Cold Case: Screams in the River — One Found, One Missing

May 2nd, 1993 is where this case brings us back to, when Todd and his friend Chad go missing.
Two weeks later, Chad is found floating in the Mississippi River, about 15 miles downstream from here.
Now, the crazy thing about this is it could be murder or it could be an accident.

The reason why it could be an accident is because a swing bridge operator, similar to this swing bridge, supposedly heard somebody screaming in the river that night when they went missing.
Did he hear Chad, or was it something else that he heard?
He also ended up quitting because of the guilt that he had.

Did he mess up that night and the car ended up off the bridge in the water?
“All right, there’s a car right there. What kind of car is that?”
“It almost looks like I have a car there that’s upside down, and it is so buried that only about a foot of it is sticking out of the sand.”

“We’re going back in the water. There is one car on its wheels. What kind of car is that? See that? Like an older car. We don’t know.”
And that’s why we’re here in St. Paul, Minnesota, to investigate this case.
We’re going to step you back into when we met his sister Shelly earlier today.

For families who have all but given up on finding their loved ones, this team is a last hope.
This is part of a new phenomenon: civilian divers cracking cold cases for free.

“Good morning.”
“Hi there, I’m Jared.”
“Hi, pleasure to meet you.”

“This is Bill McIntosh.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“And this is Kade, our camera guy.”

“Hi, Kade. And you are…?”
“Dale.”
“Dale, pleasure to meet you. Husband?”

“Nice to meet you, sir. How you doing?”

So, coming into this, your brother Todd, 25 years old at the time.
Chad is 22.
And it sounds like they were kind of running with a rough crowd back in the day, which brings a lot of potential rumors through the years.

But where I really want to step back to this—and then I’ll bring Bill in, because Bill definitely goes down the theories, the rumors, the rabbit hole once in a while—is to see what’s there.
For years I’ve known about your brother’s case, but we’ve never touched the case because, for me, Bill doesn’t care about foul play, but I care about foul play.
My wife is like, “Please stay away from it because whoever was involved then might still be here now, and we want to make sure that the family is safe.”

So that’s why we don’t touch on them.
Here’s the new information.
We have a swing bridge that was south of Bug’s Bar.

We have a swing bridge operator who is no longer with us—he’s passed away from natural causes.
But at the time, the night that the boys went missing, he heard some screaming in the river.
It sounds like there might have been a little bit of guilt, as the swing bridge operator also quit shortly thereafter.

He wasn’t sure: was it one of these two boys that was actually in the river and I, as the swing bridge operator, messed up that night?
And so that’s where I’m coming into it like, “Okay, now we have this new information. Now I have an accident scenario.”
“Now I can step into it from my wife’s perspective, and I can help you and your family out because this is what I’m interested in.”

“I’m interested in: was the bridge broken? Was it you? Was it the swing bridge operator error?”
There are several locations.
If it was foul play, then yes, the car could have been dumped in the river.

So what we learned was that a gentleman who lived two doors down from him had actually funded him to pick up “the goods” for him that night.
It was on Facebook—it was just a notated piece.
So I looked at it and went, “Well, was he actually going to Bug’s Bar to pick up and then bring it back to the other side, or bring it to him?”

He said it was a drug deal going bad.
“Well, let me bring Don into this, because Don, you were friends with Todd.”
“Yeah. Yeah.”

“So come on into this.”
“Did you know Chad?”
“I didn’t know Chad. I just met him once, maybe.”

This gentleman is by the name of Raymond something—I couldn’t remember, I can’t remember his last name.
So, another person—somebody by that name—lived two doors down from your brother.
According to him, he said that he had given money to Todd for the goods and that it was a drug deal gone bad.

That was on Facebook.
I looked at it a couple of weeks ago and then I looked at it again today to see if it was still there—and it was.
So was it that they were picking up something that caused them harm?

Does that put us back to Bug’s Bar, close to that location?
Or how far did he follow the gentleman that he was following—Paul Hodgkins?
“How far did he follow him before they lost him, and is there a place near the 495 or 496…”

“494.”
“Yeah, 494 bridge that could possibly, somewhere between there and here, be where they could have…”
“Yeah.”

So before we go down that rabbit hole, let me just finish up on this.
We have the bridge here, where Todd lived on the east side of the river.
The party was on this side of the river.

