Brothers who escaped from Alcatraz were prepared from childhood, new book suggests

The fate of the infamous Alcatraz escapees has long been speculated upon, but a new book offers details that not only shed light on what happened, but also how the inmates may have used their childhood experiences to put their escape plan into action.

In June 1962, the infamous trio – inmates Frank Lee Morris, John Anglin and Clarence Anglin – escaped from one of the maximum security prisons, called “The Rock”, by breaking through walls and then climbing onto a makeshift raft.

In a new book Alcatraz: The Last Escape, Authors Ken Widner and Mike Lynch examine why the trio was so confident in their daring plan and what they may have done with their freedom, according to The Mercury News.

Widner, the Anglin brothers’ nephew, talks about the brothers’ upbringing and believes their childhood experiences prepared them for their escape. Lynch worked on a show about Alcatraz and helped recreate the prison break, writes journalist John Metcalfe in the The Mercury News Report.

Widner goes into detail about how the Anglin brothers grew up – impoverished, in a cramped house without running water – and says their upbringing gave them the resourcefulness to overcome difficult situations.

“No matter what it was, they knew how to make something out of nothing,” Widner said, according to Metcalfe.

Widner says the brothers were children of farm workers and were among 14 siblings. The family built their four-bedroom home themselves. The brothers, who were bullied because of their poverty, decided they wanted to earn respect through money, no matter the cost, Lynch says, according to the outlet.

After a bank robbery in 1958, John Anglin and Clarence Anglin, along with another Anglin brother, were sent to prison, where they eventually attempted to escape.

John and Clarence were then sent to Alcatraz, where they met Morris and joined forces to plan their escape. A key element of the escape was a tool made from a spoon that they used to dig through the walls, Widner writes.

“My mother once said that the brothers built their own bicycles,” Widner recalls, according to the outlet. “And I remember her telling me how they built this car and filled the tires with moss from the trees so the tires could roll.”

Not surprisingly, they were able to create various props – including “dummy heads” made of plaster, paint and hair from the prison barbershop, which they placed on their pillows to make it look like they were in their cells when the guards came to check on them.

In a sense, the concept of the heads had been in their heads their entire lives: The Anglin brothers reportedly enjoyed making dolls as children and used them to escape from their Florida reformatory, the book says.

“The first time they actually used them was when they sneaked out of the house as children,” says Widner.

Another aspect of their childhood that may have helped them? Growing up around motorboats in the tourist-heavy Little Manatee River area of ​​Florida, Lynch says.

“The boys tied themselves to the back of the boats and let themselves be towed down the river,” he says. He suspects that the brothers may have used this experience in their escape: first they stole power cables and then tied them to boats so that they could be towed through the water after leaving the island.

Want to stay up to date with the latest crime reports? Sign up for PEOPLE Free true crime newsletter with breaking crime news, ongoing trials and details of exciting unsolved cases.

Fred Brizzi, a drug smuggler, offered the authors exactly this explanation, suggesting that after the trio were towed to the middle of the bay, they were probably picked up by a boat that took them to a small airport, according to The Mercury News. The next day, according to Brizzi’s theory, the three were in Mexico.

In Mexico, the authors suspect, the three probably worked on a marijuana farm before fleeing to Brazil in 1964. The brothers and Widner’s family stayed in touch, says the escapee’s nephew, according to Metcalfe’s report. The nephew presented a photo from the 1970s that supposedly shows the brothers in Brazil.

“For me, this photo is probably the deciding factor in the story of the Alcatraz escape,” says Widner. “It was analyzed by five independent facial recognition software companies, and all of them came up with an accurate match for John Anglin. For Clarence, the result was pretty similar because (his face) wasn’t turned in a particular direction.”

The book is full of other such details, many of which are supported by family accounts.

Ken Widner and Mike Lynch’s Alcatraz: The Last Escape (Lyons Press, $30) is currently for sale.