Over twenty-nine years of operation, thirty-six men attempted to escape Alcatraz in fourteen separate attempts. Most were recaptured within hours. Several drowned or are presumed to have drowned, their bodies never recovered from the bay. One attempt, in May 1946, escalated into what became known as the Battle of Alcatraz, a two-day standoff in which a group of inmates seized weapons from a guard tower, triggering a response that eventually involved the United States Marines and left two officers and three prisoners dead. It remains the most violent single episode in the prison’s history and a reminder that the mythology of Alcatraz as merely a quiet, cold place of confinement understates how dangerous the men held there, and the stakes of trying to leave, actually were.

None of those fourteen attempts, however, generated the lasting fascination attached to the escape of June 1962. Frank Morris arrived at Alcatraz in January 1960 after a string of convictions and earlier escape attempts at other institutions. He was, by every account including his own intake evaluation, exceptionally intelligent. Later that year he was joined by John Anglin, and in early 1961 by John’s brother Clarence, both convicted bank robbers who had known Morris from previous stints in prison together. Assigned to adjoining cells, the three men began a plan that would take the better part of a year to execute, aided for much of it by a fourth inmate, Allen West, whose own escape ultimately failed.

Working at night with tools improvised from spoons and a stolen vacuum cleaner motor, the men gradually enlarged the ventilation grilles at the back of their cells, concealing the widening gaps behind cardboard panels painted to match the concrete. Morris’s evening accordion practice is said to have covered the sound of the digging. Behind the grilles lay an unguarded utility corridor that led, eventually, to the roof. In the months before the escape, the group built two things in parallel: papier mâché heads, complete with real hair gathered from the prison barbershop, convincing enough to fool a flashlight check from a passing guard, and a raft roughly six feet by fourteen, stitched together from more than fifty stolen prison raincoats and sealed along the seams using steam pipes in the workshop, a technique Morris is thought to have adapted from a magazine article on rubber vulcanization.

On the night of June 11, 1962, Morris and the Anglin brothers placed their dummy heads in their beds, climbed through the enlarged vents, crossed the cellhouse roof, descended a drainpipe, and made their way to the water’s edge. West, delayed by cement he himself had used to disguise his own hole, never got out. By the time the bed check the next morning revealed three inmates missing, the men and their raft were gone. Pieces of makeshift life vest and a partially deflated raft later washed up on nearby Angel Island and further out in the bay. A plastic packet containing family photographs and addresses, wrapped for waterproofing, was recovered as well. No bodies were ever found.

The FBI investigated for seventeen years before formally closing its case in 1979, concluding that the men had most likely drowned in the bay’s cold water and strong currents, a conclusion the agency has never definitively overturned. Yet the case was never closed by everyone. The United States Marshals Service still treats it as an open investigation, and periodic claims, including letters purportedly from John Anglin decades later, have kept alive a version of events in which all three men made it to shore and lived out ordinary lives under other names. A 2003 television experiment using a raft built to the same specifications concluded that survival was mechanically plausible under the right conditions, though plausible is not the same as proven. No court, agency, or historian has ever resolved which is true. That is, more than any single fact about the prison, why the story endures: Alcatraz was designed around a promise that the bay would finish what its walls started, and the one time that promise was tested in a way nobody could later verify, the case simply never closed.