Escape (2 page)

Morris checked to see that no guard was approaching then quickly passed his new tool through the bars and into West's cell.

“No kidding,” said West. “I'm gonna get me one of these!”

Soon, all four men had made themselves similar digging tools, but they still found hacking away at the concrete was hard, tedious work. After all it was 20cm (8in) thick.

“There's got to be a better way than this,” thought Morris, and sure enough, there was.

Allen West enjoyed his job as a prison cleaner. He could wander around chatting with people, and still appear to be working at the same time. The job also brought him several unexpected perks, such as access to electrical equipment. Talking to Morris about the problem of digging through the concrete, he said:

“What we need is the inside of a vacuum cleaner, and I know just where to find one. Take the motor out for the fan, stick in a drill bit on that pivot that goes round, and what have you got – a power drill!!”

“You get me a vacuum motor, and I'll get you a drill bit,” said Morris.

West smuggled a motor into his cell, and Morris fitted it up with a drill bit he had stolen from the prison workshop. They both knew it would be terribly noisy so they had to wait until the prison music hour, when the men were allowed to play their instruments in the cells, before they could try it out.

Morris placed the motor's plug into the light socket in his cell.

“Well, here goes…”

He flicked the switch and the motor whirred into life. That was loud enough, but the noise it made when the bit hit the concrete was excruciating. Morris drilled for as long as he dared and then stopped. The results were promising. Two holes had gone right through to the other side. Working around these with the blade would be a lot quicker.

Next morning at breakfast Morris filled in the Anglins.

“We'll pass this drill around between the four of us, but we need to use it real careful,” he said. “Just make a series of holes when you can, when everyone's blowing, scraping, strumming and honking. This is gonna save us months of digging. Once we got the holes in the wall, digging the rest out with the blades at night will be a walk in the park.”

Clarence's eyes lit up. His fingers were completely covered with blisters.

With the escape now looking increasingly likely, the men turned their thoughts to getting off the island. Sitting together at the evening meal, they pondered the problems that faced them.

“Water's freezing cold. You got fog almost all year round. Wouldn't like to go to all the trouble of escaping just to freeze to death in that water,” said Clarence between mouthfuls.

“The swim's been done,” said West. “I heard three girls did it back in '33.”

Morris was more realistic: “But they were athletes. They trained for months, they probably covered themselves with goose grease to keep warm, and they definitely weren't living on no prison diet to strengthen them up for the swim… and I'll bet they had a support boat follow them over. What we need is a little assistance, a raft, life jacket, something to keep us afloat, or even better, out of that water.”

John Anglin spoke next. “I seen a whole pile of plastic raincoats just lying by the workshop. We could steal some of them, take the sleeves off and blow them up like water wings. We could even stick them on any stray planks by the water's edge and make ourselves a raft.”

Morris smiled broadly. “As soon as we've got behind that wall, we can start collecting things.”

The holes in the wall were getting bigger every day, so the four hurried to complete the false walls that would cover up their handiwork. They painted drawing boards the same shade as the cell wall, and then painted on an air vent. Then they carefully chipped away the wall just around the vent, so that their false wall would fit over it without jutting out.

In bright light the fake walls would not survive a second look, but in the dim recess of a cell they blended in well enough. Now they could dig with less fear of discovery, and soon they had made holes which were big enough to squeeze through.

Getting out at night presented a major problem. All the doors on the cells at Alcatraz were made of steel bars – this meant a patrolling guard could look in to any cells at any time of day to check on the convict within. But Morris had come up with a brilliant solution. Torn pages from magazines were soaked in his cell sink. Then the soggy paper was mashed into a pulp to make papier-mâché, and fashioned into the shape of a head.

After a week or so the head was dry enough to paint. Clarence Anglin, who worked as a prison barber, smuggled Morris some hair the same shade as his, which added a final authentic touch. Morris used the hair to add eyebrows too. Poking out of a blanket at the top of a bunk, in a darkened cell the head would look just like a real one. Rolled up bedding and clothes would make a body shape under the blankets. The prototype head completed, Allen and the Anglins set about making their own dummy heads.

Finally, the night had come to take a trip to the roof. Morris spent the day beforehand trying to curb his restlessness. What if the way up to the roof was blocked? What if the ventilator motor had been replaced after all? All their painstaking work would be wasted. The 12 year sentence stretched out before him. Then another awful thought occurred. The holes in the wall would be discovered eventually, and that would mean even more years added on to his sentence.

At last night fell, and activity in the prison slowly ground to a halt. As West kept an eye out for the guard, Morris placed the dummy head on his pillow and wriggled through the hole at the back of his cell, carefully replacing the false wall behind him.

The corridor behind the wall was a grim, damp place, which stank of the sea water that flowed through its sewage pipes. All around him were ducts and cables, and dust and dirt had settled on everything he touched. But standing up in the tiny corridor Morris felt a huge gleeful rush, like a naughty boy doing something a hated teacher had expressly forbidden.

He had to wait a while for his eyes to become accustomed to the gloom, then he began to make his way up, climbing through a tangle of conduits, mesh, wiring and catwalks to reach the roof ventilator shaft. It stood before him, hanging down 1.5m (5ft) from the roof, and took a sharp right angle 30cm (1ft) inside.

The first thing he realized was that he would need someone else to help lift him inside, and he congratulated himself on having the forethought to realize that escaping as a team would be better than going it alone. Morris also noted that there was plenty of space up here. In this rarely visited and unguarded area of the prison, it would be a perfect place to store material for their long swim to the mainland, a mile or so away.

