Submerged car raises more questions

HOT SPRINGS — The discovery of a 20-year-old Ford Escape submerged in Lake Hamilton may have solved a decades-old missing persons case but did little else to answer the question of how Kerry Joe Angell Jr. died.

Angell’s skeletal remains were found inside the 2003 Ford Escape in March, after he had been missing since 2008.

Then 49, Angell missed his shift at Riser Ford on Feb. 23, 2008. As a salesman at the dealership, he was allowed to drive the demo car as a perk for selling lots of inventory — a common practice at the time. The dealer tag FX12110 was not found when the car was pulled out of the lake.

Angell’s disappearance garnered some attention from cold case enthusiasts over the years, with the viral YouTube channel Adventures With Purpose coming to Lake Hamilton last year to dive on a car that had been found elsewhere in the lake.

Listed on numerous national databases, Angell’s case has been featured on several internet forums.

“This all has been so bizarre to me,” said Carol Carter, who rented a small lakefront cabin to Angell on her property. “He was here a month and a half and he disappeared.”

The Hot Springs Police Department issued a Crime Stoppers news release about his disappearance in 2011 that was published in The Sentinel-Record.

For over a decade, the three paragraphs issued by the police department were the sole official account of Angell, a balding white man with brown eyes and brown hair, weighing roughly 200 pounds and standing 6 feet, 2 inches tall.

The short release did not include many details about him, including that he lived and worked in Hot Springs. It said that he was from Texas — which led some to believe that he’d stolen the car and skipped town.

“We scratched our heads for a long time,” said Tim Butler, who used to work with Angell as manager at Riser Nissan. “We knew it wasn’t like him. There were never any answers to anybody’s questions.”

Conditions were clear on that cold February day, but the circumstances of his disappearance remain cloudy. Because he was submerged for so long, there was no way for authorities to determine whether there were any indications of foul play.

According to Carter, the lake level was down 3 feet the year Angell disappeared, and 9 feet the following year, as part of the annual wintertime drawdown of Lake Hamilton.

Spotted almost exactly 15 years to the day of his disappearance, the car was found by a fisherman on his fish finder on Feb. 22. Crews floated the car using airbags and extracted it at a nearby boat ramp using a tow truck.

“I never dreamed he was in the lake,” said Carter. “I just thought he was gone.”

The car was located just off the shore of Carter’s home, but she questions how it was able to get there. While the driveway is steep on the property, Carter says it wasn’t paved until two years ago and that the deep ruts would have made it difficult to gain a lot of speed. With more trees along the waterfront back then, she still questions how Angell’s car made it into the water.

“It’s nearly, almost impossible, for a car to get in the lake without any help from somebody,” said Carter.

“I told them he was probably in the lake, they just didn’t care,” said Brodie Harris, a former co-worker who says not enough was done during the investigation. “They thought he was just some junkie.”

Although he was one of the first people to go looking for Angell when he missed work that day, he says investigators didn’t reach out to him until a year later. Carter said they never reached out to her after her initial police report was filed.

Harris says that Carter assisted him in searching for Angell at his home. Harris worked at Riser Nissan with Angell for several months until a month before he went missing when Angell transferred to the Ford dealership. That morning, Harris received a call from the Ford dealership manager saying that Angell hadn’t shown up and that he didn’t call in.

Harris says the month prior, he was in treatment for drugs and alcohol. Because of this, he believes the investigators dismissed Angell’s case as unimportant.

It wasn’t until 2011 when Cedar Park Police Department in Cedar Park, Texas, collected DNA samples from Angell’s sister and mother for Hot Springs police and the medical examiner’s office. With his family still in the Austin area, where he came from, Angell came to Hot Springs to slow down in life.

“He wanted to ‘get off of the road,’” said Butler. “Get a girl, get married.”