June 11, 1962. Alcatraz Federal Penitent...

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June 11, 1962. Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary in San Francisco Bay. Three men place papier-mache dummy heads into their cell cots. They slip quietly into an unguarded utility corridor. The men were Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin. All three were convicted bank robbers serving long sentences inside America's most secure maximum security prison.

For six months, they had quietly plotted what prison authorities considered impossible. The trio occupied adjoining cells in B Block. Behind their cell walls ran a narrow utility space filled with heat and water pipes. Each night during the evening music hour, the men worked behind the cover of loud accordion noise.

They used sharpened spoons and a crude drill made from a stolen vacuum cleaner motor to chip away at the concrete around their air vents. They concealed their progress with fake cardboard grates painted to match the cell walls. The convicts worked in total secrecy night after night.

Above the cellblock ceiling lay an unwatched roof workspace. In this hidden attic, the prisoners built a secret shop to assemble their escape gear. They used a secret workspace on top of the cellblock to store their growing collection of materials. They gathered more than fifty rubberized raincoats stolen from the prison shop over several months.

They fused the seams using heat from exposed steam pipes to create watertight rubber seals. From this fabric, they constructed a six by fourteen foot inflatable raft and custom life preservers. They modified a small accordion concertina to function as an air pump.

To deceive guards during night headcounts, they crafted realistic dummy heads for their cots. The heads were built from soap, concrete powder, toilet paper, and stolen paint. Real hair from the barbershop floor was glued onto the fake scalps.

On the night of June 11, the escape plan was put into motion. Inmate Allen West could not free his ventilation grill in time and was left behind. Morris and the Anglin brothers slipped out of their cells into the dark utility corridor.

They climbed thirty feet of plumbing pipes to reach the roof ventilation shaft above. The trio forced open the roof hatch and moved across the building under cover of darkness. They moved silently past the sleeping cellblock without alerting a single guard. Carrying their folded raft, the three men slid down a fifty foot exterior drainpipe.

They climbed over two twelve foot perimeter fences topped with razor wire. Reaching the shore of San Francisco Bay, they unpacked their gear. They used their modified accordion bellows to inflate the rubber raft.

Sometime after ten o'clock, the men launched into the cold water. At seven fifteen the next morning, correctional officers began routine morning wake up calls. Officer William Long approached a cell and tapped the prisoner's shoulder through the bars. The painted dummy head detached from the bedding and rolled across the concrete floor.

Sirens echoed across the island as emergency lock down procedures were initiated. Federal agents, Coast Guard cutters, and military aircraft launched a massive search across San Francisco Bay. Military helicopters equipped with searchlights scanned the choppy dark waters. Searchers combed Alcatraz Island without finding any trace of the escapees.

Three days later, search crews discovered a waterproof packet in the water containing personal photos belonging to the Anglins. A homemade wooden paddle and torn raincoat material were recovered floating near Angel Island. Weeks later, a Norwegian freighter reported seeing a body floating twenty miles outside the Golden Gate Bridge, but could not retrieve it. No human remains were ever identified. In December 1979, after seventeen years of investigation, the Federal Bureau of Investigation officially closed its case. Analysts concluded that the three fugitives most likely drowned in the turbulent, fifty degree bay currents.

Jurisdiction was transferred to the United States Marshals Service, which maintains active arrest warrants for all three men. Over the decades, tantalizing new evidence continued to challenge the official drowning theory. Advanced computer hydraulic models developed in 2014 demonstrated that a launch around midnight aligned with tidal movements that could have carried the raft to shore near the Golden Gate Bridge. In 2015, the Anglin family revealed a 1975 photograph of two men in Brazil, which facial recognition experts matched to the Anglin brothers. In 2013, a handwritten letter delivered to San Francisco police claimed Morris died in 2005 and Clarence Anglin in 2011. Federal authorities conducted handwriting analysis, but results proved inconclusive.

The ultimate fate of the three men remains one of America's most enduring mysteries. They had the raincoat raft. They never had the men.