On 12 June 1962, guards on the Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary started their day with a startling discovery. Three inmates had been lacking from their cells. John Anglin, Clarence Anglin, and Frank Morris had escaped. On their pillows had been papier-mâché replicas of their very own heads, meant to masks their absence and throw guards off their scent.
What occurred to them stays a thriller to today.
John and Clarence Anglin, brothers from Donalsonville, Georgia, had been despatched to Alcatraz after robbing a financial institution in Columbia, Alabama. Frank Morris had beforehand been imprisoned for financial institution theft, escaped, and was despatched to Alcatraz after being convicted of a housebreaking. Investigators would later theorise that the three males started planning their escape six months earlier than it unfolded, starting in December 1960.
When Alcatraz opened in 1934, it was conceived of as a “a maximum-security, minimum-privilege penitentiary”. The jail, situated on Alcatraz Island within the San Francisco Bay, was supposed as a tough-on-crime present of power — per the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), “to show the law-abiding public that the federal government was serious about stopping the rampant crime of the 1920s and 1930s”.
Alcatraz was meant for “prisoners who refused to conform to the rules and regulations at other Federal institutions, who were considered violent and dangerous, or who were considered escape risks”. In the BOP’s personal phrases, it was “designed to be a prison system’s prison”, the place prisoners discovered how you can earn “privileges” (akin to “working, corresponding with and having visits from family members, access to the prison library, and recreational activities”) earlier than they might be despatched to serve the remainder of their sentences elsewhere.
So, how did the Anglin brothers and Morris make it out? According to the FBI, they loosened air vents of their cells, creating sufficient area to permit them to get out. Then, they used an unguarded utility hall as a “secret workshop” the place they assembled the mandatory instruments for his or her escape. These included, in accordance with the bureau, selfmade life preservers and a life raft created from 50 raincoats. (The males are believed to have discovered directions on how you can assemble the makeshift life preservers and life raft in magazines.) They additionally manufactured a periscope-like device to maintain watch on the guards whereas they labored, wood paddles, and a device to inflate the raft. “Using a network of pipes,” the lads “climbed up and eventually pried open the ventilator” on the high of the constructing. They made a faux bolt utilizing cleaning soap to hide their preparations.
On the evening of their escape, the lads are believed to have left their cells, collected their provides, and climbed their approach as much as the roof. “Then, they shimmied down the bakery smoke stack at the rear of the cell house, climbed over the fence, and snuck to the northeast shore of the island and launched their raft,” per the FBI’s account.
Whether the lads survived is a thriller the FBI has not been in a position to remedy.
Bodies had been by no means discovered. Over the years, alleged proof of the lads’s survival has surfaced, prompting debates amongst investigators, specialists, and the Anglins’ relations. In 1979, the FBI closed its clase, admitting that its investigation, “which lasted for nearly two decades, was unable to determine whether the three men successfully escaped or died in the attempt”. The US Marshals took over the probe and have saved it open since.
Ken Widner, a nephew of John and Clarence Anglin, is satisfied his uncles survived the escape and made it off the island. He and his brother David have completed various media interviews through the years, sharing what they consider to be proof that their relations made it out of California safely.
As a toddler, Widner, whose mom Marie Anglin Widner was John and Clarence’s sister, was used to listening to the story of his uncle’s escape from Alcatraz. “It’s been a part of my life ever since I can remember,” he tells The Independent. “It was always something that was talked about in family reunions.”
In 2012, the case obtained renewed consideration as media retailers marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Anglins’ and Morris’s escape. That’s additionally when Widner turned decided to dig into the case additional. In 2015, he and his brother David participated in a History Channel particular through which they unveiled what they are saying is {a photograph} of John and Clarence Anglin, alive and properly, in 1975.
According to Widner, the photograph was taken by Fred Brizzi, a household good friend, who gave it to the Anglin household in 1992. “It stayed in my mom’s collection for all that time,” he says, till he found it himself. In a History Channel particular titled Alcatraz Escape: The Lost Evidence, Ken and David Widner are proven bringing the proof to investigators and theorizing that their uncles constructed new lives as farmers in Brazil following their escape.
“I believe it was a way of feeling, like, OK, enough time has passed,” Ken Widner tells The Independent. “… I believe it was a way for them to let the family know, ‘Hey, we did make it, we’re OK, we didn’t die, but we can’t come home.’”
The photograph has been the topic of intense commentary and hypothesis. It’s grainy – as will be anticipated for an older picture – and options two males, each carrying sun shades, wanting within the path of the digital camera.
Michael W Streed, a retired police sergeant and sketch artist for the Baltimore Police Department who now presents providers as a forensic imaging knowledgeable, is featured in Alcatraz Escape: The Lost Evidence analysing the picture, evaluating it to the three males’s reserving images, and providing an encouraging evaluation, saying he sees “more [in the images] that’s similar [to verified images of the men] than I see that’s dissimilar”.
