SAWMILLS, N.C. (AP) – Forty-three years ago, Pamela Shook Kolbe’s father went out for a Saturday night date and never came home. Now, her family may finally have a chance to bury him after a discovery at the bottom of a lake.
On that night in 1972, the then-teenage daughter returned to an empty house around 8 p.m. after hanging out with friends. She eventually drifted off to sleep thinking that her father, Amos Shook, would be there when she awoke.
“I went to bed, and I didn’t think much of it, not until the next morning when I woke up,” said Kolbe. “It just felt like there was nobody in the house.”
A feeling of dread set in – then stretched four long decades – for Kolbe, her siblings and her mother, who was living in Tennessee after separating from her husband. Kolbe was the sibling living with Amos Shook at the time.
On Tuesday, investigators pulled a mud-caked, rusty car containing human remains believed to be Amos Shook from a lake in the foothills of the North Carolina mountains. Investigators found his identification and wallet in the car, which matches the model he owned at the time he was reported missing on Feb. 19, 1972 from this community about 75 miles northwest of Charlotte.