Two Minnesota fishermen may have made an unexpected crack in a decades-old missing persons case.
One of the fishermen, Brody Loch, was fishing in the Mississippi River in Sartell, about 75 miles outside Minneapolis, and stumbled upon a 1960s Buick submerged 20 feet underwater.
The car was picked up thanks to Loch’s sonar after the friend he was fishing with made a catch nearby. He called the police about the suspicious vehicle, and days later, authorities uncovered human remains inside the car.
“It was 100 percent luck,” Loch told WCCO. “If my buddy wouldn’t have caught that walleye, then we would have just kept on floating down and never would have found it.”
Authorities processed the vehicle and learned it belonged to Roy Benn, who mysteriously disappeared in 1967 with a large sum of money.
On the last night he was seen, Benn dined at the King’s Supper Club, north of Sartell and then drove a 1963 metallic blue Buick Electra, according to a missing person bulletin from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.
He was 59 at the time, according to St. Cloud Daily Times archives viewed by CNN.
The human remains found inside the vehicle are believed to belong to Benn, who was declared legally dead in 1975, eight years after he went missing.
"Looking back at some of the original case files, there was talk of quarries, there was talk of the Mississippi river, but of course, technology in the 1960s is nowhere near what we have now," said Sartell Police Chief Brandon Silgjord.
“Tons of credit for a fisherman to actually see that and then have the forethought to call the sheriff’s office and make that report,” Silgjord said.
“Artifacts, clothing items, different things like that will absolutely help in piecing this whole thing together,” Silgjord said.
Silgjord says investigators have received questions about the cash Benn was carrying when he vanished.
"I think perspective needs to be offered sometimes, of what a large amount of cash looked like in 1960 versus now," Silgjord said. "Which very well could have been, from reading some of those original reports, several hundreds of dollars."
The Benton County Sheriff’s Office is leading the investigation for the case, and the remains found in the Buick have been sent to a medical examiner’s office for examination.
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