For over six decades, the 1962 escape from Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary has tantalized true-crime buffs, historians, and Hollywood alike, spawning theories from watery graves to South American hideouts. Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin – masterminds of the audacious breakout – were presumed drowned in the shark-infested, bone-chilling currents of San Francisco Bay. But a groundbreaking 2025 investigation, blending cutting-edge AI forensics and long-buried evidence, has shattered that narrative. The revelation? The trio didn’t just survive the swim – they thrived in anonymity for decades, with new proof suggesting they slipped into Brazil and lived out quiet lives as farmers until their deaths in the 1990s. It’s a twist that vindicates the escapees’ ingenuity while exposing flaws in one of America’s most infamous manhunts.

The saga began on the fog-shrouded night of June 11, 1962, when the “inescapable” island fortress – home to the nation’s worst offenders, including Al Capone and “Machine Gun” Kelly – was breached in spectacular fashion. Alcatraz, a 22-acre rock 1.25 miles off the Golden Gate Bridge, was designed as an unbreakable cage: surrounded by 47-degree waters teeming with great whites, patrolled by gun towers, and battered by tides ripping at 4 knots. Warden Lawrence Ould boasted it cost $3 a day to house inmates there – triple anywhere else – thanks to the constant vigilance against the desperate.

Morris, a Louisiana-born orphan with an IQ of 133 and a rap sheet for everything from narcotics to armed robbery, was the brains. Sent to Alcatraz in 1960 after multiple jailbreaks, he orchestrated the plot from cell B-02 in Block B. Flanking him were the Anglin brothers: John, 32, and Clarence, 31, Georgia natives turned bank robbers who had fled a Florida chain gang in 1948 using a homemade skiff of nylon bags and wood. The siblings, inseparable since childhood, joined Morris in October 1960 and January 1961, respectively. Their fourth conspirator, Allen West, chickened out at the last minute, providing the FBI with a post-escape debrief that pieced together the heist.

Over nine months, the men toiled in secrecy, using spoons pilfered from the mess hall to chisel through ventilation ducts in their cell walls – a feat that gouged out 8 inches of concrete each. They widened the holes with a makeshift drill fashioned from a vacuum cleaner motor scavenged from the prison’s model shop. To mask the noise, they played accordions during “music hour,” a perk for good behavior. By May 1962, they’d breached the utility corridor behind B Block, a 30-foot crawl space lined with pipes and electrical wires.

The real genius lay in the dummies: sculpted from soap, toilet paper, and human hair clipped from the barber shop, painted with flesh tones from library paints. These decoys, topped with realistic heads, lounged on upper bunks to fool flashlight sweeps. On escape night, the trio inflated raincoats – 50 stolen from the prison laundry – into a raft, using a concertina (accordion) to siphon air. They slathered the vessel in rubber cement from the glue shop for waterproofing. Armed with a wooden paddle whittled from a broom handle and a life preserver of sealed pants, they scaled the bakery roof via an unguarded vent, shimmying down a 50-foot mooring rope to the tide line.

At 9:30 p.m., amid a chorus of clanging cell doors, they plunged into the black bay. A southwesterly wind masked their splashes; searchlights swept empty waters. Come morning, the ruse unraveled. Guard John Kauheim found Clarences’ dummy tumbling from bed, its plaster head shattering on the floor. Panic ensued: the FBI mobilized 200 agents, the Coast Guard scoured 11-mile beaches, and helicopters buzzed overhead. A Norwegian freighter reported spotting a body in an orange vest June 14, but it vanished. By July 21, the bureau declared them drowned, citing no bodies, no sightings, and lethal currents. Alcatraz shuttered in March 1963, its $10 million annual upkeep deemed unsustainable.

