The New York prison break is eerily similar to this 1962 Alcatraz escape
When two convicted murderers escaped from an upstate New York prison through an underground pipe on June 5, Stephen King likened the story to The Shawshank Redemption. But the incident may more accurately parallel an actual prison break that unfolded 53 years ago today at a penitentiary on the other side of the country: Alcatraz.
Frank Lee Morris and brothers John Anglin and Clarence Anglin may be the only men to ever successfully escape from the San Francisco Bay island. On the night of June 11, 1962, they used makeshift power and hand tools to access an underground tunnel, leaving decoy heads made of soap in their cell beds. Once the Alcatraz inmates made it outside the building, they scaled the prison fence and boarded a makeshift inflatable raft fashioned out of raincoats.
Soap heads the inmates carved and painted to act as decoys.
The men were never found, and would be well into their 80s today.
According to FBI files, the case remained open for 17 years before officials concluded that the men had likely died at sea. The ocean’s current would have been too deadly for the raft to survive the three-mile trip to the Golden Gate Bridge, they said.
But as recently as 2012, others have provided evidence suggesting otherwise, including a Christmas card John Anglin’s family says he sent home and television episodes including a Mythbusters and a National Geographic program that found it plausible the men could have survived.
Sharpened spoons, a vacuum cleaner motor used as a drill, and flashlights made from penlight batteries helped the men escape Alcatraz, according to the FBI.
Fifty-three years later, a search for runaway New York prisoners Richard Matt and David Sweat has led officials to Vermont. The convicted murderers fled Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York, just 25 miles from the Canadian border.
While details of their escape are similar to the 1962 Alcatraz prison break, Matt and Sweat were serving life sentences for more menacing crimes than bank-robbing Alcatraz inmates. Matt kidnapped and dismembered his former boss in 1997, and Sweat killed a New York Sheriff’s deputy during a 2002 gun robbery.
Morris and the Anglin brothers left behind a fourth inmate who had planned to escape with them when an unexpected metal bar blocked his cell from the tunnel. He became a source to investigators, but the men were never found.
In New York, officials haven’t publicized all the details about the active investigation, but its clear that Matt and Sweat used power tools and a prison tunnel just as the Alcatraz inmates did. Their tunnel brought them to a manhole outside the New York prison, officials said.
The tunnel the men escaped from on the roof of the prison.
New York authorities said on Thursday that they had readied Vermont for an extensive manhunt, and CNN reported there was “an indication’’ the men had a vessel they could paddle across Lake Champlain.
No word yet on whether or not it’s an inflatable raft made of rain coats.
The Alcatraz of the Rockies:
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