Criminology - Charles and Catherine Romer

Episode Date: October 8, 2023

In 1980, Charles and Catherine Romer disappeared on their way from Florida back home to New York. The Romers were snowbirds finishing the winter in Florida and heading back home. The police know they arrived at the Holiday Inn in Brunswick City, GA, to check-in. Housekeeping alerted management after it looked like the room had not been slept in for several days, and the Romers were due to have already checked out. Join Mike and Morf as they discuss the mysterious disappearance of Charles and Catherine Romer. They were a wealthy couple, both on their second marriages. The police discovered they had been carrying around $650,000 in jewelry during the trip. Their Lincoln Continental could not be located. Theories abound, from an accident that left them in a body of water to someone who tracked them from Miami to rob them. You can help support the show at patreon.com/criminology An Emash Digital production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Criminology is a true crime podcast that may contain discussion about violent or disturbing topics. Listener discretion is advised. Hello everyone and welcome to episode 277 of the criminology podcast. This is Mike Ferguson. And this is Mike Morford. Mr. Morford. How are you doing down there in Florida? Doing good.

How about you? Yeah. Things are great here. It was like, you know, we're into October and it was like 88 degrees the other day. I was thinking, okay, all right, this is October 88. Sounds right. Well, that's one thing I miss about the Northeast is here in the fall. It doesn't really feel like fall.

I miss coming out to those cool mornings and getting that fresh breath of air. And with Halloween coming up, I just, there's something missing down here about the season that I don't get that I, that I do miss about New Jersey. So just got to get used to it, I guess. Yeah, yeah. The problem is you go from, you know, very, very hot. weather to this little bit of fall, which is amazing, straight into super cold. I feel like the fall season is very short feeling. But let's go ahead and give our Patreon shoutouts. We had Donald Davis, Mel Tuck, Rose, Rhonda Fratatia, and Just Melody. So that's a lot of great new support. We

really appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you so much to everyone that takes the time to support the show. It means a out to us. And for anyone else out there that would like to support the show, you can go to patreon.com slash criminology. All right, buddy, let's jump into this episode. And the case that we have this week is a perplexing, missing person's case. You know, we just talked about it, right? Fall is here. And as the weather starts to get a little cooler, many people living in the northern United States begin to prepare to travel south. Usually, a lot of them go to Florida, to your neck of the woods more to spend the winter somewhere warm. They all expect to return home when the cold weather starts to disappear.

In this episode, we're talking about two of these people, Charles and Catherine Romer, who were on a routine road trip seeking warmer weather and never returned home. At 351 p.m. on Tuesday, April 8, 1980, 73-year-old Charles Romer and his 77-year-old wife, Catherine Romer, checked into the Holiday Inn in Brunswick City, Georgia. It's something they did around the same time every year on their drive from Florida, back up to their main residence in Scarsdale, New York. Every winter, when New York was getting too cold,

the couple would drive down to Miami, and they would only return when the weather started to get warmer. Like many snowbirds, Charles and Catherine were older and wealthy. Charles was a retired oil executive, and Catherine and her late husband, Frank Heller, had amassed a sizable fortune from real estate. Charles and Catherine were married on December 3rd, 1974. The couple had known each other for 40 years,

and when both of their spouses died, the two became closer. After reconnecting and then marrying, Charles moved into the upscale Scarsdale New York home Catherine inherited from her late husband, Frank. The roamers were creatures of habit, intended to keep the same schedule, every trip, and stay in the same hotels each time as well. the holiday inn in brunswick city was a regular stop for them and sticking to their plans as usual in

april 1980 they had a reservation for one night they planned to make the 1400 mile drive in just four days taking their time as they cruised in their black lincoln continental town car some reports say this lincoln was in 1978 others say it was in 1979 but either way it was relatively new and a really nice car by the time they checked into the holiday end at 351 p.m. on Tuesday, April 8th, they had been driving for about six and a half hours. They had made it roughly 440 miles into their trip. The plan was likely to rest, get dinner, sleep, and hit the road the next morning on Wednesday, April 9. So you said it morph, you know, they were snowbirds. They liked to travel to Florida to stay warm. And the winner, as a lot of people do.

My wife would love to do that. She hates the winters. She hates the snow. Unfortunately, we're not in a position where we can, you know, have another place in Florida and go down there for the winter. She works here. But there are a lot of people who do it. Yeah, living in Florida, I see a lot of snowbirds that come down here.

