Found Car Reopens Mysterious 1978 Missing Teens Case

WPLG(FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla.) — The mystery of a decades-old disappearance case has been rekindled after a car that two teens were last seen driving off in was found at the bottom of a Florida canal.

Dana Null, 15, and Harry Atchison, 18, were last seen on Oct. 7, 1978, and there have been no clues about their whereabouts, until this week.

A car was discovered Wednesday, and confirmed as Atchison’s the following day, but there was no trace of either person’s body, police said.

If anything, the mystery has deepened, since the Broward County Sheriff’s office had limited information about the hours leading up to their disappearance nearly four decades ago.

Veda Coleman-Wright, the Broward County Sheriff’s public information officer, told ABC News that while there had been reports that the couple had attended a concert by the band Foreigner before they disappeared, investigators were never able to formally confirm their attendance.

“All we know is that they disappeared on October 7, 1978,” Coleman-Wright told ABC News.

Null was a freshman at Plantation High School at the time of her disappearance, according to ABC News affiliate WPLG-TV.

As part of the initial missing persons investigation, police were able to confirm that Null was last seen in Atchison’s car when it drove away from his home that night, and that’s where the trail goes cold.

“They were last seen together and they were last seen in that Coronet,” Coleman-Wright told ABC News.

That same orange 1969 Dodge Coronet was found on Wednesday morning when a sanitation worker spotted it in a Western Broward County canal.

Local police and fire departments responded but the Broward County Sheriff’s office was not informed until Thursday afternoon and, later that night, members of their homicide and dive squads arrived on scene, Coleman-Wright said.

“They searched late last night for any remains and none were recovered,” Coleman-Wright said on Friday.

Both Null and Atchison have profiles on the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, though only Null is pictured. Her profile has both a picture of her shortly before she disappeared as well as a computer-generated age progression image of how she might have appeared in 2011, at age 48.

The investigation team was reconvening Friday morning at Broward County Sheriff’s office to determine their next steps, including “if it’s feasible to go back out and search the canal,” Coleman-Wright said.

“I know last night the visibility was very poor — it was less than a foot,” she said.

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