Missing for 22 Years: William Moldt's Case Solved by Google Earth

In November 1997, 40-year-old William Moldt left a Florida nightclub to head home to his girlfriend. However, he’d never make it there: something intercepted him on his way home.

William was a reliable man who didn’t engage in reckless behavior or vanish without telling people where he was going.

So, when he didn’t come through the door that November evening, his girlfriend began to panic.

Hours passed, and despite the Moldt family’s best attempts, they couldn’t figure out where William may have gone. Nobody had seen him since he left the club and got in his car to drive home.

The police were quickly called, and William was reported missing, although there were no witnesses and no leads for law enforcement to follow.

It was as if the night had simply swallowed William up: both he and his car had simply evaporated into the air.

Years passed, and the case became ice-cold. It was clear to many that something malignant had happened to William, though there was no evidence to suggest what.

Did he choose to disappear, or had someone taken his life that night?

His family certainly didn’t feel as if he’d willingly walked away from them and his life.

However, evidence was eventually uncovered in 2019 that would lead to a break in the case. It came from an unlikely source: Google Earth.

The satellite image offered a clear view of exactly what happened to William Moldt on that fateful November night, and it was an ending nobody could have predicted.

The Night Of The Disappearance

William Moldt, a 40-year-old mortgage broker, went out drinking on November 7, 1997. He went to a local club in Lantana, Florida, just after 9 pm that night, though he didn’t interact much with the other patrons.

He ordered a few drinks and sat alone for the most part. William wasn’t known to be a heavy drinker or someone who spent the whole night out partying.

By 11 pm, he decided he’d had enough and called his girlfriend while in the club to tell her he was leaving shortly. He promised her he wasn’t drunk and could drive, which was usually the case for William.

True to his word, not long after the call, he left the bar, got into his white 1994 Saturn, and headed home.

Only, he’d never get there.

Willam’s girlfriend sat at home, waiting for her boyfriend to walk through the door. He was never late, which was concerning.

However, when hours passed and William didn’t return home, his partner grew increasingly anxious over his whereabouts.

She trusted him explicitly, so she immediately felt as if something untoward had happened to him after he left the club.

William had no history of erratic or unstable behavior, so his not coming home after a few hours at the club was concerning. Plus, his life was comfortable, and he had no apparent reason to leave everything he’d built for himself.

By the next morning, the police were called. The investigation began just like any other missing person’s case, and the Moldt family was all questioned about William’s frame of mind prior to his disappearance.

The interviews turned up no clues and only bolstered the idea that William didn’t disappear willingly.

The nightclub staff were also interviewed. They described William as quiet, unproblematic, and polite and had nothing out of the ordinary to report.

The next route police went down was the possibility that William had somehow veered off the road and crashed his car on the way home. There had been no reported wreckages in the area, but the police still had to consider this a possibility.

Police helicopters were dispatched to scour the area from above. When the roads and highways proved to be clear, they took their search to the local lakes and canals.

William’s car being brilliant white, it should have been a little easier to pick up had it somehow been submerged in water. Nothing was found, however.

The weeks of no leads turned into months, which turned into years. It was baffling for the Moldt family: there were no signs of foul play, nor were there any signs of an accident.

Nobody had seen William after he left the club, though it was clear he didn’t just disappear into the night. It was agony for the family, and when the years turned into decades, it felt as if they’d never have their answers.

When William’s case was eventually declared cold, it was a blow for the family.

Then, in 2019, a breakthrough discovery would help offer the Moldt family some small semblance of closure: the truth of William’s vanishing was finally uncovered in a truly peculiar way.

A Google Earth Discovery

In September 2019, over two decades after William Moldt’s disappearance, he was finally found. Surprisingly, his discovery was not due to the hard work of investigators or eagle-eyed witnesses but rather to a local resident scouring the area on Google Earth.

A man was using the program to look at houses in the area. In doing so, he found a satellite image of a car submerged in water in a pond behind a house he was looking at.

The man took a closer look to make sure his eyes weren’t deceiving him: beneath the murky water was what looked like a car.

**The photo of William Moldt’s car submerged in the lake.**

Still doubting himself, the man got in touch with someone he knew in the area, and the pair decided they needed a closer look at the pond to ascertain if there was a vehicle submerged.

They got a drone and flew it over the water, getting a much clearer view than Google Earth offered. There was no doubt about it: a white car was beneath the pond’s surface.

The police were called, although it’s doubtful anyone truly believed there was a body in the car.

Still, just to be safe, a dive team entered the water, and the white 1994 Saturn was recovered. In the driver’s seat, was the remains of the driver.

The car was the exact make and model of the one William Moldt disappeared in 22 years earlier.

It seemed as though the case had been cracked, though this couldn’t be announced until the remains were tested. Sure enough, it was proven that William Moldt was the body recovered from the pond.

The discovery ended over two decades of uncertainty, though one question remained: What happened to cause William Moldt to drive into the water?

A look back at the area in 1997 showed it was still under development, the roads were poorly lit, and the neighborhood hadn’t even been built yet.

In preparation for building homes, a retention pond was installed in the area, though with no significant lighting marking its presence, it was easy for drivers to mistake it for a part of the road.

It seems this is what William did on his journey back home. Tragically, once submerged in the body of water, he was unable to free himself and drowned.

Since there was very little in the area—no homes or businesses at that time—this explains why there were no witnesses to William’s accident.

**William Moldt’s car after being recovered.**

Somehow, the car remained undiscovered for decades, and a whole batch of homes were built around it over the years. If it weren’t for Google Earth, William would likely never have been found.

For the Moldt family, it offered them closure but also cemented the fact that they’d never see their loved one again.

Surprisingly, there are other instances where Google Earth has managed to crack a cold case.

Google Earth: Solving Cold Cases?

When you combine satellite imagery with eagle-eyed users of Google Earth, it’s no surprise that other disappearances have been solved thanks to the technology.

One such case took place in Byron Township, Michigan, in 2015. Much like in William Moldt’s case, a submerged car was uncovered using Google Earth.

In fact, the vehicle had been visible from an overhead view since 2006. It just so happened that nobody had looked up and analyzed its location until that point.

When law enforcement retrieved the car, they found the body of 72-year-old Davie Lee Niles inside, who vanished without a trace nine years prior.

Just like the Moldt case, it gave the family some bittersweet closure on what had happened to their loved one.

There have also been other instances where eager Google Earth users have spotted something they believe to be a crime—but turned out to be something entirely innocent.

For example, In 2017, users of the service believed they spotted a man’s body in the back of a truck in Wilmington, North Carolina.

The image itself was pretty clear: a person lay face down in the cargo bed of a truck. It was unclear if the person was asleep or something more sinister had happened.

An investigation uncovered that the man’s name was Oscar, and he was, in fact, a Coast Guard spare search-and-rescue dummy.

Despite this being a false alarm, it shows that missing person cases can be solved with unexpected—and ever evolving—technology.

As the years go by and Google Earth images are updated every few years, perhaps we’ll see more instances of it solving cold cases.