Surrounded by the cold and turbulent waters of the Pacific, Alcatraz Prison has been known for 29 years as a place no one can leave, at least not alive.
But in 1962, three prisoners - brothers John and Clarence Anglin, and Frank Morris - escaped from the island. Police and everyone else assumed the men died at sea, but CBS television in 2013 received a letter from a man posing as John Anglin.
- My name is John Anglin, and in 1962 I escaped from Alcatraz with my brother Clarence and Frank Morris. I am 83 years old and I am in bad shape, I have cancer. Yes, we all survived that night, but barely. If you announce on television that I am willing to go to prison again for a maximum of one year in exchange for medical care, I will tell you exactly where I am. This is not a joke - wrote the "alleged" fugitive who added that he spent his life first in Seattle, then North Dakota and then, he says, returned to Southern California.
The marshal's office analyzed the letter - from DNA to manuscript - but did not come to a concrete conclusion.
- The common opinion was that the men drowned during the escape. If they survived there is no reason to believe that they have fundamentally changed and started living lives without crime - they say about bank robbers from the FBI.
"I remember being woken by a siren, and I didn't know what to do because no one had ever heard it on Alcatraz." I assumed that they died on the run, especially since no one later tracked them down - says Jolene Babyak, who was 15 at the time, and her father was the manager.
In San Francisco, the fugitive case has grown into an urban legend. It is talked about, written about and discussed even today. After the escape, the feds explained how the prisoners made a kind of "drill" out of the vacuum cleaner motor in order to widen the already existing passages and slip into the network of pipes, which was unprotected.
They made escape tools in an improvised hiding place above their cells where they hid things. Through the ventilation system, they escaped to the roof of the prison. They descended the walls and set out in their vessel composed of 50 raincoats. They also made wooden oars.
The next morning, instead of prisoners, dolls made of plaster, paper mache, paint, and real human hair were found in their beds.
In 14 attempts, as many as 36 prisoners tried to leave Alcatraz. As many as 23 were arrested, six were killed and two drowned. Apart from Morris and Anglins, two others have not been found, although they are also thought to have drowned.