On June 12, 1962, at 7:00 AM, the United States Penitentiary at Alcatraz Island, California, discovered that three of its prisoners were missing. The guards had made rounds during the night and confirmed, each time, that the figures in the bunks in cells B-138, B-140, and B-150 were present. They were not present. They had been absent since sometime after 9:30 PM on June 11.
The deception that made this possible — the heads on the pillows, the rolled clothing, the cardboard panels, the music hour drilling, the months of hidden preparation — was sophisticated enough to maintain itself through a full night of welfare checks. It was not discovered until the morning count required a response from the prisoners.
By then, the men had been gone for roughly nine hours. The bay had been crossed, in one direction or another. The raft was somewhere — in the water, on a beach, on the floor of the bay — and the men were somewhere that the investigation would spend the next six decades trying to determine.
The United States Marshals Service, as of the time of this writing, carried the case as open. The warrants for John William Anglin, Clarence Anglin, and Frank Lee Morris remained valid. The official position remained that the men most likely drowned but that this conclusion was not established with certainty.
The original dummy heads — the ones that actually fooled the guards, the ones made from soap and paint and barbershop hair in a cell in the federal maximum-security penitentiary — are held in climate-controlled storage, deteriorating slowly, literally falling apart when handled. They are the most direct surviving evidence of what the men did and what they understood about the system that held them.