Daily Verse | 2 Thessalonians 3:1
Finally, brothers, pray for us that the message of the Lord may spread rapidly and be honored, just as it was with you.
Thursday’s Reading: 1 Timothy 1-6
Happy Thursday, my friends. My plants never seem to have the will to live.
Today’s post is a little off-brand for me, since I tend to talk faith, culture and politics. But I caught a story the other day that raised some questions for me and then saw another one yesterday that raised the same questions. I’d say they fall in the category of “human interest” stories.
Both stories are about “cold cases” — investigations involving missing persons who were never found — that seem to have been solved with a discovery of a car and human remains submerged in small water ways. The first story is about two Tennessee teens who disappeared more than 20 years ago.
Erin Foster, 18, and Jeremy Bechtel, 17, were last seen on April 3, 2000, after leaving Foster’s home, White County Sheriff Steve Page said in a news release. For years, there had been no new evidence in their case.
YouTuber Jeremy Beau Sides, who creates videos in which he uses sonar technology and dives underwater to track down evidence in missing persons cases, shot a video Nov. 24 showing his discovery of a 1998 Pontiac Grand Am that belonged to Foster.
You can watch Jeremy’s discovery here:
The other story is about a 22-year-old who went missing in 1976 — and remained missing for more than 45 years.
Authorities searching for a Georgia college student who’s been missing for more than 45 years got a big break after his car was found in an Alabama creek — along with his wallet, ID card and suspected human remains.
Kyle Clinkscales, a student at Auburn University, was last seen on the night of January 27, 1976, when he left his hometown of LaGrange, Georgia, to drive to back to campus in his 1974 Ford Pinto, said Troup County, Georgia, Sheriff James Woodruff at a Wednesday news conference, a day after the discovery.
The 22-year-old never arrived at the Alabama school and neither he nor the car were seen again — until, perhaps, now.
I find it fascinating that these missing people stayed missing for so long and then, suddenly, they are found. It reminds me of misplacing something and then suddenly finding it when you least expect it. I just had that happen to me the other day when I found a gift card sandwiched between two books. I had been looking for it the last couple of months.
Both stories moved me to a degree. I mean, here’s two teens who simply disappeared, leaving their families to wonder what happened to them. I’m sure there’s relief mixed with renewed grief (Kyle Clinkscales was an only child and both of his parents have died over the ensuing 45 years). But at least they know and aren’t left imagining the worst.
But why weren’t they found earlier? How did investigators miss searching in those spots?
“For 45 years, we have searched for Kyle and his car. We have followed hundreds of leads and never really had anything substantial develop from those leads,” Woodruff said.
He said they’ve drained lakes and conducted numerous searches in hopes of finding Clinkscales.
In the case of Erin and Jeremy, how did an amateur vlogger manage to piece together the locations to search, while the professionals were stumped?
How many people drive off the road into rivers every year? In the most recent article I found the estimate was “that about 350 to 400 people a year drown in their cars in the United States and Canada after their vehicle falls into a body of water or becomes stranded in flooding.”
And here’s two more cold cases involving similar circumstances:
A car and identification belonging to Judy Chartier, a teen who disappeared in 1982, were found this week in a Massachusetts river in some of the first discoveries in an almost 4-decades-old cold case. Authorities also found as-yet unidentified human remains in the same location.
New Hampshire Fish and Game search divers found human remains on Friday in a submerged car believed to belong to a woman who has been missing for 43 years. A preliminary investigation determined that the car may have belonged to Alberta Leeman, who went missing in 1978, according to a post on the New Hampshire State Police Facebook page.
And irony of ironies, this is from yesterday at Niagara Falls, where a car was submerged in the Niagara River about 50 yards from the top of the falls.
One person is dead after a car plunged into the Niagara River, with pictures showing the car was close to the brink of the top of Niagara Falls.
A U.S. Coast Guard diver recovered the woman from her vehicle on Wednesday afternoon after being lowered from a helicopter, according to the New York State Parks Police. It was not clear if she was alive when she was recovered.
I find this all fascinating, especially since these stories all sort of showed up for me around the same time.
What does it mean?
I suppose the lesson in all this is to learn from the mistakes of others and be very careful when you’re driving around bodies of water.