Original subtitles

WILLIAM SHATNER: A master of deception,

who was known as "The Great Impostor"...

an elusive serial killer

who taunted the police with puzzling messages...

and a gunslinger from the Wild West

who may have faked his own death.

Throughout history, there have been clever criminals

who managed to outsmart both the police and the public.

These larger-than-life figures capture our curiosity

and make us wonder, just what were they thinking

when they pulled off their daring crimes?

As we investigate the misdeeds of infamous outlaws,

can we unravel the complexity

of the criminal mind?

Well, that is what we'll try and find out.

♪ ♪

As the Korean War rages around it,

the Royal Canadian destroyer HMCS Cayuga

brings aboard 19 badly wounded South Korean soldiers

requiring immediate surgery.

Dr. Joseph Cyr,

the ship's newly arrived physician,

is called upon to perform

a series of procedures to save the men's lives.

There's quite a few wounded men.

They're taken on board and the ship captain

tells Dr. Cyr, "You have to operate.

You have to save these guys."

So, according to all accounts,

Dr. Cyr takes this relatively calmly

and goes to it.

SHATNER: While the patients are prepped for surgery,

Dr. Cyr reviews a medical textbook in his private quarters

to prepare himself for what would be the defining moment

of not only his career but his entire life.

HENDLEY: He performs a number of operations

on these wounded South Korean soldiers,

removing bullets, doing chest surgery,

and by all accounts, he was successful.

SHATNER: The story of Dr. Cyr's valiant performance

hit Canadian newspapers and spread like wildfire.

Across the country, people read about

the naval doctor's heroic efforts

to save the lives of the Korean soldiers.

But there was at least one woman who was stunned

by the news that Dr. Joseph Cyr had become a national hero.

And as it turned out,

she had a very good reason to be surprised.

HENDLEY: The mother of Dr. Joseph Cyr was reading the newspaper

and reads this account of her son.

So she phones her son up and her son is sort of like,

"Uh, no, I'm still posted in New Brunswick.

I'm not on a ship, what are you talking about?"

And it becomes obvious very quickly

that the guy on board the destroyer is an impostor.

The mother of the real doctor contacts the RCMP-

Canada's equivalent of the FBI-

and the shipboard captain on the destroyer is told,

"Uh, well, your surgeon is an impostor.

Uh, we've, uh, got to take him into custody."

He's taken back to Canada, he's put before a court

that would reveal that he's Ferdinand Demara

of Lawrence, Massachusetts.

SHATNER: An American from Massachusetts

masquerading as a Canadian Naval doctor in the Sea of Japan?

But how, and why?

HARVEY ROSENSTOCK: Ferdinand Demara is a very fascinating man.

First of all, he came from a middle-class family,

very comfortable.

But then, they suffered the Great Depression.

They had to move, they had to downgrade, as it were.

They get to a poor neighborhood,

less of the affluent or semi-affluent amenities.

So, he went from a lot to less,

but it seemed to bother him more than his parents,

the best that we can tell.

And therefore, he had to fill in the difference.

HENDLEY: By all accounts, he's a very smart kid.

You know, does well at school.

But he drops out of high school

and he starts this weird sort of moving around

and trying on new personas.

ROSENSTOCK: It turns out

that he has the ability to memorize very quickly.

He even claimed that he had a photographic memory,

so that he could look at something,

say, "That really belongs to me,"

and with a very good intellect, he could carry this off.

And he found he could borrow any kind of credential

and become that person represented by that credential.

HENDLEY: He starts that from a very early age,

and he joins the military,

goes AWOL, joins other branches of the military.

And one of his very early impersonations,

he pretends to be a Trappist monk and joins a monastery.

At the time he was pretending to be a Christian monk,

he made friends with a Canadian doctor named Joseph Cyr,

and he then goes to enlist in the Canadian Navy

and announces that he's Dr. Joseph Cyr,

and uses the same credentials that the real doctor had.

There's a war going on at the time in Korea,

so they don't ask too many questions.

They're just delighted to get a surgeon.

SHATNER: In addition to posing as a military surgeon and a monk,

Demara tried his hand at impersonating

a number of other professions,

including civil engineer, zoologist, psychologist,

philosophy professor and lawyer, among many others.

Demara became so adept at impersonation

that he eventually became known by his most famous alias of all,

"The Great Impostor."

Ironically, Demara's life went full circle.

