At 7:00 on the morning of June 12, 1962, a guard at the United States Penitentiary on Alcatraz Island walked down Broadway — the main corridor of the main cellblock — and rang the wake-up bell. The prisoners were supposed to stir. Three of them did not.
This was not, at first, alarming. Inmates slept in. Guards shook them awake regularly. But when the guard looked more closely at the beds in cells B-138, B-140, and B-150, something was wrong with the figures lying there. The faces were still. Too still. The skin had a strange quality to it, waxy and inert.
The men in those beds were not men. They were heads — human-looking heads, made from soap, paint, and barbershop floor sweepings — propped on pillows to pass for sleeping prisoners. The beds beneath them were packed with rolled clothing. Frank Morris and John and Clarence Anglin had been gone for hours.
The most sophisticated escape in the history of federal corrections had just been discovered. And the three men responsible for it had vanished into San Francisco Bay.
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## The Island That Was Supposed to Be Inescapable
Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary sat on a twelve-acre rock in the middle of San Francisco Bay, 1.25 miles from the nearest shoreline. The water surrounding it ran cold — rarely above 55 degrees Fahrenheit — and was crossed by powerful tidal currents that swept from the bay toward the Pacific Ocean twice a day. Getting off the island was not simply a matter of swimming; a person who made it into the water still had to survive the currents, the cold, and the distance to reach land.