A solitary man in Poughkeepsie dies of natural causes at the end of 2012, and the mystery of his wife’s disappearance from 30 years earlier is suddenly, startlingly solved. From Vivian Yee’s amazing New York Times article:

“The Nicholses’ house was like no other in the neighborhood. Ms. Nichols loved books, and nearly every room was filled with volumes from floor to ceiling. Mr. Nichols collected cameras, guns and books about the Civil War. Neighbors marveled at the tools and gadgets he had amassed through his job at I.B.M. and his evening shifts in the Sears hardware department, including six lawn mowers.

In their yard were parked two Amphicars, novelty vehicles that could drive on land and in water, of which only about 3,800 were ever produced. At a time when computers were still relatively unknown in regular homes, the Nicholses had several, lined up in a room off the living room where Mr. Nichols also kept a police and fire scanner running at all times.

‘They were a married couple,’ Ms. Darragh, now 62, said. ‘She was normal. He was not.’

Only to a next-door neighbor and close co-workers did Ms. Nichols hint that her husband’s oddities bothered her, too. She told Mary Jo Santagate, a teachers’ aide at her school, that she disliked the house’s clutter and wished that her husband had not kept their dead cat frozen in their refrigerator: she dreaded opening it to cook. She complained of having to hand her paycheck over to him each week.

When the couple’s only son, 25-year-old James Nichols III, drowned in 1982 after falling off the hood of one of the Amphicars in a Mississippi lake, she told Ms. Darragh she was upset that her husband had parked the same Amphicar in the driveway, a daily reminder of her grief.

‘Knowing her, she tolerated it because she didn’t have the wherewithal to tell him to knock it off or I’m going to leave,’ Ms. Santagate said.”