Beloved Stolen Car Found After 42 Years - as part of the news series by GeoBeats.

One Texas man has never been able to forget his stolen car, even after 40 years. As a graduate student at Temple University, Bob Russell was the proud owner of a 1967 Austin- Healey when, back in 1970 after a date with his future wife, he woke up to find his car had been stolen. 42 years later, Russell found his car on eBay. The listing matched his car’s vehicle identification number, so he contacted the dealer in Beverly Hills who had the car listed with a top bid of 19 thousand 7 hundred dollars. The dealer tried to charge Russell 24 thousand dollars for the car, but instead he contacted police.

The case was so old that there was no computer record of it, and Russell didn’t have a copy of the police report anymore, so it seemed hopeless. But then, Lieutenant Fred McQuiggan, from Philly’s Police Integrated Information Network, realized that the wrong VIN was entered in the files and after fixing that, he relisted the car as stolen. Police in Los Angeles impounded the car, so Russell and his wife went to claim it. They spent about two thousand dollars on getting it home, the same price Russell originally paid for the car.