…disturbed by the motion of the water as your car comes to rest.
Scenario: the Camaro driver wants to show off his new toy so he backs down the boat ramp, prepared to to a mighty burnout up the ramp and on down the road. Inexperienced driver makes some minor mistake and all of a sudden they’re under water, in the dark, backwards.
I’d maintain the older wreck was a navigation error, possibly alcohol or confusion driven, on dark and twisting roads.
Rather than look through all of the articles I’ve read on this, I wonder if someone knows the answer to this: How long had the kid owned the Camaro? ISTR it was six weeks?
He had not owned it long and was 16, so even in Oklahoma ca. 1970 he likely did not have much driving experience. Recipe for a disaster; the only fluke is that it took 45 years to be discovered.
They apparently lied about where they were going, too: said they were headed to a football game but may have sneaked off to do some hunting instead. Two rifles were found in the car. (OTOH, it IS Oklahoma… the car may have come with them.)
Would be eerie if one of the three turns out to have a rifle wound… accident, racing for help, wrong turn…
I looked at the image and that shows a dock. I thought the cars were found 50 feet from the boat ramp. Isn’t a ramp like a driveway that goes into the water so you can back your boat on its trailer to the water? I don’t see anything in that image that looks like that.
Also, images of today may not be descriptive of road layouts of decades ago when country roads were gravel.
Or did I misunderstand something somewhere?
There’s very clearly a boat ramp at the marina in many images, and in the overhead view at google maps. Here’s a picture in one article (the lower picture).
It looks to me like two very simple accidents. One (the first) went straight in… the second could have hit ice, or even been turned around by the force of hitting the water.
The people questioning if there is a serial killer you should meet my friend Occam… he gives really good shaves.
p.s. I’m glad to notice others who imagined the car settling in and thinking there was still a chance only to see the car with the skeletons inside next to them.
He gives aid to reasoning, not shaves, but I wish that I had posted that.
A friend of mine, a great storyteller, oddly enough, told few stories about his family, other than he lost his sister & parents in a car accident.
Then one day, he was visibly upset. One of those primetime true life crime shows wanted to interview him about his family. He told them to fuck off and go to hell and if they ever try to contact him or his family and he would sue them. They dropped the story. He then told us his never told to anyone before story.
When he signed up for the Navy he was initially 17(the 1950’s, after Korea). He parents were in involved is his enlistment and were told that no contact was encouraged during boot camp, save the occasional letter. He felt a little hurt that there no phone calls(that was expected), no letters or response to his letters and no care packages. But that was like his parents to obey orders.
Then one day, he was summoned to the commandant’s office to meet with the FBI. It seems that a month after he left, his entire family disappeared: Mom, Dad, sister and the family car. It was almost to the end of boot camp before the found out where he was and contacted him. The local papers later would say, “Local man questioned in the mysterious disappearance of family” and “FBI hold man in connection with family disappearance”. He was distraught, of course, and didn’t know anything and had been out of contact for weeks. He could prove, without doubt, where his was and was in fact in another state, but since he seemed to disappear about the same time…
He was let out to go home early and take care of the family home but the stories in the paper made him feel unwelcomed and he couldn’t wait and leave to rejoin the Navy.
It wasn’t till the Spring thaw the next year that the full story came out. It seems one night as they were driving home, his parents accidentally drove their car into a nearby lake and it froze over. During the funeral, there was an outpouring of sympathy from friends and family, which my friend took in stride. When it was all over he said to himself, “Fuck you all!” “Where were you all when you all thought I had something to do with their disappearance”. He left town and never came back.
We never talked about it again. :o
Yes, like somebody maybe found an ‘ace place’ to do this kind of stuff in about, uh, '57? 
If so, I can’t imagine how they could have been undiscovered all that time; I mean, there’s some sort of boating facility right across, even a small boat driving past in the shot. If these spots were visible from however high up the plane that took that photo flew, then I think somebody ought to have seen them from a boat long ago.
My husband fishes competitively and has a very high tech range finder. He says he could practically tell you the make and model of a car buried under several inches of mud no more than twelve feet down, the image would be very clear. But he says that dumped cars are such a common sight in every body of water that it is doubtful than anyone would take note beyond using the cars as a reference point; a sunk car isn’t even a curiosity. One of his favorite fishing holes has a school bus submerged about fifteen feet off a dock, and no one knows the story, they just remember to go around it when the lake is at drawdown stages.
Found a video of a fish finder spotting a truck 32 feet down. The image is very clear: http://youtu.be/SoCTkqu-RNE
That’s kinda crazy, though. Don’t they report something like that? I mean, somebody should at least check out if there’s a body in there. I didn’t catch what the guy in the video said, something about ‘sitting behind the wheel’? Meaning there’s a body in there, and he’s just all blase about it? I mean, somebody somewhere is probably missing that person, seems the least anybody could do was to report it to the appropriate authority to have it checked out…
I’m nearly certain that any fisherman would report a new wreck, but the tires, cars, parts, furniture, and other assorted manmade debris are just features of the underwater landscape. People are slobs, and landfills have tipping fees. I’m not excusing it, just reporting how apparently common it is to spot submerged cars. Husband says there are dozens in the larger lakes.
I’m sorry, I think I missed your point with my reply. The technology for depth finders has made big leaps in the last few years, and formerly fuzzy outlines are nearly as sharp and clear as camera images. I believe the fisherman in the video is expressing excitement about the clarity and resolution of his new toy rather than a lack of respect for a potential victim of an accident.
OTOH, there are shipwrecks in the Great Lakes that still haven’t been found from centuries ago (e.g., Le Griffin), and occasionally someone finds a new wreck that no one knew about for decades, even not far from shore. The Coast Guard gave up trying to find the Linda E. even though they knew pretty much where it went down in 1998, near Milwaukee. It took 18 months to finally find it, and only after the family of the fishermen pleaded to the Navy to resume the search.
Water, especially deep water, can hide a lot for a long time.
I’m sure that will change as underwater camera and scanning technology improves.
Upthread, someone pointed out that the dark spots are probably not the cars. But even if they were, the visibility is only a few inches in the water. No surprise there that no one would see them. Also, and I am not a fisherman, I’m guessing that people wouldn’t be fishing near where boats are going in and out of the water. Wouldn’t the boats scare the fish away? Mightn’t there be a risk of losing your line if a boat runs over it? Wouldn’t the boaters be annoyed to have fishing line wrapped around their propellers?
Of course I don’t know the answers to those questions; but they occur to me as reasons why people might not be fishing there. The poor visibility is reported in the articles. Certainly people might use fish finders there, but there’s no reason to.
Not only poor visibility, but the water used to be much deeper in that lake.
That last story I linked to above said the kid had bought it only six days before he disappeared.
I agree with earlier posts that cars in a lake are very common. So much so, that no one bothers reporting them. I’m surprised the cops dragged these two out because there weren’t any active missing persons cases in that area.
I guess the location near the boat ramp made them suspicious that someone might have driven into the lake and died.
Man made lakes have all kinds of stuff in them. Houses, barns, cars, concrete slabs what ever was built there before to\he Corps flooded it. Any wood structures rot away within a few years.
Thanks, Siam Sam. Now that you’ve posted it, I remember it being six days.