Michael Carroll and his three siblings grew up hearing the same story about their dad. Their mother Dorothy said George walked out the door one day in 1961 and never came back. For over 50 years, the kids had no idea what really happened to their father, who had served in the Korean War.
According to The People, Michael was only eight months old when his dad went missing. His older siblings Patricia, Jean, and Steven were still very young too. Every time the kids tried to ask their mom about what happened, she would refuse to talk about it. “I was always told, ‘Don’t ask,'” Michael told the New York Post. “So I stopped asking.”
For most of their lives, the children thought their father had left them behind on purpose, maybe to get cigarettes and just never returned. But some family members whispered a much darker story over the years. A few relatives said George might have been murdered and hidden in the basement of their home in Lake Grove on Long Island. Most people thought this was just a scary rumor, but it never fully went away.
A decades long search finally pays off
Michael bought the family house from his mother a few years before she passed away in 1998. Living in the same place where his father vanished, he could not stop thinking about those old whispers. Starting around 2015, he decided to find out the truth.
He brought in a psychic and people who investigate paranormal activity. He even hired professionals who had special radar equipment to look through the basement floor.
The equipment showed that something was definitely buried around five feet down in the concrete. Michael got help from his two grown sons, Christopher and Michael Jr., and they started digging. It took them several months of hard work and sometimes risky digging.
On October 30, 2018, they found something terrible. They uncovered human bones buried six to eight feet below the basement. Stories about family members buying abandoned properties usually have happier endings than this one.
Tests on the bones proved Michael was right about who it was. The body belonged to his father George Carroll. The police in Suffolk County confirmed this in December 2018 and started looking into it as a murder case. “The DNA was extremely well-preserved within the skeletal remains, even after almost 60 years,” Suffolk County Medical Examiner Michael Caplan said.
Doctors found that George had damage to his skull from being hit with something hard. But police said they might never know for sure exactly how he died. Nobody had ever reported George as missing back when he disappeared.
Not long after George was gone, a man named Richard Darress showed up at the house. He had been doing repair work on the home and ended up marrying Dorothy. They had a child together but split up in 1983.
There was another recent case where someone abandoned a car in their ex’s name, and a Chicago man left a vehicle at an airport using his former girlfriend’s name, which caused her to owe huge fines years later.
The Carroll kids decided not to guess about who might have killed their father. “I feel great that my dad is finally free from that crappy hole,” Michael said. George Carroll got a proper burial at Calverton National Cemetery with full military honors because he was a war veteran.
