The magnet pulled up rusted metal and mud from the bottom of the boat ramp, and then something else: a watch. It was a man’s watch, and the woman who saw it knew immediately what it meant. It was her grandfather’s watch. After thirty-seven years of waiting, after a lifetime of not knowing, the family of Robert St.
Louis finally had an answer. St. Louis had vanished in 1988. He drove away from his home in Canada one day and never returned.
For decades, his daughters held onto the hope that they might one day learn what happened to their father. They pushed, they searched, they kept his name alive, but the years passed with no trace of him. Then a team of civilian divers took up the case. They were part of a growing movement of volunteer divers who use sonar and dive gear to crack cold cases that police have long since closed.
The team leader was Bill McIntosh, a man who ran a group called Exploring With Mission. He and his partner, Kate, along with an associate named Cade, had spent weeks on the road. This was their third case solved in a twenty-six-day trip. They had already recovered one missing person in Pierreville, and now they had turned their attention to the disappearance of Robert St.
Louis. The search led them to a remote boat ramp in rural Canada. The location had been noted in the case file for years, but the real breakthrough came from a simple observation about the water. Most boat ramps in the area were shallow, only about three feet deep.
This one was different. It dropped off quickly to sixty feet and deeper. Anyone who knew that ramp knew it was the one place where a vehicle driven into the water would disappear completely. St.
Louis apparently knew that as well. The evidence suggests he drove his Jeep Cherokee Chief into the lake at that ramp and sank to the bottom. His body stayed in the vehicle, resting in thirty-three feet of water, for thirty-seven years. The divers found him on the second day of their search.
When they scanned the bottom near the ramp, the sonar showed something unexpected. There was not one car down there. There were dozens. The team counted between ten and fourteen vehicles in the immediate area, and they suspected more lay further out in the deeper water.
The bottom of this boat ramp had become a graveyard of automobiles. They located St. Louis’s Jeep almost immediately. It sat in the water near the ramp, just beyond the end of the dock, with a GMC truck lying against it.
The Jeep was upside down. When the divers went down to inspect it, they found the driver’s window was open, but the interior was packed with sand and mud. The driver’s door had deteriorated so badly that when one diver tried to open it, the door simply fell off. Working without gloves, digging through the mud by feel, the diver reached into the vehicle.
His hand touched the steering wheel, then pushed deeper into the sediment. The first bone he found was a jawbone. It was intact, which mattered enormously, because dental records could confirm the identity. He brought it to the surface and placed it carefully in a bag.
The team knew they had found their man. They could not stop there. The GMC truck was pressed against the Jeep, and the men knew that more of St. Louis remained inside his vehicle.
They removed a number of bones from the car over the following hours, including vertebrae, arm bones, hand bones, and at least part of a femur. The divers worked carefully, feeling through the mud with their bare hands because they had learned that gloves made it impossible to distinguish bone from rusted metal. Skull fragments were light and smooth. Pieces of the Jeep were heavier and rough.
One diver described weighing each object in his hand before deciding what to keep. The recovery was delicate. The Jeep had been in the water for nearly four decades, and much of it had deteriorated. The team decided to try to lift it out of the lake in one piece.
If that failed, they would peel away the floor to reach whatever remained inside. The recovery team brought in lift bags and heavy equipment. The GMC was pulled out first, clearing the way to the Jeep. The divers guided the operation from below, attaching straps and lines to the fragile wreckage.
As they worked, the search expanded. The police had asked them to mark the other vehicles on the bottom. The team placed buoys on car after car, recording their positions, noting which ones were upside down, which ones lay on their sides. One vehicle looked like a Jetta.
Another appeared to be a convertible with its top open. A white Ford with the windows still rolled up was checked and found to be a non-match for any missing person. But the team suspected that some of the other cars might hold more answers. They had been told about a man named Delapena, missing from just up the road, and a woman named Lucy Bouchard, who had disappeared in the area and was known to suffer from seizures.
There was a real possibility that more bodies lay beneath the water. The divers did not stop. Even after confirming St. Louis’s Jeep, they kept going, diving on the other cars, marking their locations, searching for license plates and anything else that might identify the vehicles.
Cade, one of the team members, was in the water by four in the morning, working until his air ran low. The physical toll was real. They had been living together on the road for twenty-six days, and the exhaustion showed. But the work continued.
For the family, the moment of confirmation came when they saw the watch. It was the same watch St. Louis had worn when he disappeared. The daughter who recognized it stood with the divers and the police investigators and finally let herself accept what they all knew.
They had found him. The police would use the jawbone for dental records, and the case would close after almost four decades. The divers made it clear that the credit belonged to the family as much as to them. The daughter had been pushing for thirty-seven years.
She had never let the case go. The team told her she could rest easier now, knowing exactly where her father was. The search was not finished. The divers were asked to focus on recovering everything they could from St.
Louis’s Jeep before moving on to the other vehicles. The police gave permission to mark the remaining cars, and the team prepared to dive again the following morning. There was still work to be done at the bottom of that boat ramp, and no one on the team doubted that more families might find their answers there.