Charles Romer, a retired oil company executive from Scarsdale, N.Y., and his wife, Catherine, were driving back from their winter home in Florida in the spring of 1980 when they stopped at a Holiday Inn in Georgia.
Later, the police would find their belongings unpacked in a room at the hotel, along with a half-full bottle of Scotch and some glasses. The bed was turned down. But the couple — and their late-model black Lincoln Continental — were nowhere to be found.
For decades, the disappearance was shrouded in mystery, as relatives of the couple searched for answers. The police long suspected that the couple may have been killed in a brutal robbery, as Ms. Romer, a beloved socialite, had a considerable amount of valuable jewelry with her.
Last week, the first big break came in the four-decade case, after volunteer divers visited Brunswick, Ga., a coastal town about 75 miles south of Savannah, and found a car similar to that of the Romers at the bottom of a pond near their hotel.
The divers — who use sonar equipment to find submerged vehicles as part of an effort to find missing people — had seen the Romer case on a map of unsolved cases involving people who had disappeared with their cars. On Friday, they started scanning every body of water within several miles of the hotel where the couple had disappeared. In a 10-foot-deep pond near a parking lot of what is today the Royal Inn, they said, they found a vehicle with characteristics that matched that of the Romers — and in it human bones.
“It came out of the blue,” said Lawton J. Dodd, a spokesman for the Glynn County Police Department in Georgia. “It’s a cold case that is not a cold case any longer,” he said. “The investigation’s reopened.”
Mr. Dodd said that the police could not yet definitively say whether the car found in the pond on Friday belonged to the Romers. But, he said, “there’s plenty to suggest it is.”
For proof, Mr. Dodd said, the police must find the vehicle identification number of the long-submerged car. “We’ve drained the pond,” he said. “It’s unclear if we can even remove the vehicle from the pond without damaging it beyond being of any use.”
Then, he said, forensic experts with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation will need to analyze and try to identify the human bones that the divers found inside the vehicle.
The police will continue to investigate the manner of the couple’s deaths, the spokesman said.
One of their granddaughters, Christine Heller Seaman, said she and her siblings heard from a detective on Monday about the discovery. “There were bone fragments in the car and personal items in the car,” she said. “And it sounds like it was absolutely that car.”
The police, Ms. Heller Seaman said, had long believed that the Romers were robbed and killed for the tens of thousands of dollars worth of jewelry that her grandmother, Ms. Romer, had with her at the time. According to the divers, however, jewelry was found in the car.
“We were led to believe the worst — they had assured it was a terrible robbery gone wrong,” Ms. Heller Seaman said. “We don’t have confirmation, but it’s heading to: It was an accident, not a horrific, painful death,” she said.
Mr. Romer was an executive at Sinclair Oil. He and Ms. Romer, his second wife, traveled extensively, often with their many granddaughters, said Ms. Heller Seaman, who was 15 when the two disappeared.
At the time, the couple, who were in their mid-70s, had settled into a contented retirement, she said, sending their car down to Florida on the train every winter, then driving it home to New York in the spring. Ms. Heller Seaman remembers well the year they did not come back. “It was a horrific time for all of us. And especially watching my father suffer,” she said. “That was his mother.”
The event cast a morbid shadow for years, she said, as her father and Mr. Romer’s children would travel to Georgia to speak with the police or to identify bodies that ultimately ended up not belonging to the Romers.
To have perfect strangers take it upon themselves to try to solve the mystery so many years later was “overwhelming,” Ms. Heller Seaman said.
The strangers were Mike Sullivan and John Martin of Florida. The stepbrothers, who call their search operation Sunshine State Sonar, have found human remains in more than a dozen cases since they took up the “hobby” in 2022, Mr. Sullivan said.
In recent years, more people have become fascinated by cold cases and by the possibility of solving them. Amateur sleuths have convinced law enforcement to reopen decades-old cases after finding new evidence, even to disinter the bodies of people who were murdered.
Searching for submerged vehicles using sonar technology is not an armchair activity, but people who are trained divers, like Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Martin, can undertake it, provided they have the right tools.
On Nov. 22, in a pond near the hotel parking lot, the brothers found two large objects, Mr. Sullivan said.
One was a sedan. The other was a long and boxy car. Mr. Sullivan wrenched a distinctive part from the hood. “The nose cone,” he said.
“I sell auto parts for a living. I know Lincolns. As soon as I pulled that up, I could clearly see, this is a black Lincoln. We have the vehicle.”
Shortly after, his brother emerged, saying he had found bones. “He was able to pull the femur bone out,” Mr. Sullivan said.
Their job was done. “Once we discover human remains, we call the police,” he said. “It’s a crime scene.”
When detectives took over, they retrieved a belt with Mr. Romer’s initials, Mr. Sullivan said. And jewelry. (The police declined to confirm if jewelry had been retrieved.)
Since getting the news, Ms. Heller Seaman said, she and her eight sisters had been sharing memories of the couple lost so long ago. “We’re all flooded,” she said. “They were lovely, lovely people.”
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