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## The Dummy Heads: What They Were Made From
The final piece of the preparation — the piece that gave the escape its hours of undetected head start — was the decoys.
A morning roll call at Alcatraz was not a distant headcount. Guards walked down the cellblock and visually confirmed each prisoner in their bunk. The standard procedure involved shining a flashlight into each cell to verify the occupant. The men needed something that would hold up to this verification, in dim light, seen through bars.
The heads were constructed from materials available within the prison and without obvious evidence of illegal acquisition. The base material was papier-mâché in the broad sense — a mixture of soap, toilet paper, and other components that could be worked into a rough human head shape and would harden when dry. Some accounts mention concrete dust or plaster as components; different sources describe the mixture differently, and the original FBI evidence reports note inconsistencies in the composition of the surviving heads. What all accounts agree on is that the mixture was formed by hand into a head shape, allowed to dry, and then painted with pigment from the prison maintenance shop.
The coloring required paint that matched human skin. The men had access to paint through legitimate work assignments; pigments were acquired and mixed. The finished heads were painted to a skin-tone approximation that would hold up at a distance and in the dim light of a nighttime cell check.
The hair was real: swept from the floor of the prison barbershop, where it was otherwise discarded. Human hair glued to a painted papier-mâché head, seen through bars in dim light, reads as hair.