Cold case investigators find remains, car connected to Florida mother and child missing for 50 years: police

PLANTATION, Fla. - Volunteer search crews pulled a car containing skeletal remains from a canal in a Plantation neighborhood.

The vehicle is a 1960s Chevrolet Impala, believed to be the car at the center of the search for a 35-year-old mother and her 3-year-old daughter missing from the area for almost 50 years.

Submerged car at the center of a 50 year cold case investigation pulled from Plantation, Fla. canal (Photo: Sunshine State Sonar)

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Inside the submerged car, were the skeletal remains of a small child and an adult, according to a release from the Plantation Police Department. Clothes, shoes, toys and personal items, including a wristwatch were also pulled from the murky water inside the car.

Evidence pulled from the sunken Chevy Impala pulled from a Plantation canal. (Photo: Sunshine State Sonar)

The corroded Chevy Impala was discovered during an organized search organized by Sunshine State Sonar, an organization that conducts volunteer searches for vehicles involved in missing persons cases in south Florida. Technicians used underwater sonar equipment to locate evidence. Detectives from the Plantation Police Department and the Broward County Sheriff's Office Dive Team assisted in pulling the car and the evidence out of the canal on Saturday, Aug. 10.

The clues are the strongest evidence found in decades in the case of the missing mother and child who disappeared from their home in the Sunshine City Trailer Park, which has since been closed, in Plantation on November 12, 1974. The mother's 1961 Chevy Impala also disappeared at the same time, police said.

1961 Chevy Impala similar to the vehicle investigators have been looking for since 1974 (Photo: Sunshine State Sonar)

According to a spokesperson for the Plantation Police Department, the case went cold in 1975. Detectives have revisited the case many times over the years; in 1977, 1988, 1992, 2010, 2013, 2014, 2017, and 2018. Each time, they came up empty.

The case got the attention of Sunshine State Sonar dive teams in the summer of 2023. Periodic and random searches of waterways in Broward County resulted in dead ends until the volunteers detected something in the canal running alongside the 10100 block of West Broward Boulevard, about three miles from the where the mother and child went missing in 1974.