### Frank Lee Morris
Frank Morris was born on September 1, 1926, in Washington, D.C. His mother, Clara, was unmarried and unable to care for him. He was placed in foster care, then in an orphanage. He was orphaned entirely by age eleven.
The childhood was institutional. What came next was also institutional, though in a different direction. Morris had his first documented legal trouble at thirteen. He was convicted. By his mid-twenties he had accumulated charges for narcotics possession, armed robbery, and auto theft across multiple states. He was not a minor actor in petty crime; he was a repeat offender whose trajectory through the criminal justice system took him through successively more secure facilities.
Prison records attributed to Morris an IQ of 133 — an intelligence measure that ranks above approximately 98 percent of the population. Whether this measurement was accurate, or whether it captured whatever quality allowed Morris to plan and execute the Alcatraz escape, is difficult to assess from outside the available documents. What is clear from the record is that he consistently demonstrated an ability to analyze his environments and find their weaknesses.
In 1955, while incarcerated at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Morris escaped with another prisoner named William Martin. He was recaptured approximately a year later in Kansas City, Missouri. The escape had not taken him far enough for long enough, but it demonstrated that his interest in getting out was practical, not theoretical.
He was transferred to Alcatraz on January 18, 1960, assigned inmate number AZ-1441. His prior escape attempt was exactly the kind of history that sent prisoners to the Rock. He arrived already thinking, by all subsequent accounts, about how to leave.