Nearly four years after Savannah Hale vanished from Shreveport, Louisiana, the search team from Adventures With Purpose was back on the water, dragging sonar equipment across another muddy bayou. The case had never been closed in the public’s mind, and the team had spent years chasing leads, checking ponds, and rechecking rivers. This morning, they had finally gained access to a private pond near Savannah’s home, the closest body of water to the house she had last been seen leaving. The owner’s brother had watched one of their videos and reached out, offering them permission to search the property.
It was the kind of break the team had been hoping for. Savannah was twenty-nine years old when she disappeared. She had been downtown with her boyfriend, visiting a bar called Fatty Arbuckle’s, before returning to his house about five and a half miles away. On the morning of her disappearance, she was captured on security camera at 7:03 a.
m. , alone in her silver Kia Forte, leaving the Louisiana Tower Parking Garage on Travis Street. Her phone last pinged near a Berkshire location, and she had sent a final message to her sister around 6:08 a. m.
after stopping at a Chevron station. Then nothing. No calls, no texts, no sign of her. The team had searched dozens of bodies of water across the region, some as far as two hours south toward her hometown, but they had never found her car.
The pond that morning was shallow and cloudy. The team launched a small boat and ran sonar lines across the water, casting sixty feet in both directions. They picked up a few faint contacts near the shore, but each one turned out to be vegetation, logs, or a tree. After hours of scanning, they had to conclude that the pond was clear.
It was disappointing, but not a surprise. The team had learned from past cases that the truth often sat in deeper, harder-to-reach places. That brought them back to Ford Lane, an area that had long been their number one location for both Savannah and another missing person, Ernest Franklin. Ernest had last been seen on December 27, 2003, around 11:45 p.
m. , in the vicinity of the 1600 block of Audrey Lane in Shreveport. He told a family member he was going to meet a friend, then never returned. His vehicle, a four-door 1995 Cadillac DeVille, had never been found either.
The team had searched the bayou off Ford Lane multiple times over the years, but the water levels shifted constantly. Sometimes the silt was only a foot or two deep. Other times, it washed out to fifteen feet. They had caught glimpses of vehicles down there before, but never a clear enough image to confirm what they were seeing.
On January 8, 2026, the team returned to the bayou with better equipment than they had ever used before. The water was low, only two or three feet deep in most places, and they could see the bottom clearly. It was not deep enough to dive, but they marked the location and decided to wait. The current was slowly cleaning out the channel, and if they caught it at the right moment, the deeper sections might open up.
They came back on February 24. The water had changed dramatically. Where it had been shallow and muddy, it was now clear and deep, reaching sixteen feet in places. The team could hardly believe it.
They had never seen the bayou this deep before. It meant that vehicles that had been buried in silt for years might now be exposed. They immediately set to work, running sonar across the channel. Almost right away, they found what they were looking for.
A car sat upright in about thirteen feet of water, directly in the center of the channel. It was topped with a pink ribbon marker they had placed on a previous visit. The sonar image showed the rear window clearly, and the dimensions matched almost exactly. The vehicle was roughly fifteen feet long, just slightly longer than the Kia Forte they were searching for, at 14.
86 feet. The wheelbase measured just under nine feet, which matched Savannah’s car. The team was hopeful, but cautious. They had been wrong before.
They suited up and dove that same evening, even as darkness fell. The water was cold and murky, but the sonar had given them a precise target. They dropped a magnet on the vehicle and pulled it up to the surface for identification. It was a silver Kia Forte.
The team’s excitement was short-lived. When they got a closer look, they realized it was not Savannah’s car. It was a BMW, upside down, with the entire roof missing and both passenger windows still intact. It had been stripped out over the years by the current.
There was no telling if anyone had been inside. The next morning, February 25, the team returned with Ernest Franklin’s son and a detective assigned to the case. The detective had told them that no matter what, the vehicles in that bayou were coming out that day. The team marked the BMW and then turned their attention to a second vehicle, a red, boxy older car that had been buried in the silt.
It was not a Cadillac DeVille. It was not Ernest’s car either. A third vehicle, a Chevy Avalanche pickup, was still too deeply buried to identify, and the team decided it was not worth the effort to dig out for this search. The tow truck arrived, and the team rigged the BMW for recovery.
They had learned from past operations that pulling a car out of deep water required careful planning. They wrapped chains around the frame, using baskets to double the pulling strength, and attached floats to keep the line from sinking. The wrecker pulled slowly, and the car slid up the bank, flipping onto its side as it came out of the water. It was a clean recovery, but it was not the answer they had hoped for.
As the driver later confirmed, it was a BMW with a CarMax sticker, not Savannah’s Kia. The team had recovered three vehicles from the bayou that day. They had cleaned up the water, found plates for the detective, and marked everything for the dive team. But they were no closer to finding Savannah or Ernest.
The tow truck driver, who knew the area well, offered a few tips about other bayous and drop-offs around Shreveport that the team had not checked. They marked the locations on their map, but they could not go that day. They were already scheduled to head to Lake Providence next, to search for a missing school teacher named Carlton. The search for Savannah and Ernest would continue.
The team had checked one more location off the list, but the questions remained. Where was Savannah’s silver Kia Forte? Where was Ernest’s Cadillac DeVille? The team had learned, through years of searching, that answers sometimes came slowly, and sometimes they came from the people watching their videos.
They put out a call for tips, asking anyone who knew of an unsearched body of water in the Shreveport area to reach out. The public had helped them solve cases before. They were hoping someone would help them solve these two.