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00:01The first maximum security prison of its time, a towering fortress of US justice.
00:07If you break the law, you go to prison. If you break the rules in prison, you go to Alcatraz.
00:14Known simply as The Rock, it housed America's most notorious criminals.
00:20This was the most scary place you could possibly go.
00:23And was said to be inescapable.
00:25But then, in 1962, three men went further than was thought possible, plotting their way out of Alcatraz.
00:39Finally, these men broke The Rock.
00:41And vanishing into the San Francisco night.
00:44They escaped from Alcatraz and they entered American mythology.
00:5511th of June 1962, 9.37pm.
01:02After 15 months of planning, inmates Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin crawled through small holes carefully carved at the back of their cells.
01:14Climbing up through the narrow ventilation shaft, they emerged onto the roof of Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary.
01:23America's escape-proof prison.
01:28They were carrying a homemade raft, crafted out of stolen prison raincoats.
01:33Back in their bunks, dummy heads had been left to fool the guards and buy them time.
01:38In front of them, just beyond the dark and treacherous waters of San Francisco Bay, lay freedom.
01:45More than 50 years since the escape, this fortress in San Francisco Bay remains an enduring legacy of American justice.
02:03Called Impenetrable, it was home to the toughest, most incorrigible criminals of its time.
02:12The Rock was designed as the last stop for the worst of America's inmates.
02:18There was prison, and then there was Alcatraz.
02:22If you break the law, you go to prison.
02:29If you break the rules in prison, you go to Alcatraz.
02:34Cold and isolated from the moment it opened in 1934, the misery of life on the rock became legendary.
02:45It was a ghostly, dark, creepy place that was wet and damp, and the fog encased it.
02:56The public called the 22 acres of quartz and sandstone Devil's Island.
03:02The inmates called it Alcatraz.
03:09Never before, and never since, has there been a place like it.
03:14Roughly 80,000 square feet of concrete and escape-proof steel.
03:19Alcatraz had four independent cell blocks, and 336 active units.
03:26Each cell under the constant watch of patrolling eyes.
03:32The ratio of officers to inmates was higher than any other place in the federal penitentiary.
03:37Most prisons have about a 20 to 1 ratio.
03:40Alcatraz was 3 to 1.
03:46This was the reality of life on the rock.
03:49One historian said that Alcatraz was perfect because you could bury man alive in plain view in the middle of San Francisco.
03:58Being condemned to the rock cracked even the most hardened criminals.
04:02Almost 1,500 inmates did time during its tenure as America's ultimate prison.
04:10The purpose of Alcatraz was not to rehabilitate anyone, but to punish them.
04:16And once there, the realities of life for these men was pure agony.
04:26They cut themselves, and they killed themselves in some cases.
04:30There were five suicides on Alcatraz.
04:32There was another inmate that took an axe and chopped off his own fingers.
04:37This was the most scary place you could possibly go.
04:40Alcatraz could also be dangerous for those who worked there.
04:47George DeVincenzi was a guard for seven years.
04:51First day in the job, 9 o'clock Monday morning, they put me in the barber shop with nine inmates.
04:57And the inmate barber proceeded to cut his first customer's hair.
05:02Next thing I know, the customer getting his hair cut jumped out of the chair.
05:08And the barber went after him with a pair of seven-inch barbershires.
05:13Got him in the throat, in the heart, in the lung, and I ended up on the top of both of them as he kept stabbing him with the shears.
05:20That was my introduction of Alcatraz, my first day, my first assignment, my first hour.
05:31As America's first supermax prison, Alcatraz operated under conditions of strict secrecy.
05:38With limited visitation rights and extreme censorship of all incoming and outgoing mail.
05:44The rock was soon bathed in mystery, developing a gritty mystique perpetuated by prison officials.
05:54They wanted the inmates and the gangsters and the public to believe that Alcatraz was going to be the most horrible prison that you could possibly imagine ever going to.
06:06And that helped create the fascination that American people have with the island.
06:14The treacherous waters of San Francisco Bay only enhanced the reputation of this prison.
06:23Currents go around the island.
