He's been doing movies ever since and is director of the new movie "American Sniper". Mystery solved!
It’s studies like these that cause me to say, at least one of them made it. There’s really no evidence either way, other than the acknowledged high odds against them from the start.
Only way I see them making it is someone was waiting for them in a very small boat boat and picked them up.
These days there are numerous Alcatraz swims every year where they’ll have better than a hundred participants at a time. The vast majority make it to land just fine. I’ve provided kayak escort for these events many times. They invited us because we can mix with the swimmers (no prop). If someone did pull out, they would hang onto the kayak and we’d use the paddle to signal the Zodiac to come in and pick them up, then the boat would go back to the outside of the pack. But the vast majority made it to land. Not too hard for me to believe these escaped cons, with flotation, could have made it too.
Well so far no book on “How We Escaped”
At least one of them escaped. -Sadly, he later broke DB Cooper’s fall and died.
This is probably one of those mysteries that will never be solved. Since they never found the men, or their bodies, nobody can say for certain one way or the other.
I like to think they escaped, just because their plan was so daring and ingenious. It makes a really bad ending to the story if they went through all that to just drown in the drink.
I think their homemade rafts came apart at the seams in the water and they drowned because they couldnt swim, or froze from hypothermia and their bodies were swept out to the open sea.
Besides which, assuming they made it, its hard to believe that all of them managed to avoid detection all these years. Certainly one or most of them would have returned to a life of crime