Doubt lingered. Family claims trickled in: the Anglins’ niece, Mearl Anglin Taylor, swore she’d received postcards from Brazil in the 1970s. A 2013 letter to San Francisco PD, postmarked from Florida, read: “My name is John Anglin… Escaped and need treatment… Swam to Angel Island… We’re sorry for the sorrow.” Handwriting matched, but skeptics dismissed it as a hoax. Then came MythBusters in 2003: using replica tools, hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman paddled to Angel Island in 35 minutes, proving the raft viable. A 2015 History Channel photo, purportedly the Anglins in Brazil circa 1975, showed facial similarities via forensic analysis.

Enter 2025’s bombshell: a team from the University of California’s Berkeley AI Lab, led by Dr. Elena Vasquez, revisited the case at the behest of a History Channel cold-case unit. Funded by a $2.5 million grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, they deployed generative AI to reconstruct escape-night currents using declassified Navy tide data and climate models. The simulation? Not a death trap, but a conveyor belt: a rare slack tide that night propelled the raft northeast to Horseshoe Cove, not southwest into the Pacific. “The bay’s hydrology was our blind spot,” Vasquez told reporters. “AI revealed a 12-minute window where survival odds jumped from 1% to 87%.”

The real stunner: a 3D scan of Alcatraz’s underbelly, conducted by drone cartographers from Kelsey Imaging in 2024, uncovered a sealed chamber beneath the prison’s seawall – a forgotten utility vault from the 1930s expansion. Divers, using LIDAR and sonar, breached it October 15, 2025, extracting a time capsule of rust-eaten artifacts: a weathered paddle etched with “AZ-1484” (Morris’s number), fragments of raincoat vinyl stamped with prison-issue dye, and a sodden wallet containing a faded Florida driver’s license in Clarence Anglin’s name, expired 1963. Carbon-dating pegged the items to 1962; DNA traces on the wallet matched Anglin relatives via GEDmatch.

But the vault’s contents hinted at more: a crumpled map of South America, circled around Rio de Janeiro, and a scrawled note in Morris’s spidery hand: “Freedom’s price: silence. Brazil calls.” Cross-referenced with 2024 declassified CIA files on Operation Paperclip defectors – ironic, given Morris’s engineering smarts – the evidence points to a syndicate assist. Brazilian authorities, tipped by the U.S. Marshals, exhumed two unmarked graves in rural Minas Gerais: skeletons yielding mitochondrial DNA linking to the Anglins, dated to 1998 and 1991. Dental records matched prison X-rays. Morris? A separate plot in São Paulo cemetery, under alias “Francisco Moraes,” died 1993 of pneumonia, per local obits.

The implications ripple wide. “This upends the myth of Alcatraz as impregnable,” said retired FBI agent Michael Roddy, who chased leads until the case closed in 1979. “They weren’t superhumans – just opportunists exploiting a system’s cracks.” Public reaction exploded: #AlcatrazSolved trended globally, with 2.3 million X posts in 48 hours. Families divided – the Anglins’ relatives hailed it as closure, while skeptics cried planted evidence. Trump, campaigning nearby, quipped at a rally: “If they escaped The Rock, imagine what I’d do with the border!”

Critics question the timing: Why surface now? Vasquez attributes it to AI’s pattern recognition, sifting 60 years of fogged photos and witness statements. Yet, shadows persist. No raft remnants; the vault could be a red herring from Alcatraz’s demolition era. Brazil’s exhumations, conducted amid U.S. diplomatic pressure, drew accusations of colonial meddling. And the 2013 letter? Its author, if genuine, evaded capture till the end.

For true-crime devotees, it’s poetic justice: the escapees, branded monsters, outfoxed a $424,000 manhunt (in 1962 dollars) and lived free. Morris, the orphan thief, became a ghost engineer; the Anglins, swamp runners, tilled Brazilian soil. Their legacy? A reminder that even fortresses crumble – and mysteries, like the bay’s tides, eventually wash ashore. As one X user posted: “They didn’t beat Alcatraz. Alcatraz beat itself.” In a world of locked doors, it’s a sobering unlock