Fisherman Discovered Two Friends Entombed in Car for 45 Years in Wisconsin Lake: Part Two

After two Wisconsin hunting and fishing buddies vanished into the early-morning darkness of Feb. 21, 1961, searchers across the Madison area tried everything to find them, including financial rewards, a famous psychic, scuba diving teams, and volunteers dragging grappling hooks across area lakes.

The Madison Police Department and Dane County Sheriff’s Department only knew that Ronald Wick, 19, and Carl Stolz, 21, likely died soon after leaving an all-night bait shop a mile north of downtown Madison around 2 a.m. A man identified by store owners as Stolz paid $2 for mayfly larvae while asking, “Aren’t we crazy to go out on the lake fishing at this hour of the morning?”

The problem was, the man didn’t specify where they were headed. The bait shop was within a half-mile to 5 miles of four lakes in the Madison area, and 19 miles of the chain’s fifth lake. They also didn’t tell any friends their destination. In fact, they never went fishing. After a Madison angler/diver named Rick Krueger found Wick’s car July 21, 2006, and the MPD inventoried everything inside it during the next month, investigators didn’t find even one hook, split-shot, or jigging rod inside the car.

In addition, ice conditions in late February 1961 didn’t help searchers. The weather had been warm in previous days, which weakened the ice on area lakes; and melted snow atop the ice, which hid or obscured holes, cracks, and thin spots. Searches the next week by the MPD, sheriff’s department and Air Force helicopters from Madison’s Truax Field found no sign of the men or Wick’s car, a 1950 Ford coupe.

This headline from The Capital Times newspaper in Madison in July 1962 shows that interest remained strong in finding Ron Wick and Carl Stolz 17 months after they disappeared.

In the weeks that followed, divers searched large parts of the lakes, and crews in boats grid-searched by dragging grappling hooks across the bottom—a cold, monotonous, usually-futile process. After all, GPS was still 30 years into the future, so grid searches on lakes were usually inexact and inefficient. Likewise, portable side-scan sonar equipment small enough for fishing boats wouldn’t arrive for another four decades.

Still, Madison officials did their best to find Wick and Stolz. In late March 1961, the Air Force again helped police search the five lakes with a helicopter and crew, hoping to take advantage of early spring’s clear water, which provided up to 30 feet of visibility. Investigators also checked every hat, glove, shoe, or car tire that washed ashore on area lakes.

Then, in July 1961, businesses and Wick’s friends in Madison and nearby Wisconsin Dells offered a $1,000 reward to spur boaters and recreational divers to keep searching. Newspaper articles reported hundreds of hobby divers combing possible areas, while the University of Wisconsin-Madison volunteered its high-tech experts, sonar gear, and an underwater magnetometer capable of detecting car-size metal objects from 50 yards.

Days became weeks, and weeks became months without one solid clue. Still, the volunteers and law-enforcement agencies persisted. In April 1963, when the Madison lakes were unusually clear, the Air Force again provided a helicopter for another search.

As the futility grew, rumors and gossip boomed. Some people believed Wick and Stolz had run off to start new lives, but detective Robert Ferris of the MPD never believed it. He had worked the case since the morning Wick’s older sister, Janet Hall, reported him missing, Feb. 22, 1961. In February 1963, on the two-year anniversary of their disappearance, Ferris told The Capital Times newspaper the men probably had $5 between them when they vanished. Ferris also said Stolz never again touched his two bank accounts, and neither man had used their social security number. And if they had intended to run off, Ferris wondered why they used Wick’s unreliable, oil-spewing 1950 Ford when Stolz’s 1953 Pontiac was in better condition.

And so Ferris and the MPD kept looking. Stolz had served six months in the Army in 1958, and had remained in the Army Reserve, so the MPD requested his fingerprint file from the FBI. When the FBI replied, Director J. Edgar Hoover himself signed the letter accompanying Stolz’s fingerprint files, and said the bureau had listed Stolz on its nationwide missing-person alert.

Meanwhile, Stolz’s older brother, Larry, regularly wrote to Madison Police Chief Wilbur Emery seeking updates. When Emery replied Dec. 26, 1962, he assured Larry Stolz the MPD was doing everything possible to locate his brother. In fact, Emery said he was considering bringing in a clairvoyant, though he conceded some people thought it “a ridiculous approach.”

