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Submerged car may offer clues in cold case
Aaron Mesmer reports
OLDSMAR, Fla. - The Pinellas County Sheriff's Office plans to eventually make another attempt at removing a car from Tarpon Canal. Some wonder if it could unlock the mystery behind the disappearance of two teenage twins more than 40 years ago.
A PCSO dive team, with the help of a crane on land, tried to pull the car from the canal Monday morning, but the vehicle was in such poor condition, the axle broke, and only two tires were pulled from the water.
Sunshine State Sonar, a private company that searches for missing persons and vehicles in bodies of water, spotted the submerged car Friday while searching for a vehicle connected to a different missing person’s case.
"The vehicle was in such horrible condition. Everything we touched on it was breaking apart," said Mike Sullivan, Sunshine State Sonar's owner, adding the same thing happened Monday. "When they hooked it up the axle just broke apart. So we knew the car was really brittle. I think everybody suspected that was going to happen."
Based on pieces of the vehicle pulled from the canal, Sullivan determined it was a 1970's-era Chevy Vega. He checked a missing persons database and found 17-year-old twin sisters, Patty and Peggy McDaniel, were connected to that type of vehicle at around the time they vanished from the Pompano Beach area in 1979.
A spokesperson for the sheriff's office said detectives aren't ruling anything out. He wouldn't say whether the dive team found remains, however, Sullivan said he asked the divers about that possibility.
"They told me that there was no human remains. They did not find any remains inside the vehicle," Sullivan said, adding this is a situation he's seen in the past. "You hope nobody's inside them, but on the other side, you think, if somebody is in it and then that family, [who] has been waiting 20, 30 years, could possibly have answers."
The PCSO spokesperson said the agency will eventually make another attempt at removing the car from the canal.