On August 14, a band of seven or eight men armed with submachine guns robbed a mail truck carrying registered funds from banks on Cape Cod, Massachusetts to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. No shots were fired and no one was harmed, but the take of about $1.5 million was the most ever taken in a single armed robbery to that time. The heist took place after the truck was diverted from the main route by false detour signs and then flagged down by a fake policeman near Plymouth.

Postmaster General J. Edward Day reconstructs the robbers' route for a congressional committee.

On the night of June 14-15, Frank Morris, John Anglin, and Anglin's brother Clarence left dummies in their cots and made their way through a tunnel they had dug through the walls of Alcatraz Federal Prison. They then climbed a 30-foot pipe to the roof of a cell house, crossed rootops, clambered down another pipe and over a 15-foot fence at the water's edge, where their trails ended. Whether the men somehow made it safely across San Francisco Bay to the mainland was not determined, nor were their bodies found.

The dummy head found in Frank Morris' cot.

Two other Alcatraz inmates managed to escape from Alcatraz on the night of December 16. Darl Lee Parker, a bank robber, was captured 28 minutes later on a small outcropping only a hundred yards from the main island. John Paul Scott, another bank robber, managed to make it to the mainland before being caught, however, six hours later on a rock directly under the Golden Gate Bridge.

John Paul Scott is returned to Alcatraz after his three-mile swim across San Francisco Bay.

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This page was last updated on June 13, 2018.