So now we have: were they going to run home for something before they returned to the party?
Which then puts us at this swing bridge—and that’s why this bridge is so important to us and important to you as well.
“Oh, they would use that bridge if they were drinking.”

“That’s the bridge that they would go over. They wouldn’t go over the 494 bridge.”
And for clarity, you’re his older sister, three years older.
And this is your car that he took that night.

“Yeah.”
“Okay, I had loaned him my car for a while.”
“All right. Well, on that, Kade and I, we’re going to jump in the water. Wish us success.”

All right, it has been one year since we’ve used this boat and motor.
We’ll see how this Honda fires up after all this time.
“You want to count them?”

“Oh, it was eight.”
Almost as though it’s been a while since I’ve used motors before—how to start them.
Honda, by the way, is a lot better than the Hatsuy that we have.

We’ve got that one as a backup—and we always flood that one.
All right, so there’s our channel right here between the two poles.
Dale was saying that the water was up over the island, so it would have been up another 5–6 ft the night that they went missing.

It’s only 6 ft deep in here, too.
“All right, here we go. Let’s see what we can find.”

So he would have driven off right here.
Yep, right here is where he could have driven off.
So not on this side, but we have a big debris pile over here that he could be tangled up in.

“Let’s run it down further.”
“Well, before we run down further, let’s really focus on this right here.”

“All right, so I have something that kind of looks like… maybe right here.”
We’ll have to hit that from some different angles, but it almost looks like I have a car there that’s upside down.
It’s not sticking up on my down imaging, and that’s concerning for me—that it’s not a car.

So the car is not in the channel where it would be run over.
That would be like a Canadian Moses in Marine City, Michigan, scenario.
All right, now we got the waves from the barge.

We’re going to have to wait until those pass and rescan this some more.
I mean, I’ve got this debris pile, but I just don’t have any height for the car.
But it’s been 22 years now—sand and everything else.

“Yeah.”
“Okay, so at that scan…”

“All right, let’s go ahead and angle, come into it, in this debris pile to the left of it, if I can get backed up and not get blown off of it.”

“So, right there—is that… are those wheels there or not?”
“Yeah, I mean, I’m interested in this enough that it almost looks like wheels there.”

“Let’s see if I can get a magnet on it. The problem is, I think we have other steel that’s down there and I think I’m going to latch onto something regardless.”

“But I think that we’re going to need to dive this no matter what.”
“Hand me the buoy—or not the buoy, but hand me the magnet first, and then I’ll take a buoy after I snag it.”

“Thank you.”
“And then I’m going to need you to counterweight. I’m going to be off the right, so I need you to level me up on the left.”

Now I’ve got something flat right there in that pile to the right.
“How deep is it?”
“14 ft.”

“All right, right here is where I’m interested—right here.”
But it gives me some shine like it is a car.
This is what caught my eye just now.

But these are logs here.
So that’s a log, that’s a log, that’s a log.
I’m interested in that right there.

So let’s come back down to this one first.
“See that right there? That’s what I’m interested in right there. So let’s go back down there.”

Almost looks like a car that’s upside down.
Okay, so it’s on the low side.
The shelf drops off and it’s right where the triangle comes down.

It’s up like 10 ft from where the triangle portion of it comes down.
That’s my target to focus in on right now.
So let’s come back across at it.

“So is this pile of rocks there what it was?”
So, not a vehicle. It’s just that debris pile.
Yeah, like a rock outcropping there that went across the channel.

So it came up to 7 ft or 5 ft, then back down to 13 ft.
Normally, a car won’t come back up and over unless it’s still floating at that point.
But usually when a car comes off a bridge like that, it’s going to stick in and then stay there like a turtle.

All right, I’ve used this analogy many times—you guys may have seen it.
If this is your first time here, let me explain a few things.

First thing is we’re using side imaging and down imaging.
So the one on the left and the right—this is side imaging.
I’m casting 75 ft left and 75 ft to the right.

Anything that’s black is water column, which also represents the depth right here—13.9 ft—which is in relation to my grid lines here: 18, 36, 54, 75.
This is my favorite setting. If I only had to choose one sonar system, it would be side imaging.

But we do have the luxury, because of you guys and your support and watching these videos, that we have down imaging as well as LiveScope.
The down imaging is what helps give me the height of the vehicle.
The side imaging tells me how far it is to the left or right, so then I can pinpoint over the top of it.

