“Warden Blackwell permitted newspapermen to see one of the dummies left behind by the men in their cell,” The Chronicle reported two days later, after touring the cell.
“OUT OF ALCATRAZ BY A SPOON” blared The Chronicle’s front page, although the use of spoons turned out to be one of the least interesting facts from the escape, which involved digging around a metal air vent, shimmying up poles and sneaking past guards in towers and on the north end of the island. The news of the escape broke on Tuesday, June 12, 1962, interrupting what had been a slow news week at the beginning of summer break. Marshals Fugitive Investigations site - with age-enhanced photos of the trio, who would be in their 90s now. Dead or alive, the escapees, all convicted bank robbers who escaped other prisons, have never been found, and currently occupy the front page of the U.S. I have not heard from them, but my gut feeling is that they're OK.Technically, fugitives Frank Morris, Charles Anglin and John Anglin are still wanted men. "I really do believe the boys made it out of here," Widner said. Though both of them may have hoped just a little. Both just want to know what happened.ĭyke doesn't really believe the men would return for an anniversary. But in recent years, Dyke and Widner have found themselves having long phone conversations and sharing information. Marshals looked upon the Anglin family as targets of their investigation. You're under arrest."įor a long time the FBI and the U.S. Way to go for staying out of trouble for so long. If he saw them, he knows what he would say: "Awesome escape. Until there's evidence to the fact that they're not alive anymore, I'm going to keep looking." "It would be really nice to have answers, but some things you never have answers for," Dyke said.
It was in those cells the men saw through their plan to make dummy heads to fool the guards and to collect enough raincoats to make a raft. They wanted to be together - cell by cell." "But they brought them here and said we're putting them together they will never get off this island. "Authorities said they would never put them together anywhere because they liked to get together and plan out an escape," Widner said. They were sent to Alcatraz not because they were violent or dangerous but because they had escaped from so many other prisons. Like Morris, the Anglins were nonviolent bank robbers. They eventually found a paddle, a couple of life vests, a sealed plastic bag with letters and addresses. Coast Guard and local police scoured the water. "I cut my iron off and I run to my neighbors house and said, 'Did you hear what was on the radio? My brothers escaped from Alcatraz.' " "I was listening to the radio when told about it," she remembered. She was in her 20s when she first heard the news. "I'll never believe they're dead I don't believe they're dead," Widner said as she stood in the prison's old medical ward. She is John and Clarence Anglin's little sister. It's an unfounded rumor that drew an unlikely group to the island Monday to mark half a century passed, including many of the Anglin brothers' family.
Most people assume the men have been at the bottom of the bay or were swept out to sea since the night they broke free, tunneling out of their cells in part with spoons from the kitchen and climbing the prisons' plumbing to the roof.īut the legend of their escape has held that the men, Frank Morris and John and Clarence Anglin, would return on the 50th anniversary of their breakout. history from what was billed as the nation's only "escape-proof prison" - Alcatraz. It was one of the most daring prison escapes in U.S. Fifty years ago three men set out into the frigid waters of the San Francisco Bay in a raft made out of raincoats.