And I never really quite understood why they wouldn't just move down here. But then it made sense that a lot of them, their lives primarily are up in the northeast or whatever part of the country they're coming from. They have grandchildren there and kids and, you know, main homes there and stuff. So it does make sense as they get older and they want the warmer weather that they would keep their homes up there and then come back and forth down to Florida and then leave when the weather got nicer back up north. But then I want to talk about, you know, this drive to Florida.

It's a drive that, you know, I've made many times both as a passenger, when I was a kid. My grandparents used to live in Florida. So, you know, we would travel down there quite a bit. And then, you know, as I got older, got my own family, you know, we've gone to Disney. We've gone to places in Florida. It's a trek, even from where I live in Ohio. And I love the way that the roamers approached it, the way that they were able to approach it,

which was basically, you know, we're not going to. drive it, you know, all night, which I have done. And, and that's a, that's a tough drive. We're going to take our time. We're going to spread it out over multiple days, stay places, eat, get up. And, you know, we'll get there, but we're not going to get there in one shot. Yeah, and this was a trip they had made multiple times. They knew the routes. They knew the places they were going to stay. They had it all plotted out. So it's not like this was a, uh, a whim of a trip or a spur of the moment trip. And they didn't know. know where they were going or where they were staying, they knew pretty much what they were going to do.

The following morning on Wednesday, April 9th, when the hotel's housekeeper knocked on the door of the room, room number 149, no one answered. The roamers hadn't checked out yet, and there was no do-not-disturb sign on the door, so the housekeeper went into the room to change the trash bags and make the bed, and did the usual tidying, and she found that Charles and Catherine weren't there, but all their belongings were. There were clothes hanging in the closet, suitcases in the corner, a few potted plants sitting on the floor, a travel journal and tax forms on the desk, a book and a pair of glasses on the nightstand,

and on the other nightstand there were two empty glasses and a bottle of scotch. The plants were Catharines. She wanted to bring them from Miami back to Scarsdale. The journal belonged to Charles. He kept the very detailed log of his time. Since it looked like they were planning to return to the room, the housekeeper cleaned and left their belongings untouched. Two days later, on April 11th, it was time for housekeeping to clean the room again.

The same housekeeper, who had tidied the room two days earlier on the 9th, noticed that the room was exactly how she had left it. The bed was still made, and it appeared that the roamers had not been back to the room in the previous two days. There had been no sign of Charles or Catherine since the afternoon of April 8th, just after they checked in. because of the untouched room and because they were supposed to have checked out by this point, the staff at the hotel thought that something was wrong. Management at the Holiday Inn called the Glen County Police Department and reported the rovers missing. That same evening, Charles's son, Charles Jr., tried to call them at the hotel, but they didn't

answer. He later told the Miami Herald. I assumed they had gone out to dinner early and had gone to bed. I didn't want to bother them. The next morning, he tried to call the South Carolina Hotel they were supposed to check into on Wednesday, only to find that they never made it there. He also called authorities to report the couple missing. Searching room 149 at the Holiday Inn, investigators found a whopping $500,000 worth of jewelry, including two custom-made pins, but they determined that an additional $150,000 worth of jewelry was missing. It's likely that Catherine was wearing some of these items.

a platinum ring with a 5.5-carat emerald-cut diamond and three pairs of earrings when she disappeared, and it's likely her purse, which was missing, was with her too. Investigators didn't find Charles' wallet in the room. It's likely it was with him when he disappeared. Charles was known to carry about $4 to $500 in cash in his wallet at any given time. Thanks to the couple's rigid habits and thorough record-keeping, it was easy for their family to tell investigators what was missing. The couple's Black Lincoln Continental wasn't in the hotel parking lot.

So we talked about it more of, you know, this was a fairly wealthy couple. But when you think about how much jewelry was found in the room and then also determined to be missing, that is a lot. We're talking about 1980, $650,000 worth of jewelry. Now, I get it as a snowbird when you're going to be living. for an extended period of time in another place, you probably want to take that jewelry with you. The other thing that kind of stuck out to me was, you know, Charles carrying four to $500 cash. I think that was much more normal in 1980 than it is today. I just don't know that people

carry nearly as much cash on them as they did back then with the proliferation of debit cards. and you just don't really need that much cash. Yeah, compared to what Catherine was carrying with all that jewelry, this wasn't an overwhelming sum that he was carrying in cash. But, you know, to pay for different things that he didn't want to use a credit card for or to give tips to bellhops or whatever it might be, you can understand why he would have this cash with him. Authorities trying to figure out when exactly the roamers had last been heard from.

