Skeleton encased in a block of ice in Wisconsin

[brian.grimace]

This takes the cake as the most mysterious missing persons case UM ever covered. All you know is a young white man disappeared in a mostly white small town in Middle America, but he wasn't into drugs, crime or casual sex. He never made a pass at another man's girl as far as we know. His skeleton was found ... and he could have died from a heart attack. Maybe no one committed a crime at all. If this has been discussed since 2003, someone please help. The name of the "victim" has slipped my mind.

As I said this takes the cake for uniqueness. For openers, someone watching UM on NBC immediately came forward to provide information about the missing person's dead body ... but it was skeletonized to the point that the cause of death is unknowable. The person could have sustained an accidental fall or been murdered. I don't recall any names or precise locations, and for that reason I cannot do a keyword search here or at the Charley Project. Here's all I know, and some of it comes from a Florida newspaper report that I wish I had saved.

A man aged about 19, 20 or 21 lived with his mother in the family's house in a small Florida town near Jacksonville. I've forgotten the town, but it was near Jacksonville. One morning he told his mother he was going out, and it seemed to her to be his routine exit from the house. He didn't seem upset. He was alone. He drove his own car, not his mother's, although he might have had a rental she didn't know about. That vague possibility turned up later.

From the mother's viewpoint, her son dropped off the face of the earth. She could think of nobody who would want to hurt her son. He didn't do drugs, didn't interact with undesirables ... no nothing. Police in the town were stumped. The Florida newspaper piece I read quoted the mother as saying she was so stumped by the mystery she even considered the possibility he entered a witness protection program, and for that reason, everyone with knowledge of the case had to keep quiet, as did her son himself.

After weeks of digging, police in the small Florida town got a tip from Atlanta police proving that the missing man had rented a car there, which was found abandoned without anything suspicious in it -- no blood fragments, clothing, flat tire, signs of a struggle -- nothing. The case closed at that point until the NBC broadcast of Unsolved Mysteries in the late 1980s provided the baffling dead end of the case.

A viewer recognized some clothing identified onscreen as the missing man's. He recalled seeing these articles of clothing very close to the bizarre discovery of a skeleton in Wisconsin. Some years before the NBC telecast of UM, a skeleton encased in a block of ice had been discovered in a public park. It was a quiet, natural setting but hardly a dumping ground where murderers dump bodies. The skeleton had long since been buried with other unclaimed bodies in Wisconsin. The UM viewer seemed so convincing that the skeleton was disinterred from its unmarked grave. A DNA sample was collected from the missing man's mother and transported from Florida to Wisconsin. When you have a DNA sample from a missing person's mother then you can make a 100 percent match. Turned out it was just that.

Clothing was found near the skeleton, but it was not encased with it in the block of ice.

The Wisconsin medical examiner had ruled (years before UM got involved) that the cause of death was literally unknowable. The skeleton had no signs of trauma, no bones missing, no bones broken -- no nothing. Police in Wisconsin, Georgia (where the rental car was found), the small Florida town and the man's mother tried to fathom an explanation for how and why the man had traveled from Florida to Georgia to Wisconsin ... but could not.

I hope all of you will tolerate my not remembering any names that could show us previous threads on this case. I am positive this was an UM story from the late 1980s. I am positive I read a Florida newspaper story that referenced the Wisconsin NBC television viewer who matched clothing displayed or described on UM with his recollections (from a few years back) of clothing he had seen next to that skeleton.

Dennis Farina has not narrated this story. But Robert Stack covered it. I want proof that I read this online Florida piece and that I saw the Lifetime network rerun in the 1990s. I might be going crazy. Help ! Help !

[crystaldawn]

The story sounds like Tim Molnar but there was never any mention of a block of ice in the segment.

http://www.sitcomsonline.com/boards/...d.php?t=227339

[Steve W.]

Yes, it would have to be Tim Molnar. He left his house in central Florida for the last time on January 24th, 1984. A man somewhere in Wisconsin found (or claimed he found) human remains in woods near his house sometime in 1986, but claimed he had no idea who it was.

Nine years would pass until the Unsolved Mysteries segment about Tim Molnar first aired on November 17th, 1995. At some point the man in Wisconsin saw the segment about Tim and in 1996 he contacted authorities, telling them that the clothes Tim was last seen wearing (per the UM segment) matched the description of the clothes he found near (I guess?) the human remains in 1986.

I had never heard that Tim Molnar's remains were found frozen in ice, either.

