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| Photo: Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle |
It took the convicts on Alcatraz months to fashion the fake heads.
Using soap, concrete dust, swiped paint, bits of wire and even hair smuggled from the barber shop, they constructed the remarkable decoys used in the most famous prison escape in history.
Each night, inmates Frank Morris, along with brothers John and Clarence Anglin, placed the decoy heads in their cell beds as they undertook the months-long effort to tunnel out of their cells. On the night of June 11, 1962, they climbed to the roof and slipped into the chilly waters of San Francisco Bay, never to be seen again.
But in the 56 years since the sensational breakout that made headlines around the world and inspired a movie starring Clint Eastwood, the makeshift heads have badly deteriorated. One of the most delicate decoys was made from a wadded-up bedsheet.
Recognizing the need to preserve the valuable pieces of San Francisco’s history — and evidence in a case that remains open — the FBI devised a plan last year to build near-exact replicas of the dummy heads. The refashioned heads were recently completed at the FBI’s laboratory in Quantico, Va., and officials will gather Thursday on Alcatraz to hand them over to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area to be displayed on the Rock.
“This is part of the enduring legacy of what San Francisco is,” said John Bennett, special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Francisco field office. “One of the things we’re really proud of in this office is we’ve worked some of the biggest historical cases in the country.”
Before that fateful night in 1962, Alcatraz, an island prison surrounded by the vast moat of San Francisco Bay, was thought to be escape-proof. But unlike the previous attempts, which resulted in 10 inmates being killed over the prison’s nearly 30 years of operation, these inmates took their time.
Morris, who was said to have a near-genius IQ of 133, was the plan’s mastermind. He and the Anglin brothers, along with Allen West, who was left behind on the infamous night of the escape, were housed on the ground floor of the prison’s B block.
The plot took seven months to finish. The group of convicted bank robbers built drills from vacuum motors in the prison’s machine shop and used spoon handles to dig around vents in the back of their cells. After climbing up a network of pipes in a corridor behind the cellblock, they made it to a ventilation hole leading to the roof.
At night they placed the dummy heads in their cots, fooling the guards who made their hourly rounds as the convicts climbed to the top of the cell block and built a raft and life vests out of prison raincoats.
“The whole operation had an unusually dramatic flair as if scripted by a top film scenarist,” The Chronicle wrote in a front-page story the day after the escape.
The last time anyone saw the trio was around 9:30 p.m. At 7:15 the next morning, a guard tried to rouse Morris, pushing his dummy head off his cot and onto the floor. The head’s nose broke off.
A citywide scramble ensued. From the air, sea and land, law enforcement searched for the men. One of the only clues came days later when authorities found part of the group’s life raft bobbing in the waters north of San Francisco.
The fate of the men remains hotly debated. Some believe the men drowned. Others say they made it to the mainland and fled the country, possibly to South America.
Debates were rekindled after “Escape From Alcatraz,” a film about the escape starring Eastwood, was released in 1979. A movie prop head used in the filming is still on display in one of the prison’s cells.
Ever since the men escaped from a federal prison, the FBI has had a major role in the case.
“If these guys actually survived, they would still be fugitives from justice,” Bennett said. “If they were ever to be captured, we would be responsible to prosecute them.”
Building the replica heads was almost the opposite in every way to the furtive and rudimentary efforts by Morris and the Anglin brothers.
The FBI’s Operational Projects Unit last year sent a team to create a computer model of the heads with a 3-D laser scanner. That data was brought back to Quantico, where the FBI’s forensic artists and technical modelers 3-D printed the heads before using modeling paste and acrylic paints to fill in the details.
And much like the escapees, officials obtained hair from a local barbershop and dyed it to match the originals, said Paula Ernst, unit chief of the FBI’s Operational Projects Unit.
“We worked our best to make an exact match,” she said. “Some have green wires, so we painted those green. We really relied on photos with scale rulers and the laser to make a 1-to-1 scale match.”
The FBI was well-equipped to tackle the project. The Operational Projects Unit consists of a group of photographers, graphic artists and others with technical expertise who reproduce evidence for court. Their shop includes everything from woodworking tools, nails and hammers to high-end computer systems.
The unit has built mock explosives like those used in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, and scaled-down models of the theater scene of the 2012 Aurora, Colo., massacre.
“Being a part of preserving this historical record we took very seriously,” Ernst said. “When San Francisco asked for assistance, we were very glad to jump in.”
Officials at the FBI’s field office in San Francisco recently unboxed the heads in Bennett’s office, which is a bit of a museum itself. He keeps an original tommy-gun used by agents in the 1930s, and his walls are adorned with original classic Hollywood posters from movies about “G-men” starring actors like Edward G. Robinson and Clayton Moore.
“Just bringing these out for us to do this, they were incredibly concerned,” Bennett said, as he and others laid out the four replica heads on a table in his office. “We didn’t know if they were going to disintegrate.”
Wearing purple latex gloves, Special Agent Gail Paresa examined the new heads as she placed them on the table. As senior team leader for the FBI’s Evidence Response Team, she’s usually involved in more grim endeavors, such as exhuming bodies or collecting evidence from places like the Unabomber’s Montana shack.
“This was fun,” Paresa said. “We’re keeping history alive for the next generation.”
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