06:26Unless you're a really well-trained swimmer, swimming to the mainland is almost impossible.
06:30With a fairly constant hypothermia-inducing water temperature, dangerous currents, and the widely believed rumor of great white sharks, San Francisco, less than a mile and a half from the rock, was a world away.
06:47The true torture of Alcatraz was that as you would sit there in this cold, dark, damp cell, you could hear the traffic in San Francisco and the fog would suddenly part and you could see this beautiful city on the hill shining in the water.
07:06And all you were left with in this cell was the fact that you could not live this life.
07:17Prior to 1962, there had been 12 escape attempts from Alcatraz.
07:23All 12 failed.
07:24The rock was seemingly inescapable.
07:29But in 1961, a group of four criminals, Frank Morris, brothers John and Clarence Anglin, and Alan West, hatched an ingenious escape plan that took them more than a year to execute.
07:42Their plan was different from all those that had come before.
07:46A plan that might actually break the rock.
07:55December 1961.
07:58Prisoners Frank Morris, John Anglin, Clarence Anglin, and Alan West devised a plan to escape from the inescapable Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary.
08:10The men got a tip from Clarence Carnes, a fellow prisoner who'd been on the rock for 18 years.
08:15He mentioned a secret passage to the roof by means of a ventilation shaft that ran behind the cell block walls.
08:24On the back wall of each cell was a tiny 6 by 10 inch grate that opened into the ventilation shaft.
08:32The hole was much too small for a grown man to fit through.
08:36But after close inspection, they found that years of exposure to the salty sea air had taken its toll on the concrete walls.
08:47And with the right tools, you could chip away at it.
08:51Clarence Anglin was first to break through.
08:54He made a tool from the simplest of items.
08:58Something readily available to every inmate, every day, at every meal.
09:04A spoon.
09:06The escape had begun.
09:08Alcatraz was conceived as America was in the throes of a huge crime wave.
09:22Prohibition and the Great Depression had spurred on unprecedented criminal activity.
09:30Lawlessness was at an all-time high.
09:33America's murder rate had risen 1,000% in three decades.
09:40And the U.S. government found itself paralyzed, not just by the scope of the crimes, but by the criminals themselves.
09:48Gangsters like Machine Gun Kelly, Al Capone, Alvin Karpus, some of America's most public enemies, they were basically dominating the headlines.
09:57Celebrated in movies and print, these villains became anti-heroes.
10:06The criminals we have now, bad as they might be, are nothing like the 1930s criminals.
10:12These guys were celebrities.
10:14This desperate public enemy now rises to fame as an underworld hero.
10:19America's fascination with criminals undermined their law enforcement.
10:23J. Edgar Hoover, director of the newly created Bureau of Investigation, soon to be called the FBI, struggled to gain control.
10:34Law enforcement had no way to control the crime wave and the surge that was happening during that time period.
10:40Worse, if one of these public enemies was actually convicted, there was practically no penalty, with prison escapes at an all-time high.
10:51In Texas, Clyde Barrow escaped from prison with a gun smuggled into him by his partner, Bonnie Parker.
10:57While John Dillinger broke out of an Illinois prison using a fake pistol he'd carved out of wood.
11:04But even for those who couldn't escape, life inside was hardly a deterrent.
11:09Whenever a gangster in the early 30s was sent to a federal prison, often it was a cakewalk for these guys.
11:19They had control over the officers, probably even the warden in a lot of circumstances.
11:24They would sit in a cell, they would eat some steak, and then they would go home.
11:28The situation demanded action, and Hoover took an aggressive stance.
11:38He needed something that was going to frighten them, something that was going to be the worst place they could possibly imagine spending their days.
11:48J. Edgar Hoover, the Bureau of Prisons, they brought in some of their foremost security experts, and they designed kind of a dream prison.
11:55Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay was the perfect spot for a revolutionary supermax penitentiary.
12:04It had been a military prison during the Civil War, so had a pre-existing infrastructure.
12:11But built in 1847, it needed an upgrade, so a new cell block was constructed featuring state-of-the-art steel and keyless locks.
