Edward and Stephania Andrews | Chicago's 1970 Vanishing

Chicago, Illinois, May 1970. Edward and Stephania Andrews, a couple in their early sixties from Arlington

Heights, spend a Friday evening at a cocktail party at the Sheraton-Chicago Hotel on Michigan Avenue. Around

9:30 they ride the elevator down to the underground garage, and their black-and-yellow 1969 Oldsmobile

speeds out and turns onto Michigan Avenue's lower level. That is the last time anybody saw them. Fifty-six

years later, nobody has found Edward and Stephania Andrews or the car.

The gang investigates on location in Chicago for Part 2 of our Chicago Special. Shane walks Kim and guest

Jennifer through the vanishing of Edward and Stephania Andrews. They work through the police theory that

the car went into the Chicago River, the searches that kept coming up empty, a 1994 tip that sent divers

into a pond, and a 2025 search by an independent dive team. Every theory has a hole in it, and nobody knows

what happened.

Timeline of Events

May 15, 1970: Edward and Stephania Andrews leave a cocktail party at the Sheraton-Chicago Hotel around 9:30

at night and drive out of its underground garage.

1970: Two river searches with dragging gear, sonar and divers find nothing.

1971: A sonar technician says he is ninety-five percent sure the car is not in the area they searched.

1973: A detective wonders whether a barge crushed the car into the riverbed or shoved it toward the lake.

1974: A tip sends searchers to the harbor by Navy Pier.

1978: Edward and Stephania Andrews are declared legally dead.

1980: A river cleanup hauls up a dozen cars, and none of them is theirs.

1994: A man who says he was there as a kid tells a sheriff's office the car was sunk in a pond, and divers

mark with a yellow buoy an object in the muck that they cannot identify.

Late August 2025: Chaos Divers search the river system between Diversey Parkway and Cicero Avenue and find

nearly a hundred cars, and none of the ones they checked is a black-and-yellow 1969 Oldsmobile.

What You Will Hear

What the parking manager told police about the car's last minutes in the hotel garage.

The multilevel streets along the Chicago River, and the police theory that the car went into the water.

A house left in order, bank accounts that never moved, and fourteen credit cards nobody used.

The trail leads to a pond in 1994, and to an object under a yellow buoy that nothing we read identifies.

Why an independent dive team searched miles from the bridge in 2025.

Sources

Chicago Tribune, August 3 and August 5, 1994

Cook County Sheriff, missing persons record MP20728

The Charley Project, Edward P. Andrews and Stephania Andrews

Fox 32, NBC Chicago, CBS Chicago, WGN and the Chicago Tribune, 2025 coverage of the Chaos Divers search

Chicago Architecture Center and Chicago History Museum, Michigan Avenue Bridge

If you liked this: Episode 136, Vanished at Sea: Amy Bradley. Another disappearance where accident and foul

play both stay on the table, and nobody has ever found the answer.

The Haunted Bunker is brothers Shane and Josh Waters taking turns with the strange, the unsolved and the

unexplained, with Kim Morrow asking the questions the rest of us are too afraid to ask. We do not debunk

and we do not prove. We keep the mystery. New episodes every Tuesday at mythsandmalice.com/haunted-bunker

Episode 191 | The Haunted Bunker | Where Mysteries Hide

Come join our Patreon for all the fun, early access and more extras at patreon.com/itsmysteryinc

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