A Georgia police department says it has found a car that could contain the remains of a New York couple who have been missing since 1980.
The car, a Lincoln Continental with one human bone inside, was found in a pond between the Royal Inn Hotel and Interstate 95 on New Jesup Highway, by a nonprofit investigative group from Florida called the Sunshine State Sonar Team, police said.
“The vehicle is similar to the description of a vehicle that Charles and Catherine Romer were believed to be driving when reported missing in April 1980,” the Glynn county police department posted on Facebook. “At this time there is no conclusion about the identity of the remains that were found.”
The Romers, from Scarsdale, New York, were returning home from Florida when they went missing 44 years ago, according to WABC reporting. The couple had checked into the Brunswick Holiday Inn, now named the Royal Inn, which is right beside the pond where the vehicle and remains were found.
Mike Sullivan, who identified himself as the “owner” of Sunshine State Sonar, said he personally dove into the pond and located the vehicle.
“It’s safe to say that we know, we know it’s them,” Sullivan said in an interview. “We found belongings in the vehicle with their names on it.
“This guy had a lot of money so he had a lot of customized stuff that was made.”
The Glynn county police department did not immediately return phone calls on Tuesday but a police spokesperson told CNN earlier in the day that “ultimately a match must be determined by the VIN number and it has not been possible yet to get that from the vehicle found in the pond”.
Sullivan posted a photo on the Facebook page for Sunshine State Sonar with what he said is a photo of a belt recovered from the vehicle that appears to include the writing “C. R. R.”
Sullivan speculated that the car could have entered the pond from the parking lot of a nearby diner in reverse.
Sunshine State Sonar says its mission “is to find missing persons, vehicles or vessels believed to be in waterways”. Sullivan said they specifically went up to that section of Georgia to look for the Romers after hearing about failed attempts in the past.
“We have a team that’s actually in Virginia that gets together and they map out every body of water within five miles of the person’s disappearance, or last known whereabouts. We descended in the Brunswick area on the 22nd November, we searched several bodies of water, and at 10:07am we located their vehicle at the edge of the pond” using sonar technology, he said, adding that authorities then drained the pond.
Family members of the Romers told WABC they had worried for years that the couple were potentially the victims of a crime.
“It’s always been such a mystery. So, it would be so wonderful to find out, just have some peace,” Christine Seaman Heller, a grandchild of Catherine Romer, told the station. “You know maybe it wasn’t a horrible ending, maybe it was just an accident.”
