A pair of fishermen who stumbled upon a sunken vehicle on the Mississippi River in Minnesota may have inadvertently helped solve a missing person cold case from the 1960s, authorities say.
Brody Loch and James Ham, the fisherman who found the submerged car, told CBS News Minneapolis affiliate WCCO that the sonar device they were using to locate fish over the Aug. 9 weekend pinged something unusual after a lucky catch.
“When (Ham) caught the fish, I turned the transducer around and, ‘Boom!’ There it was just sitting on the bottom,” Loch said of the ’60s-era Buick sedan.
“It was 100 per cent luck,” he continued. “If my buddy wouldn’t have caught that walleye, then we would have just kept on floating down and never would have found it.”
Loch first found the vehicle on Aug. 9, but returned the following day with his family to check it was still there before calling the police.
By Wednesday, local sheriff’s office divers, with the help of a tow truck crew, hauled the vehicle out of the river.
The recovery mission took several hours to complete, police said in a press release, adding that human remains were found inside.
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It wasn’t until investigators ran the car’s vehicle identification number (VIN) that they were able to determine the car belonged to Roy Benn, a man who was reported missing to the sheriff’s office in nearby Benton County in 1967 and has not been seen since.
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For now, police say, they have sent the remains found in the vehicle to the medical examiner for testing and identification, but based on items found in the car and the VIN, they have every reason to believe they finally located the missing man.
Benton county’s sheriff, Troy Heck, told CNN that his office had notified Benn’s remaining family, who had previously been asked for DNA samples.
He cautioned, however, that “some of the typical techniques that our partners, the medical examiner’s office, would use to identify aren’t going to be real effective” because of the length of time the body has been underwater.
“We’re just grateful that we may likely have finally gotten the break that we needed to bring closure to this family,” Heck told the network.
When Benn first disappeared, his mysterious missing-person case made headlines, reports Eyewitness News. He was reportedly carrying a large amount of money when he disappeared and was last seen leaving the King’s Supper Club north of Sartell, Minn.
“Looking back at some of the original case files, there was talk of quarries, there was talk of the Mississippi River,” Sartell Police Chief Brandon Silgjord told the outlet.
At the time of his disappearance, Benn was a businessman and owner of the St. Cloud Appliance Repair Service. His wife had died the year before, according to archives from the St. Cloud Daily Times that were reviewed by CNN.
He was declared legally dead in 1975, eight years after he went missing.
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