Major clue to 60-year-old mystery found at bottom of Mississippi River

Searches that took divers deep into central Minnesota quarries and had officers digging up possible roadside graves — searching for the 59-year-old Sauk Rapids, Minn., man who vanished in September 1967 — had proved fruitless for decades.

That’s until a 22-year-old fisherman playing with a new sonar fish locator stumbled upon what looked like a vehicle about 24 feet below at the bottom of the Mississippi River.

“I was skeptical at first because it looked like it could be a rock,” said Brody Loch of Watkins, Minn., who was fishing on the river with a friend Saturday night. “But when we came around the other side ... it just made that perfect vehicle cab and frame shape. It was definitely very spooky, to say the least.”

Loch returned to the spot, just north of the Sartell dam and close to the western shore of the river, on Sunday morning to get a second look. He then reported it to the police.

Three days later, authorities dredged up a 1963 Buick sedan that was owned by Sauk Rapids resident Roy George Benn, who mysteriously vanished nearly six decades ago while “carrying a large sum of money,” according to reports at the time.

Benn’s metallic blue Buick Electra, which was half full of sediment, was severely deteriorated but intact, officials from the Stearns County Sheriff’s Office said Thursday. The VIN was matched to Benn and remains found inside the vehicle are being sent to the Midwest Medical Examiner’s Office for confirmation of his identify and to investigate a possible cause of death.

Benton County Sheriff Troy Heck said Friday he doesn’t expect the autopsy results for a few weeks, but said the sheriff’s office collected familial DNA from a relative of Benn about seven years ago when conducting a review of the case that could be used to confirm the identify of the remains.

“If my buddy would not have caught a walleye in front of the boat, we would have kept drifting downriver and we would have never seen that thing,” Loch said. “I can’t believe that car sat at the bottom of the river for almost 60 years.”

Benn, a widower, owned an appliance repair store in St. Cloud and had purchased a 12-unit apartment building in Sauk Rapids about six weeks before he went missing.

Reports from the time say Benn was last seen the evening of Sunday, Sept. 24, 1967, at the popular King’s Supper Club wearing a dark suit with a red tie, a white French-cuffed shirt and gold and pearl cufflinks. He was stocky — about 5 feet, 8 inches tall — with thinning dark hair and gray eyes.

It was later determined he was last seen at about 4 a.m. the next day, eating breakfast at a café attached to a gas station on the east side of the Mississippi River in Sartell.

Because he lived alone, Benn wasn’t reported missing right away. The first story about his disappearance was in the St. Cloud Times on Thursday, Sept. 28, 1967.

“He had a one-man business here. He couldn’t be gone over two days and he had that apartment house to take care of yet,” Walter Benn said.

Walter Benn said his brother might have been carrying $700, but his lawyer thought it could have been up to $5,000, which is equivalent to about $48,000 today.

Acquaintances called Benn “comfortably well off” with “no unhappy life or debts to walk away from,” according to a 1975 story in the St. Cloud Times. “People who knew him said that he always carried a substantial amount of money. When he made a purchase, he always paid cash in full, and in bars he frequently bought rounds of drinks for his friends.”

In October 1967, scuba divers from the Twin Cities searched granite quarries in Sauk Rapids. Len Trushenski, then the deputy sheriff in Benton County, told the Times he wasn’t confident the search would yield results but said the “out-of-use quarry [was] large enough to conceal an automobile.”

The following spring, divers searched a quarry in Stearns County and found two cars, but there was no connection to Benn. Officers also searched a channel on Little Rock Lake near King’s Super Club.

In 1971, a tip came in from an inmate at the St. Cloud prison, who said he helped bury Benn’s body in a wooded area near Little Rock Lake. But no body was found. In 1975, Benn was legally declared dead.

A 1975 story in the St. Cloud Times says law enforcement officers speculated Benn “was murdered for the money he was carrying, and perhaps he and his car were pushed into a quarry so secluded and distant that it hasn’t been searched, or the body was buried in an inaccessible location.”

Trushenski, who died in 1994, believed something would crack the case eventually: “There’s always a possibility something could turn up.”