The next night, Morris and Clarence Anglin made a trip to the roof together. Clarence lifted him inside, but what Morris saw there came like a punch to the stomach. The fan blade and motor had been removed all right, but they had been replaced by two iron bars, a grille and a rain hood. All of these unexpected barriers were firmly anchored in place by solid steel rivets.

They shared the news next morning with West.

“What did you expect to find up there?” he chided, “A couple of airline tickets to Brazil? We got through eight inches of that concrete, so a few bolts ain't gonna stop us now.”

West was right. Morris chewed over the problem for a couple of days and came up with a solution. The two bars could be bent back with a length of pipe a repairman had carelessly left in the back corridor. The rivets that held the grille and rain hood in place were far more of a problem. The vacuum cleaner drill would have been handy, but it would make far too much noise. What they needed was something to cut through the rivets. The workshop had a supply of carborundum string – a thin cord coated with abrasive powder, used to saw through metal. It would take many more hours of painstaking work, but it could be done.

So, most nights, a couple of the escapers would climb up to the roof and saw and saw. It was tedious, painful work, but eventually the rivets came away. Morris thought up the clever idea of replacing them with rivet-shaped balls of soap, which they painted black. He did not want a patrolling guard to peer into the shaft and notice the rivets were missing.

Now it was midsummer, 1962. Everything was in place, and there would be no better time of year for an escape. The coldness of the water around the prison made it lethal at most other times of the year. Hunched together in the canteen they haggled about when they should go.

“I say now, and John's with me,” said Clarence Anglin. “We've got a huge pile of raincoats waiting to be discovered up in the roof, and those holes in the cells ain't gonna stay secret forever.”

“That's true enough,” said West. “My fake wall keeps slipping too when I'm outta there at night. I'm gonna have to fix it in there with cement, so let's set a date that will give me time to chip it all out again.”

“We'll go in ten or so days,” said Morris. “I'm gonna pay a visit to the library, and get me a book on tides. Water in the Bay's dangerous, so we've got to go at a good time, otherwise we'll end up dead.”

But over the next week things were getting even more worrying. Convicts would return to their cells after mealtimes and notice small differences – a towel moved here, a book moved there – that gave away the fact that their cell had been searched. Maybe it was just routine checks, or maybe the prison authorities suspected that an escape was coming.

Three days after their last conversation with West, the Anglins could wait no longer. About 9:00pm on the evening of June 11th, Morris heard a voice behind his wall. It was John Anglin telling him that he and Clarence were going NOW. Before Morris could argue, John had headed back up the corridor. Next door, West was panic-stricken. Unprepared, and choking with anger and frustration, he began chipping at the hardened cement seal he had placed around his fake wall.

Morris kept watch for him as long as he could. It was just before lights-out, and the prisoners had yet to settle down for the night. For now, the dull bustle of conversation and activity drowned out West's frantic digging, but Morris could not stay watching out for him much longer.

When the lights were turned off for the night, Morris had to go. He left West digging away, and headed up to the roof. The Anglins were already up there waiting for him. There was no point arguing with them about what they had done to West, they just had to get on and see the escape through without him.

John lifted Morris up to the shaft and he quickly removed the soap rivet heads, his face starkly lit by the recurrent flash of the lighthouse beacon as it swept over the roof. Morris gently eased the grill from its moorings and onto the floor of the roof. But as he lifted away the rainhood, it caught in a sudden gust of wind, and clattered noisily to the floor. Inside the vent, Morris froze. He was so tense he could hardly move.

The three men waited, stock-still in the dark, expecting to hear alarm bells or shouts, and guards rushing up to investigate. Down below, a patrolling guard had indeed heard the noise, and hurried off to tell the duty officer.

“Don't worry about it,” he was told. “There's lots of garbage on the roof. It's probably an old paint can blowing around in the wind.”

Ten minutes passed before Morris and the Anglins thought it would be safe to move. Each man slowly slithered out onto the roof, with three or four raincoat sleeves tucked around their belts. They all blinked in the harsh glare of the lighthouse beacon. Away from the stuffy hothouse of the prison, the night air felt cool, and the salty sea breeze caught in their nostrils.

The route from rooftop to shore passed through brightly floodlit areas, overlooked by gun towers. There was a lot to do before they could get safely away. The three hugged the shadows as best they could and crawled to the edge of the roof. Morris hauled himself over the rim of the parapet and on to a pipe. Below was a 15m (50ft) drop, and he moved with infinite slowness, lest any sudden movement catch the eye of a guntower guard. He slid down the pipe with the same slow care, and waited for the Anglins to follow.

Away from the cell block the three men carefully made their way over a couple of fences and down a shallow cliff to the seashore. Across the water, the mainland beckoned, just a 2.5km (1.5 mile) swim away. Crouching in the damp sand, and shivering in the sharp sea breeze, they blew into their raincoat water wings, then waded into the freezing waters of San Francisco Bay…

West finally chipped away his false wall after midnight. He hurried up to the roof but Morris and the Anglins were long gone. Poking his head through the ventilator he disturbed a flock of seagulls. They made such a screeching he fled back to his cell in panic. He spent the rest of his sentence wondering what would have happened if the Anglins had given him fair warning of the escape. Maybe he'd be in a quiet backwater bar, with a long cool drink and a beautiful girl. Maybe he'd be lying at the bottom of San Francisco Bay, his bleached bones picked clean by crabs.