After checking into the hotel on the 8th, The last complete entry Charles wrote in his journal was from April 7th, before the couple had left the Seaview Motel in Miami, and checked into the Brunswick City holiday end. That weekend was Easter weekend. And on that Sunday, Charles spoke to his son, Charles Jr. on the phone, and he wished him a happy Easter. Everything was fine. On Tuesday, they arrived in Brunswick City, checked into the Holiday Inn Hotel at 3.51 p.m. and not long after at 417, Charles called home to inform their housekeeper of their schedule. He said they would be back in Scarsdale in just two days and requested that she have chilled glasses ready for cocktail hour.

And there's a bunch of stuff there that just screams out, you know, Ritzy to me. Number one, just the name Scarsdale just seems Ritzy, right? you have the Scarsdale diet murder, Scarsdale, New York. You just, you get this image of like a Ritzie enclave. And I think when you're calling your housekeeper to say, hey, we're on our way home,

make sure you have some chilled glasses ready for cocktails. Okay. Yeah, like we said, they've got some money. These are rich people. Yeah, it definitely brings back some old school memories of,

you know, back in the 50s or 60s, these well-to-do people that would dress up for dinner with stuffy jackets on and whatnot. It conjures those kind of images for me. But then again, this is a couple that was transporting hundreds of thousands of dollars of jewelry with them. So they definitely seem to live a lavish lifestyle. Word about the missing couple quickly spread. And Jim Wilson, a local contractor, claimed to have seen the couple on Jekyll Island,

about 20 miles from the Holiday Inn. According to Wilson, the couple was on the island's sightseeing, and he talked with them about fishing. This was around 3 p.m. on April 8th. Wilson said that he saw them talking to another couple who was also from New York, but couldn't remember any other details about the second couple. The issue with this reported citing by Jim Wilson was that this would have been before they safely checked into the hotel.

Charles Rumor Jr. found Wilson's story a bit fishy, telling the crime wire, they'd be tired after driving that long. They weren't the type that went sightseeing. Charles and Catherine didn't change up their routine often, and this was a drive that they did in exactly the same way every year. Why would they suddenly decide to change their plans? Charles Romer Jr. added,

usually they check into a hotel, have a drink in their room, go down to dinner in a hotel restaurant, and go to bed. Some investigators agree. Donald Flynn of New Rochelle's FBI office added, this mysterious disappearance has been of concern to us because they're a predictable, responsible people. But if Wilson did see the cup on Jekyll Island, that was still before they made it to the holiday in safely. So something had to have happened after this, which would be just as puzzling. Charles Jr. added, it's very unusual that they'd go out again.

So the one thing that, you know, I'm really getting here morph is that this was a couple who very much, stuck to routine. You hear these people say they were predictable. They stayed in the same, you know, hotels in the same cities every year on these drives that they make. So I think for a lot of people, you know, this siting on Jekyll Island and this person saying that they were outsighting, that wouldn't be unusual. You know, a lot of people do things on a whim.

It just doesn't seem to me that the Romers were that type of people. And so maybe that's why this story rang, you know, hollow to some people, investigators and in Charles Romer Jr. Yeah, and Charles Jr. also touched on something that was interesting and very specific that usually when they checked into a hotel, they'd have a drink, go down to dinner, then come back up to the room. Once they were checked in, they wouldn't really drive out and go all over the place. So that might be a big clue as to what happened. If the roamers had been sightseeing, which was unlike them, maybe they also traveled away from the hotel. On April 8th, the day they checked in just before 5 p.m.,

a Georgia Highway Patrol officer noticed a Black Lincoln Continental, its New York plate reading CRR-CBR stood out to him. It turns out that the Lincoln the officer saw was the rovers, The plate number was their initials. Charles Robert Romer and Catherine Blanchfield Roamer, the officer spotted the car about 40 miles south of the Holiday Inn, driving south. A bit after this, a Georgia State Trooper saw the Continental parked at a strip mall south of Brunswick. This location has not been revealed, but was said to have been near several restaurants.