And then we have the LiveScope—this is happening in real time.
I cannot scroll back on this system for the LiveScope, but on this one I can scan back and be like, “Okay, I saw an object there. Let me zoom in on it and identify if that’s something of importance for me.”

Those are the three systems.
Now, as far as a vehicle and my reference to the turtle: when a car goes in, a lot of people say, “Oh, well, there’ve been storms over the last 23 years. Big storms. Big floods.”

It doesn’t matter.
What’s going to happen is that vehicle is going to go in like a turtle.
It sits on the bottom, water’s pushing on the front of it, and then it’s creating an eddy on the back of it.

So you have a push‑and‑pull motion that keeps that vehicle—that turtle—in spot, cements it in, and it’s going to be there for the rest of its life until somebody finds it and removes the vehicle from the water.
That’s why we can come into these 20, 30, 40 years later and still be able—if we can find the vehicle, we’re going to find Todd.

Now the other thing that we have is we know the water was higher.
The water was up to almost the top of the island, is what Don was saying.

With the water being up, how far can the vehicle make it down?
We have a case such as John Zaroski, where he was about 700 yards downstream from the boat ramp where he entered the water.
His vehicle was a larger SUV, so it had a lot more air.

Whereas the Toyota Tercel is a lot smaller car.
We also have the rumor of the swing bridge operator hearing screaming in the water that night, which means that the windows were down.
If the windows are down, then the car is going to sink even quicker.

The moment the water comes in—in fact, we have a sample video where we intentionally sunk a car to show the vehicle going underwater.
Once the water comes in, it’s 5–10 seconds at max that you have to get out of your vehicle if the windows are down.

So don’t put your windows down unless you’re ready.
We have escape tools if you happen to find yourself in a terrible situation where your car is in the water and you need to escape.

Make sure that your seat belts are unbuckled first, everybody is ready to go.
Then, and only then, put your windows down or break the window with the emergency tool and get out as quickly as you can.

The other thing that we have on this is because the current and the sand shift over 23 years, he could still be in the water here.
We just can’t locate him because of the vehicle being covered by sand and debris.

Let’s also go with the theory—follow me on this thinking—that let’s say they made it home and then they were heading back to the party.
So we need to check this side also, where the swing bridge would have opened and closed as well, not just on this side.

“All right, I’m satisfied with all that.”
“All right, it’s 2 miles up the way for the other boat ramp, so I say we head up there and then we can head up to that other area from there.”

Nothing of interest forced us to dive out there.
We had a debris pile that had some hopefulness to it, but by the time we scanned it in multiple directions and dropped a magnet on it, there was nothing magnetic.

It was only 18 inches tall.
If a vehicle would have gone in, in my opinion, based upon our previous experience, it’s not going to be down any more than 20–40 ft down from the bridge if he went off the end here.

We did, however, go down to the buoy several hundred yards downstream just to make sure, and we did some scan passes down there.
We also played with the theory of, okay, what if he made it back to his house and then he was coming back over from the other side?

So that’s why we ended up heading to the other side, to make sure we scanned that area as well.
Same thing—nothing of interest for us to jump in the water on that one.

So what we’re going to do, since the wind is blowing with us right now, is we’re going to jet up to the 294.
Jean was putting in a phone call to find out how many cars were there when they scanned that one, so we can identify those cars and see if there’s anything else they missed that we can pick up on as well.

And then, should we come up empty there, we’re going to play with the train yard across from Bug’s, where there was access to the river.
I guess the ball fields are there now—or something’s there—so we’ll make sure we scan that area as well, playing with the other scenarios that may come into play on this one.

“All right. One tree log on the left. Oh, here, you don’t have any side imaging video, so let me show you.”
One tree log on the left—right now, we’re about 60 ft from shore.

I usually like to be about 50 ft—anywhere from 35 to 50 ft from shore when I do my first pass.
“Oh, it’s only 3 ft deep right there. A vehicle would be sticking out of the water there.”

Okay, so then see how we came up to this little knoll?
I would not expect any cars to be down past that right there.

And then it looks like we’ve got a car on the left here, car on the right, another car on the left, another car on the left.
So we have four cars here so far.
These three I know for sure; this one we’ll verify again.

So let’s come over the top of these three and we’ll look at them on the LiveScope here.
“All right, so there is one car on its wheels—maybe on its wheels—and then there’s another car on the right, and then there should be one more, I thought.”

“Oh, actually—one, two, three. And this one I don’t know. So let’s go out to that one real quick. I swear that one’s a car.”