After pretending to be

all these different identities his whole life,

in the end, he became famous for who he was.

Oh, I've been a surgeon lieutenant

in the Royal Canadian Navy.

-You operated on people? -Mm-hmm.

(audience laughter)

Isn't that rather dangerous?

-Uh, you might say that. -Mm-hmm.

Where did you steal your new credentials?

-I acquire these things. -Yeah.

I know, you keep telling me that.

I hate to bring the word "steal" into this conversation.

HENDLEY: He appeared on You Bet Your Life with Groucho Marx,

and he makes it clear that he "acquired credentials,"

and that he's going to use his prize money

to buy more credentials.

Were you in jail in-in, uh, Canada?

-No. No. -In the United States, have you ever been in jail?

Yes, I have been in jail.

I spent a year in the Texas State Penitentiary.

Well, it's about time, I... that somebody nailed you.

What were you in there for?

Uh, I was in there as deputy warden.

Oh.

(laughter)

As a result of that, everybody wants to meet him,

wants to talk about him, wants to hear about him.

-Are you Martin Goddard? -Yes, I am.

And your real name is Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr.?

ROSENSTOCK: And then, when Tony Curtis

acted in The Great Impostor,

he became famous because he could fool the world.

ALEXANDER STEIN: In many respects, to be an impostor

is fairly normal,

although we think of them as somehow pathological.

In fact, there are many people who do it for work.

Actors are a form of impostors.

There are people who put on a costume

or a uniform to transform themselves in some way

that gives them some measure of authority in their work.

SHATNER: Let's face it,

at one time or another, most of us have fantasized

about trying on a new identity,

like when we engage in role-playing games

or wear costumes on Halloween.

For most of us, of course,

the fantasy remains simply that: a fantasy.

But in the case of Ferdinand Demara,

the Great Impostor, by pretending to be a surgeon,

is it possible that, in his mind, at least,

he actually became one?

Ferdinand Demara impersonated a surgeon.

He wasn't a surgeon, but during the Korean War

while he was on a ship, he saved lives.

His ability to adapt from impersonation

might have given him the ability to adapt

under a stressful situation.

Con man, of course, "con" is a kind of a nickname.

The origin of that word is "confidence."

In the case of someone like Ferdinand Demara,

because of his success

in being able to truly believe every one of his fantasies

as one new piece of reality,

he can act it out in such a real way

for a limited period of time.

SHATNER: By the time of his death,

from a heart attack on June 7, 1982,

Ferdinand Demara had spent

the last several years of his life

as a Baptist minister, and later, a counselor

at Good Samaritan Hospital in Anaheim, California.

In his obituary, Demara's lawyer and good friend Melvin Belli

is quoted as saying, "I never heard him say

he had any regrets about anything."

And why should there be?

After all, most of us can only live one life at a time.

Ferdinand Demara was able to live several.

SHATNER: Sandra Boss, a recent Harvard Business School graduate,

marries Clark Rockefeller, a man who is known to her

as a member of one of the wealthiest

and most powerful families in America.

After the couple's fairy-tale wedding,

Sandra went to work

for a prestigious consulting firm in Boston

while Clark resumed working on international poverty relief.

But the fairy tale didn't last long.

MARK SEAL: He claimed he was working on so many high-level things,

but he wasn't contributing to the marriage financially.

He said, "Well, to charge these struggling countries

a fee would be, you know, unconscionable."

He didn't seem to want to go out and get a regular job.

And so she was beginning to get tired of this.

SHATNER: After more than ten years of marriage,

Sandra Boss finally had enough and filed for divorce.

It was a decision that would not only unravel her marriage

but also unravel the strange truth about her husband.

Clark Rockefeller had no passport,

no credit cards, no birth certificate

that she could find.

HENDLEY: She can't come up with any documentation.

So she really has the whip hand during the divorce,

and she ends up winning custody of their daughter, Snooks.

He's absolutely gobsmacked by this, and he's miserable

because he is actually devoted to his daughter.

So he comes up with this hairbrained plan,

and he kidnaps his daughter.

SHATNER: The FBI immediately launched a nationwide manhunt,

but Clark Rockefeller had vanished into thin air.

And the reason the authorities had such a hard time

tracking down Clark Rockefeller was because...

there was no Clark Rockefeller.

EDWARD SAVIO: So, I'm at home.

My brother calls me.

He goes, "Turn on CNN right now."

