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Timecapsule: December 16, 1937
Braving armed guards, bone-chilling water, and a mythical one-finned shark named Bruce, Theodore Cole and Ralph Roe take advantage of the heaviest fog on record to escape from the escape-proof prison island of Alcatraz.
The two were incorrigible criminals -- and escape artists. Roe had once broken out of an Oklahoma pen by stuffing himself into a shipping crate, and Cole had successfully used the old "laundry bag" routine in Texas. Garbage cans, hacksaws, guns carved from wood -- they'd tried them all.
That's why they ended up on the Rock .
Here's a condensed version of their legendary escape: Under cover of fog, the two used heavy tools to cut through the bars of a blacksmith shop and break a padlock on the prison fence. They clambered down to the water's edge ... and were never seen again.
Alarms were sounded, a massive manhunt was launched, but that fog made chances of spotting the two unlikely -- and frankly, not a soul thought they'd survive that cold, cold water. The warden summed up the official attitude this way:
"Serving terms tantamount to life imprisonment, it is my belief they decided to take a desperate chance and that they had no outside aid. I believe they drowned and that their bodies were swept toward the Golden Gate by the strong ebb tide."
Though the FBI stated that the hunt for Roe and Cole would "go on until they are found—dead or alive”, the invulnerability of the Rock remained officially unbroken.
That's more or less how things stood until 1941, when an article in the Chronicle busted the case open again:
“Ralph Roe and Theodore Cole ... are alive. They are now living in South America; (and) have resided for periods in both Peru and Chile. The only prisoners ever to stage a successful break on “The Rock,” they have eluded all the law enforcement agencies engaged in one of the Nation’s greatest manhunts."
The article reported that a makeshift “raft” of two large, air-tight oil cans had been planted on the island's rocky shoreline, and that a small boat had picked the two men up minutes after their escape. A car was waiting on the north shore, and the two zipped up the Redwood Highway and out of the Bay Area before the manhunt could really get rolling. They made their way to the Mexican border, where a confederate was waiting with a suitcase full of money -- and Bob's your uncle, they were out of the country.
The report goes on to allege that just before the escape, Roe and Cole had told fellow inmates that “If we make it, a letter will come back to one of you. That letter will say business was good in the month in which the letter was written.” Sure enough, in July of '38 a letter was received by one of the inmates which stated: “Business was good in July.”
As romantic as this account seems, there's reason to be skeptical -- for one thing, many years later fellow convicts claimed to not only to have known about the escape plot, but to having seen the two sucked under the waves by the chilling undertow, and drowned.
Turns out that this is one of those stories where you, dear listener, get to choose your own favourite ending. South America? Eaten by crabs? We'll never know for sure. And if Bruce the one-finned shark played a role -- well, we'll never know that either.
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I just eat these stories up... thanks!
Me too. I like to believe that everyone who tried to escape succeeded.