PA PA - William Alfred Higgins, 35, Allegheny Cty, Mar-April 1969

[renaebri]

WTAE Pittsburgh News — 1/24/83

Not directly related to the case but something to think about. At around the 20:30 mark of this news broadcast there’s a brief blurb about thirty rusting cars being pulled out of Pittsburgh’s Ohio River that day. This was done by a barge company and was far different than the way submerged vehicles are pulled today. Were these vehicles even examined further or were they just pulled from the river and crushed into scrap? From the sound of it the cars were being thought of as ones being hidden from insurance companies. Who knows what missing vehicles, such as the truck in this case, could’ve been in there…

Great find, thanks for sharing! Yeah he lived and worked ~17 miles from there but I wonder if anything closer was dredged like that too. Even with a more recent environmental cleanup that happened in that area, it worries me if some of the vehicles they remove are even able to be identified. Living lands and waters went through there in August 2024. 50 cars in three days.

Arconic Davenport Works

Look who showed up outside Arconic headquarters this week! Living Lands and Waters founder Chad Pregracke and his team are in Pittsburgh helping clean up the Allegheny River. They've pulled 50 cars...

www.facebook.com

However, I was sent an article about Belgium recently where in one year their shipping police did 20 operations on their canals to clean up vehicles, and they removed 718! It was done carefully, with the goal of finding missing people in mind, and even then only 23 people were found out of all those cars.
https://bib.kuleuven.be/rbib/collectie/archieven/politiej/2008-5.pdf (pg 7 here but it's in Dutch)

Hopefully the odds are still in his favor of being found if he's in the water.