Alcatraz_ A Definitive History of the Penitentiary Years - Michael Esslinger [219]
Frank Lee Morris
Frank Lee Morris – a chronology of mug shot photographs, representing a hardening lifetime spent in prison. On his Alcatraz admission card, officials listed one of his formal occupations as “escape artist,” and noted his superior intelligence. He would escape from nearly every prison to which he was ever committed.
Frank Lee Morris had spent a lifetime navigating the prison system before his arrival on Alcatraz. From his infant years until his teens, Morris was shuffled from one foster home to another. Frank’s years as a toddler are poorly documented, but it is known that he was convicted of his first crime at the youthful age of thirteen. Whether by fate or misfortune, Frank’s rudderless course had been dictated by his mother long before birth. Some sources indicate that his Morris’s mother was the daughter of an upper-middle-class family and that she began her misadventures as a runaway at a very young age.
It is alleged that Frank’s mother was in her teens when she found herself pregnant. Frank was born on September 1, 1926, in Ednor Maryland. In his responses to a questionnaire that he completed at sixteen years of age during incarceration in a youth reformatory, Frank documented that his mother was born in Ireland, his father born in Spain, and both were dead (he claimed that his father had died when he was two or three). He went on to reflect that their passing had affected him very deeply. He was raised in foster homes with extremely strict foster parents who delivered harsh discipline, and on occasion he resided with his aunt and her children. His responses to the questionnaire also indicated low self-esteem. In one question asking his opinion of his own appearance, he stated “not so good.”
Frank was convicted of his first crime at only thirteen years of age for burglary. He was arrested by the Sheriff's Office in Clarksburg, West Virginia, and was listed as a runaway from Washington. On November 13, 1940, at age fourteen, the young freckled-faced Morris was again arrested for burglary, and was sentenced to six years and nine months. His sentence was to be served at the National Training School for Boys in Washington D.C., not far from the reformatory where his mother had once allegedly been interned. His teachers considered him highly intelligent but difficult to manage and uninterested in his studies. In one incident during his first few weeks of imprisonment at the boys’ school, he drew a sexually explicit sketch of his female teacher, including sexual comments and signing it “from guess who?”
Morris was prone to violent outbursts, as was illustrated on the morning of July 31, 1941. He had been caught stealing oranges from the kitchen icebox, and was told by the senior officer to put them back. When he refused to obey the order, the officer stated that he would have him benched for three days. But as soon as the officer turned his back, Morris threw a large kitchen knife, which struck him on the blunt side, luckily causing no injury. After receiving harsh discipline for this act, he began planning his escape. Thus began Frank’s career in what would later be listed on his Alcatraz record card as his official occupation, that of an “escape artist.”
By the time Morris reached his late teens, his criminal record included a multitude of crimes ranging from narcotics possession to armed robbery, and he had become a professional inhabitant of the correctional system. His repeated escapes and quite brazen acts of non-conformity earned him his way to ever-larger penitentiaries. His life was a merry-go-round of short bouts of freedom interspersed with long terms of imprisonment. Meanwhile, he graduated from small burglaries to large bank heists. Then one day in late April 1955, while serving a ten-year sentence in the Louisiana State Penitentiary for armed robbery and possession of narcotics, Morris and fellow inmate Bill Martin were on a work detail cutting sugar cane when both slipped away – and their escape went undetected for several hours.
The fugitives made their way to New Orleans,