every once in a while the smartest minds of the criminal world hatch ingenious plans to steal back their freedom but was Alcatraz San Francisco's notoriously inescapable prison and vulnerable to such escape attempts well one letter claiming to be from someone who successfully escaped the prison threatens to shatter this idea let's dive into the San Francisco Bay and try to get to the bottom of it Alcatraz was in operation from 1934 to 1963 during which time it was home sweet home to some of the most infamous criminals in American history its inmates included George Machine Gun
Kelly and even Al Capone himself it was designed to be a prison for America's most troublesome inmates as its armed guards towering steel was an isolated location made escapes seemingly impossible even if an inmate made it out of the building somehow they then have to find their way across the natural freezing cold moat of San Francisco Bay the bay was rumored to have currents powerful enough to drown even the strongest swimmers in seconds and that's not to mention the great white sharks with its reputation considered you can imagine that San Francisco Police Department surprised when
they received a letter in 2013 claiming to be from an Alcatraz escapee but how could someone possibly escape from Alcatraz and lived to tell the tale let's rewind in 1962 for men planned and escaped from Alcatraz the mastermind behind the plan was Frank Lee Morris a career criminal Morris was convicted of his first crime at the age of 13 before he was even old enough to buy cigarettes he'd been arrested for everything from drug possession to armed robbery but despite his troubled life Frank was highly intelligent scoring 133 on an IQ test administered in prison
unfortunately he applied his high IQ for almost solely criminal endeavors it made him a nightmare for prison wardens in the late 1950s he escaped from prison and Louisiana tried to avoid serving a 10-year sentence for bank robbery when he was recaptured in 1960 he was sent straight to Alcatraz if the cops ever jokingly told him to try getting out of this Jail they'd have to eat those words less than to you later escapees 2 & 3 were brothers and criminal partners John and Clarence Anglin from Georgia when the brothers were in their 20s they branched
out from their jobs as seasonal farmworkers and started robbing banks they were initially successful but as criminals they had their quirks the brothers claimed that the only weapon they ever used was a toy gun as they disliked the idea of physically hurting anyone during their robberies but despite the toy gun they were found with during their final robbery they received 20-year sentences after the police apprehended them they made repeated escape attempts from a facility in Atlanta before the guards grew tired of their shenanigans and sent them to Alcatraz the final piece of the puzzle Allen
West went to jail for car theft and was also sent to Alcatraz after an unsuccessful escape attempt from a Florida prison at the time of his transfer he was 28 but had only an eighth-grade education this might explain the unfortunate thing that happened to him later in this story stay tuned to find out Wes crucial mistake these four prisoners were next door cell neighbors in Alcatraz and after becoming acquainted they were soon working on an escape plan over the course of six months each of them painstakingly gradually widened the ventilation ducts in their cells this
is where the cleverness of Frank Lee Morris really flourished under his guidance they chipped away using discarded saw blades from the prison workshops spoons stolen from the mess hall and an electric drill fashioned out of a vacuum cleaner motor they hid their progress from the prying eyes of the guards by covering it up with cardboard painted to resemble the walls the noise their work created was masked by the din of the daily music our something Alcatraz staff had introduced to try and make things less grim when the holes were big enough to crawl through the
four men began slipping away every night to the vacant top level of the cellblock there they stealthily assembled life preservers and a six by 14-foot raft out of stolen raincoats hand-stitched together and sealed using heating pipes scrap wood would serve as their only way of steering against the powerful currents and frigid waters of the bay the guards never noticed that the men weren't in their beds every night thanks to the dummy heads they crafted and left on their pillows they fashioned them out of a mixture of soap toothpaste concrete dust and toilet paper they even
painted on faces and stuck on hair from the barber shop floor with everything in place their plan was to paddle across the bay to land where they would steal a car and drive off to freedom eventually the big day arrived night fell and each man wriggled his way to the roof all but one that is unfortunately for Allen West he'd used cement to keep his vent in place so the guards wouldn't noticed he'd removed it and it had hardened by the time he got it off it was too late Morris and the Anglin brothers had
no choice but to leave without him the escapees took their gear with them climbed down a vent pipe to the ground then scaled a couple of 12 foot tall barbed wire fences eventually they reached the shore near the islands power plant which was a blind spot for all the searchlights and gun towers using a concertina a sort of miniature accordion has a bellows they inflated the raft and set sail into the uncertain night though he didn't escape it's thanks to Alan that we know so much about how those three prisoners got away but did they
survive the rafts maiden voyage let's look at the evidence in 2013 51 years after Morris and the Anglin daring escape the police received a letter from someone claiming to be John Anglin the writer admitted to the escape and claimed that he was the last surviving member of the trio and that he was dying of cancer in light of his seemingly imminent demise the writer offered the cops a deal he would turn himself in if they promised to get a medical treatment in less than a year of jail time but was this extraordinary letter really from
