I noticed something on Google Maps.
When I zoomed in, it kind of looked a little bit like a car.
I got the text message from Erika,
and there was skeletal remains of a person inside of the car.
Yes, it’s got to be. Oh my God.
Tonight, a 22-year-old case of a missing man,
one step closer now to being solved, thanks to Google Maps.
Twenty-two years. The bones were still intact, still in a seat belt.
That's crazy.
Google Earth solving a 22-year-old missing case.
The facts around this case are pretty bizarre.
My name is Jerry Nyman,
and I found a dead body using Google Maps.
[Super_Users]
[I Found a Dead Body on Google Maps]
I work for the Palm Beach County School District
in the Transportation Department.
And our in-house developed routing system uses Google Maps
as the layer where we can see where the bus stops are
and where the buses are if we’re tracking them with the GPS.
Often when I look at where a school is and where students live,
I usually go and see how would those students walk to school safely
so that they don’t have to walk next to a busy highway.
We pretty much use Google Maps on a daily basis.
I got an email from the principal at Polo Park Middle.
The school named Polo Park rang a bell;
that was the school
that my ex-girlfriend’s two daughters used to attend.
We were in the relationship for a few years.
I would say we keep in touch.
So when I looked on Google Maps to see where Polo Park Middle was,
I noticed that it was very, very close to where Erika’s house was.
When I was kind of pretending to walk from Polo Park Middle
to Erika’s house,
I noticed something on Google Maps in the man-made lake.
Kind of looked a little bit like a car,
and I tried to compare it to cars that were parked nearby.
I thought, “Let me see if I can text Erika
and see if she can walk out in her backyard
to see if she can see the car,”
and I texted her that screenshot.
And he just says something funny like,
“Are you hiding cars in your backyard?”
The water was kind of green and brown,
so she couldn't see the car.
So I’m trying to jump at my fence.
I’m trying to see if I can see something,
but I couldn’t see anything.
So she went and asked one of her neighbors
if they maybe could help her.
I was hoping there was nobody there, of course.
My heartbeat, it was like...
I got the text message from Erika,
and she had even added a little video
where she showed they had actually pulled the car out of the canal.
There was skeletal remains of a person inside of the car.
The back side’s open.
Yes, it’s got to be. Oh my God.
Erika texted me and says that the police want to talk to me.
Of course, they asked me who gave me those pictures
and they asked me for their number.
But I just explained that I got the email from the principal,
and the police, they just were happy that I discovered the car.
And Erika also sent me a link to a website
that had information about people that had gone missing,
or cold case files.
It turned out that the man was William Moldt,
and he was a person that had been missing since 1997.
It explained that he had been at a nightclub.
He made a call to the girlfriend around 09:00 pm,
saying that he was coming home.
So that was the last time anybody heard from him.
At the time in 1997, that’s when they were actually building
the whole community that Erika lives in.
So it would have been a complete construction zone.
There was nothing in the area.
This house wasn’t built.
How and when Moldt’s car got in to this retention pond
in the Grand Isles community in Wellington remains a mystery.
But Google Maps shows, if you look close enough,
it’s been visible from the sky since 2007.
After this, I saw a lot of people had posted things on websites wondering,
“Why didn’t nobody see this car before?”
On Google Images, it looked so clear.
But when you actually stand next to one of these man-made lakes,
they're typically brown or green
and it’s almost impossible to see what’s in the water.
No, I couldn’t see nothing.
Yeah, I think it was just great for the family
to get closure after all these years.