Twenty-five years. More than three hundred ponds searched. And this was the one they had been looking for. Libbi Di Benedetto, a thirty-five-year-old mother of three, had last been seen in 2000.
Now her car had finally surfaced from thirteen feet of water, and the identification was definitive: the vehicle belonged to Libbi Ann Di Benedetto. But how had it come to this? And how had a volunteer team called Sunshine State Sonar found Libbi when no one else had managed it in a quarter century? The answer begins in April 2000, in Davie, Florida.
Libbi Di Benedetto went out for an evening with close coworkers at a restaurant called Duke’s Bar and Grill. She placed a final phone call from a payphone near Pine Island Road and Sunrise Boulevard. Then she vanished, along with her 1996 Toyota Camry, which bore a dolphin decal on its bumper. No car.
No Libbi. Only a missing person poster, a cold case file, and three children who never received an answer. That was the situation for twenty-five years. To understand how Libbi was found, it helps to know who was doing the searching.
Mike Sullivan, his brother John Martin, and Shelly McKinnie made up Sunshine State Sonar. Mike had learned to read sonar by watching instructional videos, rewinding them, and watching again. Their first discovery came in January 2023, when they found Karen Moore, a mother missing for twenty-two years, in a pond behind a Publix store in Davie. Her daughter received the call every family in that position dreads and hopes for at the same time.
She said it meant everything to finally be able to bring her mother home. But the name that had been on their list since their very first search in July 2022 was Libbi. Pond after pond across Sunrise and Plantation, car after car, and every vehicle they pulled up belonged to someone else. When the team traveled to Florida to work through that list, Libbi’s name was the one they circled.
In January 2024, two days into their Florida trip, the road to Libbi began thirty miles south of her home. A canal in Miami held the team’s immediate objective: Marine Sherman, who had disappeared in 1985. She had been driving a red 1983 Plymouth Reliant station wagon. The team positioned themselves behind her former home and prepared to sweep the canal, a stretch of water that had apparently never been searched.
Nearly forty years had passed, and in that era, sonar technology was not available to those looking for her. The problem the team faced was the same one they had been dealing with for two years in Libbi’s ponds. Florida’s waters are full of cars. Every vehicle had to be dived on, and its license plate read, before it could be ruled out.
In that one canal, the sonar lit up with multiple vehicles. The first was a Honda Accord with a plate, but it was not their car. Then a white mid-1990s Toyota Camry appeared, upside down, its driver’s window open, empty inside. For a moment, every mind went to Libbi.
But the car was white, and it was empty, and it sat thirty miles from her home. The search continued. Then came a station wagon, flipped upside down, sitting in a cul-de-sac right next to Sherman’s home. The count in that canal kept climbing.
Twenty-one vehicles, then with the extra ones on the bottom, twenty-four. The twenty-fourth and last car rested at the end of her own street. It was Marine Sherman. A dive team pulled her from the darkness that night, and forty years of waiting came to an end.
One family had its answer on day one. Tomorrow, the team would head thirty miles north to the search area with Libbi’s name still on the list. Day two was Libbi’s day. In Sunrise, Florida, behind a shopping center, a pond sat in the middle of the water.
Mike and Shelly were on the water, and Mike’s sonar had already picked up a car. They had contacted the fire department dive team responsible for pulling vehicles from the water, and the department said they knew of no vehicles in that shopping center parking lot. So the team prepared to dive the car themselves. The windows appeared open.
The windshield was shattered, the roof pushed inward, as if the car had flipped over. A person was inside. Standing on the bank, the team could think of only one name. The family would finally have answers.
But when the vehicle was identified, it was not Libbi. It was a man no one had reported missing in that pond: Curtiss Tesdall, thirty years old, missing since 2005. They had found him entirely by accident while looking for someone else. The Florida trip ended with one missing person found and another found by chance, but Libbi was still missing.
She had been only half a mile from where they had stood. For fifteen more months, she remained unfound. Mike, John, and Shelly kept returning to Broward County, roughly thirty-six trips, more than three hundred ponds. Plantation police opened restricted waters to them.
Every car they found, every single one, was not hers. On April 6, 2025, twenty-five years to the day after Libbi left Duke’s, the team was heading to the airport. Mike said, let’s put the boat in one last pond. At 3:48 in the afternoon, in thirteen feet of water, there it was.
The car was upside down, and on the bumper, still attached after twenty-five years, was a Miami Dolphins decal. The license plate read XJF84P. The missing person poster for Libbi listed that exact plate. It was her car.
Plantation police, the fire department dive team, and a tow crew arrived. Lift bags broke the surface, and the Camry came up for the first time since 2000. A 1996 Camry with a Toyota Hollywood logo on the trunk, and the Dolphins sticker back in its proper place. Twenty-five years, thirteen feet deep, and the plate matched the poster exactly.
Sky 10 flew overhead as the site became a crime scene that Monday. Forensic units from the medical examiner processed what had been found. By the end of the week, it was official. Libbi Di Benedetto had been identified.
A family that had waited twenty-five years finally knew where she was. People ask why this pond was the last one. Three hundred ponds, and this small body of water behind a shopping center was where it ended. The answer is the same reason your keys are always in the last place you look.
You stop looking the moment you find them. How Libbi ended up in that pond remains unclear. The only obvious access point is a loading zone that, at night, could easily look like a dead-end road ending at the water’s edge. The pond sits hidden behind the stores, less than three miles from her home, on the same road where she made her last phone call.
No one has released a definitive explanation of how her Camry came to rest there, and how it remained undisturbed for twenty-five years. No formal answer has been given, and none was invented here. Libbi Di Benedetto is finally going home. Along with Marine Sherman, Curtiss Tesdall, and, since Karen Moore in January 2023, Sunshine State Sonar has brought twenty people home.
The team is set to close its doors on December 31, 2026. But Mike, John, and Shelly learned to read sonar from review videos, went out, and found Libbi. Every pond they checked mattered.