Chief Emery apparently got that idea from MPD Inspector Herman Thomas, who was checking out Milwaukee’s Peter Hurkos, a nationally known psychic who had immigrated from the Netherlands. Besides demonstrating his divining skills at theaters and other venues, and claiming an 85% success rate in newspaper interviews, the famed Dutch psychic had appeared three times on The Steve Allen Show—The Tonight Show’s forerunner. Hurkos wowed Allen’s studio audience members by holding their hands while asking questions, and then revealing personal insights he couldn’t have learned in advance.

More importantly, Hurkos had helped Chicago police and the Miami Police Department solve several crimes. In a July 1963 interview with the Wisconsin State Journal, Inspector Thomas said his sister was the Miami police chief’s secretary, and she told him Hurkos was “right more times than wrong” during the Miami investigations. Thomas also said he had witnessed a psychic moment himself during a dinner at age seven. He said his father looked troubled when their house started shaking, and said in German, “Mutter ist dodt,” or “Mother is dead.” Two weeks later, a letter from Germany said his father’s mother had died at that time and date.

And so Thomas and a Wisconsin State Journal reporter, John Newhouse, met with Hurkos at his Milwaukee home before he visited Madison on July 30, 1963, for two shows at the Orpheum Theater. Hurkos agreed to help the MPD find Wick, Stolz, and the car. Before leaving Hurkos’ home, Inspector Thomas gave him a bag of clothing items worn by Wick and Stolz. Hurkos told Thomas and Newhouse that when it got quiet that night, he would turn out the lights, hold the clothing, sit still, and “go to work with it” for several hours.

Inspector Thomas, meanwhile, assured Madison officials he would use vacation time while working with Hurkos, and that Hurkos wouldn’t bill the city for his time or expenses. Hurkos, in turn, told reporters he had no doubt he would find the missing men.

The Wisconsin State Journal took this photo of psychic Peter Hurkos in late July 1963 before he spent two futile days in a boat on Lake Monona, showing searchers where he thought Ron Wick and Carl Stolz died inside Wick’s submerged car.

On Aug. 1, 1963, Hurkos stepped aboard a boat with searchers and a local dive team on Lake Monona near the Madison Gas and Electric Company’s power plant. This area remains open year-round because of warm-water discharges from the facility, which caused many locals to speculate Wick drove into the open water after checking the ice in two nearby locations earlier that night.

Hurkos told reporters he sensed Wick and Stolz were on the bottom in the general area, and would soon be found. At one point, Hurkos lowered magnets on a string, and the magnets clung to something large. When divers checked it out, they found only a heavy steel bar.

Hurkos expressed confidence before returning with the searchers and divers the next day, Aug. 2. When that daylong search also failed to find Wick and Stolz, Hurkos told reporters he remained confident, but had to leave for another appearance on The Steve Allen Show. In the meantime, a Madison cab driver told police he had seen a car’s headlights spin on Monona’s nearby ice the night Wick and Stolz vanished.

The UW-Madison’s magnetometer experts joined the search for its third day, Aug. 3. Though the device identified a large steel object on the bottom, divers only found a 50-gallon steel drum and several beer cans. The search continued, because the magnetometer had detected something larger than the steel barrel. Whatever it was, it had to have sunk beneath the lakebed.

Therefore, a week later on Aug. 10, a Navy team searched the site with its state-of-the art sonar equipment. They found nothing on Monona’s bottom or the top 5 feet of lakebed muck their sonar signals could penetrate. All the while, the volunteer divers futilely probed the lakebed by hand with long metal poles.

On Sept. 4, MG&E officials ended the 5-week effort after finding old company photos and documents that identified the unknown metal mass as a huge I-beam. MG&E engineers had driven the I-beam deep into Monona’s bottom 150 yards offshore to anchor an underwater fence that protected the power plant’s intake pipes.

Hurkos, meanwhile, had claimed on The Steve Allen Show that he had found Wick and Stolz, and that Madison police were in the process of recovering their bodies. When learning Hurkos’ taped segment would air Sept. 6, the MPD asked the local TV channel to let Inspector Thomas appear minutes after to “clarify” they had found neither a car nor bodies.

Hurkos never returned to Madison. News reports from Milwaukee on Sept. 11, 1963 — a week after MG&E identified its I-beam—perhaps explained his absence. Hurkos had testified during recent divorce proceedings that he was broke, deeply in debt, and could no longer demonstrate his extrasensory powers because he was a “nervous wreck.”

That high-profile failure humiliated Inspector Thomas. The Capital Times, Madison’s afternoon newspaper, published an editorial that called the Hurkos search a stunt, a farce, and “crystal ball sleuthing.” The newspaper’s editors also said officers within the MPD referred to the psychic-driven search as “Thomas’ Folly.”

