It was on November 7, 1997 that William Moldt was reported missing from the Lantana area of Florida.
The unfortunate man had not returned home after a night out. It was around 9.30pm in the evening that the 40-year-old had called his partner to tell her he would be home soon.
But that was also the last time they spoke because William Moldt never came back.
Police quickly launched a missing person investigation, but the case remained open for more than two decades, with William Moldt’s loved ones going years without answers.
It was in August 2019 – 22 years after the disappearance – that a former resident of the Grand Isles neighborhood was checking his former home on Google Earth when he noticed something strange in a large lake.
He zoomed in to see what looked like a car, so he contacted the person who lived in the house bordering the lake to ask them to investigate.
Homeowner Barry Fay raised a drone over the area and found that there was indeed a white car hidden beneath the surface of the lake.
So he called the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, which sent police to the scene.
Pulling the white car out of the lake, they noticed it had been in the water for a considerable amount of time. And after opening its doors they found the skeletal remains of William Moldt inside.
Barry Fay told the Palm Beach Post that he thought it was just some old car that had been wrecked. “I never thought there would be a 22-year-old body,” he admitted.
No one noticed since 2007
The most chilling and harrowing aspect of the case is that the car has been visible on Google Earth since 2007, according to a report by the Charley Project, an online database of “frozen” cases in the United States of America.
And yet it took another 12 years for someone to open their eyes and spot it.
The sheriff’s office told the BBC that William Moldt likely lost control of his vehicle and crashed into the lake. However, witnesses had said he did not appear drunk when he left the nightclub.
The force insisted that when the search for his disappearance first began, the car was not visible and it was only thanks to a more recent shift in the waters of the lake that it became visible.
“You can’t determine what happened years ago,” police spokeswoman Teri Barbera said. “All we know is that he disappeared off the face of the earth and now he’s been found.”