I turn on the TV, and I look, and I go...

"That's Christian Gerhartsreiter."

And it says right across the top, "Clark Rockefeller."

So we called the FBI and said,

"This is Christian Gerhartsreiter."

He is a German exchange student that came to our house.

I was 15 at the time, and he was 17.

But the FBI, like, they didn't even know his name.

SEAL: It was covered in all the media, on television,

and when the Amber Alert was issued,

he was apprehended.

He was returned to Boston to face charges.

And that's when his incredible life

of all these different personas unspooled.

SHATNER: At trial, Sandra watched as her husband,

the man she had believed to be a member of

the Rockefeller family,

was sentenced to four to five years in prison

for custodial kidnapping.

But what was it that compelled Christian to lie to his friends,

family and associates for so long?

ROBBINS: The phenomenon of an impostor is,

it's an interesting dichotomy that somebody has to live with.

They have two stories constantly colliding.

And often, if you're gonna perpetuate that consistently,

you have to almost have a form of delusion

to be able to compartmentalize one of those realities,

so that you can live your life

without having this other one on the back burner.

SHATNER: Are impostors who carry out elaborate deceptions

acting out a kind of wish-fantasy?

And if so, how does this fantasy first take hold in their mind?

For the answer, perhaps it's best to look

all the way back into Christian's past.

Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter grew up in West Germany.

By all accounts he was kind of a bit of an oddball,

prone to fantasy, little on the nerdy side

and really wanted to get out of West Germany.

So, in 1978, he travels to the United States

and shows up on the doorstep of this family in Connecticut

called the Savios,

and sort of went into high school,

said he was an exchange student

and things got progressively stranger from there.

SAVIO: He told me that his father created parts for Mercedes-Benz,

and of course, you know, they had money,

you know, servants.

We all knew it was ridiculous.

We laughed at it at the time.

SHATNER: By 1985, Christian had taken up residence

on the West Coast.

He had also taken a new name.

He moved to San Marino,

which is a rich community in Southern California,

and assumed the name Christopher Chichester

and announced that he was part of the British royal family.

He would go get free lunches

at social clubs and private members clubs.

He'd start schmoozing up all the rich ladies in town,

attends a very fancy church.

Ends up living in the guesthouse

of a local woman named Ruth Sohus.

He lives there rent-free and all is well for a while,

but then Ruth's son, John, shows up with his wife Linda.

And John apparently was a bit suspicious

of this strange guy living in mom's guesthouse.

And then all of a sudden Linda and her husband disappear.

SHATNER: Soon after Linda and John Sohus disappeared

so did Christopher Chichester.

And Christian, the impostor, moved back to the East Coast,

where he would eventually live under his most infamous alias:

Clark Rockefeller.

The rest, as they say, is history.

But not before this bizarre story

took yet another unexpected twist.

In March of 2011,

after Christian was convicted of kidnapping his daughter,

authorities in California gathered enough evidence

to charge him with a more serious crime

than any he had been charged with before:

the 1985 murder of John Sohus.

SEAL: Ruth Sohus had passed away

and another couple had bought her home

and were installing a swimming pool.

HENDLEY: Where Christian lived in San Marino,

they dug up the backyard and discovered human remains,

and the body was cut up into pieces,

but it was wearing the same kind of clothes

that John Sohus typically wore-

jeans and a flannel shirt.

And apparently parts were in bags from schools

that Christian Gerhartsreiter had attended.

So then he was put on trial for murdering John Sohus.

He was found guilty, and he is now an inmate

in San Quentin Prison in California.

The police detective that I interviewed said

that the motive was money.

He was to inherit a sizable amount of money

from Ruth Sohus, and that's what they believed.

And Linda Sohus had disappeared off the face of the Earth.

What happened to Linda?

That's still an enduring mystery of this case.

SHATNER: Impostors like Christian, who are willing to lie-

or even kill- for the sake of protecting an illusion

would certainly seem to be troubled, misguided individuals.

But if that's true, then why do so many of us

fall for their deceptions?

ROBBINS: The secret to a con is

not about manufacturing a whole fake reality.

Instead, it's finding the story

that people are telling themselves

and just elaborating on it.

They're able to compartmentalize this reality

because they're not worried about somebody else.

These together present opportunity for somebody

to be very evil.

SHATNER: Today, instead of going by the name Clark Rockefeller,

Christian is known as inmate number AR3108

at San Quentin State Prison.

