WASHINGTON – Fifty years after their
escape from U.S. Penitentiary Alcatraz on June 11, 1962, the U.S. Marshals
Service remains diligent in the manhunt for Frank Morris and brothers Clarence
and John Anglin. They are the only men to escape from Alcatraz Island in San
Francisco who remain unaccounted for.
The elaborate escape plan was the result
of more than one year of planning and included the design of a life raft and
life preservers fashioned from more than 50 raincoats, the fabrication of
lifelike dummies to ruse guards on night bed checks and enlarged ventilation
holes in their cell walls, which they used spoons to create and concealed with
cardboard replicas of vent covers.
On the night of June 11, 1962, the three
escaped through the vents and made their way to the northeast part of the
island, where they inflated the makeshift raft and three life preservers and
slipped into the water. Varied reports stated that the inmates either drowned
or made their escape via nearby Angel Island. A fourth inmate, Allen West, was
involved in planning the escape, but he never made it out of his prison cell.
The known details of the escape were provided by West during several
interviews.
The Marshals Service adopted the case
from the FBI in 1979. Since that time, countless deputy U.S. marshals have
worked the case and investigated thousands of leads in almost every state in
the country and a few foreign countries. They used media venues such as the TV
show America’s Most Wanted to generate tips and additional investigative
information. In a 1993 interview with that program, U.S. Marshals Service
Acting Director John Twomey said, “We know they were young and vigorous, that
they had the physical ability to survive and that they had a well-thought-out
scheme.”
The possibility of survival steered
investigators to unusual and detailed leads to suspected whereabouts of the
escapees. One example occurred in 2010, when an unmarked grave, claimed to be
that of an escapee, was exhumed but failed to offer positive identification.
The 1962 escape remains one of the best known unsolved crimes in American
history. “No matter where the leads take us, or how many man hours are spent on
this historic case, the Marshals Service will continue to investigate to the
fullest extent possible,” said David Harlow, assistant director, U.S. Marshals
Investigative Operations Division.
The Marshals will continue to pursue the
escapees until they are either arrested, positively determined to be deceased
or reach the age of 99. “The ongoing U.S. Marshals investigation of the 1962
escape from Alcatraz federal prison serves as a warning to fugitives that
regardless of time, we will continue to look for you and bring you to justice,”
said U.S. Marshal Don O’Keefe of the Northern District of California. If the
inmates survived the escape and are alive today, Frank Morris would be 85 years
old, Clarence Anglin would be 81 and John Anglin would be 82.
The U.S. Marshals have a long history of
successfully tracking, locating and apprehending prison escapees. In August
2011, Frederick Barrett, a convicted murderer wanted in Florida for escape, was
apprehended after 32 years on the lam. He was found hiding in a remote cabin in
the mountains of Colorado.
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About
the U.S. Marshals Service Fugitive Investigations
The U.S. Marshals Service is the federal
government’s lead agency for conducting fugitive investigations, including
escaped prisoners, as well as probation, parole, bond violators and violent
offenders. For 30 years, the Marshals Service has specialized in the
apprehension of fugitives, a mission that is carried out through a network of
fugitive task forces that span the U.S. and its territories, as well as a
growing network of offices in foreign countries.
Additional information about the U.S.
Marshals Service can be found at http://www.usmarshals.gov.
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