The Night That Wouldn’t End: Texarkana, 1987

Texarkana’s October air has a way of holding onto sound—truck brakes sighing on State Line Avenue, the neon hum of diners that never quite turn off, the last shift doors clacking shut at 11 p.m. On October 20, 1987, a registered nurse named Margaret Jane Chony left work in her 1983 red Pontiac Fiero and drove into a pocket of American night that still hasn’t let go. She had a feeling—soft but insistent—that someone might be following her. She asked a colleague to shadow her to the post office. She went in, picked up her mail, walked back out, waved to say, I’m okay, and turned toward home.

She never arrived.

Three decades on, the case has the tautness of a drawn bow. The facts are sparse, unglamorous, resistant to myth. A young mother, a compact fiberglass sports car, a city straddling Texas and Arkansas, a route that should have been routine. The danger with a story like this is the space between the last sighting and the first silence; if you’re not careful, speculation rushes in like floodwater. So this is a careful telling—what’s known, what’s likely, what’s been done, and what remains undone—in a voice that believes a life is not a plot twist.

 

– Date and time: Tuesday, October 20, 1987. Around 11:15 p.m., Texarkana, Texas.
– Vehicle: 1983 red Pontiac Fiero—small, mid‑engine, heavy on fiberglass body panels, light on ferrous metal.
– Sequence: She left her hospital shift, expressed concern about being followed, asked a friend (another nurse) to follow her to the post office, collected mail, waved “I’m okay,” drove away.
– Destination: Her apartment off College Drive—new-build at the time, within a short, sensible route from the post office.
– Last confirmed sighting: Departing the post office in Texarkana, waving to her friend.

From there the road diverges—not in the poetic sense, but literally: city streets that feed into neighborhoods, access points near water, the quiet geometry of late-night commutes. Her daughter remembers the story in a rhythm that has become family scripture: work, post office, wave, gone. It’s the cadence of a door closing.
If you want to understand why the search returned to water, you need to understand Texas water. It keeps things. It silts and hides and flattens edges until a car becomes a suggestion of itself, a contour half-swallowed by mud. In fiberglass cars like the Fiero, magnets lie to you; they slide, they refuse to grip, they send back no affirmation. Sonar, not steel, is your proof.

The search team who stepped into this case decades later didn’t arrive with TV theatrics. They arrived with daylight as a finite resource, an RC sonar boat, a larger craft that—crucially—didn’t yet have lights, and a plan to get ahead of the dusk before dusk got ahead of them. They chose a starting point: Bringle Lake. Not because Google Earth settled the matter (archival imagery in 1987 is stubborn and imprecise), but because proximity and plausibility still matter in the absence of certainty. Closest body of water. Closest boat ramps. Easiest throw off a road you shouldn’t be on after midnight.

Everything about the water asks you to be humble. Lakes change. Ramps move. Dirt roads vanish from maps but not from memory. Floods re-draw the floor. Silt works like time does: slow, relentless, generous with erasure.

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## 🗺️ Day One: Bringle Lake and the First Shadow on Sonar
There’s a cadence to a search that works: grid, sweep, mark, confirm. With only an hour of light left, they cut Bringle Lake in half and found what every lake seems to contain at its deepest habit: a car idling forever off a boat ramp.

– The image on sonar didn’t flirt—it declared: mass, edges, a profile that looked wrong but right. Maybe a fence? Maybe a trunk rack? Maybe the skeletal shape of a small car that’s been taught to forget itself.
– The hypothesis surfaced: Fieros are fiberglass-heavy and weirdly shaped. If the magnet won’t catch, that’s not a dead end; it could even be a signpost.

Night said stop. They listened. In this work, the difference between professional and reckless is sometimes as small as a light switch.

—

## 🤿 Day Two: The First Dive, The First No
Visibility is not a word you use lightly in Texas water. In ten to twelve feet, a diver can feel like a man in outer space—weight where it shouldn’t be, touch doing what sight can’t. The GoPro died the second water met lens; if you do this enough, you stop thinking of that as failure and start thinking of it as character.

Underneath, the car had been eaten down to function: wheels, windows, hubcaps. The hubcap told the truth—Chevy ribbon. Not a Fiero. Not red, not that the mud would have admitted it if it were. Old, likely older than the case, maybe fifty years in the silt. A river of time disguised as a lake.

The first no is a useful no. It prunes the map.

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## 🌪️ The River That Fights Back: Current, Mud, and Three Upside-Down Truths
If lakes conceal, rivers argue. They take you if you let them. From the bank, the Red River and its feeders look brown, unremarkable, almost civic. Inside, it’s teeth: zero visibility, current that moves like intent, bottom that isn’t bottom at all—just mud pretending to make promises.