The wreck site of Ron Wick’s car, and two boat launches where Wick might have driven onto the ice. Police initially thought Wick drove onto the ice off of Libby Road, while Wick’s relatives thought he likely drove onto the ice at the end of McConnell Street, a mile to the south.

The Hurkos fiasco ended organized searches for Wick, Stolz, and their presumed coffin, Wick’s 1950 Ford coupe. Though individuals and small groups occasionally dragged or dived sites on Madison lakes the next four decades, the two-door Ford lay undisturbed on Lake Waubesa 5½ miles southeast of the MG&E I-beam on Lake Monona.

More precisely, Krueger found the car 600 yards east of Brams Point on Waubesa’s western shoreline. Coincidentally, he found it July 21, 2006, exactly 45 years and five months after it sank Feb. 21, 1961.

Krueger stayed ashore once the Dane County Sheriff’s Department dive team deployed July 23. After crafting a salvage and recovery plan, the dive team anchored a barge over the site with two water pumps. Starting Aug. 1, 2006, three two-diver teams took turns collecting bones, personal effects, and car parts from Wick’s car 35 feet below.

About 1¼ miles to the north, the Sheriff’s Department also set up a command post for press conferences and processing work at the end of Libby Road. The boat launch there is part of what’s now the William G. Linney Lake Farm Park. It’s the same site where Detective Ferris thought Wick and Stolz left solid ground, crossed the sandy shoreline, and drove onto Waubesa’s ice to their doom.

Rick Krueger, however, said a then-little-known boat launch at the end of McConnell Street a mile south of Libby Street is a better guess for where Wick drove onto the ice. Krueger said Wick’s family members, who owned a nearby farm, also thought he drove onto the ice from the McConnell Street landing, which enters Lake Waubesa about 900 yards northwest of the wreck site. Krueger said one of Wick’s relatives told him he had searched the lake often with a grappling hook, and was surprised he never latched onto Wick’s car.

Whether the men drove onto the ice at Libby Road or McConnell Street, one will never know their exact path to the wreck site, nor how long they drove around before the ice failed. Adding to the mystery, a lakeshore resident told investigators in 1961 that she saw a car on the ice at 6:30 a.m. the day the men vanished.

Whatever the case, when Wick’s car punched through Waubesa’s late-winter ice, its hood apparently slammed into the surrounding ice, likely causing the large dent in the hood’s right front. Water pressure held the doors shut as the car started sinking, rolled over, and plunged nose first into the bottom with the men trapped inside. Police reports in August 2006 described the car as resting on its roof, its bottom angled at 31 degrees with a 7-degree tilt to the passenger’s side.

Jeff Nelson, the lead diver and dive master for the Sheriff’s Department, said the car might still be out there if not for sonar equipment. “It’s the deepest water on Waubesa, and there wasn’t a lot exposed on that car to catch a grappling hook,” Nelson told MeatEater. “Other than snagging a corner of the rear bumper, a grappling hook would’ve slid right past everything. When I started on the dive team years earlier, we dragged sites forever and found nothing. My predecessor, Bob Pavey, said he found something only once by dragging. It’s too imprecise.”

Neither did the divers notice any fouled fishing hooks, weights, or lures on the car, or broken monofilament line trailing across the lakebed, all common finds on many Great Lakes shipwrecks. Nelson and the other five divers, however, searched the site thoroughly Aug. 1-8, mostly by feel because of poor visibility. He said visibility was 4 to 5 feet when first reaching the car, but then fell to 6 inches when their work stirred sediments around the car.

But before launching the search, Nelson consulted his cousin, Tamara Thomsen, a veteran diver who owns the Diversions Scuba center in Madison. Using photos and drawings, Thomsen designed a handheld dredge for Nelson. He then took her plans to nearby Pertzborn Plumbing, where company staff custom-built the dredge from fire hose and PVC pipe.

(MeatEater readers might recognize Thomsen, who is now the Wisconsin Historical Society’s maritime archaeologist. MeatEater featured Thomsen in the July 2024 article, “Archaeologists Find Ancient Dugouts on Bottom of Wisconsin Lake,” which describes how she found the first of at least 16 ancient dugout canoes while diving on Lake Mendota since June 2021.)

Nelson also worked with Josh Ripp, an assistant fire chief at nearby Maple Bluff, and Dane County Public Works to anchor the barge and two large water pumps over the site. Ripp helped build the dredge and operate the pumps, which pulled water, mud and silt through the dredge while filtering solid objects into a mesh bag on the dredge’s far end.