12:21By the time it was complete, Alcatraz had been transformed into one of the largest concrete structures in the world.
12:29Alcatraz, America's Devil's Island, comes as Uncle Sam's answer to the underworld.
12:35Its doors open to Al Capone and 40 others as the nation's worst criminals.
12:38Alcatraz was quickly championed in the press as brutal, inescapable, and unlike any other prison.
12:46Hoover finally had a public weapon in his battle against crime.
12:51It truly was this powerful symbol of how they were going to punish these men in the headlines.
13:02Prisoners shipped to Alcatraz were stripped of their celebrity and their identity.
13:09The worst criminals simply became a number.
13:1685
13:19117
13:22594
13:251518
13:271355
13:33Robert Scheibline arrived on Alcatraz in 1958, after being implicated in an uprising at Leavenworth Prison.
13:42The government was trying to send a strong message to the prisoners that Alcatraz is waiting for them if they screw up.
13:49And if they do, they are sent to Alcatraz and then there's no privileges. You have nothing there.
13:53It became so effective that even the most legendary of inmates succumbed to its harsh conditions.
14:04After four and a half years on this cold, wet rock, even Al Capone, having been stabbed by a fellow inmate and isolated, admitted to warden James Johnson, Alcatraz has got me licked.
14:17But for four criminals, the option of living life as a meaningless number was not for them.
14:27Armed with tools made from spoons, they chipped away at the vents at the back of their cells.
14:33Avoiding the watchful eyes of prison guards was a daily challenge in their long journey to freedom.
14:39Winter 1962. Four prisoners at Alcatraz, Frank Morris, brothers John and Clarence Anglin and Alan West, were attempting to do what no one had done before, successfully escape from the rock.
15:00They had discovered a route out of the prison, through a grate in their cell walls, but they needed tools to cut through.
15:11They secured a metal stake from a fellow prisoner and used the soles of their shoes to hammer holes into the eight-inch thick concrete walls.
15:18Using cafeteria spoons, they turned into chisels. They widened the holes, getting closer to the corridor behind their cells.
15:30But the tools only got them so far, they soon discovered that a steel frame encircled each vent.
15:36With the help of Clarence Carnes, the most connected man on the rock, they procured hacksaw blades left over from a failed escape attempt that had not been found by guards, then spent the next nine months hacking away.
15:50The task was slow, and risky, and quite simply, loud.
15:57But they found a solution in one of the privileges afforded Alcatraz inmates in the reform-minded 1960s.
16:03The so-called Music Hour.
16:07For 60 magical minutes each day, prisoners were free to play instruments, a cacophony of music filling the prison block.
16:16And drowning out the sound of four men crafting their escape.
16:20In its 29 years, Alcatraz housed just over 1,500 prisoners.
16:35And for every one of the inmates, the path to the rock was identical.
16:41Shackled in chains, they boarded a prison boat in San Francisco.
16:4515 minutes later, their lives changed forever.
16:48My first day in Alcatraz, I thought, what have I gotten myself into now?
17:01The cell is nine feet long and only five foot wide.
17:05If you don't have a job, you're in your cell 23 hours a day.
17:09All it is is a small bunk, a metal table bolted to the wall, a toilet, and a sink.
17:16I feel like a rat in a trap.
17:18Outside the cells, machine gun-toting guards kept watch over the cell block.
17:26Electromagnetic metal detectors were positioned throughout the prison.
17:30And remote-controlled tear gas canisters were in the mess hall.
17:33If you look at all the different layers in security, no cell would actually touch an exterior wall.
17:41They had multiple gun towers throughout.
17:43They had armed officers inside that would be completely separated from the inmate population.
17:48Every time a prisoner was out of the prison building in any of the work areas,
17:53there were always at least two barbed wire fences between them and the water.
17:56From the morning whistle at 6.30 a.m. to the final lights out at 9.30 p.m.,
18:04inmates faced a rigid regime of 13 head counts, six prisoner verifications, and three 20-minute meals.
18:13To prevent escape, the prisoners were prohibited from gathering in small groups,
18:19even during rest breaks or dining, and a strict hush on the cell block was upheld.
