Brothers Who Escaped Alcatraz Were Prepared by Childhood, New Book Suggests

Speculation has long surrounded the fate of the infamous Alcatraz escapees, but a new book offers details that not only shed light on what happened but also how the inmates might have used their childhood experiences to carry out their escape plan.

In June 1962, the infamous trio — prisoners Frank Lee Morris, John Anglin and Clarence Anglin — escaped one of the most high-security prisons, dubbed “The Rock,” by chipping through walls and then accessing 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 possibly did with their freedom, according to The Mercury News. 

Widner, the Anglin brothers’ nephew, discusses the brothers’ upbringing and posits that their childhood experiences prepared them for their escape. Lynch worked on a show about Alcatraz and helped re-create the jailbreak, journalist John Metcalfe writes in the The Mercury News report.

Widner delves into how the Anglin brothers grew up — impoverished, living in a cramped house with no plumbing — and says their upbringing gave them a resourcefulness to overcome difficult situations.

“It didn’t matter what it was, they knew how to take nothing and make something out of it,” Widner says, per Metcalfe. 

Widner says the brothers were children of farmworkers, and were among 14 siblings. The family built its four-room house itself. The brothers, bullied because of their poverty, decided their way to earn respect was money, at any cost, Lynch says, per the outlet.

After a 1958 bank robbery, John Anglin and Clarence Anglin, along with another Anglin brother, were sent to prison, where they ended up attempting an escape.

John and Clarence were then sent to Alcatraz, where they met Morris and banded together to plot their escape. A key component of the escape was a tool fashioned from a spoon that was used to dig through the walls, writes Widner.

“My mom said one time [that the brothers] created their own bicycles,” Widner recalls, per the outlet. “And I remember she told me how they built this car and took the tires and filled them full of moss off the trees, so the tires could roll.”

It’s no surprise, then, that they were able to make various props — including “dummy heads” made out of plaster, paint, and hair taken from the prison barbershop, which they propped on their pillows to make it look like they were in their cells when the guards checked on them.

In some ways, the concept of the heads had been in the making their whole lives: The Anglin brothers reportedly enjoyed making dummies as kids and used them to escape their Florida reform school, the book states.

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

Another aspect of their childhood that possibly helped them? Growing up near power boats in the area of Florida’s tourist-heavy Little Manatee River, says Lynch. 

“The boys used to tie themselves to the back of these boats and get towed down the river,” he says. He theorizes that the brothers could have used this expertise in their escape: First, they would steal electrical cords, and then, they would tie the cords to boats to get towed in the water after they left the island.

Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Sign up for PEOPLE’s free True Crime newsletter for breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases.

Fred Brizzi, a drug smuggler, offered this very explanation to the authors, suggesting that once the trio got towed into the middle of the Bay, they were likely picked up by a boat which took them to a small airport, per The Mercury News. By the next day, according to Brizzi’s theory, the three were in Mexico.

In Mexico, the authors suggest, the three likely worked on a marijuana farm, before escaping to Brazil in 1964. The brothers and Widner’s family stayed in touch, the escapees’ nephew says, according to Metcalfe’s report. The nephew produced a photo from the 1970s that purports to show the brothers in Brazil.

“To me, that photo is probably the biggest game-changer in the history of the Alcatraz escape,” says Widner. “It’s been analyzed by five independent facial-recognition software companies, and they all come back for an exact match on John Anglin. With Clarence, it came back close, because [his face] wasn’t turned in a certain way.”

The book is brimming with more such details — many of which are backed up by family accounts.

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