Since the rovers in their car hadn't been reported missing yet, and because there was no reason to pull the car over, the police officers who saw the Lincoln went on their way. At around 6 p.m. on the 8th, another guest at the hotel recalled seeing Charles and Catherine in the doorway of their room, room 149. This would mean if it was indeed the rovers who were driving their Lincoln 40 miles south of Brunswick around 5 p.m., that they had made it back to the Holiday Inn in time for the 6 p.m. sighting. The hotel guest remembered Charles and Catherine speaking to another couple who had a small dog. with them. This couple looked to be in their early to mid-40s. It's unknown whether this couple

could have been the same couple that Wilson saw the rovers talking to at the fishing pier on Jekyll Island. Regardless of who the couple was, the last confirmed sighting of the roam was still at the Holiday Inn near their room, right where they should have been. So how and when did they disappear? It's like they were there one second and gone the next. Glent County Police Lieutenant R.J. Smiley told the Palm Beach Post, I've never run across anything. like this in my whole life. People don't just vanish. In the suburbs of D.C., a woman fails to show up for work and is found brutally murdered. I wonder what's emergency? We just walked in the door and there's blood in the foyer.

For the next two decades, the case remained unsolved until new technology allowed investigators to do what had once been impossible. A new series from ABC Audio in 2020, blood and water. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts. Glenn County Police Lieutenant William Pittman told the Atlanta Constitution. One theory is that somebody followed them here from Florida, caught them off guard, and wasted no time, taking off with them in their car. And Captain Buddy Andrews of the Glen County PD told the Harold statesman. It's a known fact that in the Miami area, these people hang around resorts and watch. watch tourists. There are a few different problems that some people can see with this theory.

The first is that they had taken everything from their car up to their room. They had time to settle in and unpacked, hanging clothes in the closet, pulling down the covers on the bed, and laying out their tax forms. And if all the sightings in the area that we'll discuss later on are true and were actually the rumors, they likely went out to eat and then disappeared. So the roamers, if they were targeted, would have had to have been tailed to multiple locations. So I think as one of the officers said, it is true that there are people that hang out around resorts looking for older, vulnerable people that might be wealthy that they can target. But how likely is it that they would have driven that far following them all that way from Florida up to Georgia? that part seems unlikely to me.

I don't know what you think. Yeah. I mean, I would think that they would most likely have figured out a way to, if they were targeting them to maybe rob them before they left. I don't know. That just seems more reasonable to me. Not that someone couldn't or wouldn't tail someone from Florida to Georgia,

but why? It wouldn't be absolutely necessary. They could have figured out what hotel they were staying at, what room they were in. They could have done the job in Florida. And it's easy to think that an elderly, wealthy couple could draw the attention of someone who's up to no good and that they could have been the victims of someone who wanted to rob them. But if they were victims of a robbery, a lot of valuables were left behind in their hotel room. But just one of the pairs of Catherine's missing earrings had 50 diamonds.

in it. The missing custom model Lincoln was only a year or two old and was so nice that a highway patrol officer noted and remembered it. With $150,000 worth of jewelry, the fancy car, and the four to five hundred hours that Charles was known to carry in his wallet, it still could have been a nice score for someone targeting the couple, and perhaps they were happy to get what they could and not risk being seen getting the remaining valuables from the hotel room, or perhaps they didn't know about the remaining valuables here. But then again, there's no proof at all. the couple was robbed or targeted. One odd thing is that a travel agency booked a reservation at the hotel for Charles

and Catherine, but Charles Jr. wasn't sure which agency. Normally, the agency would have revealed itself 10 days after the reservation was honored when an agent stepped up to collect commission on the booking, but by April 21st, no one had. This is probably the least popular theory. but this fact has led at least a few people to wonder if the roamers were set up by a travel agent. Maybe someone didn't need their commission because they had all that jewelry, the car, and Charles's cash. Again, this theory of kind of a rogue travel agent stalking the couple seems a bit unlikely.

