Relatives of escaped inmates whose bodies were never found mark 50th anniversary

A woman paddleboards past Alcatraz Island in San Francisco, Friday, March 9, 2012. The clear sunny conditions in the Bay area are expected to change with clouds and a chance of rain on Sunday.(AP Photo/Eric Risberg)


For 20th-century crime buffs, few capers match the intrigue and ingenuity of the “Escape from Alcatraz,” the 1962 prison break three inmates pulled off with stolen spoons, dummy heads and a raincoat raft.


The two Florida women are the younger sisters of John and Clarence Anglin, who along with fellow prisoner Frank Morris disappeared from the federal prison on Alcatraz Island 50 years ago. Whether the three men perished in chilly San Francisco Bay, as prison officials and federal agents insisted at the time, remains a subject of hot speculation because their bodies were never found.


“I’ve always believed they made it, and I haven’t changed my mind about that,” Widner, 76, said Monday while visiting the former penitentiary to commemorate the anniversary of her siblings’ daring getaway.

Widner’s sons arranged for their mother and aunt to visit Alcatraz because they wanted, in Kenneth Widner’s words, “to clear up some misnomers about the boys” that followed their unlikely escape’s passage into prison lore, a book and a Clint Eastwood movie.

Among those that rankle Mearl Taylor the most is the idea that her brothers were simpletons who benefited from a plan crafted by Morris and the belief that Clarence and John were hard-core criminals because they ended up in a prison designed for “desperate or irredeemable individuals.”

Like Morris, the Anglin brothers were serving sentences for bank robbery, but it was the pair’s history of previous escape attempts, coupled with a failed attempt to sneak Clarence out of the federal prison in Leavenworth, Kan., that got them sent to Alcatraz in 1960 and 1961.

“Just because they did this mischievous stuff growing up, they were not bad boys. They never caused no problems with the family. They just got out and did this mischievous stuff until it got to the bank robbery,” Taylor said. “I’m proud of them.”


U.S. Marshal Michael Dyke, who inherited the unsolved case in 2003, does not disagree with the sisters’ account. Dyke doesn’t know whether any of the trio is still alive. However, he’s seen enough evidence to make him wonder, which makes tracking down tips necessary.

The clues he considers the most tantalizing are credible reports that the Anglins’ mother, for several years, received flowers delivered without a card and that the brothers attended her 1973 funeral disguised in women’s clothes despite a heavy FBI presence.



