The breakup and sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald in November of 1975,with the loss of 29 souls, has garnered wide and enduring public interest. It has been the topic of a popular song as well as a number of television documentaries that have espoused a range of scenarios ranging from the plausible to the highly unlikely. The focus of this paper is to develop numerical modeling methodology to investigate the breakup of a ship in heavy seas. The Edmund Fitzgerald provides an example that is useful in developing these tools that can then be generalized to investigate other vessels. This paper will begin with a summary of the history of the vessel and the factual events leading up to her sinking. Next a detailed weights accounting and hydrostatic analysis that establishes the condition of the ship will be presented. The wreck lies on the bottom in two major pieces and as a confused debris field representing the middle 200 feet of the ship. An analysis of the strength of the hull girder in the locations corresponding to the established damage is presented. Several different linear and non-linear seakeeping programs have been used to study the vessels motions at various times over the voyage. These results include time histories of green water on deck as well as the primary loads on the hull girder due to wave induced stresses. Based upon these new and state of art analyses, a new plausible scenario will be presented that takes all of the known facts into account.