– Sonar found what boat ramps famously hoard: cars that wandered, cars that were nudged, cars that were driven by bad ideas into worse endings. One, two, maybe three, upside down, partly buried, a small graveyard of haste and hazard.
– The diver tethered himself to a rope that ran from shore to target. You don’t bring a buoy when the water tries to take what floats.
– Touch became taxonomy: door handle shape to rule out a fiberglass Fiero; magnet behavior as a proxy for composition; dipstick stamped FS01, a breadcrumb that Google later translated to Mazda.

Again: not her. Another car eliminated. Another map reshaped.

It’s worth saying plainly: these dives were dangerous. The current roared. The ground took your ankles. The light was a formality. The diver surfaced and said the thing no camera wants, which is also the thing a family needs: this was one of the hardest. And it was a no.

Even in refusals, progress is a kind of mercy.

—

## 🐾 The Cat at the Boat Ramp: A Small, Human Interruption
Grim work has a way of inviting small graces. When the boat rolled back onto the trailer, a cat appeared, mottled like a bobcat, domestic in temperament, untidy in address. For a few minutes, the boat ramp turned into a threshold between jobs. Someone else took the cat home. Not a clue, not a symbol—just the universe reminding everyone to breathe.

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## 🕳️ The Private Pond: A Shape with Mirrors
Close to the last-sighting corridor, a private pond offered something lakes don’t: intimacy. Smaller water forces certainty sooner. The team sent an RC sonar craft—quiet, efficient, accurate in shallow bodies. The return was unmistakable: a car clear enough to make out mirrors, a centered tag, the posture of a modern sedan lying still.

– The magnet wouldn’t bite. In this specific context, that can be good news: composite panels, plastics, aluminum—things a Fiero understands.
– The rope became the guide again. The water was 53°F—cold enough to focus, warm enough to endure. Ten to twelve feet, the diver said. Still, zero visibility, and a bottom that drags.

What they found was not a ghost from 1987 but a newer story stalled on the floor:

– Silver Toyota Camry.
– Tag number readable: MXB 670—an anchor for the practical world above the waterline.
– Windows up, sunroof present, no obvious corrosion telling a decades-long tale.
– Law enforcement ran the plate: expired, no active warrants, not connected to the nurse’s case.

In a kind of bittersweet efficiency, police arranged to pull the car. Somewhere a case from 1999 flickered—stolen vehicle, a backpack with a life’s clutter, school patches stiff with silt. A small closure for someone else. Another no for this family.

This is how search becomes service; you go looking for one person and end up carrying news to ten.

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## 🧩 The Taut Line: Route Logic and the “New” Apartments on College Drive
When you strip the glamour and leave the geometry, some things make more sense than others.

– Post office to College Drive is a short, domestic path. The apartments were new in 1987 and would have drawn young professionals. The line from one to the other is not adventure—it’s routine.
– Bodies of water near that line become suspect: small lakes, private ponds, culverts masked by brush, low bridges where a late-night swerve could land badly.
– Accidental entry is possible but not casual. Locals noted: you don’t simply drift off a ramp in the dark without a mistake or intention. If a car entered certain access points along the river, flood history suggests burial more than buoyancy.

This is not to suggest conclusion; it’s to suggest why the team built their search around water, ramps, proximity, and the pragmatics of an ’80s compact car.

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## 🛠️ Tools of Certainty: Sonar, Magnets, and the Tactile Science of Fiberglass
For readers who haven’t stood in a jon boat with a screen humming:

– Side-scan sonar sketches the bottom in grayscale, pulling silhouettes from darkness. Cars, because they are geometry pretending to be animals, show up with a particular confidence—roofline, wheel arch, trunk lip, the neat insistence of symmetry.
– Magnets are call-and-response. On steel-bodied sedans, they bite with a sound you can feel in the rope. On fiberglass-heavy cars like a Fiero, they slip, they lie, they teach patience.
– Dive method is choreography under duress. Attach a line. Run it to shore. Descend by feel, hand over hand, counting distance, building a spatial map in your head like a blind architect. Identify by parts the river can’t eat: handle shape, wheel style, engine placement.

There’s craft here, but also restraint. The team marked targets for law enforcement, logged what they could, resisted the theater of calling every silhouette a breakthrough.