18:24In the early years they had something called the silence rule,
18:28and essentially you were not allowed to talk with men in adjacent cells.
18:34Adherence to the rules was the foundation of life on the rock.
18:38Disobeying meant a transfer to dreaded D-block,
18:43where men were locked up in cells simply known as the hole.
18:48If an inmate struck an officer and abused an officer,
18:54we'd strip them down, throw them in a hole,
18:57anywhere from four or five days to 19 days.
19:00Some people commit a suicide in there. Some people went crazy in there.
19:08And yet, right alongside these harsh conditions, ran the lives of the officers who ran the prison.
19:23Moving men to and from San Francisco was expensive, so most prison staff and their families made their home on the rock.
19:35Just yards away from some of the worst criminals in America.
19:40At any given time, there were roughly 300 civilians living on Alcatraz, including women and children,
19:50with families enjoying a bowling alley, a shop and cafe.
19:54We were perfectly safe there. You know, we had 60 sets of parents, tower guards.
20:01I mean, it was the ultimate in gated communities.
20:04Jolene Babiak is the daughter of Arthur Doyson, the last associate warden on Alcatraz.
20:10She lived on the rock as a child and had been told by her father to abide by a very simple rule.
20:17We were not allowed to talk to a prisoner. I saw them from a distance usually.
20:21I had one moment when I was about eight when a prisoner handed me a ball through the fence with the permission of a guard that was standing right there.
20:30And my dilemma was whether I should actually say thank you to him or not.
20:38Despite all the security measures, inmates still tried to break the rock.
20:43On 14 different occasions, prisoners attempted to escape.
20:50These men were prepared to risk everything for a shot at freedom.
20:55Spring 1962. Frank Morris, brothers John and Clarence Anglin and Alan West were determined to escape from Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary.
21:12Their initial plan was not to swim, but to float away from the rock in a man-made raft and paddle towards freedom.
21:22But as the inmates began to build this raft, an obvious problem presented itself.
21:29Where to hide it?
21:30Assigned to paint detail on the top of B Block, Alan West convinced the guards that he needed to hang blankets to prevent paint and dust from dripping down below.
21:43The guards approved, and West hung blankets creating a concealed workspace.
21:47For six weeks, this was their escape base, home to an assortment of items they'd used to make their break.
22:04Opened in 1934, Alcatraz Prison was said to be escape proof.
22:09I've had inmates tell me that, you know, day in and day out, they were obsessed with thinking of schemes and plots on how to get off the rock.
22:19That's all they thought about.
22:231936.
22:26Prisoner Joe Bowers, on an outside work detail, made it all the way to a perimeter fence at the island's edge.
22:34But was shot dead by a tower guard.
22:36If you're locked up in there for years and you have nothing else to do, you write poetry, you play the guitar, or you figure out a way to get out of there.
22:471938.
22:49Three men planned to seize a boat and pilot it to shore.
22:53Using a hammer, they assaulted a guard, killing him in the process, before making their way to the rooftop, where they were spotted by guards.
23:01Two were shot, one killed.
23:041943.
23:07Four men made a desperate escape attempt, overpowering two guards with metal shanks.
23:14They leapt out of a window and scaled a cliff down to the water, but were discovered missing, and an alarm sounded.
23:21Gunfire rained down on them at the edge of the water, killing one man.
23:27It made it even more bulletproof.
23:28You hear how many failed escapes and how they were caught, and you just read into it and it's like, it probably is escape proof.
23:39While the repeated failed attempts may have kept some inmates from trying to escape, for others, it simply meant more desperate measures.
23:52In 1946, six men made the most daring attempt ever, in an event known as the Battle of Alcatraz.
24:01It's the only escape attempt where an inmate was successful in gaining actual firearms.
24:09One inmate made his way into a gun gallery, overthrowing an unsuspecting guard.
24:14The others took several guards hostage.
24:17Guards came in and tried to overpower them and take over.
24:22So they said, well, okay, now it's a war.
24:25So they said, well, if we're going to, if we're going to die, we're going to kill the guards first.
24:29The military landed. You had Marines basically on the west side of the island.
