More than six decades after one of the most famous prison escapes in American history, the fate of three missing Alcatraz prisoners remains one of the country’s enduring mysteries.
In June 1962, prisoners Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin disappeared from Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, a maximum-security prison located on an island in San Francisco Bay. Investigators discovered that the men had apparently escaped through a carefully prepared tunnel and left behind dummy heads in their beds to make it appear as though they were still sleeping.
Authorities launched a massive search, but no confirmed trace of the three men was ever found.
For decades, the official explanation remained uncertain. The prisoners may have drowned in the cold and dangerous waters surrounding Alcatraz—or they may somehow have survived and disappeared.
Then, in 2013, the mystery took another dramatic turn.
A handwritten letter was reportedly sent to a San Francisco police station. The writer claimed to be John Anglin, one of the three men who vanished from Alcatraz more than 50 years earlier.
According to the letter, all three escapees had survived.
The writer made an extraordinary offer: in exchange for revealing his location, he wanted authorities to agree to a limited prison sentence and provide medical treatment. The letter immediately attracted widespread attention because it appeared to offer a possible answer to one of America’s most famous unsolved prison mysteries.
But there was a major problem.
Authorities could not establish that the letter had actually been written by John Anglin.
The FBI examined the document, including its handwriting, but experts were unable to reach a definitive conclusion about its authenticity. That left investigators with no reliable proof that the person behind the letter was really Anglin—or that the three escapees had survived their daring escape.
The U.S. Marshals Service later stated that the claim had no merit. Meanwhile, the FBI’s official history continues to list Frank Morris and John and Clarence Anglin as missing.
No confirmed evidence has ever established what happened to the men after they left Alcatraz.
Did they perish in the freezing waters of San Francisco Bay? Did they somehow reach the mainland and begin new lives under different identities? Or was the mysterious 2013 letter simply an elaborate hoax?
More than 60 years later, there is still no definitive answer.
The escape remains a remarkable story of planning, deception and disappearance—and the possibility that the three men may have survived continues to fuel one of America’s most enduring mysteries.