The bones at Point Reyes tested negative for Anglin DNA. This was a potential evidence point for death that turned out to be unrelated. The absence of bodies — in the bay, on beaches, in the records of the Marin County or San Francisco coroner’s offices — means the most direct evidence of death has simply never materialized.
The case is officially open. The United States Marshals Service, as of the time of this writing, was still carrying active warrants. That official status is not merely bureaucratic; it reflects a genuine assessment that the escape’s outcome has not been established beyond reasonable doubt.
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## The Escape and Its Place in Alcatraz History
The June 1962 escape was not the first attempt at Alcatraz, and it was not the first to produce uncertainty about outcome. But it was the most elaborate, the most methodically planned, and the one that has generated the most sustained evidentiary and cultural attention.
Of the fourteen escape attempts at Alcatraz over its twenty-nine years of federal operation, most ended quickly and definitively: recapture, drowning, shooting. The June 1962 attempt was the one in which the question of what happened never received a clear answer.
One other escape from Alcatraz reached shore under its own power. On December 16, 1962 — six months after Morris and the Anglins disappeared — John Paul Scott escaped by swimming from the island using improvised flotation devices made from rubber gloves and reached Fort Point on the San Francisco mainland. He was found semiconscious and was immediately recaptured. His swim established that the crossing was physically possible under appropriate conditions, though Scott arrived incapacitated and was caught immediately.