Selected by Sarah. Like this week’s Flashback Friday, this is actually a double selection because Claude disappeared with his wife, Martha “Sue” Shelton. On May 21, 1971, they tucked their three kids into bed in their Corbin, Kentucky home, drove away in the family car (which I have pics of) and were never heard from again.
I wonder if this wasn’t an accident of some kind. I tend to suspect that when a person or persons vanish with their car and neither car nor human(s) are ever found, and there’s no evidence of foul play but no evidence that they left on their own either. I checked out pictures of the local area on Google’s image search and there are some mountains and rivers that might be able to hide a car and occupants. It looks like a kind of pretty place, actually.
For the Shelton family, it’s been nearly 44 years. As we have learned from the cases of Dana Null/Harry Atchison and others, it’s possible for such accidental deaths to be resolved even many decades after the fact.
The Charley Project Blog 
I’m willing to bet many of our nation’s missing, whether caused by accidents, suicides or murders, are lying in watery graves across this country. One of the worse missing persons stories I’ve ever seen was released to the media last spring when Tim Miller from Texas Equusearch told the press his group had done sonar searches in 2012 & came across 127 vehicles in just 3 Houston bayous alone. When he took his findings to Houston Police, they told him to shut up & go away. HPD claimed they didn’t have the money to pull those vehicles from the water, and that most of them would fall apart if they attempted. How would they know unless they tried?! We heard the same crap for 10 years here in Baltimore regarding Bernadette Caruso’s case. Its incomprehensible to me that they wouldn’t bring these vehicles up from the deep, knowing many of them could be holding human remains. Imagine how the families of the missing in these jurisdictions feel, knowing police don’t prioritize these type of cases. What a sad world we live in when police make excuses for not doing their jobs 😦
Tracey Reitterer
http://texasequusearch.org/2014/05/texas-equusearch-locates-125-vehicles-in-local-bayous-so-far/
How crazy! That’s a lot of cars! They really should pull them out of there. We have cars found in canals where I live frequently but in every case it’s always been a stolen car that was dumped there after a joyride.
Yeah… I wonder if that’s why they’re not more pro-active about recovering them. The cost/expense/time may not be worth the results, especially for a large city with somewhat limited resources (of course every place is different).
It seems to me that the only time missing people/cars cases are solved is if a drought exposes the vehicle or if locals are scuba diving or testing some type of underwater equipment. That’s what happened at Oklahoma’s Foss Lake and two car’s with a total of six people, 3 each, missing since 1969 and 1970 respectively, were found.
Rarely are individuals found because of police searches. The exception seems to be Florida, were rescue crews come upon cold cases while training
The same thing applied to Cheryl Miller and Pamella Jackson, both 17, who vanished on May 29, 1971 from Vermillion, South Dakota
So many of these disappearances defy any logic or rational explanation. I am sure in most of these cases there are details and circumstances forgotten or lost to history but still it seems like the Earth just opened up and swallowed them. Fascinating, frustrating and tragic at the same time.