At some point after lights out — with the precise timing unrecorded — the four men began the final phase of the escape. They had discussed the plan. They had waited for favorable conditions. The spring tide timing, the cover of dark, the approaching end of their window before the cardboard concealment started to fail: all of it had converged on this night.
Morris and the two Anglin brothers placed their dummy heads on their pillows and arranged the rolled clothing and towels under their blankets to approximate the shape of a sleeping body. For a guard shining a flashlight from outside the bars, what was left in those bunks would read as three sleeping men.
Then each of the four removed the cardboard covering their ventilation opening, squeezed through the enlarged duct into the utility corridor behind the cells, and climbed.
The climb was not simple. The vertical shaft from the utility corridor to the roof required ascending roughly thirty feet — accounts vary somewhat on the exact distance — along pipes and other infrastructure that could serve as handholds. For physically fit men who had been thinking about this route for months, it was possible. It was not comfortable, and it was not fast.
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## Allen West and the Cement
Allen West did not make it through.
The specific reason involves a material decision that became a critical failure. In widening his own ventilation duct, West had used some cement-like material — the accounts do not specify the exact composition — to work on the opening. At some point in the weeks before the escape, this material had hardened in a way that made the grill fit too tightly for West to remove it in time.