Frank Morris

The June 1962 Alcatraz escape was a prison break from Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, a maximum-security facility located on an island in San Francisco Bay, undertaken by inmates Frank Morris and John and Clarence Anglin. The three men were able to escape from their cells and leave the island in a makeshift raft. It remains unknown what happened to them after entering San Francisco Bay.Morris and the Anglins attempted to escape on the night of June 11, 1962. They availed themselves of the unguarded three-foot (0.9 m) wide utility corridor of B-Block which ran behind their cells and reached above to all floors of the prison complex with pipes for them to climb. To gain access to the corridor, the prisoners meticulously chiselled out a vent at the back of their cells using makeshift tools such as a spoon soldered with the silver from a dime and a drill improvised from the motor of a purloined vacuum cleaner. Alcatraz's music hour, a recently-implemented loosening of the stringent rules, came as a boon to the three conspirators: dozens of men simultaneously playing the accordion and other instruments made a cacophony that resounded through the cement-walled cellblock and served to disguise their drilling. Their progress was concealed by false walls which, in the dark recesses of the cells, fooled the guards. After they were finally able to pass through the vents, at an appointed time each night, they climbed to the top of the cellblock to prepare their egress from the prison. Their absence would have been noticed by the guards who made hourly rounds, had it not been for the lifelike dummy heads that the inmates left on their cots; repurposing soap, concrete powder, and even hair pilfered from the barbershop, they had fashioned remarkable decoy dummy heads resembling themselves. These succeeded in fooling the guards. Since they intended to get to the roof via a fan vent, they first removed the blades and its motor, leaving only a grille; afterwards, with a carborundum ab