[RobinW]

Heh. Just out of curiosity, I did a search and I've found at least two sources that claim that Tim Molnar's skeleton WAS found in a sheet of ice! Strange that UM would not mention that detail in the segment.

"101 Wisconsin Unsolved Mysteries" book:
http://books.google.ca/books?id=j9RT...page&q&f=false

Wisconsin State Journal:
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-69578475.html

[crochetbuff]

He must've had an uncontrollable urge to go polar bearing and it all went horribly awry...

[brian.grimace]

Originally Posted by crochetbuff

He must've had an uncontrollable urge to go polar bearing and it all went horribly awry...

Other than some of the years (1984, 1996) my memory was pretty good. Skeleton was found in a pine forest approximately 25 miles northwest of Milwaukee, not a public park. Another error was that I had recalled Mr. Molnar having rented a car in Atlanta. But the book about 101 mysteries in Wisconsin implies he had driven his own car, "a 1969 Dodge Dart," from Florida to Georgia. Wisconsin State Journal piece confirms it was his own car.

That makes sense. One of the parking violations bureaus in the Atlanta area (Gwinnett County?) had to notice the Florida plates on the Dodge Dart and the length of time it had been abandoned, possibly months. The plates led them to the Daytona Beach, Florida address where Molnar's mother got this rare clue "a few months" (sourced by the "101 Wisconsin" book) after her last sighting of him. It was the last clue she ever got. She knows her son traveled at least 400 miles voluntarily after giving her the vague (and possibly false) explanation that he planned to go to aviation school. Did he fly from Georgia to Wisconsin? We'll never know. You don't have to be a genius to find some schools near Daytona Beach, Florida, as we found out after 9/11.

Doesn't this Molnar case take the cake as a sheer mystery? Not to sound misogynistic, but with any missing woman there is no mystery about the fact that a lot of men want to harm her. With a missing man, unless he has a criminal background, is walking out on a nagging wife or is involved with a cult or promiscuous gay people, you cannot imagine who might want to harm him and for what reason.

Some law-abiding young men who disappear have been described as trying to find themselves. But Tim Molnar's farewell to his mother regarding aviation school isn't solid enough for us to speculate in that direction. The Molnar case is the most mysterious case not involving the supernatural. You can't even speculate as to whether he got involved with the wrong people, did something stupid or provoked someone to harm him. You got nothing. With a missing woman at least you know what millions of men, especially in Latin America, want to do to her.

[RobinW]

Originally Posted by brian.grimace

Doesn't this Molnar case take the cake as a sheer mystery? Not to sound misogynistic, but with any missing woman there is no mystery about the fact that a lot of men want to harm her. With a missing man, unless he has a criminal background, is walking out on a nagging wife or is involved with a cult or promiscuous gay people, you cannot imagine who might want to harm him and for what reason.

Yep, in my eyes, some of the greatest unsolved mysteries involve people being found dead in locations that are very far from home when they should have no rational reason to be there in the first place (i.e. Blair Adams, Aileen Conway, Judy Smith, etc.). I think Blair Adams is probably the longest distance that was traveled (from B.C. to Tennessee), but at least they know he got there, whereas Tim Molnar abandoned his vehicle and somehow wound several states north. Unfortunately, this definitely tops my list of cases that will probably never be solved.

[Arnold_OldSchool]

Birth: 1965
Death: Jan. 24, 1984
Neosho
Dodge County
Wisconsin, USA

Unsolved Murder Victim.

On January 24, 1984, 19-year-old Tim Molnar of Daytona Beach, Florida, a student in aeronautical mechanics, simply drove away from home and out of his family's life. His 14-year-old brother, Frank, had been the last person to see him. Two weeks passed with no word from Tim. Then the Molnars received their first clue from a gas station in Lake City, Florida, 150 miles north of Daytona Beach. On the day he disappeared, Tim had stopped there and paid for a tank of gas with his parents' credit card. The attendant recalled that Tim had been traveling alone. Then the Molnars received a letter from an auto impound company in Georgia. Apparently, six days after Tim vanished, his car had been abandoned in a parking lot, one block from Atlanta's Greyhound Bus terminal. A new stereo, Tim's expensive tool set, and a 10-speed bike he had packed in the trunk were all missing. On November 8, 1996, Tim Molnar's parents received confirmation that the remains of a body found in the woods in Neosho, Wisconsin were those of their son. His murder remains unsolved.

Burial:
Unknown
Specifically: Volusia County, Florida

[Steve W.]

We don't know that he was murdered for sure and if he was, I doubt he was murdered on the exact day (Jan. 24, 1984) that he last left his home in Florida.