Famous US prison breaks show that some fugitives spend their life on the run

The New Orleans jail breakout of 10 inmates and the time it has taken to capture them conjures images of previous newsworthy escapes involving the likes of gangster John Dillinger, serial killer Ted Bundy and Mexican cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

While those notorious criminals were eventually apprehended or killed by law enforcement, which typically nabs more than 90% of escapees, a relative few eluded searches and remained at large, presumably until their dying days.

Here’s a look at some of those instances:

Fleeing Alcatraz

The ingenious plot by Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin in 1962 probably stands as the nation’s most famous prison break, memorialized in the 1979 film “Escape from Alcatraz” and countless tourist visits to the former maximum-security penitentiary in a San Francisco Bay island. President Donald Trump even wants to restore it.

Morris, a convicted bank robber who had attempted to flee from other prisons, was regarded as the mastermind of a plan that featured dummy heads with real hair left on the cell beds to fool guards and a raft made out of raincoats to carry the escapees to freedom.

Nobody knows whether they made it alive or perished in the cold, treacherous bay waters. Their bodies were never found, so their legend lives on.

Elusive in multiple countries

Glen Stewart Godwin was serving a sentence of more than 25 years for a stabbing murder when he escaped in June 1987 from the Folsom State Prison outside Sacramento, California, a maximum-security facility that had yielded only two previous breakouts in a quarter century.

Godwin found his way to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where later that year he was arrested for drug dealing. The FBI says he was convicted and sent to a prison in Guadalajara, where in 1991 he was accused of killing another inmate. Later that year he escaped and hasn’t been tracked down.

“Godwin is fluent in Spanish and may be traveling throughout Central and South America, and Mexico,” says the FBI, adding that Godwin goes by several aliases. “He is thought to use illegal drugs and be involved in narcotics distribution.”

If alive, Godwin would be 66 now. The FBI is still offering $20,000 for information leading to his arrest.

Family killer vanishes in Australia

William Leslie (Les) Arnold was just 16 in 1958 when he killed his parents for not letting him use their car and buried them in the backyard of the family’s home in Omaha, Nebraska.

He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison, arousing few suspicions of an attempt to escape until he and a fellow inmate – James Edward Harding – made their getaway in 1967 with the help of a former convict on the outside who provided them supplies. After cutting through window bars, they scaled a 12-foot fence topped by barbed wire.

The fugitives reached Chicago and split up there, but while Harding was caught the next year in Los Angeles, Arnold was not to be found alive. The U.S. Marshals Service, which solved the cold case in 2023 with DNA evidence, said Arnold worked in Chicago for a while before moving to California and later to Australia.

“Arnold obtained an alias and was married within three months of escaping,” the service said. “But investigators learned he eventually made his way to Australia, with his second wife, had a family and worked as a businessman until his death in 2010. At that time he had been living under the name John Vincent Damon.”

A dubious distinction

Joanne Chesimard, who changed her name to Assata Shakur, is a New Yorker who in 2013 became the first woman to be added to the FBI’s list of Most Wanted Terrorists. The bureau’s reward for information leading to her arrest sits at $1 million.

Chesimard was a member of the militant Black Liberation Army when a group she was traveling with was stopped for a vehicle violation by two New Jersey Police troopers in May 1973, at a time when she was the subject of arrest warrants for felonies that included bank robbery.

A shootout ensued, killing a police officer and injuring the second trooper. Chesimard was convicted of first-degree murder and several other charges in 1977, and sentenced to life in prison.

Two years later, three men who visited Chesimard at a New Jersey prison pulled out guns, took two guards as hostages and commandeered a prison van to flee with her.

The FBI says Chesimard lived underground for years before a 1984 move to Cuba, where she is believed to still reside.

Second time around

Glen Stark Chambers was facing execution for the 1975 fatal beating of his girlfriend in Sarasota, Florida, when later that year he and two other inmates escaped by rappelling down from the third floor of a county jail building after stringing together bed sheets.

Chambers was caught after three days.

He later had his sentence reduced to life in prison, but that didn’t keep him from conceiving ways to flee. In 1990, when he was helping build furniture at the shop of a state prison in Polk City, Florida, Chambers convinced fellow inmates to put him in a box that was loaded onto a truck headed to Daytona. He escaped enroute without the driver noticing.

Authorities said he was later seen in Florida and Alabama, but never captured. If alive, he would be 73 now.

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