In addition, ice conditions in late February 1961 didn\u2019t help searchers. The weather had been warm in previous days, which weakened the ice on area lakes; and melted snow atop the ice, which hid or obscured holes, cracks, and thin spots. Searches the next week by the MPD, sheriff\u2019s department and Air Force helicopters from Madison\u2019s Truax Field<\/a> found no sign of the men or Wick\u2019s car, a 1950 Ford coupe.<\/p>\n Searches Dragged On<\/p>\n In the weeks that followed, divers searched large parts of the lakes, and crews in boats grid-searched by dragging grappling hooks across the bottom\u2014a cold, monotonous, usually-futile process. After all, GPS was still 30 years into the future, so grid searches on lakes were usually inexact and inefficient. Likewise, portable side-scan sonar equipment small enough for fishing boats wouldn\u2019t arrive for another four decades.<\/p>\n Still, Madison officials did their best to find Wick and Stolz. In late March 1961, the Air Force again helped police search the five lakes with a helicopter and crew, hoping to take advantage of early spring\u2019s clear water, which provided up to 30 feet of visibility. Investigators also checked every hat, glove, shoe, or car tire that washed ashore on area lakes.<\/p>\n Then, in July 1961, businesses and Wick\u2019s friends in Madison and nearby Wisconsin Dells offered a $1,000 reward to spur boaters and recreational divers to keep searching. Newspaper articles reported hundreds of hobby divers combing possible areas, while the University of Wisconsin-Madison volunteered its high-tech experts, sonar gear, and an underwater magnetometer capable of detecting car-size metal objects from 50 yards.<\/p>\n Days became weeks, and weeks became months without one solid clue. Still, the volunteers and law-enforcement agencies persisted. In April 1963, when the Madison lakes were unusually clear, the Air Force again provided a helicopter for another search.<\/p>\n As the futility grew, rumors and gossip boomed. Some people believed Wick and Stolz had run off to start new lives, but detective Robert Ferris of the MPD never believed it. He had worked the case since the morning Wick\u2019s older sister, Janet Hall, reported him missing, Feb. 22, 1961. In February 1963, on the two-year anniversary of their disappearance, Ferris told The Capital Times newspaper the men probably had $5 between them when they vanished. Ferris also said Stolz never again touched his two bank accounts, and neither man had used their social security number. And if they had intended to run off, Ferris wondered why they used Wick\u2019s unreliable, oil-spewing 1950 Ford when Stolz\u2019s 1953 Pontiac was in better condition.<\/p>\n And so Ferris and the MPD kept looking. Stolz had served six months in the Army in 1958, and had remained in the Army Reserve, so the MPD requested his fingerprint file from the FBI. When the FBI replied, Director J. Edgar Hoover himself signed the letter accompanying Stolz\u2019s fingerprint files, and said the bureau had listed Stolz on its nationwide missing-person alert.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Stolz\u2019s older brother, Larry, regularly wrote to Madison Police Chief Wilbur Emery seeking updates. When Emery replied Dec. 26, 1962, he assured Larry Stolz the MPD was doing everything possible to locate his brother. In fact, Emery said he was considering bringing in a clairvoyant, though he conceded some people thought it \u201ca ridiculous approach.\u201d<\/p>\n Summoning the Psychic<\/p>\n Chief Emery apparently got that idea from MPD Inspector Herman Thomas, who was checking out Milwaukee\u2019s Peter Hurkos<\/a>, a nationally known psychic who had immigrated from the Netherlands. Besides demonstrating his divining skills at theaters and other venues, and claiming an 85% success rate in newspaper interviews, the famed Dutch psychic had appeared three times on The Steve Allen Show\u2014The Tonight Show\u2019s forerunner. Hurkos wowed Allen\u2019s studio audience members by holding their hands while asking questions, and then revealing personal insights he couldn\u2019t have learned in advance.<\/p>\n More importantly, Hurkos had helped Chicago police and the Miami Police Department solve several crimes. In a July 1963 interview with the Wisconsin State Journal, Inspector Thomas said his sister was the Miami police chief\u2019s secretary, and she told him Hurkos was \u201cright more times than wrong\u201d during the Miami investigations. Thomas also said he had witnessed a psychic moment himself during a dinner at age seven. He said his father looked troubled when their house started shaking, and said in German, \u201cMutter ist dodt,\u201d or \u201cMother is dead.\u201d Two weeks later, a letter from Germany said his father\u2019s mother had died at that time and date.