24:35It was a very brutal battle. It went on for three days.
24:40The Battle of Alcatraz was the bloodiest escape attempt in the Rock's history.
24:45Five men lost their lives, three inmates and two guards.
24:50Alcatraz lived up to its legend.
24:53Nobody has yet escaped from Alcatraz alive.
24:59Over the next 12 years, there were only two more escape attempts. Both failed.
25:08This unforgiving fortress in the middle of San Francisco Bay seemed to finally have broken the spirit of the men inside.
25:16Ironically, the island's location contributed to its undoing.
25:2128 years after opening its doors in San Francisco Bay, Alcatraz Penitentiary began to kneel before the elements.
25:31Yeah, well, the impenetrable fortress left a lot to be desired.
25:38The concrete was old.
25:41Alcatraz main cell block is exposed to fog and wind and moisture.
25:47It attacks the rebar in the concrete and it tends to crumble.
25:51And so Alcatraz was generally crumbling away by the 1960s.
25:57So a lot of Alcatraz's mythology was based on, I won't say myth, but shall we say an over-inflated reputation.
26:05May 1962, after 14 months of plotting, stealing and digging, Frank Morris, brothers John and Clarence Anglin and Alan West had made significant progress.
26:22They had carved holes in their cells big enough to crawl through, found the tunnel to the roof and spent their evenings gluing together stolen raincoats to make a raft.
26:34Their final challenge, almost complete, their chance at freedom was just days away.
26:40By the early 1960s, conditions within Alcatraz prison, coupled with changing social values, may unwittingly have helped the Rock's first successful escape attempt.
26:59The US was in the midst of massive cultural upheaval, and the public's appetite for cruel institutions like the infamous Rock had waned.
27:08By 1962, Alcatraz had become the spirit of a different era. By then, you know, the security measures had really gotten laxed.
27:18Among the changes, fewer guards patrolled the island, and prison rules and regulations were relaxed.
27:26Inmates were able to move around more freely, and the legendary law of silence was lifted.
27:32After almost three decades, the Rock was changing.
27:37Something else that had entered in was the fact that because no one had ever successfully escaped, the staff kind of tended to believe too that, especially once the prisoners were locked in those cells, that was it.
27:48That was it.
27:53For Frank Morris, brothers John and Clarence Anglin, and Alan West, changing prison conditions created more opportunity.
28:00They spent a year planning what is, in fact, one of the most intricate and complex and incredible escapes from prison in US history.
28:13They each had different skills. Alan West knew about the facility.
28:18Frank Morris had the native intelligence. The Anglin brothers did a lot of the work.
28:22That's why that escape attempt was so magnificent.
28:24But it was a change in prison protocol that gave them their greatest edge.
28:33For almost 28 years, the dining room had ten man dining tables.
28:39In 1961, they threw those ten man dining tables away, and they brought in four man dining tables.
28:45Every day, three times a day, Alan West, Frank Morris, and the Anglin brothers could sit together without six other people knowing what they were saying.
28:57And this was an advantage nobody ever had ever before in Alcatraz history.
29:06Free to discuss the escape plans, the men chipped away at the walls of their cells with their spoons.
29:11And working in pairs in adjacent cells.
29:16A close eye could be kept on the guards while making those holes.
29:22One man would dig, the other one would watch.
29:26So there was always a pair of men working together to make sure that no one saw what they were doing.
29:31It took them months and months and months of digging until they created a space big enough for them to slip through.
29:39The trick, of course, was how do you make sure that you're not detected while you're out of your cell?
29:46How do you make sure the guard staff doesn't find the hole in the back of your cell?
29:50They would, one at a time, tackle those problems and overcome them.
29:53To conceal their work, the men created facades using cardboard they'd made out of magazine pages soaked in water.
30:04Creating fake vent covers to replace the ones they'd removed.
30:09But the holes only got them out of their cells, not out of the prison.
30:13There's, it's called a utility corridor, behind the cell blocks where all the pipes are running.
30:18And it leads to the ceiling.
30:20And there's an air vent in the ceiling, had some bars across it.