Hopefully, his days of adopting false identities

have been ended forever.

SHATNER: The city is gripped by fear

after a number of horrific and unsolved murders

are committed by a shadowy serial killer.

The panic reaches a fever pitch

when the killer releases a series of chilling notes,

in which he refers to himself as the Zodiac.

Three virtually identical handwritten letters arrived

at the offices of three California newspapers.

And those letters took credit for the crimes

and included details from the crimes,

including the ammunition that was used,

the positions of the victims, and things like that.

And then another letter that was sent on August 4 of 1969,

was the first to use the name the Zodiac.

The Zodiac's crime spree is often referred to

as a reign of terror.

And that's because his murders

not only sent fear throughout the community,

but he eventually threatened to murder schoolchildren on a bus.

He also said he was gonna use a bomb.

He threatened to kill dozens of people over a weekend.

So there were a lot of threats that sent fear

through the community.

DAVID ORANCHAK: His name really got out there, and on top of that,

Zodiac's victims were selected presumably randomly.

And so people felt like, "Well, he could be around the corner,

ready to kill me or us."

So he became kind of like a boogeyman

waiting to kill somebody out of the blue.

SHATNER: The Zodiac's reign of terror became national news,

not only because of the frightening nature

of his crimes

but also because some of his mysterious letters

were written in code.

The Zodiac, as macabre as this sounds,

turned his killings into a game,

not just for law enforcement to try to figure out

but for the average citizen.

These ciphers sort of served as a way

for people to play his game.

Can you figure out who I am?

So, using these codes,

while it made Zodiac incredibly scary,

it also made him intriguing, because...

anybody could figure out who the Zodiac Killer is,

if you know how to play his game correctly.

SHATNER: The Zodiac's claim that the ciphers

revealed his true identity

taunted the police and the public.

Both the authorities and amateurs alike

poured over the encrypted letters,

hoping to crack the killer's devious codes.

JARROUSH: The first cipher of the Zodiac,

it's commonly referred to as the 408 cipher.

That was actually solved in a matter of days by

a couple of citizens in the San Francisco Bay area.

BUTTERFIELD: A local high school economics teacher and his wife,

Donald and Bettye Harden,

decided to take the killer's challenge

and spend a weekend trying to solve that cipher.

And they were able to find a solution.

Unfortunately, the Hardens' solution

did not reveal the killer's identity.

But it did begin with the phrase:

Then he talked about collecting slaves for his afterlife.

SHATNER: The shocking content of the first cipher

heightened public panic about the Zodiac.

But the killer's second cipher, known as Z-340,

would not be solved so easily.

BUTTERFIELD: The Zodiac's second cipher consisted of 340 symbols.

Unfortunately, that cipher was very difficult to solve.

And he may have made it that way deliberately

because he may have been upset that his first cipher

was solved so quickly.

SHATNER: Despite years of effort,

the Z-340 cipher eluded decryption.

By 1974, the Zodiac had released more than 20 letters,

in which he claimed to have killed 37 people.

And then, after a five-year reign of terror,

his communications abruptly ceased,

and the case went cold.

It seemed that the codes- and the crimes-

of this evil genius

were destined to remain unsolved.

More than 30 years would pass

before software engineer David Oranchak

became inspired to take on the Z-340 cipher.

I first heard about the Zodiac ciphers

when the Zodiac movie came out in 2007.

And so there was already kind of a vibrant community

of people involved with the Zodiac cipher specifically.

So when I saw that, I thought,

"Hey, I want to take a crack at that."

Because I'm a programmer, uh, I like puzzles

and it would be very cool to be able to-to crack that.

SHATNER: To try and solve the cipher, David Oranchak teamed up

with Australian mathematician Sam Blake

and Belgian computer programmer Jarl Van Eycke.

The team became kind of this collaboration of people

that would run experiments, try out different ideas,

come up with computer programs

and different kind of specialized tools

in order to try out these ideas

or to just run a bunch of keys and try to break the code.

SHATNER: In spite of their combined efforts, the Z-340 cipher

seemed like it might be an unbreakable code.

But then, after 15 years of challenging work,

the team finally cracked it.

ORANCHAK: It was very satisfying to decrypt the message.

It was very exciting.

Once we had the solution,

I put together a report and sent it to my contacts

in the code-breaking unit of the FBI.