Michael Dyke, a now-retired deputy on the US Marshals, investigated the destiny of the Alcatraz escapees for years. In 2016, he expressed doubts in regards to the photograph, telling ABC30 that some bodily traits counsel it doesn’t depict the Anglin brothers. Though, he additionally mentioned it couldn’t be dominated out as a potential lead.
Now, Dyke is extra definitive. “After working the case for 17 years, it is my opinion that [the three men] very likely did not survive the first night of their escape,” he tells The Independent. “Because no body has been recovered, you can never say that a hundred per cent, but based on all the evidence, more than likely all three of them died that night and were swept out to the ocean.”
Of the photograph, Dyke says this: “You cannot do facial recognition on either of them. Because in order to do facial recognition, you need to see the eyes, the pupils, the corners of their mouths. Also the height of the ears on their heads.” The males within the photograph, he factors out, each have lengthy hair, sun shades, and facial hair. That means there may be “no valid way” of conducting facial comparability on both of the lads, he says.
Other components will be examined, he provides, that are unlikely to alter over time, such because the size of the arms and of the fingers. “I have existing photographs of both Anglin brothers showing their full- length body. Both had unusually long arms,” he says. “Both subjects in the Brazil photo have short arms. When you do measurements on each, you can easily tell that the two men in the photo are not either Anglin brother.”
Fred Brizzi died in 1998. In 2015, his widow Judith Brizzi informed the Daily Mail that her husband had “never said anything to [her] ever about those men escaping from Alcatraz”.
“He showed me the photograph because of the size of the anthill. I’ve no idea who the men are in the photo and Fred never talked about them,” she added. “He did say the photograph was taken on his trip to Brazil.”
Ken Widner and his brother have provided up one other piece of what they view as proof that their uncles lived. It’s an audio tape Widner says was recorded by their mom whereas Brizzi defined what had occurred to the Anglin brothers.
On the telephone with Ken Widner, I ask if he’ll play a part of the tape for me. He agrees, and inside a number of seconds, audio performs from the opposite finish of the road. By Widner’s personal admission, it’s robust to make out what the individuals on the tape are saying, as a result of the recording is previous – and it most likely doesn’t assist that I’m listening to it over the telephone. A clearer model aired on the History Channel – the identical part I’m listening to. “Nobody positively, absolutely knows they’re alive, really, but me,” Brizzi says on the tape.
Dyke says he has listened to your complete tape and sees inconsistencies in Brizzi’s narrative. To him, lots of Brizzi’s model of occasions “does not make sense and is exaggerated”.
Think in regards to the Alcatraz escape lengthy sufficient, and you’ll inevitably begin questioning in regards to the our bodies. In the 60 years for the reason that escape, no physique was ever discovered. If the lads had drifted off into the ocean, or if they’d drowned, wouldn’t their stays have floated to the floor by now?
Well, not essentially. According to a 2002 New York Times Q&A (which was not particularly associated to this Alcatraz escape however shared basic details about what occurs to human our bodies in water), “a body in deep, cold water may never resurface” as a result of the chilly water slows down decomposition, and subsequently the discharge of gasses which trigger our bodies to rise to the floor.
Adding to that, Dyke says, is the ocean life within the Bay Area and within the close by ocean, which incorporates “crabs or other bottom-dwelling sea creatures [which] will usually poke holes in the body”, additionally stopping the buildup of gasses that might trigger a physique to drift.
“Based on the tidal charts from that evening, it is more than likely they were swept directly out to the ocean,” Dyke provides. “If they had left a half hour earlier in the day, or even an hour later in the day, their bodies may have been recovered.”
But, as Ken Widner wonders over the telephone, if investigators are so satisfied the escapees drowned, why don’t they shut the case? Why has the FBI launched age-progressed photos of all three males?
“As long as the bodies haven’t been recovered, there is still a chance that they could be fugitives and alive, even if the chance is very small,” Dyke says. There are procedural causes, too: so long as there may be an lively fugitive warrant for the three escapees, the US Marshals Service gained’t shut its case, he says, and it’s “not standard practice to request a warrant be dismissed without solid evidence to support it” – akin to stays or DNA proof being discovered.
Back in 2012, on the fiftieth anniversary of the escape, US Marshal Don O’Keefe informed Reuters the continued investigation “serves as a warning to fugitives that regardless of time, we will continue to look for you and bring you to justice” – language that prompt the need on the service’s half to ship a message and venture a picture of tenacity, maybe greater than the rest. The US Marshals Service has beforehand mentioned it’s going to preserve investigating the lads’s destiny till they’re both arrested, proven to have died, or are all alleged to have turned 99. This would put the deadline to formally remedy the case in 2030.
Ken Widner says he and his household don’t consider the Anglin brothers are nonetheless alive, however relatively that they survived the escape and died afterward. He thinks any investigation going ahead ought to goal not “to find them alive, but to find their grave.”
Source: www.impartial.co.uk