—

## 🗣️ The Daughter’s Voice: Memory as Evidence
The cleanest account we have of the final hours is a daughter’s inheritance: “She got off work, went to the post office. She was worried somebody was following her and asked a friend to follow her. Went in, got her mail. Came out. Waved like, I’m okay. Got in the car. That’s the last time she was spotted.”

People underestimate how far a single sentence can carry you. That “I’m okay” wave is not proof of safety; it’s proof of intention. She intended to finish the drive, unlock her door, set her keys down on a kitchen counter in an apartment that still felt new. The wave sits in the record like a candle lit in a draft.

—

## 🧭 What Was Searched, What Was Ruled Out
Progress is a ledger, not a headline.

– Bringle Lake: one car located off a ramp, later identified as a Chevrolet by surviving hubcap; condition suggests older submergence; not a Fiero.
– Adjacent river section: multiple upside-down vehicles near ramp area; at least one assessed hands-on; magnet adherence and handle shape inconsistent with Fiero; one vehicle likely Mazda (dipstick FS01 marking).
– Private pond near last-sighting vector: one car located (silver Camry); plate read; confirmed not connected to 1987 disappearance; recovered with law enforcement coordination.
– Observations: silt loads heavy; visibility effectively zero; current significant in river; flood history suggests potential deep burial in certain river sections.

Each ruled-out vehicle tightens the narrative. Each negative scan keeps a promise to the family: you will never not know what we found.

—

## ⛈️ The Physics of Disappearance: When a City Splits the States
Texarkana sits on a fault that isn’t seismic but cultural: Texas and Arkansas shoulder to shoulder, jurisdiction knitted by habit and undone by paperwork. In 1987, a nurse could drive one mile and change the color of a patrol car. Missing person cases live and die on the first 48 hours; crossing a line at 11:30 p.m. can fracture momentum in a way only the families feel.

The city’s waterways obey no border. Ramps used by fishermen are used by everyone else. Dirt access points appear in one decade and vanish in the next. A searcher standing on a bank today has to be bilingual in both geography and time.

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## 🧠 What We Don’t Do Here: Speculate Beyond the Shoreline
There’s a temptation to fill silence with story: a shadowed car in the rearview mirror, a decision at a stoplight, a detour nobody noticed. That temptation is the enemy of families. This feature avoids it. Where the record speaks, we listen. Where it doesn’t, we say so.

– We do not know who, if anyone, followed her past the post office.
– We do not know whether her car entered water, a garage, a cul-de-sac, a storage unit, or a scrapyard the city has since forgotten.
– We do not know which turn she took after waving goodnight—only which turns made sense.

What we do know is what has been searched, by whom, with what methods, and what those methods returned.

—

## 🛟 Craft, Courage, and Constraint: Inside the Dives
It’s easy to romanticize dive work until you inventory the risk.

– Zero-visibility means the light on your mask is for colleagues, not you. You are reading by fingertips.
– Current turns rope into language; it hums the strength of the river into your wrist.
– Mud behaves like grief: it pulls at the ankles, insists you stay, complicates every motion with drag.

Divers describe a particular kind of quiet when a hand finds a door handle. It’s language; it’s the car speaking. In this case the language said: not her. It’s a sentence that can both hurt and help.

—

## 🧵 The Thread That Won’t Break: Thirty Years of Questions
Three decades is a very long time to carry a question to bed. Families find ways to live beside it: birthdays, graduations, first apartments, the luxury of laughter on days that make room for it. The question does not soften; it simply learns where to sit.

Even in 2024 America, with satellites and databases, certain truths still require a small boat and a stubborn heart. That’s not failure; that’s the nature of loss in a country with this much water and this many places to hide.

—

## 📚 The Case File in the Public Square: How Communities Help Without Harm
There are ways to assist that honor both the complexity of the search and the dignity of the missing.

– Share facts, not folklore: date, time, vehicle make/model/year, last confirmed location, intended destination.
– Treat tips like testimony: who, what, where, when; avoid why unless you were there.
– Respect jurisdiction: Texarkana Police Department on the Texas side is the first call; neighboring agencies coordinate as required.
– Understand the limits of crowdsourcing: speculation can smother; practical memories—old ramps, former gravel cut-throughs, “that pond wasn’t there back then”—can unlock new grids.

There’s work here for people who want to help and don’t need a headline.

—

## 🧭 Why Water Again, Why Still
Skeptics sometimes ask why searches return to water. The answer is threefold.

1. Probability: National data shows a significant subset of long-term missing persons are resolved with vehicle recoveries in water near last-known routes.
2. Accessibility: Boat ramps and low-lit access points provide both opportunity and concealment in the small hours.
3. Physics: In low banks and flood-prone regions, a minor miscalculation becomes terminal.

