The skeletal remains of a woman missing 25 years were found in a Florida pond this week, after a man using a magnet to locate the vehicle of another recently missing person found her automobile instead.
Rita Sue Zul disappeared on January 15, 1990, after leaving work in her boyfriend’s red Datsun. The fate and whereabouts of the 46-year-old has been a mystery ever since.
But on Monday a man and his colleague inadvertently solved the 25-year cold case while employing fishing poles with magnets affixed to their lines to probe a small body of water for clues in the similar disappearance of Chelsey Green this summer.
To their surprise they did indeed discover a vehicle in the water’s murky depths, but it wasn’t the one they were looking for…
When the magnet stuck to Zul’s rusted out vehicle, one of the sleuths dived down to verify it was a real hit, and, when he came back up seconds later, “his eyes were about as big as quarters,” says Mr. Magnet Man, Scott Dunlap of Cape Coral. “He came up and said it really is a car.”
The two then contacted police about their find, and when the old car was pulled from the pond and bones discovered inside it, the matter became a bona fide criminal case.
No foul play, however, is suspected in the apparent death by drowning of Rita Sue Zul, although the circumstances of her watery demise still have to be fully investigated, the sheriff’s office confirms, in order “to figure out how she ended up in the water.”
Naturally, for loved ones who still held out some hope of finding Ms. Zul alive, it’s a very sad outcome, but “it's been a long time coming," a sheriff’s spokesman says. “Closure is closure.”
Zul’s is the second family in as many days who’ve received such somber news and whose long missing relative was finally found in a vehicle that somehow got submerged:
The remains of missing airman Amos Shook and his 1968 Pontiac have just been located in a North Carolina lake, 43 years after he drove off one day and vanished without a trace.