And then very quickly they came back to us and said,

"This looks good, it looks strong,

looks like the real solution,"

and that's when the media storm hit.

SHATNER: The revelation that the Z-340 cipher

had been broken, more than 50 years after it was released,

made headlines around the world.

But unfortunately, the decrypted message

did not reveal the killer's identity.

However, the search continues,

because there are other Zodiac ciphers

that are yet to be solved, the most fascinating of which

is called Z-13.

This cipher will literally make you pull your hair out,

because at first glance,

you would think it's got to be easy.

There's only 13 characters in the cipher.

What's worse, is that it starts with the phrase,

"My name is..."

He's literally telling you, "Here's who I am."

And to this day, no one's been able to figure it out as of yet.

Until cipher Z-13 can finally be solved,

it seems that the true identity of the Zodiac Killer

will continue to remain a mystery.

But there's another master criminal

whose name is quite well known.

He's the notorious gunslinger William H. Bonney,

better known as Billy the Kid.

And some people believe that this outlaw eluded justice

by faking his own death.

SHATNER: Each year, thousands of tourists travel to this small rural town,

located 160 miles east of Albuquerque,

to visit a museum dedicated

to the most notorious outlaw of the Old West...

Billy the Kid.

Among the attractions is a tombstone where,

according to the history books,

the gunslinger was laid to rest.

DOWNS: Billy the Kid claimed to have killed 21 men,

one for each year of his short life.

(gunfire)

(screams)

DOWNS: He escaped prison at least three times,

he was shot and stabbed,

and these things all added to the legend

and the lore surrounding him.

At the height of his infamy,

there was a $500 bounty on Billy the Kid's head,

which was a crazy amount of money at that time period.

That resulted in Sheriff Pat Garrett

and his sizable posse trying to hunt him down.

According to official accounts,

he was shot down by Pat Garrett in 1881

and laid to rest in Sumner, New Mexico.

SHATNER: In 1882, Sheriff Pat Garrett published a book entitled

An Authentic Life of Billy the Kid,

which described Garrett's encounters with the outlaw,

including their final showdown in Sumner, New Mexico.

For decades, historians considered the book

to be the definitive account of the death of Billy the Kid.

But then, in the 1940s, new information came to light

which suggested that, incredibly,

Billy the Kid had evaded justice

and survived for more than 60 years.

Investigator and lawyer William Morrison

visits this rural community

in search of an elderly prospector and cowboy named

Brushy Bill Roberts.

Morrison has traveled to meet with Brushy Bill

because he has reason to believe that Bill

may in fact be Billy the Kid.

NELIGH: In 1949, William Morrison came across somebody

who said he knew that Billy the Kid was still alive

and living in Texas

and William Morrison decided

that that's who he needed to find.

So, he went to Texas

and he found Brushy Bill Roberts.

When he asked Brushy Bill if he was Billy the Kid,

Brushy Bill said, "Okay, I am Billy the Kid,

"and I will tell my story if you can secure me a pardon

"from the governor of New Mexico

for the crimes that I committed."

DOWNS: Brushy Bill was hesitant to admit to being Billy the Kid

because there was still technically

a warrant out for his arrest

and he'd been sentenced to death and if he were recaptured,

he technically could have still been executed.

SHATNER: It may seem outlandish to consider the possibility

that Brushy Bill Roberts was Billy the Kid.

But the truth is that the more William Morrison

investigated Brushy Bill's story

the more he started to believe that it could be true.

William Morrison thought that Brushy Bill

very well could be Billy the Kid.

He had knife wounds and bullet wounds

that seemed to fit with the Kid's story.

In addition, Morrison found several different people

who knew the Kid in the olden days

who were willing to sign affidavits

saying that, "Yeah, indeed, Brushy Bill was Billy the Kid."

SHATNER: While the evidence in favor of Brushy Bill's story

was compelling, many skeptics asked an obvious question:

If Billy the Kid didn't actually die in 1881,

then who is buried in the grave site

located in Fort Sumner, New Mexico?

The official account of Billy the Kid's death

comes from Pat Garrett.

But there's a lot of inconsistencies

in Garrett's story from the very beginning.

He said that Billy was armed,

but when the body was examined, there was no weapon on him.

The body was described as having facial hair.

Billy the Kid was always described

as not having facial hair.

The body was also described as having dark skin,

and Billy was always described as fair-skinned.

