A fisherman who recently went out on the Mississippi River in Minnesota ended up spotting a submerged car and evidently helped solve a nearly 60-year-old missing person case, according to authorities and local news reporting.
The fisherman at the center of the remarkable chain of events, Brody Loch, told Minneapolis news outlet WCCO that he called authorities after discovering the 1960s-era Buick in question with a sonar device on the weekend of 9 August.
By Wednesday in the community of Sartell, local sheriff’s office divers and a tow truck crew had recovered the vehicle. And investigators processing the car found human remains inside, the office of Steve Soyka, the Stearns county sheriff, said in a statement.
Furthermore, Soyka’s agency said, through the car’s vehicle identification number (VIN), investigators were able to determine the car belonged to Roy Benn, who at age 59 was reported missing to the sheriff’s office of nearby Benton county in September 1967 – and had not been seen since.
Officials have sent the remains in Benn’s car to a medical examiner’s office for possible identification. Nonetheless, based on the items in the car and its VIN, Soyka’s office said it believed the remains were that of Benn.
Soyka’s office added that it had turned the case over to the Benton county sheriff’s office. 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.
“We’re just grateful that we may likely have finally gotten the break that we needed to bring closure to this family,” Heck said to the network.
A missing persons bulletin published by Minnesota’s public safety department said Benn was last seen on 25 September 1967 while “carrying a large sum of money”. He was also driving his 1963 four-door, metallic blue Buick Electra, said the bulletin, which described the car missing alongside Benn.
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Benn owned an appliance repair service in St Cloud, Minnesota, when he went missing, according to reports at the time from the local daily newspaper. The St Cloud Daily Times also reported that Benn’s wife had died the year before he went missing.
Benn’s brother, Walter, worked with authorities investigating Roy’s disappearance, but leads back then never materialized into something definitive, as CNN reported.
Walter Benn moved to sell his missing brother’s personal possessions at an auction in 1968, the St Cloud Daily Times reported. Roy Benn was then declared legally dead in 1975, about eight years after he was last seen, the St Cloud Daily Times’ reporting showed.
After finally being located, Benn’s car was “filled with river sediment” and “severely deteriorated” from being underwater for decades, yet it was “intact”, Sartell’s municipal police department said in a statement.
Loch told WCCO that he hoped Benn’s family was finally closer to getting meaningful answers about what happened to him. He attributed it to good fortune that he and the friend with whom he was fishing didn’t float by Benn’s car without detecting it on sonar that fateful day.
“It was 100% luck,” Loch said.
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