cell He stood eagerly at the bars and looked around He listened as the guards walked down the aisle and counted prisoners one at a time He had reason to believe that the count might be short this morning His friends had planned a daring overnight escape from the escape-proof prison He hoped they had made it What Carnes heard next made his heart leap One of the guards called for a recount It was possible that the guard had simply made a mistake and needed to count again But Carnes didn’t think so His friends were smart and they had a good plan They had been working on their escape for months and had been painstaking about every last detail Right now Carnes imagined they were breathing fresh outside air He suppressed a smile as Officer Lawrence Bartlett the guard on duty counted again Officer Bartlett soon noticed that prisoner John J W Anglin had not gotten up He walked over reached between the bars and tapped the prisoner’s pillow But Anglin did not respond Bartlett called Lieutenant Bill Long down for a look He told Long that Anglin was either dead or he had
been replaced by a life-sized dummy Long poked Anglin’s head Still Anglin just lay there He poked it again harder and this time his fingers pushed right through Startled he swatted the head and it rolled off the bunk onto the floor It was a dummy Long jumped back Long reached through the bars yanked the blanket down and saw rolled up blankets and clothes that Anglin had placed there to look like his body He quickly went to the next cell that of Clarence Anglin John’s brother and pulled off his blanket Clarence’s bed was also filled with blankets and a fake head There was one more prisoner missing from the head count Frank Morris Long dashed over to Morris’s cell and pulled the covers off his dummy head and blankets He was gone too A call was made to acting Warden Arthur Dollison He lived in a duplex on the island with his family When the phone rang in his home Dollison felt a chill of dread go through him It could not be good news to get a phone call right after the morning count As he and more officers
rushed to the cellblock an escape alarm blared throughout the prison and all across the island indoors and out Adding to the commotion another prisoner was calling out to the guards from his cell I planned the entire escape Allen West cried out In his hands he held what looked like a vent cover only it was made of cardboard Meanwhile officers climbed up on top of Cellblock B which was constructed of prison cells stacked three-high Looking up they saw a roof vent that had its bars removed The prisoners had gone through there The vent shaft led to the roof and was capped by a rain hood But when officers got to the roof they saw that the rain hood had been knocked aside On the north side of the building barbed wire had been cut from the fence Outside the fence the grass was matted down as if people had been there The officers could hardly believe their eyes The Rock the impenetrable fortress of Alcatraz had been breached Dozens of officers fanned out all over the island They searched the cell house the workshops storerooms and
other buildings They checked an old dungeon below the cell house They scoured the beaches tramped through shrubbery and inspected the caves along the shore By boat they patrolled the water around the island looking for bodies in the cold churning sea At this point Alcatraz officers realized that Frank Morris John Anglin and Clarence Anglin were most likely not on the island anymore They called the San Francisco office of the FBI and informed them of what had happened The FBI alerted the local police the California Highway Patrol the U S Navy the U S Coast Guard and all the sheriffs offices in the area A search was begun by land air and sea It was 7 55 a m about 40 minutes after the morning head count and a federal investigation was underway Back in Cellblock B officers questioned other prisoners including Clarence Carnes and Allen West Years later Carnes claimed to know a lot about the escape He said he had helped Morris and the Anglin brothers with several details But he kept his mouth shut at the time and
