On June 21, 1962, a rubber-sealed life vest washed ashore at Cronkite Beach — a beach on the Marin Headlands north of the Golden Gate Bridge, roughly three miles outside the bridge. This was outside the bay entirely, which raised the question of what that meant for the trajectory of the raft or for the men’s fate: had the raft been swept through the Golden Gate into the ocean? Had a life vest become detached from a living person who had made it to shore? Had it simply been carried by currents from a site elsewhere in the bay?
The following day, June 22, a prison boat recovered another life vest about fifty yards off Alcatraz itself, its strings still knotted. The life vest found close to Alcatraz with its strings still knotted was interpreted by some investigators as suggesting the vest had been discarded before or as the men entered the water — possibly deflated accidentally or discarded when the raft launched. The interpretation is not certain.
The raft itself was never recovered. No bodies were ever recovered. The Norwegian freighter *Norefjell* reported spotting a floating body approximately fifteen nautical miles northwest of the Golden Gate Bridge on July 17, more than a month after the escape — a report that was not filed with American authorities until October, introducing significant uncertainty about whether the sighting was related to the Alcatraz escape. The county coroner, Henry Turkel, suggested the body might have been a person who had jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge in the days before the sighting.