BRUNSWICK, Ga. — The family of two cold case victims whose car was found submerged in a Brunswick pond last weekend is grappling with a new revelation.
When Catherine and Charles Romer disappeared in 1980, their family believed they were murdered. Now four decades later, they think the facts point to something else.
Christine Heller Seaman said she and her sisters spent 44 years believing their grandparents were murdered and they lived in that mindset, fearful from the trauma of the violence they believed happened to their loved ones.
Now, Seaman believes her grandparents’ death was an accident and said for the first time since she was a teenager, her family is sharing memories of their grandparents without that same pit in their stomachs. She said they are processing the news and now have some closure in their grief.
“Living with that fear and that terror and wondering what can happen around the corner is, has definitely affected all of us,” Seaman said.
Seaman was 15 years old when her grandmother and step grandfather, the Romers, disappeared. She said she and her eight sisters believed they’d been murdered.
“It's just the kind of thing that never ever leaves you," Seaman said. "It's just part of who you are and you, we've all thought about, think about it every day.”
But now after a break in the case, the certainty Seaman and her family had been living with for most of their lives was flipped upside down. They now believe their grandparents’ death was an accident.
“It's just been so overwhelming for all of us,” Seaman said.
Last weekend, a Florida dive team discovered a car in a pond in Brunswick, Georgia. It was the last place the Romers had been seen. Seaman said they were driving home to New York from Miami in 1980. Seaman said she recognized the car pulled from the muddy pond.
“It would come down the driveway and it would be a big celebration because they were coming," she said. "And when they showed up, it was a holiday. Lots of stories and music and food and just, it was always just such the best time. So seeing the car being pulled out of the mud like that was startling and upsetting.”
Though a Glynn County Police Department spokesperson police said Friday they don’t have a positive identification yet on the car or a bone found in it, Seaman said she's sure it’s from her grandparents' case. Because she believes their deaths may have been an accident, she said this Thanksgiving was different.
“I just felt that was the shift," Seaman said. "We could actually talk about happy stories, laugh about them.”
Now her family can focus on the true legacy of their “larger than life” grandparents.
“Very much in love and travelling and adventure, music," she said. "The perfect recipe for a nice life.”
A police spokesperson said it could take weeks or months before they get DNA evidence back from the bone, if they do. Seaman said her grandparents’ belongings were also in the submerged car.