Frank Lee Morris

Actor

Born: Washington, District of Columbia, USA

BIOGRAPHY

The June 1962 Alcatraz escape attempt was a prison break from Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, a maximum-security facility located on an island in San Francisco Bay, undertaken by inmates Frank Morris and John and Clarence Anglin. The three men were able to escape from their cells and leave the island in a makeshift raft. It remains unknown what happened to them after entering San Francisco Bay.Morris and the Anglins attempted to escape on the night of June 11, 1962. They availed of the unguarded 3 ft wide utility corridor of B-Block which ran across behind their cells and reached above to all floors of the prison complex with pipes for them to climb. To access the corridor, the prisoners had meticulously chiselled out the vent at the back of their cells, using such makeshift tools as a spoon soldered with the silver from a dime and a drill improvised from the motor of a purloined vacuum cleaner. Alcatrazs music hour, a recently-implemented loosening of the stringent rules, came as a boon to the three conspirators: dozens of men simultaneously playing the accordion and other instruments made a cacophony that resounded through the cement-walled cellblock and served to disguise their drilling. Their progress was concealed by false walls which, in the dark recesses of the cells, fooled the guards. When they were finally able to pass through the vents, at an appointed time each night, they climbed to the top of the cellblock to prepare their egress from the prison. Their absence would have been noticed by the guards, who made hourly rounds, were it not for the lifelike dummy heads that the inmates dutifully left on their cots; repurposing soap, concrete powder, and even hair pilfered from the barbershop, they had fashioned remarkable decoy dummy heads resembling themselves that succeeded to fool the guards. As they conspired to bust out to the roof via a fan vent, they first removed the blades and then the motor of the same, leaving only a grille; next, with a carborundum abrasive cord smuggled from the prison workshop, they extracted the rivets of the grille, clearing the shaft for their passage. The escapees, further, dedicated many a week to constructing an improvised inflatable raft along with life vests from an excess of fifty prison raincoats, all stolen. This, too, was carried out on the topmost level of the cellblock; since it lay perpetually vacant and was concealed from the sight of guards by sheets, those having been draped on all sides lest the occasional sweeper should send dust falling to the vigilantly polished floors below. Late on Monday, June 11, the three inmates tucked their dummy heads into their beds, broke out of the main prison building via the unused utility corridor, and departed from Alcatraz Island aboard the raft to an uncertain fate.The FBI investigation was aided by another prisoner, Allen West, who had been part of the escape group but was left behind. West, to stop his false wall from slipping, had resorted to using cement only to find that it set. As Morris and the Anglins accelerated the schedule, West desperately chipped away at his wall; but by the time he got out, his companions were long gone. No conclusive evidence has ever surfaced to either prove the success or failure of the attempt. In 1979, the FBI officially concluded, based on circumstantial evidence and a preponderance of expert opinion, that the men drowned in the frigid waters of San Francisco Bay while trying to reach land.But notwithstanding the conclusion of the FBI report, the case file of the U.S. Marshals Service remains open and active. Morris and the Anglin brothers are still included in its wanted list. In the early 2010s, circumstantial evidence came to light which would appear to suggest that the men had survived: contrary to official insistence, investigators did find a raft on Angel Island; and, though the FBI asserted that no cars were reported stolen, a 1955 blue Chevrolet was stolen after the escape by three men, who may have been Morris and the Anglins. The import of the leaked evidence thus suggests that officials engaged in a cover-up. Relatives of the Anglin brothers presented further circumstantial evidence in the mid-2010s in support of a longstanding rumor that the Anglin brothers had fled to Brazil following the escape; a facial recognition analyst concluded that the one piece of physical evidence, a 1975 photograph of two men alleged to be John and Clarence Anglin, did support that conclusion. No evidence has been produced to disclose the whereabouts of Frank Morris.

Bio from Wikipedia - See more on en.wikipedia.org Text under CC-BY-SA license

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