{"id":36400,"date":"2015-07-23T20:13:28","date_gmt":"2015-07-24T00:13:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/?p=36400"},"modified":"2015-07-23T20:13:28","modified_gmt":"2015-07-24T00:13:28","slug":"rita-sue-zul-found-25-years-later","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/2015\/07\/rita-sue-zul-found-25-years-later\/","title":{"rendered":"Rita Sue Zul
Found 25 Years Later"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Her family finally knows what happened to their loved one 25 years ago.<\/p>\n

Rita Sue Zul was reported missing on January 15, 1990. \u00a0Zul left the restaurant she worked at driving her boyfriend’s red Datsun, but never made it home.<\/p>\n

On Monday, that car was pulled from the bottom of a pond near Bayshore Road and State Road 31.<\/p>\n

The car was barely recognizable after years of being underwater. The Lee County Sheriff’s Office spent three days working to confirm the connection between the car, the remains and the missing 1990 missing person case.<\/p>\n

A man searching for another missing person’s vehicle made the discovery.<\/p>\n

Once a tow truck pulled it out, they found human skeletal remains inside. \u00a0That quickly made it a Major Crimes investigation — one with its own major challenges.<\/p>\n

“With this vehicle here, it’s been in there for so long the metal’s degraded,” said Sergeant John Desrosier with the Lee County Sheriff’s Office.<\/p>\n

The VIN numbers are missing, the license plate deteriorated and all of the major identifiers are impossible to make out.<\/p>\n

“We actually had to tear this car apart, find unique numbers on the engine block and other numbers we were able to verify,” said Sgt. Desrosier.<\/p>\n

While the sheriff’s office worked to confirm the car was the one Rita Sue Zul was last seen in, the Medical Examiner was tasked with confirming the identity of the remains.<\/p>\n

As for this case, the sheriff’s office says foul play is not suspected in Zul’s death. \u00a0But they do hope to figure out how she ended up in the water.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Her family finally knows what happened to their loved one 25 years ago. Rita Sue Zul was reported missing on January 15, 1990. \u00a0Zul left the restaurant she worked at… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36400"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36400\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}