While some people theorize that perhaps the rumors were tracked and followed all the way from Miami and their stalkers waited for the right moment to pounce, it's just as likely. or even more so, that they could have attracted the attention of someone up to no good near the hotel they checked into. The older couple with their jewelry and fancy car could have easily caught the attention of someone who saw them as an easy score. Catherine's wedding ring, with the 5.5-carat emerald-cut diamond, would have been worth a lot of money, and she was known by friends and family to like to wear her extravagant jewelry out in public. She shipped it all with her from New York to Florida and back every year

because she enjoyed wearing those pieces frequently. She wasn't known to, take off her jewelry or hide it when she was traveling. Anyone, like an opportunistic couple on Jekyll Island or another guest at the Holiday Inn, could have taken notice of the wealthy couple and decided to strike. At the end of the day, there was no clear evidence, however, that the rumors had been robbed by anyone. So it seems to me more that the majority of the theories to this point in the story have kind of focused on the Romer's wealth, their extravagance, the jewelry, the car, you know, all of that type of stuff as maybe attracting the attention of someone who thought that they would be an easy target. It would be an easy score. Now, the theories vary,

right, from someone following them from Miami to a rogue travel agent setting them up or to just some random person seeing them maybe in Brunswick or around that area. And I don't think, you know, any of these are horrible theories. We know that any of these could happen. The travel agent thing's a little outlandish to me. But we know that there are predators everywhere looking for all types of things, but especially what they consider to be easy opportunities to get their hands on some money. Yeah, the jewelry, the cash, the car, it was all stuff that someone could have

coveted and saw an opportunity to strike and take. But one thing that we know for sure, the car has never turned up. Obviously, it could have been chopped up or sold, parted out, disposed of. But the jewelry also, that jewelry was so expensive and so valuable, it was traceable. And I guess there were records of that specific jewelry so that if it ever did turn up again, police might have found it at a pawn shop someplace where a jewelry store, but it's never turned up. So you have to wonder if it was stolen by someone, why wouldn't it show back up in circulation someplace if they had sold it or whatever? Yeah. And I think you're probably talking most likely about those pens.

These were specially made and therefore traceable. Police were desperate for help and called on the public to come forward with tips and the public responded. There were multiple purported sightings of the couple called in by the public, but none of them were ever confirmed to actually be Charles and Catherine Romer. One woman thought she saw the couple's Lincoln on Route 8.5.5. just 40 miles from New York City. This would have put them almost home in New York,

but this sighting was brushed off by police as it just being a similar car. Another person thought they saw the roamers in a black Lincoln with what they called a group of hitchhikers in Tennessee on April 15th. But this too seemed like a dead end. And this last one kind of stuck out to me. from what we know of Charles and Catherine Romer. They don't seem like the type of people to just randomly pick up a group of hitchhikers in Tennessee.

But, you know, if that one was true, would it not really be a group of hitchhikers? Would it have been somebody who forced their way into the car, you know, something like that? But again, you know, you get all these tips that pour in. in these types of cases, most of them are not valid. We know that. You still want all the tips you can get, but how many black Lincoln's were driving around in the 1980s? And I would say the number is probably pretty large.

While investigators work leads called in by members of the public, authorities searched the waterways within 20 miles of the Holiday Inn. They felt it was possible that the couple may have had an accident and went off the road into a waterway. helicopters were used to get an aerial view and divers searched underwater. Runswick City has a river on either side as well as to its south. There's plenty of water and multiple bridges in the area. There are many missing persons cases where someone has, for whatever reason, ended up driving off the road and into the water,

just deep enough to obscure their car from view. In some of these cases that have since been solved, the missing person was in the original search area and had somehow been missed in the search. sometimes cars can be obscured by mud and other debris where divers can be searching in such low visibility that they miss something just feet away from them. Looking again at the clues in the hotel room, it's never clarified in any reports or articles

whether the two glasses on the nightstand near the bottle of scotch had been used or not if they were clean glasses. They could have been set out next to the scotch for later in the night, maybe after dinner, and after the two had gone over, their taxes if they had already been used. It might give a bit more weight to the theory that they drove off possibly affected by the alcohol and swerved off the road and into a body of water

somewhere. One article in the reporter dispatch mentions the bottle of scotch was half empty, but we just don't know for sure when the first half of the bottle was consumed. Local Georgia authorities conducted a number of searches, but all of them came up empty. Authorities ran out of places to look. Glen County Police Lieutenant R.J. Smiley told the Palm Beach Post, we got a few leads and we ran them down, and they always led to a dead end. By July 1980, the search had been called off. At that time, Neil Herman, an agent with the FBI's new Rochell office, told in New York Daily Times,

we're still treating the case as a missing person's case, but there has been no reason for us to consider it a kidnapping because there has been no demand for a ransom. And Captain Buddy Andrews added, there's really not a thing else we can do. We've searched the entire county and shared every bit of information we had with the FBI. And I think you hear similar things in many unsolved cases, right? Tips come in. The authorities conduct searches. They follow up on leads, but none of it really leads anywhere.

