13 Unsolved Prison Escapes Where the Men Were Never Found

June 12, 1962. A guard on Alcatraz reaches through the bars during the early bed check and pushes a sleeping prisoner. The head rolls off the pillow and hits the floor. It is plaster, paint and real human hair, and the man it was supposed to be is gone. Most escaped prisoners are caught within days. Some are caught within hours. This documentary countdown is about the ones who never were. Thirteen real prison escapes, ranked not by how clever the trick was, but by how completely the men disappeared. Not one of them ended with the man back in a cell. You will see a Florida prison where a man serving life for murder had other inmates nail him into a furniture crate and load it onto a delivery truck. On the day he vanished, a prison supervisor told reporters, "They all come back." He never did. You will see an Ohio penitentiary where the city panicked over forty escaped convicts, the real number turned out to be three, and two stone-cutters still beat the state by walking into a sewer. A colony in Western Australia that believed the bush itself was a wall, until forty-seven convicts proved otherwise. A Greek prison where the exercise dumbbells broke the locks and the bed springs became a ladder. An English teenager who walked out of a prison classroom and was never found. In Michigan, a burglar wrote letter after letter asking to be moved to a low-security camp, then disappeared from it. The state offered a reward of 25 dollars and gave up the search 44 years later. In Latvia, hospital patients watched nearly ninety men crawl out of a tunnel under a prison fence, phoned the police, and were not believed. In New Zealand, a young man flipped two buckets upside down, climbed a wall, and later became so popular that trade unions took up his cause. Then the count gets heavier. A condemned killer in 1845 Illinois, defended in court by Abraham Lincoln, who escaped a log jail days before his hanging. A Confederate officer held in a dungeon on an island fortress in the Gulf, who rowed into a storm and was never heard from again. A man who walked into a Bronx district attorney's office and confessed to eight murders, and then walked out of an asylum. A murderer on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list who escaped from two prisons in two different countries, and whose reward has dropped over the years. And at number one, the escape from the prison that was built to be escape-proof, the case the FBI closed and the U.S. Marshals still refuse to. These were not heroes. Many of them had victims, and those families waited decades for an answer. But every one of these stories shows a system that lost a man and never found him again. Which of these disappearances stays with you the most? Do you think any of these men made it? Tell us in the comments, and subscribe if you want more true stories from behind prison walls.