The 1962 Alcatraz escape: did the three men make it?

What happened

Alcatraz, on an island in San Francisco Bay, was a maximum-security federal prison from 1934 until 1963. In that time, the FBI says, 36 men tried 14 separate escapes, and nearly all were caught or did not survive the attempt. The fate of the three men in the Alcatraz escape of 1962, it adds, remains a mystery.

Frank Morris arrived in January 1960 after convictions for bank robbery, burglary and other crimes and repeated attempts to escape from other prisons. John Anglin followed later that year and his brother Clarence early in 1961; all three knew each other from earlier prison terms. Assigned to adjoining cells, they began planning with another inmate, Allen West, with Morris taking the lead.

The plotting began in December 1961. Using crude tools, including a drill made from the motor of a broken vacuum cleaner, each man drilled around the air vent at the back of his cell until the section could be removed. Behind the cells ran an unguarded utility corridor, and on top of the cell block they set up a secret workshop. There they turned more than 50 raincoats into life preservers and a 6-by-14-foot rubber raft, built wooden paddles, and converted a musical instrument into a tool for inflating the raft. In their beds they left dummy heads made of plaster, flesh-tone paint and real human hair.

On the evening of 11 June 1962 they went. West had not finished removing his vent grille and was left behind. The other three climbed out through a ventilator onto the roof, shimmied down the bakery smokestack, climbed a fence and launched the raft from the island's northeast shore. The dummy heads apparently fooled the night guards until the early-morning bed check on 12 June.

What investigators found

The FBI was notified immediately, interviewed the men's relatives and asked boat operators on the bay to watch for debris. Within two days a packet of letters sealed in rubber and related to the men was recovered. Paddle-like pieces of wood and bits of rubber inner tube turned up in the water, a homemade life vest washed up on Cronkhite Beach, and a paddle similar to one found at the prison was recovered on Angel Island. Extensive searches turned up nothing else.

West, still in his cell, began to talk. The plan, the FBI learned, was to reach Angel Island, cross Raccoon Strait to Marin County, and steal clothes and a car once on land.

The FBI concluded the men had not made it, for four reasons. The currents were strong and the water frigid. No theft of clothes or a car like the one planned was ever uncovered, despite the publicity. Outside help could not be substantiated, and the families appeared unlikely to have had the means to provide real support. And in the 17 years the FBI worked the case, no credible evidence emerged that the men were alive, in the United States or overseas.

The main theories

The official view is that they drowned. As Inside Science summarised it in 2014, the FBI stated that the prisoners probably drowned but might have reached Angel Island. The men were never found.

A second theory is that the tide carried them to land. In 2014 researchers from Delft University of Technology and Deltares presented a model of the bay's currents to the American Geophysical Union's annual meeting. At about 10 p.m., the long-assumed time of departure, the outgoing tide would have pushed the raft west toward the Golden Gate Bridge rather than north toward Angel Island. A launch at about 11:30 p.m. would have landed the men near the bridge, and would also fit debris washing up on Angel Island later. The model shows that survival was possible, not that it happened.

A third is that they survived and hid. The Anglin family has pointed to a photograph said to show the brothers alive in Brazil in 1975, taken by a childhood friend; an analyst hired by the family vouched for it, but the FBI did not.

In 2013 the San Francisco Police Department's Richmond station received a letter from someone writing as John Anglin. It claimed all three had made it that night, only just; that Morris had died in 2008 and Clarence in 2011; and it offered the writer's whereabouts in return for a promise of no more than a year in jail and medical attention. FBI tests for fingerprints and DNA, and a handwriting comparison, were inconclusive. When the letter became public in January 2018, the Marshals Service told KPIX 5 that it considered the lead closed, with no merit.

As for suspects in the 1962 Alcatraz escape, the FBI's account involves only four men: the three who got out, and West, who never left his cell. Morris had been sentenced in 1956 to 14 years for a bank burglary in Slidell, Louisiana, and the Anglin brothers in 1958 for an armed bank robbery in Columbia, Alabama.

Where the case stands

Is the Alcatraz escape of 1962 solved? No. The FBI officially closed its case on 31 December 1979 and turned responsibility over to the U.S. Marshals Service, which, in the FBI's words, continues to investigate in the unlikely event the trio is still alive.

In September 2026 the Marshals Service website still lists Frank Lee Morris, John William Anglin and Clarence Anglin as wanted for escape, on warrants from the Northern District of California dated 11 June 1962. Their listed dates of birth, 1 September 1926, 2 May 1930 and 11 May 1931, would make Morris 100 and the brothers 96 and 95. In June 2022 the Marshals released updated renderings of how the three might look in old age. Online accounts often say the Marshals have set a date to stop looking; none of the FBI or Marshals Service material cited here gives one.

What is still missing

So what happened in the 1962 Alcatraz escape? Explained as briefly as the evidence allows: three prisoners got out of their cells, onto the roof and into the bay on a raft they had built, and nobody has been able to show what became of them.

The missing pieces are what would settle it: a body, a sighting that can be verified, a letter or photograph that survives testing, or a reliable departure time, which the tide model suggests would have decided where the raft was carried. Until one appears, the record supports only this: the men reached the water, and no credible evidence has shown them alive since. Real or Legend files this as unsolved.

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