In June 2022, the Marshals Service released age-progressed images of what the three men might look like if they had survived to old age — a standard investigative technique used to assist identification in long-running missing persons or fugitive cases. The images showed men in their late eighties, produced by forensic imaging software using the last known photographs of the escapees as the base images.
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## The Claims of Survival: What Evidence Exists and How Reliable It Is
The cultural fascination with the Alcatraz escape has generated decades of claimed sightings, alleged contacts, and asserted proofs of survival. Each of these requires individual evaluation.
### The Christmas Cards and Funeral Flowers
The Anglin family reported receiving Christmas cards signed by John and Clarence in the years following the escape. The cards, according to family members, were in handwriting consistent with the brothers’. No postmarks were found on the envelopes — the specific detail that would allow dating the cards and establishing that they were mailed after June 1962 rather than prepared before the escape.
The Anglin family also reported receiving anonymous flowers delivered to their mother, Rachel Anglin, each Mother’s Day until her death in 1973 — eleven years after the escape. After her death, the deliveries stopped. The family interpreted this as evidence that the brothers survived and knew their mother had died.
These claims come from family members who had obvious emotional reasons to believe in survival and who may also have had accurate information. They are not independently verified.
At Rachel Anglin’s funeral, family members claimed to recognize two unusually tall men in heavy makeup as Clarence and John in disguise. The two men, according to this account, left the funeral quickly. No photographs are known to exist of these men. The identification was made by people whose grief and hope may have influenced their perception.