He escaped from Alcatraz. Did he escape to North Dakota?

Feb. 23—Editor's note: This archival Vault article was first published on Feb. 3, 2022.

FARGO — It's become the stuff of legend — a tale of three men, taking on a seemingly insurmountable task. Breaking out of the unbreakable, chiseling, climbing, swimming and just surviving their way into folk history. And now, North Dakota has become part of the narrative.

We'll get to that in a bit, but first the background of one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in the history of U.S. prisons.

The story begins on a lonely island in the middle of San Francisco Bay named Alcatraz, home to the ultimate maximum security prison. Dubbed "The Rock," it's a forbidding place, a fortress surrounded on all sides by the choppy, frigid waters of the Pacific.

If the isolation weren't enough, a 1930 redesign of the prison (which had held prisoners since the Civil War) included tougher iron bars, more strategically placed guard towers and more strict rules, including a dozen inmate counts a day. Still some tried to escape the inescapable, but failed miserably.

According to the FBI, from 1934 to the close of the prison in 1963, 36 men tried to escape 14 different times. All were either captured or killed. All except three: Frank Morris, and brothers John Anglin and Clarence Anglin.

Their story became the inspiration for the 1979 hit movie starring Clint Eastwood, "Escape from Alcatraz."

On June 12, 1962, guards conducting their early morning bed checks found something very wrong in the cells of Morris and the Anglin brothers.

The men were not in their beds. Instead, peeking out from the covers, resting upon the pillows were cleverly built plaster heads with painted faces topped with real human hair — realistic enough to fool the guards who passed by in the dark the previous night.

In the back of their cells, guards found ventilator grills removed. The men had apparently chipped away at the walls, removed the grill and climbed through an unguarded corridor to freedom.

They were all gone. The prison went into lockdown and an intensive search began.

With the nighttime escape Morris and the Anglin brothers had a head start, but the odds were still against them. While experienced swimmers have successfully made the two-mile swim from Alcatraz to San Francisco, the men were attempting the crossing in the pitch black night with strong nighttime tides and a water temperature of 54 degrees.

Still in the first two days, authorities did not find their bodies. Eventually, they did find a packet of the men's letters sealed in rubber, as well as paddle-like pieces of wood, bits of a rubber innertube and a homemade life vest washed up on a nearby beach. But no evidence of loss of life.

In fact, some speculated the men successfully made the crossing in a homemade raft or life jackets and purposefully left the items to mislead police they had drowned. (Morris is said to have had a high IQ and was the mastermind of the plan.)

Even so, in 1979, the same year the Eastwood movie was released, the FBI closed the case, concluding that the men died. They cited the following reasons:

* The treacherous conditions they would have faced were daunting, despite the fact all three men knew how to swim.

* In the days surrounding the escape there were no reports of stolen clothes or cars on the mainland which would have been needed to blend into society.

* The Morris and Anglin families didn't seem to have the financial means to provide any support to the men.

* There was no evidence in the coming years that they were alive. As career criminals would they really have stayed out of trouble and undetected for so long?

Maybe. Thanks in part to the popular movie and the fact that the real-life story was so mysterious and compelling, people kept looking for the men and the truth.

Among the people who want answers are members of the Anglin family. Ken and David Widner, nephews to John and Clarence Anglin, set up the

Anglin Brothers Online Museum,

which is full of information about the Anglins and the chances that they might have survived. Here is some of the evidence collected over the years indicating that the men might have survived.

On the Anglin Brothers Museum website, handwriting analysis shows letters written before and after the escape appear to be very similar. A letter written by Clarence Anglin while at Alcatraz in 1961 shows the unusual way he wrote his "t's" with the horizontal top line sometimes not touching the vertical stroke.

A postcard supposedly written by the three men and addressed to the Alcatraz warden following the escape, which read "Ha, Ha! We made it!" showed a similar "t."

At least twice over the years, dying men have confessed that they knew more than they were letting on about the case.

In a 2016 instance

one man says he and an accomplice helped Morris and the Anglins escape via boat, but then later killed and buried them in Seattle.

The story sounds far-fetched, but an off-duty police officer reportedly saw a boat that night matching the man's description. However, no bodies were ever found in Seattle. Also, the Anglin's oldest brother is reported to have reassured his sister while on his deathbed, that she needn't worry anymore about John and Clarence as they were alive and well.

In a

History Channel documentary

, the Anglin family said that a family friend had told them he had run into John and Clarence in Brazil in 1975. He presented them with a picture of two middle-aged men on a farm. U.S. marshals were skeptical, but a forensic expert in the documentary said he believed it was "highly likely" that it was John and Clarence.

And as late as 2020 some

facial recognition software

seemed to back him up.

In 2013, another piece of mail points to the possibility that not only did the three men survive the escape, but that one was still alive. In the letter, John Anglin writes that he was 83 years old and sick with cancer. He wanted treatment as long as he wouldn't be incarcerated for more than one year. He wrote that they all survived, but barely. He was the last one left as Frank had died in 2005 and Clarence in 2011.

He mentioned that he spent time in Seattle after his escape and was in Southern California at that moment, but for a period between 1990 and 2005 lived in both Minot and Fargo, North Dakota, but hated the cold and left.

Not surprisingly, research shows no record of a John Anglin in Fargo or Minot, during the time period mentioned in the letter. However, it is likely if he had been in the two cities he would have been using a different name.

Records on Ancestry.com show John as well as Clarence and Frank Morris all with a death date of June 11, 1962, the night of the escape. (Based on the birth dates found on Ancestry, if the men were still alive, Morris would be 95, John Anglin, 91 and Clarence Anglin, 90.)

If John were here, there is a chance he could have been working in farming. According to the Anglin Brothers website, the 14 Anglin children grew up in a rural community in Florida and "all the kids worked in the family farming trade and were expected to contribute in their off hours from school."

They said John and Clarence turned to petty crimes to help make up for their meager farm income and that is what eventually led them to Alcatraz.

While the FBI officially closed the case in 1979, the agency turned it over to the U.S. Marshals Service "in the unlikely event the trio is still alive."

If you have information, including whether you might have remembered seeing John Anglin in North Dakota, contact Deputy U.S. Marshal Michael Dyke of the Northern District of California at 415-436-7677.

The Anglin family, including nephews Ken and David Widner (whom The Forum was unable to reach for this report), write on their website: "If you have information, insight, theories, contacts, or just words of encouragement that can help solve the mysteries that are posited in these pages, the family welcomes you." Their contact information can be found on their website:

www.anglinbrothersmuseum.com.