So, all of the inconsistencies in Garrett's story

raises a lot of doubt into his version

of Billy the Kid's death

and it opens the door for the possibility

that Garrett shot the wrong man.

And Billy the Kid could have survived,

and Brushy Bill Roberts really could have been Billy the Kid.

SHATNER: With the help of William Morrison,

Brushy Bill was able to secure a meeting

with Thomas Mabry, the governor of New Mexico,

in an effort to finally receive a pardon

for the crimes of Billy the Kid.

But unfortunately, the meeting did not go well

for Brushy Bill.

NELIGH: Brushy Bill's meeting

with the governor of New Mexico went horribly.

He couldn't remember Pat Garrett's name.

It's said that he maybe was suffering

from some kind of physical ailment.

We don't really know, but it didn't take long

for the governor to decide that he wasn't

going to give him the pardon.

SHATNER: Soon after the governor denied his clemency,

Brushy Bill suffered a heart attack

and died on December 27th, 1950.

But the town of Hamilton, Texas still commemorates

Brushy Bill to this day,

where his tombstone identifies him as being

the notorious gunslinger.

Could Billy the Kid have actually escaped an early death?

The true fate of the notorious outlaw remains a mystery.

Just like the fate of three criminals...

...who may have pulled off one of history's greatest escapes.

SHATNER: A little over one mile offshore stands

what was, at one time,

the most secure penitentiary in the United States-

Alcatraz.

Or, as it is more famously known...

The Rock.

♪ ♪

Formerly a military stockade,

it was converted to a maximum security prison in 1934

by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover who wanted to house

the nation's most dangerous criminals in a place

from which there was no escape.

MICHAEL DYKE: Alcatraz was Hoover's baby.

And he wanted it for his public enemy number ones.

And, supposedly, nobody could escape.

The island is out in the middle of the water,

the water's 52 degrees on average

throughout the whole year,

and there's sharks in the Bay.

SHATNER: Since it first began operations in 1934 until 1962,

a total of 31 prisoners attempted to escape Alcatraz.

23 were caught. Six were shot and killed.

Two drowned in the frigid waters of San Francisco Bay.

MICHAEL ESSLINGER: With Alcatraz, you had

America's most security safe prison

in the middle of the San Francisco Bay.

When it first opened, they had what was called

the silence rule.

They couldn't talk to each other.

There was no news coming in.

But they had the sights, even the smells

of the Ghirardelli chocolate factory across the Bay.

They could hear the tour boats in the Bay

-kind of going around -(people laughing)

and the laughs and the parties going on.

So it was more of a psychological torture for them

than it was actually physical torture.

SHATNER: In 1960,

an inmate named Frank Morris was admitted to Alcatraz,

followed by three others-

Allen West, and brothers John and Clarence Anglin.

ESSLINGER: Allen West, Frank Morris

and the Anglins had all served time

in Atlanta Penitentiary.

I think that at least, you know, by sight,

they would have known each other,

probably met for certain.

SHATNER: Together, the four men hatched an elaborate plan to succeed

where other potential escapees had failed.

Allan West was on the cleaning detail.

He was up on top of the cell blocks sweeping up

when he saw that there was a vent in the roof

that didn't work.

And West, the Anglin brothers and Morris noticed

that the cement inside the backs of the cells was

crumbling because of the salt air.

ESSLINGER: So, what they would do is

they would take the ends of these steel spoons

and use them to route out these holes

through the cement.

And they recreated the grates using cardboard,

cutting out the exact pattern.

When you actually compare the grill itself,

the fake ones they made, to the real grill,

they're pretty convincing actually.

SHATNER: The men now had access to the roof of the prison,

but in order to hide the fact

that they were working there every night,

they needed to fool the guards into thinking

they were still asleep in their bunks.

So they devised an ingenious solution-

they created dummy heads in their likenesses

and placed them in their beds while they worked.

DAVID WIDNER: Each one of them had a part.

They knew that they needed to make dummy heads.

So they took up paint to paint these two portraits

of their girlfriends.

That gave them access

to the flesh colored paint

that they needed for the dummy heads.

Clarence took up haircutting.

He was a barber.

And so, while he was cutting hair,

he would walk it back to the cells and that's where

they got the real hair that's on the dummy heads.

SHATNER: After 18 months of digging and planning,

the men were finally ready to make their escape.

There was just one more problem:

Surviving the more than one mile of treacherous waters

between the island and the mainland.