<\/p>\n And so Thomas and a Wisconsin State Journal reporter, John Newhouse, met with Hurkos at his Milwaukee home before he visited Madison on July 30, 1963, for two shows at the Orpheum Theater. Hurkos agreed to help the MPD find Wick, Stolz, and the car. Before leaving Hurkos\u2019 home, Inspector Thomas gave him a bag of clothing items worn by Wick and Stolz. Hurkos told Thomas and Newhouse that when it got quiet that night, he would turn out the lights, hold the clothing, sit still, and \u201cgo to work with it\u201d for several hours.<\/p>\n Inspector Thomas, meanwhile, assured Madison officials he would use vacation time while working with Hurkos, and that Hurkos wouldn\u2019t bill the city for his time or expenses. Hurkos, in turn, told reporters he had no doubt he would find the missing men.<\/p>\n Psychic Hits the Water<\/p>\n On Aug. 1, 1963, Hurkos stepped aboard a boat with searchers and a local dive team on Lake Monona near the Madison Gas and Electric Company\u2019s power plant. This area remains open year-round because of warm-water discharges from the facility, which caused many locals to speculate Wick drove into the open water after checking the ice in two nearby locations earlier that night.<\/p>\n Hurkos told reporters he sensed Wick and Stolz were on the bottom in the general area, and would soon be found. At one point, Hurkos lowered magnets on a string, and the magnets clung to something large. When divers checked it out, they found only a heavy steel bar.<\/p>\n Hurkos expressed confidence before returning with the searchers and divers the next day, Aug. 2. When that daylong search also failed to find Wick and Stolz, Hurkos told reporters he remained confident, but had to leave for another appearance on The Steve Allen Show. In the meantime, a Madison cab driver told police he had seen a car\u2019s headlights spin on Monona\u2019s nearby ice the night Wick and Stolz vanished.<\/p>\n The UW-Madison\u2019s magnetometer experts joined the search for its third day, Aug. 3. Though the device identified a large steel object on the bottom, divers only found a 50-gallon steel drum and several beer cans. The search continued, because the magnetometer had detected something larger than the steel barrel. Whatever it was, it had to have sunk beneath the lakebed.<\/p>\n Therefore, a week later on Aug. 10, a Navy team searched the site with its state-of-the art sonar equipment. They found nothing on Monona\u2019s bottom or the top 5 feet of lakebed muck their sonar signals could penetrate. All the while, the volunteer divers futilely probed the lakebed by hand with long metal poles.<\/p>\n On Sept. 4, MG&E officials ended the 5-week effort after finding old company photos and documents that identified the unknown metal mass as a huge I-beam. MG&E engineers had driven the I-beam deep into Monona\u2019s bottom 150 yards offshore to anchor an underwater fence that protected the power plant\u2019s intake pipes.<\/p>\n Hurkos, meanwhile, had claimed on The Steve Allen Show that he had found Wick and Stolz, and that Madison police were in the process of recovering their bodies. When learning Hurkos\u2019 taped segment would air Sept. 6, the MPD asked the local TV channel to let Inspector Thomas appear minutes after to \u201cclarify\u201d they had found neither a car nor bodies.<\/p>\n Hurkos never returned to Madison. News reports from Milwaukee on Sept. 11, 1963 \u2014 a week after MG&E identified its I-beam\u2014perhaps explained his absence. Hurkos had testified during recent divorce proceedings that he was broke, deeply in debt, and could no longer demonstrate his extrasensory powers because he was a \u201cnervous wreck.\u201d<\/p>\n That high-profile failure humiliated Inspector Thomas. The Capital Times, Madison\u2019s afternoon newspaper, published an editorial that called the Hurkos search a stunt, a farce, and \u201ccrystal ball sleuthing.\u201d The newspaper\u2019s editors also said officers within the MPD referred to the psychic-driven search as \u201cThomas\u2019 Folly.\u201d<\/p>\n The Wreck Site<\/p>\n The Hurkos fiasco ended organized searches for Wick, Stolz, and their presumed coffin, Wick\u2019s 1950 Ford coupe. Though individuals and small groups occasionally dragged or dived sites on Madison lakes the next four decades, the two-door Ford lay undisturbed on Lake Waubesa 5\u00bd miles southeast of the MG&E I-beam on Lake Monona.<\/p>\n More precisely, Krueger found the car 600 yards east of Brams Point on Waubesa\u2019s western shoreline. Coincidentally, he found it July 21, 2006, exactly 45 years and five months after it sank Feb. 21, 1961.<\/p>\n Krueger stayed ashore once the Dane County Sheriff\u2019s Department dive team deployed July 23. After crafting a salvage and recovery plan, the dive team anchored a barge over the site with two water pumps. Starting Aug. 1, 2006, three two-diver teams took turns collecting bones, personal effects, and car parts from Wick\u2019s car 35 feet below.