Dummy head used by John Anglin to fool prison guards during his escape from Alcatraz Prison. Him and his 2 companions whereabouts are still unknown. The head was made of cloth, soap, toothpaste, concrete-dust and human hair.
On June 11, 1962, three Alcatraz inmates used dummy heads to pull off perhaps the most daring prison break in recorded history. That night, brothers Clarence and John Anglin and their friend Frank Morris managed to make it off “The Rock” — but whether they made it safely to shore remains a mystery to this day.
Six months earlier, Morris had noticed that the concrete walls around his cell’s ventilation duct were crumbling from decades of salt water saturation. Soon, the three of them were spending every possible opportunity chipping away at the ducts using discarded saw blades they found on the prison grounds and even a makeshift drill they fashioned using a vacuum motor. Meanwhile, Morris would play his accordion to mask the noise.
Once the holes were large enough to fit through, they moved onto the next phase. They made dummy heads from soap, toothpaste, concrete dust, toilet paper, and barbershop hair and left them in their beds at night while they mapped a route through the prison’s service corridors. Finally, they hand-sewed a raft and life jackets from pieces of rubber and old raincoats and constructed paddles from wood scraps and screws from the prison shop. And once they escaped, no one even noticed they were gone until the next morning because their dummy heads had been so convincing.
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