And so at a certain point, when they run out of, of tips and leads. What else are they supposed to do? Yeah, we've talked about cases where it seems like the police didn't actively pursue stuff and they maybe sat on their hands a little bit and didn't get involved right away. It seems like they took this case serious right from the beginning and they followed up on leads. They did searches and there was just nothing for them to go on. No, no one direction to point them in to see to say what happened to this couple. Though the search was officially over, people were still looking for the couple. In 1982, 34-year-old George Baker made the news due to his efforts in the search for Charles and Catherine.

He told the Atlanta Constitution, I think about the rumor case every day. Baker, a Southern Bell telephone installer, was also an auxiliary police officer who would assist when divers were needed. He had been part of the original search. for the couple, but was now performing dives on his own. Dive by dive, he was searching for the roamers. Every year, Charles Jr. traveled from his home in New Jersey to South Brunswick to speak to investigators there and remind them that Charles and Catherine were still out there somewhere, but there was

no movement on the case. And this guy, George Baker, is fascinating to me because you do hear about this quite often. in these types of cases where, you know, someone, yes, he's an auxiliary police officer, but it's almost as if, you know, sometimes these people become consumed with a case. And they work on it, even though they're not really in an official capacity. I think you find that a lot. Yeah, I think to some degree, it's like people that go on Reddit or web sluice and get involved in the case and they're spending time doing research and mapping out possible locations

and routes that they might have driven on. And here this is somebody that's actually going out to the locations and diving in the water and really taking it a step further. Fresh air, longer days, a chance to reset. This season let therapy be part of your spring cleaning. Clearing mental clutter, shaking off stuckness and building something better. Grow therapy helps you get there. Whether it's your first time in therapy or your 15th, grow makes it easy. to find a therapist who fits you, not the other way around. They connect you with thousands of independent licensed therapists across the U.S., offering both virtual and in-person sessions nights and weekends.

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Sessions average about $21 with insurance and some pay as little as $0 depending on their plan. Visit growtherapy.com slash book now to get started. That's growtherapy.com slash book now. Growtherapy.com slash book now. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan. In 1985, Charles and Catherine Romer were declared legally dead. Charles is a state worth approximately $1.2 million, which is almost $3.5 million today, passed down to his sons, Charles Jr. and Richard. Seven years later, in 1992,

Richard Romer passed away. In 2001, Catherine's son, Frank Heller Jr., passed away. By 2004, George Baker had made well over 300 dives of local waterways, searching for the roamers or their car to no avail. He told the Brunswick News, this thing doesn't seem to ever go away. It seems as if a new tip given to George Baker may have held a clue. A woman, reported that on the night that the roamers were last seen, her husband, a bookmobile delivery driver, was run off the road by a black Lincoln town car. They had tried to give this tip during the original investigation, but felt that it may have gotten lost in the shuffle since there was so much activity and so many tips coming in at the time. Though her husband was deceased, she still

had the delivery ticket from that night, showing the area that he was working. in, apparently Baker had independently been focused on this area before he received the tip. He planned to search an undisclosed location based on this tip in his research with a few other rescue divers. Baker said, I just want to give them a decent burial if I can't. Near the area where the man was run off the road by a Lincoln Town car, there used to be a bridge. There's just a small boat ramp there now, and the bridge is just south of where it was. was. If you look on Google Maps, you can easily find the boat ramp labeled South Brunswick River boat ramp. And if you look at old aerial photos, you could see where the original bridge was in the