<\/p>\n About 1\u00bc miles to the north, the Sheriff\u2019s Department also set up a command post for press conferences and processing work at the end of Libby Road. The boat launch there is part of what\u2019s now the William G. Linney Lake Farm Park. It\u2019s the same site where Detective Ferris thought Wick and Stolz left solid ground, crossed the sandy shoreline, and drove onto Waubesa\u2019s ice to their doom.<\/p>\n Rick Krueger, however, said a then-little-known boat launch at the end of McConnell Street a mile south of Libby Street is a better guess for where Wick drove onto the ice. Krueger said Wick\u2019s family members, who owned a nearby farm, also thought he drove onto the ice from the McConnell Street landing, which enters Lake Waubesa about 900 yards northwest of the wreck site. Krueger said one of Wick\u2019s relatives told him he had searched the lake often with a grappling hook, and was surprised he never latched onto Wick\u2019s car.<\/p>\n Whether the men drove onto the ice at Libby Road or McConnell Street, one will never know their exact path to the wreck site, nor how long they drove around before the ice failed. Adding to the mystery, a lakeshore resident told investigators in 1961 that she saw a car on the ice at 6:30 a.m. the day the men vanished.<\/p>\n Whatever the case, when Wick\u2019s car punched through Waubesa\u2019s late-winter ice, its hood apparently slammed into the surrounding ice, likely causing the large dent in the hood\u2019s right front. Water pressure held the doors shut as the car started sinking, rolled over, and plunged nose first into the bottom with the men trapped inside. Police reports in August 2006 described the car as resting on its roof, its bottom angled at 31 degrees with a 7-degree tilt to the passenger\u2019s side.<\/p>\n Searching the Car<\/p>\n Jeff Nelson, the lead diver and dive master for the Sheriff\u2019s Department, said the car might still be out there if not for sonar equipment. \u201cIt\u2019s the deepest water on Waubesa, and there wasn\u2019t a lot exposed on that car to catch a grappling hook,\u201d Nelson told MeatEater. \u201cOther than snagging a corner of the rear bumper, a grappling hook would\u2019ve slid right past everything. When I started on the dive team years earlier, we dragged sites forever and found nothing. My predecessor, Bob Pavey, said he found something only once by dragging. It\u2019s too imprecise.\u201d<\/p>\n Neither did the divers notice any fouled fishing hooks, weights, or lures on the car, or broken monofilament line trailing across the lakebed, all common finds on many Great Lakes shipwrecks<\/a>. Nelson and the other five divers, however, searched the site thoroughly Aug. 1-8, mostly by feel because of poor visibility. He said visibility was 4 to 5 feet when first reaching the car, but then fell to 6 inches when their work stirred sediments around the car.<\/p>\n But before launching the search, Nelson consulted his cousin, Tamara Thomsen, a veteran diver who owns the Diversions Scuba center in Madison<\/a>. Using photos and drawings, Thomsen designed a handheld dredge for Nelson. He then took her plans to nearby Pertzborn Plumbing, where company staff custom-built the dredge from fire hose and PVC pipe.<\/p>\n![\"CapTimesHeadline,July1962-2\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/CapTimesHeadline_July1962-2.jpg\")
\nThis headline from The Capital Times newspaper in Madison in July 1962 shows that interest remained strong in finding Ron Wick and Carl Stolz 17 months after they disappeared.<\/p>\n![\"HurkosPhoto,WisStateJournal,July1963\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/HurkosPhoto_WisStateJournal_July1963.jpg\")
\nThe Wisconsin State Journal took this photo of psychic Peter Hurkos in late July 1963 before he spent two futile days in a boat on Lake Monona, showing searchers where he thought Ron Wick and Carl Stolz died inside Wick\u2019s submerged car.<\/p>\n![\"Waubesa,onXMap,AccessPoints,WickCarLoction\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Waubesa_onXMap_AccessPoints_WickCarLoction.jpg\")
\nThe wreck site of Ron Wick\u2019s car, and two boat launches where Wick might have driven onto the ice. Police initially thought Wick drove onto the ice off of Libby Road, while Wick\u2019s relatives thought he likely drove onto the ice at the end of McConnell Street, a mile to the south.<\/p>\n
![\"WickCar,Barge,Aug2006,JeffNelsonPhoto-2\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/WickCar_Barge_Aug2006_JeffNelsonPhoto-2.jpg\")
![\"Car,OnBarge,Aug2006,RickKruegerPhoto\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Car_OnBarge_Aug2006_RickKruegerPhoto.jpg\")
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