30:23If you could get out of your cell, figure out how to get those bars out of the air vent,
30:28it was a clean shot across the roof and down to the water.
30:30Getting past the bars blocking the air vent would take time,
30:36requiring the men to be out of their cells for long periods.
30:40To trick the guards into believing they were still in their bunks,
30:44they made paper mache heads from a combination of homemade cement, bed sheets, soap and toilet paper.
30:50They even acquired flesh tone paint from the prison's art kits.
30:57And human hair was collected by Clarence from his job at the Alcatraz Barbershop.
31:05So what they would do is they would actually take turns putting their dummy head in
31:09and then, you know, going to the top of the cell block and working up there.
31:14With the holes covered, their bunks filled and the pathway up to the roof decided,
31:19the men focused on the most critical part of the operation,
31:23the raft, to get them off the island.
31:27They basically stole. They swiped.
31:30They had at least 50 rubberized raincoats that they used,
31:34and they were cutting them up and turning them into life preservers.
31:37They figured out a way to make glue by reading Popular Mechanics magazine
31:41and using the steam from the pipes to seal the glue,
31:44to create a watertight seal around a raft.
31:46It was so meticulous.
31:51No matter how well they prepared, there was one thing out of their control.
31:56The treacherous tides of the bay.
31:59Incredibly, they had a plan for that, too.
32:02Inmate Robert Scheiblein had a job working on the boat docks and was more than willing to help.
32:13Any con would help another con in Alcatraz in an escape attempt.
32:19The only thing I added to their escape plan was to offer them the tide table.
32:25They always used to publish the tide charts in the newspaper,
32:30and he actually was able to snag the tide charts and deliver them to the Anglins.
32:34Cheiblein's information was crucial.
32:38Leaving the rock at the wrong time could send a makeshift raft into the abyss of the Pacific Ocean.
32:45But if they timed it correctly, the tides could transport them to nearby Angel Island or the shores of Marin County.
32:5211th of June 1962, 15 months of planning finally came to fruition.
33:08Right at 9.30 it lights out.
33:11They left their cells at 9.37, so literally seven minutes after the lights went out,
33:15these guys went up onto the roof and then started working.
33:17With the dummies lying in their bunks, the Anglins and Frank Morris crawled out of the grates in their cells
33:24and made their way to the base of the ventilator shaft.
33:27But one of the inmates, Alan West, ran into a problem.
33:31He launched the escape, he got it going, but he couldn't get out of his cell.
33:37Unlike the others, West had waited until the night of the escape to make his final push through his hole.
33:43Apparently he couldn't break through, or so he claimed.
33:48The other men went on without him.
33:51They climbed through the ventilator shaft, used a crowbar to get through the steel bars,
33:57and with all their might, pushed off the vent cover to gain access to the roof.
34:01The noise from the steel cover hitting the rooftop pierced the prison's silence, reverberating so loudly around the cell block,
34:14that it immediately drew the attention of everyone, including the guards on duty.
34:18All the inmates heard it, and then all of a sudden there was a ruckus around the cell house of all the inmates yelling and clamoring,
34:26just to help kind of cover it up.
34:29Meanwhile, the men made it across the rooftop, undetected,
34:32and scaled a pipe down the side of the prison block, leaving their mark in footprints at the base.
34:43From there they traversed two barbed wire fences, made their way down to the rocky edge of San Francisco Bay,
34:51and inflated their raft.
34:52For months, Frank Morris had been playing an accordion-like instrument called a concertina.
35:00He realized that if he removed a few reeds, it could serve as a pump, and inflate the makeshift raft.
35:11Then they got in their raft, and they set off rowing.
35:16Or maybe not.
35:18It's still debated how the men made their way through the water, and if they survived.
35:24But no bodies were ever found.
35:27There's no debating, however, what happened the next morning.
35:31All hell broke loose at Alcatraz.
35:36At seven o'clock in the morning, the bell rings, which is, get up, for a head count.
35:40When he got to Morris' cell, he didn't stand up, so he said, Morris, get up.
35:44And he said, OK, Morris, get up.
35:47So he reached in his arm to grab his head and shake it.
