By LISA LEFF | Associated Press – 9 hrs ago
ALCATRAZ ISLAND, Calif.
(AP) — For 20th century crime buffs, few capers match the intrigue and
ingenuity of the "Escape from Alcatraz," the 1962 prison break three
inmates pulled off with stolen spoons, dummy heads and a raincoat raft.
For Marie Widner and Mearl Taylor, the fabled flight from the Rock is all about family.
The two Florida women are the younger sisters of John and Clarence
Anglin, who along with fellow prisoner Frank Morris, disappeared from
the federal prison on Alcatraz Island 50 years ago. Whether the three
men perished in chilly San Francisco Bay, as prison officials and
federal agents insisted at the time, remains a subject of hot
speculation because their bodies were never found.
Out of the 36 Alcatraz inmates who tried to flee before the prison
was closed in March 1963, the three are the only ones who remain
unaccounted for, according to the U.S. Marshals Service, which maintains
active arrest warrants on Morris and the Anglins.
"I've always believed they made it, and I haven't changed my mind
about that," Widner, 76, said Monday while visiting the former
penitentiary to commemorate the anniversary of her siblings' daring
getaway.
Widner's sons arranged for their mother and aunt to visit Alcatraz
because they wanted, in Kenneth Widner's words, "to clear up some
misnomers about the boys" that followed their unlikely escape's passage
into prison lore, a book and a Clint Eastwood movie.
Among those that rankle Mearl Taylor the most, is the idea that her
brothers were simpletons who benefited from a plan crafted by Morris and
the belief that Clarence and John were hardcore criminals because they
ended up in a prison designed for "desperate or irredeemable
individuals."
Like Morris, the Anglin brothers were serving sentences for bank
robbery, but it was the pair's history of previous escape attempts,
coupled with a failed attempt to sneak Clarence out of the federal
prison in Leavenworth, Kan., that got them sent to Alcatraz in 1960 and
1961.
"Just because they did this mischievous stuff growing up, they were
not bad boys. They never caused no problems with the family. They just
got out and did this mischievous stuff until it got to the bank robbery
and that's when they really got into trouble," Taylor said. "I'm proud
of them."
The U.S. Marshals Service took over the manhunt from the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1978.
U.S. Marshal Michael Dyke, who inherited the unsolved case in 2003,
does not disagree with the sisters' account. Dyke doesn't know whether
any of the trio is still alive. However, he's seen enough evidence to
make him wonder, which makes tracking down some 250 tips and reported
sightings — even the wackier ones — necessary. He gets tips every one or
two months.
The clues he considers the most tantalizing are credible reports that
the Anglins' mother, for several years, received flowers delivered
without a card and that the brothers attended her 1973 funeral disguised
in women's clothes despite a heavy FBI presence.
A statistical perspective also lends authority to the idea that at
least one or two of the escapees survived the treacherous bay crossing,
Dyke said, because the bodies of two out of every three people who go
missing in San Francisco Bay are recovered.
"We have to operate under the assumption they made it," he said.
If the Anglins or Morris ever surrender or are tracked down, Dyke
said he would arrest them, but "I'd have to compliment them because it
was very meticulous what they did, how they escaped from here." Federal
prosecutors then would have to decide whether to charge them. The
warrants on them will expire when each man passes his 100th birthday.
The FBI acquired most of what it learned about the great escape from a
fourth inmate who planned to take part in the break-out but, at the
last minute, ran into technical problems. The four reportedly spent
months using spoons and forks to dig holes in the crumbling masonry
surrounding the air vents in their cells. The crawl spaces they
fashioned eventually pierced the six-and-a-half-inch thick walls until
they reached a utility corner, from which they were able to shimmy out
through a roof vent.
To prepare for their flights, they also produced a raft and life
vests out of more than 50 cotton raincoats, with rubberized backing,
that inmates were assigned, said "Breaking the Rock" author Jolene
Babyak. They also had created mannequin heads out of paper, paint and
hair purloined from the prison barber shop. They left the heads in their
beds while they worked on the raft and the night of the getaway.
Babyak was 15 years old and living on Alcatraz when her father, the
associate warden, got the June 12, 1962, call that three inmates had
escaped the night before with an eight-hour head start.
For her part, Babyak is less convinced that any of the inmates
survived the escape. Given how exhaustively the FBI investigated the
incident and the number of years that have passed, she thinks more
concrete evidence would have surfaced if Morris or the Anglins had lived
to tell about it.
Replicas of the dummy heads lie in their former cells, which are
popular stops with the more than a million tourists who visit Alcatraz
Island every year. While what happened to the three men remains a
mystery, the escape's enduring mystique isn't ambiguous at all, National
Park Service spokeswoman Alexandra Picavet said.
"It's one of those yarns where everyone can attach their own reality
because they can wrap themselves around whatever part they want,"
Picavet said.
source(
http://news.yahoo.com/alcatraz-marks-50th-anniversary-fabled-escape-070900165.html)
FILE - This July 16, 1992 file …
