Prisoners Who Escaped Alcatraz In 1962 'Could Be ALIVE'

Publish date
Tuesday, 13 Oct 2015, 10:14AM

It's been more than 50 years since an infamous Alcatraz escape when three inmates - brothers John and Clarence Anglin and their fellow inmate, Frank Morris - carried out their grand plan.

They had chiselled a hole into the walls of the prison, and shimmied out through to the roof, leaving dummy heads made of papier-mâché and real human hair in their beds.

Creepy!! The escapees left paper-mache (pictured) heads with their own hair attached in their beds to make it appear that they were tucked up in bed.

The men sailed onto the San Francisco Bay with makeshift paddles and a raft made of stolen raincoats, but prison officials claimed the men had drowned, allowing Alcatraz to continue claiming that they had no escapees, though 36 have tried.

Now the Anglin family are cooperating with authorities for the first time ever. And they're claiming that the brothers didn't only escape alive, but they were alive in the 70's and may even still be at large today! 


The brothers’ nephews, 48-year-old David Widner and 54-year-old Ken Widner, are featured in a History Channel special that will soon be airing entitled Alcatraz: Search for the Truth. “This is absolutely the best actionable lead we’ve had,” Art Roderick, the retired US marshal who was lead investigator on the case for 20 years, told The Post. Roderick retired in 2008 but is still working on the case.

The Anglin family say they didn't speak up earlier because they were “spied on and harassed by the FBI for years,” but they want to see the case solved before the sister of the escapees, Marie Anglin Widner, passed away. 

How they may look now.

The Anglin family received Christmas cards, signed with the names of the brothers’, delivered to their mother sans postage during the three years after their escape.

A photograph, which will be revealed on the show, was provided that may prove the brothers were alive in the ’70s. 

There was a set of bones that washed up on shore north of San Francisco the year after the escape that proved to not be a match after the DNA-testing of their older brother Alfred, though the bones could still belong to Morris, who has no relatives to test.

Investigators are planning to search South America for signs of the Anglins, alive or dead.

“He taught them that when you disappear, you have to cut all ties,” Ken says in the special. “He told me in a letter, ‘This is the mistake that I made.’ He told me, ‘These brothers undoubtedly had done exactly what I told them to do.’”

If the brothers were alive today, they would be in their mid-80s. 

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