Nelson said the two-person dive teams would descend, dredge about 30 minutes to fill the bag, and then haul it to the surface. Their air tanks would be almost empty by the time they returned to the barge, and so the next team would take over. At the end of each day, they had to scrub mud from all their gear and dive suits.

Soon after beginning their search, the divers found small hand bones from Stolz just outside the slightly ajar passenger-side door. Later, the divers also found hand bones from Wick wedged between the driver-side door and frame.

To get inside the car, Nelson said the divers excavated for several days around the drivers-side door before removing enough mud to open it with a crowbar. The door opened more easily than expected. When the divers reached inside, they found a large bone just inside the door. Space didn’t allow them to safely swim inside the car, so they reached in the length of their arms to search the interior by hand.

As the work progressed, they brought up larger bones and the skulls, and Wick’s two firearms they found in the trunk: a 7mm Japanese military rifle and a 12-gauge Remington 870 shotgun. A forensics anthropologist, and forensics experts from the MPD and county coroner’s office, identified and logged every item, no matter its significance. That included two Old Style beer bottle caps, clothes buttons, two wrist-watches, two hair combs, two leather belts, a hat/cap visor, both men’s wallets, a double-wrapped stick of chewing gum, and a coin purse containing four pennies, three nickels, one quarter, and two keys.

Two cranes lift Ron Wick’s 1950 Ford coupe onto a barge Aug. 9, 2006, after Madison angler/diver Rick Krueger spotted its sonar image on Lake Waubesa three weeks earlier. Photo via Jeff Nelson

Nelson said the divers removed so much silt and muck from around the car’s front end that they carved out a wall nearly 5 feet high. By that time they had recovered all the bones and personal effects within reach and were growing nervous the mud wall might cave in on them. Therefore, they secured the car doors to reseal the interior and began attaching straps and aluminum boards to lift the car to the surface on Aug. 9, 2006.

The divers needed fire hoses to break the suction between the car’s engine compartment and mud below. A crane then lifted the car far enough off the bottom for divers to fit it with air bags. Next, they turned it right-side up, and rigged chains and other gear to allow two cranes to lift the Ford from the lake and onto the barge. Once secured on the barge, the MPD’s forensics investigator, Marie Burgette-Bach, searched the deck around the car and picked up one bone, one slip-on shoe, two .22-caliber rounds, two clothes buttons, and a piece of metal car trim.

Burgette-Bach and the forensics team then wrapped the car in plastic sheeting to ensure nothing fell out while it was towed ashore, loaded onto a flat-bed trailer, and driven to the MPD’s evidence facility. The next day, divers scoured the lakebed a final time to ensure nothing dropped or got left behind.

Burgette-Bach let the car dry five days before conducting her final forensics search and examination Aug. 14, 2006. She noted 6 to 8 inches of mud and pieces of seat frames on the car floor, and found three more bones. She also noted many everyday items, such as Wick’s car keys hanging from the ignition switch, a Kodak Brownie 8-mm movie camera with its leather strap still attached, two tire irons and a spare tire in the trunk, and a plastic ice scraper from the Firestone Schlimgen’s Texaco “Complete Motor Clinic” at 301 N. Sherman Ave. in Madison. The business’s old-time phone number was still visible on the scraper: CH4-1229.

After Burgette-Bach finished her examination, she released the car for transfer to a salvage yard to be crushed into scrap metal, as Wick’s family requested. Before workers towed the car away, a MPD detective met Ron Wick’s brother, Dennis, and Dennis’ two daughters at the facility to view the coupe. The detective also gave Dennis Wick the car’s rear license plate, which Krueger brought to the surface July 22, 2006. In addition, the MPD returned the Japanese rifle and 12-gauge shotgun to Wick’s brother Bob, who had restored the rifle before giving it to Ron nearly a half-century before.

Stolz’s brother, Larry, told newspapers he wished their father could have known Carl’s fate before dying in 1964. Larry told reporters he and Carl never really knew their mother, who left them with their father when they were infants. After settling in California, she lost contact with the Stolz family.

Carl Stolz’s wife, Nancy, remarried a few years after he vanished, and her new husband adopted her two young sons. In May 1961, her attorney filed a life-insurance claim on Carl after courts declared his insurer insolvent.

Likewise, in April 1968, after meeting Wisconsin’s requirement to wait seven years before declaring a missing person dead, Wick’s family claimed his life-insurance payment. They gathered June 2, 1968, at Immanuel Lutheran Church on Spaight Street for his memorial service. Both men’s remains were buried beside other family members.