons was struggling to keep the facility properly staffed. “You put all that together, and that’s how the escape occurred.”

Investigators found the men punched out holes in their cell walls by drilling them over weeks and covering their work with painted cardboard, FBI records show. Climbing up the pipes of a utility shaft, the inmates disassembled the ventilation covers, descended the roof on a chimney pipe and scaled a fence.

Launching the raft they had designed with the help of a Sports Illustrated magazine, the three escaped into the frigid darkness, government files say.

Intriguing clues soon turned up. But, somehow, they all seemed to go nowhere.

“I have never in my life come across a case that has more of those types of leads,” Roderick said.

Search: Boats, a copter and a postcard

Within hours of the escape, investigators scoured the waters around Alcatraz. State police were put on alert. The Coast Guard and Army Corps of Engineers contributed boats and a helicopter, FBI records show. Blackwell, the warden, even ordered a full search of Alcatraz on the off chance the men never actually left.

A hundred soldiers and 35 military police combed Angel Island, the spot just north of Alcatraz where West told investigators the men planned to go. “No evidence was found to indicate the Escapees ever reached this island,” an FBI report says.

“Of course, it became the hottest thing in the media at the time,” retired FBI agent John Arend said years later. “We didn’t have cable news, but you had all the media very fascinated with this case.”

Then, the first bit of evidence the guys might have survived appeared. But it did not wash up on shore. It arrived by mail.

The postcard addressed to “Warden, Alcatraz Prison” turned up June 18, signed “Frank, Jim, Clarence,” each in a different hand.

The FBI commissioned a handwriting expert, who determined the signature of “Clarence” was likely a forgery. There were not enough handwriting samples of John and Frank to make a comparison, and the FBI concluded the card was probably a hoax inspired by the intense and worldwide news coverage.

Within days, searchers skimming the waters near Alcatraz Island, with its crystal-clear view of the Golden Gate Bridge, found sparse evidence related to the escape, including a portion of one of their improvised oars and part of a homemade life jacket, FBI records show.

Sealed packets made out of the same material as the raft contained personal photos of the Anglins and family addresses, as well as contact information for a San Francisco attorney who had defended Alcatraz inmates in the past, the files say. The attorney told the FBI he never heard from Morris or the Anglins.

The government files contain dozens of contacts from people who said they may have seen the prisoners, but none ever panned out. They also include then-Director J. Edgar Hoover’s reluctance to reveal the information the bureau had to the public.

“I trust our (San Francisco) Office isn’t giving (a) ‘blow by blow’ account to the press nor anyone else,” Hoover said in a June 13 memo. “Our job is to find these thugs, not keep them advised of our progress.”

The Anglin family is convinced that, despite the FBI’s release of hundreds of pages of documents in the case, the agency is still reluctant to discuss the full story.

“They know things they won’t tell because they couldn’t find them,” Widmer said.

FBI: ‘They are presumed to be dead’

Widner’s first encounter with his uncles’ story came in 1977, when four men from the FBI visited his home and asked his mother Marie if she had any information about where her brothers, Clarence and John Anglin, ended up, he said.

“She told them no, and if she did (know), she wouldn’t tell them,” he said.

Two years later, the FBI closed its investigation, saying it had never found any evidence Morris and the Anglin brothers survived the escape attempt. “They are presumed to be dead,” a 1979 memo stated.

But the Marshals Service, which is responsible for capturing fugitives, has never closed its file. Wanted posters of the three remain on the service’s website, and the government even created computer-aged portraits showing how they believe the men would have appeared in their mid-80s.

“There have been actionable leads that have come in,” said Roderick, the retired marshal who continues to consult on the case.

Alleged proof of life keeps resurfacing

The assumption that Morris and the Anglin brothers could not have possibly survived the tricky tides and freezing cold spray of the San Francisco Bay took a hit in 2003 from an unlikely source: reality TV. The Discovery Channel science program “MythBusters” launched its own raincoat raft from Alcatraz, matching the tools and circumstances of the 1962 escape as closely as possible. (Discovery and CNN share the same parent company.)

Following the bay’s currents west toward the Golden Gate Bridge instead of the long-assumed path north toward Angel Island, hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman successfully landed at the Marin Headlands in their homemade watercraft, saying the three men’s survival was “entirely possible.”

A decade later, Dutch scientists using computer models of currents in the Bay found the brothers and Morris could have made it safely to the Golden Gate Bridge area if they had left between 11 p.m. and midnight. Prison officials believed the men escaped between 10:30 and 11 p.m., they told the FBI.

The changing tides would then have sent any debris related to their trek back toward Angel Island, the researchers found. “We don’t know how good they were at paddling, but I suppose if you ever have energy to spare, it would be in that situation,” said study co-author Rolf Hut at the Delft University of Technology.

More than 40 years after the FBI turned over the investigation to the Marshals Service, leads continue to surface. The Anglin family says it got a photo from a family friend purportedly showing the brothers in Brazil in 1975, something the Marshals Service has said is impossible to verify.

In 2013, the FBI got a letter that claimed to be from John Anglin, CNN affiliate KPIX reported. The writer said he would be willing to turn himself in if he was publicly promised cancer treatment and a one-year prison sentence.

Even relatives who believe the inmates survived their escape acknowledge the men – who would now all be in their 90s – are almost certainly no longer around to be found.

“They either died in the Bay or are dead by now,” Roderick said.

Past raises questions of prison’s future

The dramatic 1962 disappearance – which inspired the 1979 Clint Eastwood movie, “Escape from Alcatraz” – seemed to harden the resolve of then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy that Alcatraz had outlived its usefulness, telling reporters he was committing to closing it.

“Kennedy does not agree with the view that Alcatraz should be retained as a deterent (sic) to hardened criminals in that other institutions could fill the same role at less expense,” stated an FBI memo, citing a story in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Alcatraz was shuttered for good the following year, remaining dormant until the National Park Service began converting it into a museum in 1972. Since then, the former lockup has attracted more than a million visitors a year, one of the most popular National Park sites, according to the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy.

But Trump sees the site much differently.

“It represents something strong, very powerful in terms of law and order. Our country needs law and order; Alcatraz is, I would say, the ultimate,” the president said Monday. “We’ll see if we can bring it back in large form, add a lot.”

Widner, the Anglins’ nephew, has visited Alcatraz many times. He says he stays out of political debates but doesn’t like the idea of scrapping the museum to make Alcatraz great again.

“I think it’s a bad idea,” Widner said. “You would be losing a lot of history there.”

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CNN’s FJ Feng and Alex Matthews contributed to this report.