John Anglin he would have been 83 in 2013 so it's certainly possible that he would have been alive provided he survived the trip across the bay in 1962 that is the letter was carefully examined for fingerprints and DNA and the handwriting was expertly analyzed but results were inconclusive without certainty either way the letters origins may seem dubious at first but there are convincing reasons to believe that trio made it off the island alive which may give credibility to the letter while the FBI officially concluded in 1979 at the 3:00 meant drowned after their escape in
1962 their bodies were never found and not everybody was convinced the US Marshal Service for instance officially lists the case is still open to this day when commenting on the case one us mark from a michael dyke noted that the bodies of two out of every three people who go missing in san francisco bayeu are eventually recovered seeing is none of the three escapees were ever officially found dead or otherwise this may give extra statistical backing to the claims of a successful escape on top of this a police officer on the night of the break
reported spotting in illegal boat near Alcatraz at 1:00 a.m. this aligns with the escape which likely took several hours and began at around 10:00 p.m. based on this some theorize the trio and outside help of some kind indeed a jailbreak like this would also require meticulous planning for life on the lam after the escape was completed under the guidance of the demonstrative Lee gifted escape artist Frank Morris does that really seem so impossible what did seem impossible to many at the time was the thought of escaping Alcatraz on the water the base reputation made escapes
seemed like a futile deadly waste of effort however later on in the same year as the trio's Prison Break another inmate named John Paul Scott shook up the bays reputation Scott successfully swam from Alcatraz to Fort Point below the Golden Gate Bridge he was recaptured half-dead from hypothermia but it proved that escaped across the water was in fact possible plus all Scott used were some water wings he'd made by inflating rubber gloves Morris and the Anglin brothers had a raft what's more nowadays amateur athletes swim the bay all the time just for fun the perilous
Bay idea may indeed have been more of a scare tactic myth than a real impassable obstacle but the evidence goes deeper still over the years there have been many reported sightings of the escapees at one point in the mid-60s rumors about Clarence Anglin living in Brazil were so prevalent that the FBI actually sent agents down there to try and find him in 1967 someone claiming to be a former classmate of Frank Morris told police that he'd bumped into him in Maryland and then he now sported a beard and mustache on top of that family members
of the England's have reported receiving countless unsigned postcards seemingly from their brothers over the years the England's mother even received flowers from an anonymous source every mother's day until she died in 1973 and two tall odd-looking women and heavy makeup reportedly attended her funeral when their father died two mysterious men with large beards showed up at the funeral home cried in front of the casket then left could these have been the slap - comical disguises of two masters of escape and evasion years later still in 1989 there were reports that the trio were in Florida
a woman called the unsolved mysteries tipline and said she recognized a picture of Clarence Anglin as a man living on a farm near her home another unrelated woman also reported seeing him in the same area when a third witness identified a sketch of Frank Morris and said she'd seen a man resembling him in the exact same part of Florida the evidence reached new heights but could these witnesses merely be people pranking the police or conspiracy prone individuals simply seeing what they wanted to see or could the trio really have survived their perilous raft trip and
fled to the Sunshine State the reliability of these accounts is questionable no doubt but the evidence stretches further than personal stories arguably the strongest evidence of a successful escape is the evidence of an FBI cover-up the FBI had claimed at the time of the escape and in the decades that followed did no evidence of a successful escape had ever been discovered there was they claimed no evidence of a raft making it to shore nor of any car thefts to facilitate a getaway but despite official statements in 1962 it was later revealed that evidence of a
homemade raft and paddle was found on Angel Island north of Alcatraz the day after the escape not only that but a 1955 blue Chevrolet was stolen that night shortly after the escape by no less than three men the choice to withhold this evidence until the early 2010's does seem to suggest to cover-up after all why would this information be withheld for decades if there was nothing more to the case and the men drowned like the FBI said they did and it's certainly aroused the suspicion but there's one last piece of evidence that some take is
proof of a successful escape a photograph taken in 1975 which supposedly features both Anglin brothers the photo was given to the Anglin family by an old family friend in the 90s who claimed to have encountered the brothers in the 70s the picture was recently examined by a facial recognition analyst who concluded that the minutes showed could indeed the brothers if the photo really is them then their escape was a success and with the evidence of a cover-up and countless reported sightings and contacts with the Anglin brothers is a deathbed confession letter beyond possibility well I
guess that's up to you so the big question is do you think that mysterious letter came from John Anglin or do you doubt the trio ever made it safely to land it off let me know in the comment section below and thanks for watching [Music]
