The images showed, predictably, elderly men whose age-approximated faces bore some resemblance to the faces of the young men in the 1962 photographs. Whether any person seeing those images would have been able to make a reliable identification of a specific elderly man they had encountered — given the decades elapsed, the possible deliberate appearance changes, and the inherent limitations of age-progression modeling — is a separate question from whether the release served a purpose.
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## What “Probably Dead” Actually Means
The FBI’s formal conclusion — that Morris and the Anglin brothers “most likely drowned” — deserves careful examination as a statement of what the investigation established.
“Most likely” is a probability claim. It means: given the available evidence, drowning is the more probable outcome. It does not mean “certainly drowned.” It does not mean “drowned with high confidence.” It means: in the absence of contrary evidence, the balance of physical evidence and investigative inference supports drowning as the most probable single explanation.
This is a weaker claim than it is sometimes presented as. It is not a death determination. It is not a coroner’s finding. It is an investigative inference from absence — the absence of bodies, the absence of reported crimes, the absence of contact with family, the absence of any traced evidence of the men alive. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence; it is simply the absence of evidence.
The Marshals Service’s continuing warrant maintenance reflects the same epistemological position in a different institutional form. The warrants remain valid because the evidence does not exclude survival. The warrants are set to expire when the men would turn 100 not because there is evidence they might still be alive at that age, but because that is the institutional threshold at which the warrant maintenance is no longer considered worthwhile regardless of the state of the evidence.