The YouTube channel Adventures with Purpose is solving a lot of very old missing persons cases.
Grandma leaves a Thanksgiving dinner and never gets home? Her 67 Chevy and remains may be at the bottom of a local lake.
It’s amazing how many old cases are being solved by the volunteer divers at Adventures with Purpose.
I’ve linked their most recent video. Check out their full list of videos. This is just one volunteer dive team. Imagine how many more people haven’t been recovered because no one got in the water and looked for them.
My question is why so many people drove into lakes and rivers? I’ve driven since 1975 and never seen any roads that dropped off into a lake. Backing down boat ramps can be tricky but it’s usually not dangerous. I’ve gotten my tailpipe underwater a few times.
I got interested after this local case from 1998 was solved. Samantha Hopper and her 22 month old daughter went missing. Samantha was 9 months pregnant.
The car was found in 8 feet of water.
I can’t understand how drivers get themselves into this kind of trouble. The roads I’m familiar with aren’t very close close to water. There’s usually a wide strip of land between the road and lake or river. You could drive into a ditch and not be within a 100 ft of a lake.
There are 300 million people in the US, and they die in all kinds of unusual ways. Many that are far more unusual than driving into a lake. But finding cars that fell into water is not that easy a thing, so improved technology plus amateur interest could easily solve a bunch of old cases.
Your link says it happened in Hampton, Iowa. The only major body of water I see there is Beeds Lake:
There’s a super-narrow road that cuts right across the middle of the lake. It would be trivial to drive off the side. There are some other places around the border which are also possibilities, but Beeds Lake Dr. seems like the best bet.
Yeah, this. It’s entirely survivorship (well, sort of) bias. People who die in easily accessible places are pretty easy to find and don’t end up as mysterious missing persons cases that are solved years later.
And, the OP seems to have sort of found out about this “trend” by looking at the YouTube channel of a group of divers who specifically does this sort of recovery, and publicizes their successes on social media.
I initially heard the local news about recovering Samantha Hopper. I remember the search when she went missing over 20 years ago. There was a lot of local news coverage.
I looked up Adventures with Purpose and subscribed to their channel.
Also stories like this are going to be published far and wide because it’s so interesting and unusual, which will make your perception of how common they are be distorted. Stuff that happens all the time doesn’t show up on the nightly news.
I also suspect that, in a lot of these cases, there’s already a strong suspicion that the missing person had wound up at the bottom of the lake in question, but previous searches hadn’t turned up anything. (If there wasn’t that suspicion, no one would be bothering to look in Lake X for Miss Smith.)
I agree that media coverage brings more attention to these cases. It can exaggerate the number of missing person cases.
Some may be suicides or elderly drivers that got disoriented and lost. Ended up on a back road near water.
It’s fascinating to see these old, muddy cars recovered from the water.
The Samantha Hopper case was odd because she was dropping off her kid and had tickets for a concert. She was 9 months pregnant and should be avoiding alcohol. Getting out of the car would be cumbersome in a parking lot. She had no chance in water. Strange case.
I’m sure the families appreciate getting answers after so many years.
I suspect driving into a body of water is the number one cause of drivers and their cars that disappear without a trace. I can’t think of any more probable scenario.
A long time ago, I had a friend who fell asleep while driving inebriated and drove off the road and drowned in the Des Plaines River in the Chicago suburbs. Had it happened in a more remote area, she’d probably still be underwater.
I’ve thought about the reported cases and realized a backlog of vehicles under water has built up over time.
Adventures with Purpose and other groups are applying new tech to extremely old cases.
It’s similar to metal detecting. Hobbyists found a lot of historical relics in the early years. Metal detecting is not as lucrative today because the ground has already been repeatedly searched. It’s big news when hordes are occasionally found. Hobbyists today are more likely to find a tourist’s Rolex or ring.
It’s also important to remember that 20, 30 years ago it was way more common for no one to know exactly where you were for a while. With no cell phones, GPS, any of that, people were often untraceable for much of the time.
If someone goes into a lake today, we have a much better chance of knowing exactly where to look.
This has happened more than once at this boat ramp. I can see how someone gets disoriented there at night, especially now that I have problems driving after dark. When we lived in the Jax area 20-ish years ago, they found a car that an elderly man drove down the same ramp, with tragic results.
Also magnet “fishing”. YouTube videos of people tossing magnets into bodies of water are fun to waste time watching. They catch lots of pieces of unidentifiable metal, the occasional tricycle, and a surprising number of guns and bombs.
