MI MI - Eric Franks, 40, Buena Vista Twp, 21 March 2011 *car found in 2020* #2

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Cold case: Car of man missing since 2011 turns up in northern Michigan
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Eric L. Franks, missing from Saginaw County since March 21, 2011.

''Chad D. Baus, Franks' brother-in-law of Archbold, Ohio, told MLive the Malibu was located in a curious way thanks to an amateur internet sleuth.

“It was the most extraordinary thing,” Baus said. “It was a person from California, a student who was getting distracted from her schoolwork watching a YouTube video of Eric’s case. She ran a Carfax report on his car, which had been missing all this time. I’m a car dealer by trade myself and I had never thought to run a Carfax report. I was 100 percent convinced, as the police were, that the car had been destroyed, hidden, was at the bottom of a lake, who knows.”

The timeliness of the student’s search was also eerily fortuitous.

The Carfax reports showed the car had a title issued in Saginaw County on Aug. 21, followed by an oil change in Clare on Aug. 31, Baus said.

“Had she run it two weeks ago, nothing would have shown up,” Baus said. “These are all fresh records.”

Baus himself years ago had sold the car to Franks' mother, Jo Ann Franks, who then let her son use it, he said. As such, Franks himself could not buy license plates or get the title for the car, Baus said.''
 
If Kendra runs an adult care facility, wouldn't other properties be considered, where she delivered adult care? Seems like such a sloppy waste for authorities to merely assume the car had been scrapped, based on some phone numbers, instead of at least checking the major possibilities first. This reminds me a little bit of an Unsolved Mysteries segment in which a female caretaker took advantage of an older wealthy partially blind man by switching out his expensive furniture for very cheap stuff placed in the same locations. This older gentleman probably never knew the car was stashed in his garage. But I doubt he would have fought a police request to take a look.

Find the car when Kendra is still alive and it's a totally different ball game. The mother and daughter can be played off each other in separate interrogation rooms. Greater chance of finding forensic material also, before it went through an estate sale and changed owners.

Regardless, I'm thrilled there was a breakthrough in this case.

Yes, what is Emily thinking now? Somehow I'm not defaulting to her tragic bad luck.

Quite the opposite
 
Somehow from what I've read, I have the theory that Kendra didn't kill Eric, she just helped cover it up. Her boyfriend was hostile towards Eric and there were witnesses. Perhaps he killed him in a fit of jealousy. Emily was quite young and we don't know what story she heard from her parents. Let's remember that she didn't know Eric all her life. The one she knew and trusted was her mother.
 
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Finding the car is a very good development. Police budget is limited on an adult Missing person's case as opposed to a Murder investigation and they can't thoroughly follow every lead or even allowed to get the warrants they would need to search properties etc. If any indication of foul play is verified the investigation can then become a Murder investigation and things develop more quickly.

I was following the Mcstay Family dissapearance, that turned out to be a gruesome murder. Police procedure was very dissatisfactory and seemed inadequate while it was just treated as a Missing person's case. They couldn't even get a warrant to seal off the family's home for a thorough forensic investigation. When the family's skeletal remains were found (completely by chance) after 4 long years, the detectives were finally able to progress the case and come to charge and later convict the man who killed the family in just one year.
 
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Aluev said:
OMG! This case is finally being solved! It will be difficult as the indication of blood on the car's floor sadly confirms Eric met with harm but his family can finally have some closure.
Click to expand...

Not solved just that his car was found at a house where Erics former girlfriend was a caregiver
 
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