Theodore Cole

Theodore Cole

Theodore Cole (born February 16, 1913 , † probably December 16, 1937 ) was an American prisoner. Cole became famous as one of five men who may have escaped from the US maximum security prison Alcatraz .

Life

Theodore Cole was arrested in Shawnee , Oklahoma on December 30, 1933 after a failed bank robbery and shooting with agents from the US Federal Police, the FBI . His accomplice Wilbur Underhill was killed in an exchange of fire with federal officials.

Attempted escape from Alcatraz

Cole was sentenced to thirty years in prison in 1936 after a failed bank robbery in Oklahoma . To serve the same he was taken to the Alcatraz prison on the prison island of the same name in the Bay of San Francisco . From there he made an attempt to escape on December 16, 1937, together with his fellow inmate Ralph Roe . The two managed to escape from the tire workshop in which they were employed, which was located outside the actual prison complex, by using their tools to bend the bars of the windows of the building apart in an unsupervised moment, to slip through the opening created in this way and then to reach the coast of the island. After that, their track is lost.

Officially, Cole, like Roe, is considered missing and was pronounced dead soon after his disappearance. It is believed that the two of them frozen and / or drowned while trying to swim to the mainland in cold December weather (probably with the help of a self-made raft) and that their bodies were then driven off the sea and "swallowed".

The escape attempt by Cole and Roe was the second of a total of fourteen escape attempts from Alcatraz and, along with the escape of Frank Lee Morris and the Anglin Brothers in 1962, is considered the only one that may have been successful.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Alcatraz Escape Attempts. www.alcatrazhistory.com, 2018, accessed on October 4, 2018 (English).