Escape from Alcatraz

My real name is Frank Morris, and I once was a prisoner at Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary.

This is the story of my escape with my two buddies, John and Clarence Anglin.

It was the winter of 1961, and we wanted to be anywhere but Alcatraz. They used to remind us frequently that no one had escaped from this hellhole, but that did nothing to dampen our dreams of escape.

John liked to tap on the wall to get his brother’s attention late at night when he wanted to talk. It was not easy to rest in Alcatraz. They would lay along the adjoining wall by the bars and whisper about whatever brought them peace. The guards would make their rounds then the brothers would hop back into bed.

That tapping lead to our discovery that the salty air and spray that pounded upon this monstrosity had compromised the concrete. We could tell there was a narrow corridor behind our row of cells. But where did it lead? We dug at the concrete below our sinks and widened the vent area with a simple spoon to start with, and eventually used a vacuum motor to make a drill which made quick work to weaken the walls. Billy Wallace played my accordion which drowned out our drilling noise amazingly enough.

The day we could crawl into what we found was a utility corridor, we were so excited. We were like children on Christmas morning, but this was just the beginning. We had a lot more work to do. After we had made serious progress, we would undergo periods of elation or terror daily at our work being discovered. It was a gut wrenching few weeks in May and into June of 1962.


We stole hair from the barbershop and made papier-mâché heads for our beds so the guards would think we were still in our beds while we worked inside of the corridor. We stole raincoats and made a six-by-fourteen-foot rubber raft. We hand stitched the seams and sealed them with liquid plastic. We stored the raft on the roof of our cell. Fortunately for us, no one climbed up to this area to patrol. We stored the heads and our tools in the corridor, and we created false walls to cover the holes we had made.

The hardest part by far was cutting through the rivets in the fan that lead to the roof. We managed to steal an abrasive cord from the workshop. That was the last hurdle. We just had to decide on a date. I don’t remember why we chose June 11, 1962, but it will always be a date I celebrate yearly.

It is said that we all drowned in the cold San Francisco bay waters that night, but they can think what they want.

We had to leave Allen West behind when he failed to show up at our appointed time. I heard many years later that his false wall had hardened, and he was unable to dig out timely. I felt bad that we had to leave him behind after all that work, but we had no way to know what was keeping him that night.

The brothers planned to go to Brazil. I never heard from them after we split up in San Francisco that fateful night. I eventually made it down to Belize and lived as a simple fisherman. I married and had two sons. They are also fishermen. I am nearly ninety-seven years old now. I wanted my story to be told at least to my family. If they choose to publicize my letter after my death, so be it.

We will always be the three that escaped from Alcatraz.

Frank Morris
Belize
2023

Prompt ▼

Use the following in your story: undergo, weaken, tap, name, and narrow.

Credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_1962_Alcatraz_escape_attempt#Frank_Morris
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcatraz_Federal_Penitentiary

Word count: 623