These aren’t grim obsessions; they are the algorithm of prudence.

—

## 🕰️ A Timeline Without Ornament
– 11:15 p.m.: Nurse Margaret Jane Chony leaves work in Texarkana, Texas.
– Minutes later: Arrives at the post office, asks a friend to follow due to concern about being trailed, collects mail, waves “I’m okay.”
– Shortly after: Departs toward her apartment off College Drive. Disappears.
– In the decades following: Case remains open; family keeps the light on; the city changes around the absence.
– Recent field search: Bringle Lake scanned; a vehicle found and excluded. Nearby river segment scanned; multiple cars located; at least one inspected and excluded via tactile ID and component markings (Mazda). Private pond near last-sighting vector scanned; silver Camry located, tag read, unrelated case identified; vehicle coordinated for removal by police. Search continues.

Timelines like this are modest. They do their job.

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## 🧭 The Investigative Edges: What Might Widen the Search Responsibly
Without guessing, there are rational next steps seasoned teams pursue:

– Historical imagery and plats: County records, aerial photos from late ’80s and early ’90s to map defunct ramps, culverts, and pre-development ponds.
– Drainage and flood maps: FEMA layers to understand sediment patterns and deep-burial likelihood along candidate river bends.
– Apartment complex archives: Original builder records and early tenant maps may show parking lot layouts, curb cuts, and exits that no longer exist.
– LPR gaps: Although license plate readers didn’t exist then, modern tip patterns often correlate with historical traffic flows; community memory can substitute.
– Peripheral water bodies: Small retention ponds behind commercial strips along the route; they are often omitted from casual scans and are easiest to resolve with RC sonar.

These are not romantic tasks. They are effective.

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## 🇺🇸 An American Place, An American Silence
The story lives in a particular corner of the United States—Texarkana, a city that wears two names like a hyphen. Hospitals here know night shift courage. Post offices here are the last honest light on certain blocks after 11. Police here know both the limits of jurisdiction and the stubbornness of love.

In the wider American imagination, disappearances belong to big cities and coastal newsrooms. But so much of our vanishing happens on roads like College Drive, under streetlights that work when they feel like it, five minutes from home.

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## 🧩 The Human Ledger: What the Search Gave, Even in Its No
If you just count “yesses,” you will think this was failure. That’s not how a ledger works.

– One older vehicle off Bringle Lake’s ramp identified and dismissed.
– Multiple river targets clarified, at least one tagged by component ID.
– One unrelated but meaningful recovery initiated: silver Camry with readable tag, reported, arranged for removal; a small circle closed for another family.
– A map refined: less ink where the nurse is not, more focus where she still might be.

Every ruled-out contour is a square of night given back to the living.

—

## 💡 What Remains True
– A woman named Margaret left work and was trying to get home.
– She was cautious, careful enough to ask for a shadow to the post office.
– She signaled reassurance to a friend.
– She vanished in a corridor of ordinary life that should not have been dangerous.
– The community still cares, and careful people are still looking.

Those truths are enough to sustain the search without inviting fantasy.

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## 🧭 Practical Takeaways for Readers in Texarkana and Beyond
– If you grew up in Texarkana in the late ’80s and remember a dirt ramp, a cut-through near a pond, or a culvert that used to be open and is now fenced, write it down. Time erases access points faster than memory does.
– If you worked near the post office or along College Drive and remember road work, signage changes, or habitual detours from 1987–1989, that context matters.
– If you manage or own property with legacy water features—old retention ponds, unfenced borrow pits—modern scanning can be done respectfully and legally with law enforcement coordination.

Help is a map, not a theory.

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## 🧭 Coda: The Wave
In stories like this, the mind returns to small gestures because they are what remain: a wave at a friend under sodium light; a car turning left where right would have been quicker; a key ring on an index finger; a nurse’s badge clipped to a pocket. We don’t know what the road kept that night. We only know that a family did not stop waiting, and strangers showed up with boats and rope to honor the waiting with work.

If you measure a country by what it does with its mysteries, then this corner of Texas has something to be proud of. Not because the ending is neat—it isn’t—but because the labor is honest. Boats launched, cars logged, families called, cats rescued, rivers argued with and survived. The kind of American stubbornness that doesn’t trend but does endure.

The case of Margaret Jane Chony remains what it was on the first morning after: a question with a name. The work continues in daylight, in grids, in patience. And until the night gives up its answer, the wave she made in the post office parking lot is the last confirmed fact we have—the small, stubborn promise that she meant to reach home.