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The Foss Lake Mystery

Foss, Oklahoma: The '69 Camaro in the Lake

Identified: Three Oklahoma teens missing 40 years, found at the bottom of a lake
By Gail Sullivan October 27

On Nov. 20, 1970, Jimmy Allen Williams picked up his friends in his new, bright-blue 1969 Camaro. It was a Friday night in Sayre, Okla., a town of fewer than 3,000 people on the old Route 66. He told his family he was heading to a high-school football game in nearby Elk City. The trio was last seen by friends at a bowling alley.

The beginning of the night could have been a John Cougar Mellencamp song. But how it ended was a mystery. The sleek muscle car carrying three teenagers simply vanished. Law enforcement officials stumbled on it last year — four decades later — while testing sonar equipment at Foss Lake, a recreation area about 20 miles on the other side of Elk City, where Williams told his family he was heading.

Last week, DNA testing confirmed suspicions the bodies were those of the missing teens: Williams, 16, Leah Gail Johnson, 18, and Thomas Michael Rios, 18, all of Sayre.

The mud-caked Camaro was submerged in just 12 feet of water, about 50 feet from the end of a boat ramp. It was found alongside a 1950s Chevrolet. Strangely, that car was connected with an earlier but supposedly unrelated missing persons case. It contained the bodies of Cleburn Hammack, 42, John Alva Porter, 69 and Nora Marie Duncan, 58, who disappeared in 1969 after they stopped to ask for help getting their car started. They were all from nearby towns.

The road that dead ends at the ramp intersects another road about 700 feet from the lake’s edge. To some, it seemed unlikely local kids would have turned off the main road and driven across a small parking lot into the lake.

Continued: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morn ... of-a-lake/

The period touches make it all seem rather eerie; the second submerged car makes one ponder - and shudder.

One wonders whether it could have been a stunt gone wrong. Could the driver have been trying to frighten the passengers on the ramp but done something daft in error?

If I were looking for a setting for a mystery, this place would be ideal:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foss,_Oklahoma - population 151, fabulous name, just off Route 66!

More on the second car and the location:
http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/ar ... -lake.html - bad signposting?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foss_Reservoir

Anonymous letter:
http://www.muskogeephoenix.com/news/okl ... l?mode=jqm
 
This story gives me the heebie jeebies, particularly the idea that when the second car went in, they might have been trapped and spent their last minutes looking at what happened to the last lot of people that happened to!
 
OneWingedBird said:
This story gives me the heebie jeebies, particularly the idea that when the second car went in, they might have been trapped and spent their last minutes looking at what happened to the last lot of people that happened to!

Definitely material for a Twilight Zone episode. Maybe involving an evil Water Spirit.
 
Hadn't seen this thread till it just got bumped. Read it from the start, got to page two and ...

... stalactites???

Good Lord, I missed that detail.
How on earth could they have been there if the car was supposedly underwater for forty years?
 
There could have been air trapped in the roof space or possibly in the quarter panels.
 
Here's another story relating to cars in water. In this case, a July 26 wreck left a vehicle and its two dead occupants in a stream whose current was too treacherous to permit recovery. In the course of discovering and belatedly recovering this vehicle and its occupants authorities discovered a second submerged vehicle, believed to contain a Chinese couple missing since early August. River conditions are still too treacherous to permit recovery of this second vehicle.

SHERIFF: 2 BODIES PULLED FROM CALIFORNIA RIVER GORGE
A recovery team using a helicopter and a winch on Friday dragged a car from the middle of a dangerous California river where it had been stranded for more than a month and freed two bodies inside believed to be a pair of exchange students from Thailand.

The car had crashed through a guardrail and plunged 500 feet (152 meters) over a cliff in the Sierra Nevada into the Kings River below, authorities said.

After weeks of planning and waiting for the river water to calm, a helicopter lowered members of the recovery team into the gorge. They used a hand winch to drag the car close to the bank and free the two bodies, authorities said. ...

On July 26, the exchange students were driving a rented car on curvy Highway 180 along a steep canyon 75 miles (120 kilometers) east of Fresno when it crashed and became lodged on boulders in the middle of the river. ...

But only now has the river - with thundering rapids fed by massive amounts of snowmelt high in the Sierra Nevada - calmed enough to make conditions safe for the recovery team, officials said. ...

Friday's recovery effort did not include a second car in the same stretch of the river believed to hold a missing couple from China. Publicity of the first stranded car and the trail of wreckage led investigators to the white car submerged nearby.

Authorities have linked it with married couple Yinan Wang, 31, and Jie Song 30, missing seen since early August. The river's flow has to drop even more before it's safe for the second recovery, officials said.

SOURCE: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/storie...ME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2017-09-01-20-18-19
 
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