“Go back over that one. 18 ft out. All right, there’s a car right there. What kind of car is that? See that? Like an older car.”

“It’s not a Toyota.”
“Looks more like a sports car, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah. It’s too short.”
“Yeah, it’s too square. The hood of it—or is that even a car? It’s only a foot tall. Oh, it’s buried in the sand.”

“It looks like a truck to me when I look at side scan right here.”
“Yeah, that’s a pickup truck.”

So here’s the thing about if we get up to that other part and it’s like this: that’s where the car would be if the water level was up higher.
Again, we haven’t gone up to that other area yet.

“Yeah, I think there’s only one truck.”
“All right, rain gear, rain gear, rain gear. They’re only in 3–7 ft of water over here.”

“All right.”
“Yeah. Right. Right there.”

“That’s really flat—that looks like a dock on that one.”
“All right, off to the left is our truck.”

“What is it, Kade?”
“Well, kind of on it—like it wanted to go on it.”

“So that’s really weird. It’s on it, but it’s not strong at all.”
“Yeah, ‘cause it looked like it was a cab, but it’s really super buried.”

“Yeah, I swear that’s a pickup truck. Yeah, that’s a single‑bed, single‑cab pickup truck. See it?”
“That third one that I thought we had down here is two trees right there—that’s what that is. So, not a vehicle.”

“So we’ll do one pass up to the ramp, have a conversation with them, and then I think we’ll leave them here. Then we’ll go run up and go scan that other portion.”

No other vehicles that are exposed.
“All right, turn that one off. Let them know our game plan.”

“Jean, how you doing? Good to see you. Pleasure to meet you.”
“To warm up with?”

“Oh my God, I’m a lot warmer now that I’ve got actual rain gear on.”
“You were—I heard you were keeping my driver.”

“Yeah, and I didn’t have any warm rain gear, so I hung out under the bridge and hid for a little bit, out of the rain.”

The only thing that I have out here is a pickup truck.
And it is so buried that only about a foot of it is sticking out of the sand.

But if you need a pickup truck, there’s one there.
The only other thing I had out there was just a dock that’s floated off somewhere and is up from the truck just a little bit closer to shore.

And then there were two tree logs that were laying down out there as well that looked like a vehicle at first, but weren’t.
So no objects of interest.

“So what I’m going to do is leave Bill here to stage.”
“We’re going to run up to the ball fields ‘cause there’s nowhere to pull—there’s no boat ramp up there to pull out.”

So we’ll take two markers with us, see if we find anything of interest.
If so, then we’ll call Bill, let him know, and then we can move the party up there.

If not, then we’re going to come back down here and end up pulling out here and give you a report of something, I hope.
“All right, that’s where we’re at in the process, Jean.”

“Thank you.”
“Yeah, absolutely. And Bill caught you up on everything else?”
“Mhm.”

“All right, sounds good.”
“All right, we’re good to go.”

So directly to the west from here is where Bug’s Place is at.
This is now a big ball field park, but we’re going to show you the map from 1991 from the Wayback Machine.

He went missing in ‘93, but it’s very similar in ‘93 as just being all open fields.
You’ll see that some of these roads come directly to the river here.

That’s why we want to drop in and scan all this—working the “what if” there was a meet‑up at the bar and then something sinister happened right across the street.
Maybe they came over here to do a little deal and the two of them ended up in the river.

Or again, it could be an accident.
We’ve had several people that just go to the river and then accidentally end up in the river as well.

We still don’t have a reason as to why the swing bridge operator heard screaming in the water that night.
So we still have the possibility and theory that they did go into the water there at the swing bridge.

But again, while we’re in the area, we want to make sure that we rule out all possibilities—see if there’s a vehicle in the water at this location as well.
“There’s a barge there. Oh, shallow there. Woo! One foot—let’s go out a little bit deeper.”

And here’s the thing: again, think about the islands that we were talking about earlier and how the water level was up at least 6 ft.
Which means that, during the time Todd went missing, all of this right here would have been underwater.

So that makes it a little bit more difficult to get out into the water here.
Because what we need is a high benchmark with a road that drops off into the water.

That’s what we’re going to be looking for as we come up here.
Going back to this 1991 map, you can see the roads that come up to the water, but once you’re on the water, can you actually get into it?