They were able to go to all these other convicts at the time

and acquire all these different raincoats.

And then Clarence actually stitched a raft together.

And then they created this valve

kind of like an air stem where they would blow it up.

They were creating things that they would be able to use

in the success of their escape.

SHATNER: On the night of June 11, 1962,

at approximately 9:45 p.m.,

the men put their plan into action.

As they crawled from their cells and headed up to the roof,

Allen West elected to stay behind, fearing capture.

It was the last verified time anyone would see Frank Morris

and the Anglin brothers again

because their elaborate escape plan worked.

ESSLINGER: This massive manhunt is initiated.

You've got the FBI, uh, the U.S. Marshals Service,

the Coast Guard, everybody is searching

for these three men.

The warden of the prison comes out

and says that the water conditions were too extreme.

He didn't feel that they could have made it.

J. Edgar Hoover comes out.

He indicates that, you know, they certainly drowned.

It was a big embarrassment to them.

Alcatraz was supposed to be escape-proof.

DYKE: I still to this day will never 100% say

whether they lived or died

because there's no bodies recovered.

Once they left the island,

nobody knows what happened except them.

WIDNER: Digging through the FBI files,

there's no doubt in my mind

that John and Clarence survived that escape.

Every year on Mother's Day,

my grandmother received roses.

And the card would always say, "Joe and Jerry."

Well, she didn't know anybody named Joe and Jerry,

but she did know who those flowers came from.

SHATNER: Did Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers survive

their treacherous journey across San Francisco Bay?

Or did they fall prey to the rough,

shark-infested waters?

One thing is certain- they made it off The Rock.

And there are many who believe

that not only did they make it to the mainland-

they did so with the help of mysterious

and unexplained forces.

(seagulls calling)

SHATNER: On June the 11th, 1962,

Frank Morris, John Anglin,

and his brother Clarence,

pulled off what is arguably the most daring

and difficult prison break in history.

And if the rumors are true,

it's because they knew the precise moment

to attempt to get off Alcatraz Island.

♪ ♪

Long before Alcatraz became a prison,

it was actually used by local indigenous tribes

who used the island for the same purpose.

They sent their own undesirables there,

their own criminals there,

and they essentially left them there to die.

Most did die and many of them were buried on the island.

And that led to speculation

that their spirits still inhabit the island right up to this day.

ESSLINGER: Certainly, there were Native American inmates

who were on the island.

Some of the Native American's believed

that if, you know, they could actually tell,

that if the birds were circling the island

and they refused to land,

that there was some type of negative energy.

Clarence Carnes was a Native American

who was on the island.

He was very close friends with Frank Morris

and with the Anglins.

Maybe it's something that he brought up to them,

but certainly it could've been one of the stories out there.

SHATNER: On the day of the escape, while out in the prison yard,

Frank Morris reportedly noticed

the birds were particularly calm.

According to local legend, Morris believed

that this was the island's spirits sending him

and his accomplices an omen

that it was safe to put their escape plan

into motion on that day.

But not everyone believes the tale to be true.

I've heard that rumor,

but I've-I've never seen any proof

that Frank Morris actually knew about premonitions

or anything to that effect.

(seagulls calling)

I don't think when the birds were flying

or their activities

or anything like that had any bearing

on what day they were gonna make the escape.

They'd worked on their escape for months

and they hadn't been caught up to that point,

and I think they were starting to get worried.

They left when it was their opportunity to leave

and they thought they had the best chance.

WIDNER: When my grandmother passed away, I was about ten years old.

At the funeral,

there were several FBI agents there,

and they were very noticeable.

I mean, you could tell that that's who they were.

After the funeral, there was a lot of talk

about the two women that showed up.

They sat up front. They didn't talk to anybody.

And they were very tall women.

And from what we understand,

the FBI actually noticed that and they was wanting

to question these two individuals

that actually were men dressed up as women.

But they disappeared before they had a chance.

There's no doubt that it was John and Clarence.

But my question to them was, "Well, if y'all really believed

"that these guys died in that water,

"why are you all still looking for them?

Close the case."

Whether it's convicts who escape from maximum security prisons,

gunslingers who fake their own death,

or serial killers who toy with the police,

outlaws are strangely compelling figures.

And while we condemn their devious actions,

these criminal masterminds continue to be unforgettable.

And their evil exploits will remain...

unexplained.

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