Escape from Alcatraz: Cracking a Jailbreak Mystery Using AI
Rothco Chief Creative Officer Alan Kelly applies creativity and technology to cold cases.
/ JUNE 06, 2020
Thirty-six people are known to have attempted escape from Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, the maximum-security facility located on an island in San Francisco Bay. The common belief is that none were successful. Or was one? That’s what Rothco Chief Creative Officer Alan Kelly aimed to answer in The Long Shot, a short film that uncovers if any prisoners survived.
On the night of June 11, 1962, three prisoners—Frank Morris, along with brothers John and Clarence Anglin—broke out of their cells and made it to the shoreline of Alcatraz island. The trio, made famous by Clint Eastwood in the 1979 film Escape from Alcatraz, used sharpened spoons to bore through the prison walls and left papier-maché dummies in their beds. They were assumed to have drowned as they fled the island on a raft constructed from 50 inflated raincoats.
This is Kelly’s kind of tale. He applies his creative touch and the latest technology to historical events. Recognizing that digital and physical imagery are converging in fascinating new ways, Kelly uses modern facial recognition tools to unlock mysteries from the past. Though he couldn’t be sure, Kelly had a hunch the brothers survived. Why? “Because there have been stories about their mom getting Mother’s Day cards,” he says.
In 2015, a grainy photo surfaced of two guys standing in the Brazilian bush circa 1975—13 years after the supposed drowning. It was allegedly of the Anglin brothers. However, with their long, wavy hair and bearded faces, not to mention dark sunglasses, the pair hardly resembled the clean-shaven guys in the Alcatraz mugshots.
Along with shoe leather investigating, Kelly had the right tools to unearth the truth. He teamed with machine learning and AI experts Identv whose technology uses a deep neural network algorithm to build facial models for people. This can then identify faces in images. “Everyone’s face has about 20 points where the distance between those points are unique to you,” says Kelly. “You can create a fingerprint of your face, for lack of a better phrase.”
Identv scanned the faces of the two men in the photo and put the facial fingerprint match for each brother at 99 percent. Kelly, who had spent months pursuing this story, had cracked the 58-year-old mystery that couldn’t have been solved without AI.
“Technology is advancing at such a rate it can leave you a little dizzy and, short of obtaining DNA proof, there will always be a little room for mystery in the Alcatraz case,” says Kelly. “But as far as technology is concerned—the prisoners made it.”
Matt McCue is an editor and co-founder of Creative Factor. He lives in New York City, but he is willing to travel long distances for a good meal.