The thing I’m having a difficult time accepting in a theory like this is that Chad didn’t have any signs of foul play.
So, for that reason again, I want to come back to the whole accident and the swing bridge—and I think that’s what happened that night.

Makes sense.
“Look at this, I mean—it just goes from a couple feet and then just drops down into this great big hole right here.”

All right, so this is the swing bridge where the swing bridge operator would have been.
Something up like this—a little house up at the top there.

He spends his entire shift up there.
Waiting to open the bridge, close the bridge.

“What is making so much noise? Oh, there’s an eagle over there—couple of eagles. There’s like three eagles.”
There’s the female eagle that’s being chased by the male eagle.
And then you have the other male eagle that just took off—he’s over on the left.

All right, so we’re going to come down to this corner here.
After we turn the corner, we’re going to go up about another 500–600 yards, and that will be where we’ll end the search along the riverbank here where the train yard is.

As I was mentioning earlier, places that I’m really interested in are like this—where you can just drive the car off into the water.
Where we were at down near the ball fields, it was more of an embankment.

Trying to get a Toyota Tercel over that embankment is going to be a lot more difficult.
So if we are looking at the sinister side of it—or even an accident location, we can play it both ways—this is where you would end up off into the water if that was the case, from this property that we’ve been scanning over here.

And remember, the water level was up 6–7 ft the night that he went missing.
So there was plenty of depth and plenty of embankment here to drop off of.

We had a canal like this up in Portland when we first started doing the diving and car recoveries.
Somebody told us about this scrapyard that’s up there.

The scrapyard is still there, and they have the big cranes with magnets and claws.
They were saying that back in the day they would take them and have car‑tossing competitions out into the water to see who could get the cars the furthest.

They were like, “Oh yeah, there’s hundreds of cars over there. Go over there.”
Not a single car.

I was really disappointed—I wanted to find hundreds of cars in the water there, and nothing.
Just like a bad telephone game.

Do you know how many times I’ve been lied to?
See, this is a straight drop‑off here.

Yeah, we’ve covered every boat ramp on this side.
“All righty. No such luck.”

So my thoughts and my feelings on it: your story with the swing operator—that’s where I keep leaning.
But I understand that everybody’s been going down rabbit holes while I’ve been gone.

So I don’t know, with this case, where Todd is at.
I think what we’ll end up doing on our side—we’ll put the video out, that way it continues to keep Todd in the news.

We’ll do a call to action to the local boaters in the area:
“Hey, keep your sonar on, keep checking the bridges, keep checking the boat ramps.”

See if these sands are just shifting and if, right now, he’s at the bridge and, after another nice big storm or runoff, something might shift and we might see a vehicle.
That’s going to be the hope on that one.

But I don’t know.
I don’t have any answers for you.
I was hoping to have more for you today.

“It’s our 100 weekends—something else.”
“Yeah. It’s constantly moving.”

Before we pack up, before we leave, is there anything like, “Hey Jared, I need you to check this one location for me”?
Or do you feel like we’ve done what we needed to today for you?

“No, I think it’s been good.”
“Okay.”

Like I said, I wish I had better news for you today.
But it’s been very nice meeting you.

“Yeah, you too.”
We’re going to head down the road to the next one and hopefully we can solve that one.

And hopefully, someday, you’ll have answers as to where Todd’s at.

All right, so my final thoughts and call to action for all of you on this case.
We don’t always make it up to St. Paul, Minnesota.

So if you happen to be a boater, I believe that the vehicle—the Toyota Tercel—went off the bridge that night.
I don’t think it was foul play or anything sinister.

I think it was nothing more than an accident: a faulty bridge, a bridge operator error—whatever it is that caused the vehicle to end up there.
Because I keep coming back to the screaming in the water and where Chad was found.

So again, the call to action: if you have a boat with sonar, continue—because these sands shift in the Mississippi all the time—to scan where that bridge ends, where it’s currently at.
Scan for the next 100–200 yards downstream, and it’s going to be roughly within, I’m going to say, no more than 70 ft out from the end of the bridge.

Stay on it.
Let’s see if we can do everything we can to give Shelly the answers and to bring Todd home.
That way they can have peace and move forward with putting this one to rest.

We appreciate you being a part of this with us and on every episode.
Make sure that you like it, make sure that you share it, because that is how we’re able to come out here and help these families free of charge.

We’ll see you on the next one, as we’re heading up the road and hopefully we’ll be able to solve the next case.
Thanks. Bye‑bye.

“Heat.”