Google Earth helps solve the mystery of a decades-old disappearance

After several drinks at a local night club, William Earl Moldt called his girlfriend around 9:30 p.m. to say he would be home soon.

Moldt, a 40-year-old mortgage broker, rarely drank, but he had decided to go out that evening in November 1997. He mostly kept to himself at the club in Lantana, Florida, and then left alone in his 1994 white Saturn SL around 11 p.m., according to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. He didn’t appear to be drunk.

Moldt did not make it home that night or any of the nights after. For 22 years, the whereabouts of the quiet, sandy-haired man known as Bill remained unknown.

Then someone looked closely at a Google Earth satellite photo.

Submerged in the corner of a retention pond in Wellington, Florida, rested a car that was heavily calcified and clearly had been in the water for a long time. Moldt’s remains were found inside the vehicle along Moon Bay Circle, the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.