1950s. Just two miles southeast of this area, in Fancy Bluff Creek, a Lincoln town car seat was found floating in 1986. This was after the rovers had legally been declared dead, so the investigation into their disappearance was likely already closed. It's unclear how much the town car seat was looked into. One 1998 article notes that it was the wrong color. It still seems like too big of a coincidence to some, though. Charles Romer had owned the apartment down in Miami since the 1940s. So if he crossed the South Brunswick River on trips back then, he definitely would have used the bridge that was originally replaced by Georgia State Route 303. After he retired, Charles and his first wife, Jane O'Shea, would drive down to their

property in Miami for the winter together until her death in 1973. If he continued to take the trip to Florida on his own, after her passing, that is half a dozen times he would have taken that exact route. Charles Rumour Jr. passed away in 2007 at the age of 76. None of Charles and Catherine's children learned what happened before they died, but the couple seven granddaughters still light a candle on the anniversary of their disappearance each year and hope for answers. Sadly, in 2010, George Baker was still searching for Charles and Catherine and Bain. In July, he searched the South Brunswick River again. This time, instead of just

searching the area near the boat ramp and bridge, with long aluminum poles, he was able to use something called side-scan technology to see below the mud in the current. This time, Baker was able to spot at least a dozen cars. He and his team tried to dive down to the area nine times, but due to the strong current they couldn't make it. Baker felt that one of the cars he spotted could have been a Lincoln Continental. Still, despite knowing there were cars down there, nothing conclusive or certainly relevant to the rumors was found. Baker told the Brunswick News of the latest letdown. We will have to wait until the technology evolves. In January 2023, the dive-in recovery team Adventures with Purpose released a video about their search for Charles and Catherine Romer. They have success.

found many missing people in their cars underwater in areas that were already searched and cleared by authorities. Sometimes it feels like if something is there to be found, adventures with purpose will find it. But of course, it's always possible for them to miss something, just like the divers who miss things that AWP found later. Even with this new technology, it's not foolproof. If you're not trained well, the marks on a scan that indicate a car could just look like rocks at the bottom of the river. Unlike many of their videos, this one did not end with a recovery. The roamers are still missing today. So do you watch Adventures with Purpose videos at all, Mike? No, I don't, but I know you do. You've talked about it before with me. Yeah, we've covered a few cases too where they've been called in

And they do a really fantastic job. They use a lot of great technology, the newest sonar, and they have a very experienced team. And anybody that wants to watch their YouTube channel, they've got a lot of videos. And they've recovered, I don't know what the numbers, but they found a lot of people in their cars in bodies of water. So, you know, anytime a car is missing and the people are missing, there's a good chance that it went in the water. there's a there's a very high likelihood that this team if it's out there can find it yeah obviously they're doing some amazing work and helping to clear up questions that you know have been lingering for 20 30 40 50 years in some instances you know i want to go back to this charles baker

because he fascinates me in a way you know we said 30 years later he was still making dives looking for the roamers. And, you know, one of the things that he said was that in one particular dive, they spotted at least a dozen cars. And that just really kind of stuck out to me. And when you think about it, how many waterways are there just in the U.S. alone? And how many cars are sitting at the bottom of some of these waterways holding the answers to some missing persons?

cases that have happened over the years. And he mentioned specifically in 2010 the use of this side scan technology. And I don't know how much you fish. But for any of the people who are listening who are fishermen, side scan technology and the fish finders and the sonar that has come along in the recent years just for fishing is amazing. You know, what you can see standing on a boat. It's almost like a picture of what's underneath your boat. It blows people away when they see it. Yeah. And on the Adventures with Purpose Channel, a lot of times when they show an image, you can clearly see even without being a trained expert, a clear outline of a vehicle, the tires, and It's just really amazing the technology that they can use to find these things.

So we talk a lot about advancements in DNA technology, you know, the exciting things that are happening with genetic genealogy. This is just another area where technology is advancing to the point where it's going to help solve a number of these cases, especially when you have teams like adventure with purpose out there armed with the technology and who are more than willing to put their time and effort into using it. The key for police has always been to find the Lincoln. Lynn County Police Captain Buddy Andrews told the New York Daily Times, a big expensive car like that one is an awfully hard thing to hide or get rid of. I think regardless of what happened, an accident, a robbery, or even something no one has explored yet,

finding the car is what will clear the whole thing up. If we find the car, we'll be close to answering all our questions. If someone did follow the roamers up from Florida and kidnapped them to steal the Lincoln and the valuables they had with them, the car could really be anywhere. The suspects could have dumped the car in one of the waterways that people assume the romers drove into, but they also could have used the car to get far away from Brunswick. it could have been dumped in any body of water, but it also could have been scrapped or chopped or parted out or hidden away somewhere in a barn, a garage, or even buried. In November 22, a convertible Mercedes was found buried in the backyard of a mansion in Northern California. After a quick investigation, it was determined that the owner of the home had buried his Mercedes worth $1.2 million to get the insurance money.

