A week before Thanksgiving, authorities in south Georgia made progress in a more than 40-year-old disappearance case.
On November 22, Glynn County Police announced on Facebook that a submerged vehicle was discovered in a pond between the Royal Inn Hotel and Interstate 95 on New Jesup Highway in Brunswick.
In April 1980, Charles and Catherine Romer drove a 1978 Lincoln Continental back to New York after spending the winter in Miami Beach. The automobile has a personalized license plate with the couple’s initials. They were last spotted on April 8 after checking into the motel, which was then known as the Holiday Inn.
Divers from the Sunshine State Sonar team in Florida explored the pond on Friday and discovered the buried, badly rusted automobile. A further investigation by investigators working with the Camden County dive team yielded the bone, and the pond was drained to look for more remains.
The couple, both widowed, had married a few years before their disappearance and were living in an apartment on Popham Road in Scarsdale, New York. Charles Romer, 73, was a retired Sinclair Oil executive and a close friend of Catherine’s deceased husband.
Glynn County Police said Monday that they are still trying to match the found automobile to the Romers’ VIN to see whether it was theirs. The remains are in the hands of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which has directed media questions back to the police department. While the Romer family has told other media sources that these are the couple’s remains, Glynn County Police claimed they had not been positively identified as of Monday morning.
Catherine Romer’s granddaughter told ABC New York that the family was pleased that the search for the pair may be done. She said her father had spent years traveling Georgia to find out what happened to his mother and her husband, and the family had always suspected foul play.
Christine Seaman Heller told the newspaper, “That was all we were concerned about until, you know, today.” “I was discussing it with a buddy yesterday since it has always been a mystery. So, it would be fantastic to find out and have some serenity. You know, maybe it wasn’t such a bad ending; perhaps it was simply an accident.”
According to published reports at the time of the disappearance, a maid discovered the couple’s possessions in their hotel room two days later, after they had not checked out. There were no signs of foul play in the room, and police reported a month later that an extensive search of the area and coastal areas from the Florida state line to Savannah yielded no results.
A week after their disappearance, Charles Romer Jr. told a New York news outlet that he believed the wealthy couple had been kidnapped. He recalled a couple who methodically followed their snowbird pattern year after year, moving into the apartment at his father’s Miami motel, driving the same route home, and always stopping at the Brunswick hotel.
Among their possessions in the Georgia hotel room was his father’s diary, which had the last entry on April 7, the night before the couple departed the Miami condominium.
It was unclear how thoroughly the pond where the automobile was discovered had been examined before.