Police believe a 1970s Lincoln Continental and human bone found in a pond near Brunswick, Georgia, could solve a 44-year-old cold case.
The car and bone were dredged up from the lake by the nonprofit volunteer Sunshine State Sonar search team on Friday.
The car resembled one driven by the missing couple Charles Romer, 73, and Catherine Romer, 75, before they disappeared in April 1980. The pond is being drained to see if any other remains are present, the Glynn County Sheriff’s Office said.
The identity of the remains has not yet been confirmed.
Sunshine State Sonar said they found the Romers and the specific car they were driving, a 1979 custom black Lincoln Continental with a license plate CRR-CBR. The group noted in a Facebook post that DNA results on the human remains inside were still pending.
The Facebook post also included pictures of items found with the car and human bone, including a belt with the husband’s initials “CRR.”
The couple were returning to their home in Scarsdale, New York, from a vacation in Miami Beach, Florida, and had checked into a Holiday Inn in Brunswick. The two were reported missing after employees at the Holiday Inn found that their bed had never been slept in.
Previous theories of the case suggested that the couple, a pair of widowed friends who married a few years before their disappearance, had been robbed of about $81,000 in jewelry and killed and that the car and their bodies had been disposed of.
“We never knew what happened to any of them. We just all figured somebody had, with all the money they had, somebody followed them and robbed them,” Andy Mavromat, a former clerk at the Holiday Inn the couple checked into, told New York’s WCBS-TV.
The missing woman’s granddaughter, Christine Seaman Heller, told New York’s WABC-TV, “It would be so wonderful to find out, just have some peace. You know, maybe it wasn’t a horrible ending, maybe it was just an accident.”
Instead of a violent end, the car may have been driven into the pond by accident.
“None of these fences were here, and they could’ve run into the pond. They could have. The way you see this now, it was very different 44 years ago,” Mr. Mavromat told WFOX-TV of Jacksonville, Florida.
• Brad Matthews can be reached at bmatthews@washingtontimes.com.
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