SATELLITE IMAGE SOLVES COLD CASE

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
On a mild November night in nineteen ninety seven, William
Molt Moldt walked out of a Florida nightclub and was
never seen again. No wreckage, no witnesses, no clues. It
was as if the night swallowed him. Hole in Florida.
For over two decades, his disappearance remained one of those
haunting unsolved mysteries until a little glint from beneath the

(00:22):
surface of a pond spotted on a satellite revealed the truth.
William Molt was forty years old, a mortgage broker with
a stable life and a steady girlfriend. Not the kind
of man to party hard, let alone vanish without a word.
But on November seventh, he went to that club in Lontana, Florida.
He had a few drinks, kept most of himself, and
called his girlfriend around eleven to let her know he

(00:43):
was on his way home. He wasn't drunk, he stated
to her, but he never did make it. As the
hours passed, panic set in. He was always dependable. His
girlfriend reported him missing by the next morning. The police
have started an investigation, but couldn't find a trace of
him or his white nineteen ninety four saturn As weeks

(01:03):
turned to months, and months turned to years. Molt's case
frozen time. You could say the case was eventually declared cold.
Hope dimmed, though never fully disappeared. Twenty two years later,
in September of twenty nineteen, the answer surfaced. A man
browsing satellite images of his Florida neighborhood noticed something odd
in the retention pond behind his home, the faint outline

(01:25):
of a car beneath the water. Curious, he contacted a
former resident. Together they flew a drone over the pond
for a closer look. Sure enough, it was a white
car that was submerged just below the surface. Police were notified,
a dive team was sent in. When they pulled the
vehicle out, they found scaltal remains in the driver's seat.
The car was the same model as William Molt he
had been driving the night he vanished. DNA tests confirmed

(01:47):
that what many had long suspected, William Mote never left Lantana.
Back in nineteen ninety seven, the area where the pond
now sits was still under development, Roads were dimly lit,
and signage was minimal. It's believed that William accidentally drove
into the water and couldn't escape. With no homes around
and knowing to witness to crash, the pond became his
silent tomb. Over the years, homes were built around the water,

(02:10):
and the car remained hidden just beneath the surface. William's
story isn't the only cold case helped along by satellite
imagery in Michigan. In twenty fifteen, another missing man with
another submerged car, Davy Lee Niles, had also been visible
on Google OAR for nearly a decade. In an edge
where we often talk about privacy concerns from above, these

(02:31):
discoveries serve as a reminder sometimes the watchful digital eye
in the sky offer something more powerful than surveillance. It
could offer closure to those loved ones. In this case,
it wasn't really a murder. In this case, it was
a tragic accident and from William Molts loved ones, the
mystery is no longer there. It's amazing how this story ends,

(02:54):
But some cold cases don't have any nefarious perpetrators behind them.
To share this story, because some cases are solved in
ways you wouldn't expect