35:50And when he did, the head rolled off over the floor.
35:53The officers obviously were in shock over it.
35:56But the inmate population thought, you know, finally, these men broke the rock.
36:00And at that moment, the whole cell house erupted in cheers.
36:07It was a moment of freedom for all of them.
36:09On the 11th of June 1962, three men achieved the impossible.
36:20Frank Morris, along with brothers John and Clarence Anglin, escaped from Alcatraz, vanishing into the San Francisco night.
36:29The spoon proves funnier than the bars and supposedly escape-proofed Alcatraz prison.
36:39Three bank robbers, serving long terms, scratched their way through grills covering an air vent,
36:44climbed a drainage pipe, and disappeared from the forbidding rock in San Francisco Bay.
36:48The 1962 escape is an iconic point in American history.
36:55I mean, it truly is one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the 20th century.
36:59The entire country was riveted to what happened to these three inmates who had done what had seemed to be impossible,
37:07escaping an escape-proof prison.
37:08There's two reasons why people obsessed over the Anglin brothers and Frank Morris.
37:15One is the fear that they got away and might come and get you.
37:18And the other one is you're kind of rooting for them.
37:23The escape and the ensuing futile manhunt tormented the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons, and the officers of Alcatraz.
37:31You can't have dummy heads sleeping in a bed for a couple of months and have an escape detection.
37:38You can't have someone dig a hole in the back of their cell wall big enough to crawl through.
37:42That's not how prisoners are supposed to operate.
37:47The pressing question became, if Alcatraz was no longer escape-proof, was it worth keeping open?
37:55The Bureau of Prisons answered the question less than a year later.
37:58On the 23rd of March 1963, the Rock's time as the pinnacle of American justice came to an end.
38:08It doesn't seem possible that they've closed it down.
38:12These are the last 27 convicts to be removed to mainland prisons.
38:16Farewell, Alcatraz.
38:17But while the fate of Alcatraz was settled in 1963, the mystery surrounding the 1962 escape continues.
38:32Since that fateful night, there have been countless tips and leads, fueling speculation on what became of the men.
38:38The crew of a Norwegian freighter claimed to have seen a body in denim floating in the bay just days after the escape.
38:49A San Francisco lawyer said she received a call from a man named John Anglin.
38:54And in 2002, the U.S. Marshals received an anonymous tip that the three escapees had made their way to Canada, but were double-crossed by their handlers and murdered.
39:07In 2014, the study by a Dutch scientist revealed a new theory in this half-century-old cold case.
39:21The Dutch scientist who did a study stated that if these guys would have left between the times of 11.30 and midnight,
39:28the tide conditions actually would have taken them up towards the base of the Golden Gate Bridge.
39:31And from there, quite possibly, to freedom.
39:37For the U.S. Marshals Service, who took over the investigation from the FBI in 1979,
39:44the idea that these three men not only survived, but are still alive today, is a real possibility.
39:52The Marshals Service never stops looking for people until they would reach the age of 99,
39:56and in this case, we still have another 10 years or so until that happens.
40:01I always hope that this case can be closed in some way,
40:05either by finding proof that any of them died or even lived.
40:10If we did find them, they would be still arrested because they still, believe it or not, owe time to the government.
40:15While the mystery of what happened to the men may never be completely resolved,
40:24the legacy of John Anglin, Clarence Anglin and Frank Morris is secure.
40:29By the time the prison closed in 1963, there were 14 attempts to escape from Alcatraz.
40:35Thirteen of them failed.
40:37Whether their escape was successful or whether they perished, the one thing that we do know is that these guys, they did make it to freedom.
40:48Even if it was short-lived, they didn't die in prison, and I think that that's powerful.
40:53They got away clean from the famous escape-proof prison.
40:58They're still looking for these people years later.
41:00They escaped from Alcatraz, and they entered American mythology.
41:04I think that's what it comes down to.
41:05The rock was unbreakable, and they proved that it wasn't.
41:09The rock was unbreakable, and they proved that it wasn't.
41:10The rock was unbreakable, and they proved that it wasn't.