Reddit reviews MythBusters: The Explosive Truth Behind 30 of the Most Perplexing Urban Legends of All Time

Like a lot of people here, I first heard about the Alcatraz escape through Mythbusters, where they hypothesized and then demonstrated that the escapees could have used the currents to their advantage to make landfall on the Marin Headlands rather than Angel Island.

I also have a book, published in 2005, that put a lot of their early myths into print, including the Alcatraz escape one. There's a comment by Peter Rees, the executive producer of Mythbusters, that really grabs my attention:

"Another thing that didn't get into the show, which we thought was critical, was that the pieces of debris that were found were found on the west side of Angel Island. The only way the debris would have gotten there was if it were released from Horseshoe Bay on the north shore, the Marin Headlands, where we landed."

There's not a doubt in my mind that they managed to escape. As to what happened after the fact, I'm not so sure about - the picture smells like bull, and I'm somewhat skeptical of the letter, but I'm thoroughly convinced that they made it off Alcatraz.

MythBusters the Explosive Truth behind 30 of the most perplexing legends of all time - Keith and Kent Zimmerman.
https://www.amazon.com/MythBusters-Explosive-Behind-Perplexing-Legends/dp/141690929X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1510889523&sr=8-3&keywords=mythbusters

There was another one written about 2005 or 2006 by an Australian author. That was the most comprehensive.

And there is an Encyclopedia that came out around the time of the the tenth anniversary