The car was reported stolen in 1992 and literally unearthed 30 years later. The Romers Lincoln could also be buried somewhere. In looking at all the clues or the lack of clues, and especially at all of the searches, the most likely theory for many in this case is that Charles and Catherine did, sadly, somehow drive into the water. They usually didn't go sightseeing or go far from the water. the hotels they stayed at. They were getting older, and they could have decided to change it up, wondering how many of these trips they would take together in the future. So maybe they decided to make

a short spur of the moment trip to sightsee, or maybe they just went out to dinner. If the romers were parked near restaurants in the evening, south of Brunswick, where their car was supposedly seen, they would have needed to cross South Brunswick River to get back to the Holiday Inn. If after dinner they headed toward the river, and it was their Black Lincoln, that the bookmobile driver saw, something was clearly happening by then. The bookmobile driver didn't just see a Black Lincoln. He claimed to have nearly been run off the road by it. Some take this to mean that someone else was driving the car wildly, like a getaway car, or perhaps they had carjacked a couple and abducted them, but it could also be a sign that perhaps there was some sort of

medical emergency. If the bookmobile driver was heading away from the river and the roamer swerved into his lane, then they easily could have ended up on the path to the boat ramp, which runs parallel to the road they were supposed to be on. And ending up in the water is a real possibility. Other than a medical emergency, a half-empty bottle of scotch and maybe more alcohol at dinner could explain why the car was driving so radically. If it was dark, and whichever Romer was driving, was intoxicated or maybe beginning to struggle with driving at night or both, it would have been incredibly easy to drive off that boat ramp. Even today, that area is not lined with signs warning that the boat ramp is there. And I think, you know, that's part of what's so frustrating

in this case. The roamers may have gone into the water with their car and it just hasn't been found, but there is zero evidence of it, just like there is no evidence that the rovers met with foul play. At the end of the day, there just is no real starting point for investigators and there never has been. We always talk about the police using the tools available to them at the time. If the roamers went missing today, there would be all kinds of tools available to help look for them. Cell phone pings, data, surveillance cameras, drones, but none of that was available to investigators back in 1980 when the rovers vanished. barring perhaps some of the Romer's belongings turning up or their car or their remains being found, it's possible that we'll likely never know what happened to them.

And that's always a frustrating statement to make. It's true, but it's frustrating. As we wrap this one up more, there are a lot of different angles to consider when it comes to the case of Charles and Catherine Romer and they range pretty wildly from they drove into the river due to alcohol, a medical emergency, you name it, right? There's a number of reasons for why they could have had an accident and their car ended up in the river and they perished and the car has just never been found to some type of foul play

where they were targeted due to their wealth and jewelry and stuff like that. And I think the important thing is for police is to have a starting point, whether it's a missing person's case or a murder, just trying to track their last moments and have some direction ahead in is what starts off an investigation. But here, when you have no starting point and no sign leading to any one avenue, of investigation, where do the police start? They have to sort of consider everything.

We talked about how they took the case series from the beginning. They did check out leads. They did searches, but, you know, all of that came up empty. And maybe if they had some smoking gun of a clue that could lead them in a specific direction, we might have some answers. But unfortunately, there's just nothing leading police in one direction. And I don't remember who it was, but one of the investigators said, you know, finding the car would give them a great starting point. And it would, no doubt. Obviously,

if that car is found in the river, then there are going to be some answers that come from that. You know, if the roamers met with foul play and whoever committed that foul play took their car, likely they got rid of that car in a way that it would never be found today. You know, whether it was crushed or buried or whatever, it's unlikely that it would be found. But if it is in a body of water somewhere, there is a real chance that someday it will be found and we'll get some answers. But that's it for our episode on Charles and Catherine Romer. If you love the show and haven't done so yet, take a minute, go out, give us a five-star rating, leave a review, and keep telling your friends, word of mouth about the podcast really helps us out.

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But Morph and I will be back with everyone next Saturday night with a brand new episode. So until then, for Mike. And Morph. We'll talk to you next week. Take care, everyone.