Florida canal remains identified as woman missing since 1985

Human remains pulled from a Florida canal in 2024 were identified as Rose Marie Gayhart, who vanished at 23 in 1985 after leaving Dansville, New York, for Southwest Florida. Livingston County Sheriff Thomas J. Dougherty said the sheriff’s office received DNA confirmation on May 27, 2026, from a Texas lab after family DNA matched the remains. Cape Coral police have said the case is now an open homicide investigation.

Gayhart was last seen alive outside a diner in Cape Coral on March 21, 1985. She had moved to the Cape Coral and North Fort Myers area to work and live, and her parents in Dansville reported her missing that year. The identification finally tied a name to a set of remains that had been considered untraceable for decades.

Cape Coral police said the remains were discovered in a canal in 2024. A teenager found a human skull in the water, prompting a two-day dig by officers off Kismet Parkway. The search led to more evidence being recovered from the canal and eventually into the hands of investigators who could compare it with DNA from Gayhart’s family.

Thomas J. Dougherty announced the updated information on behalf of the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office. The identification gives Gayhart’s family an answer more than four decades after her disappearance, and it marks a sharp turn in a case that had long remained unresolved. For investigators, the breakthrough shows how modern forensic work can do what older techniques could not: take remains found years later, extract usable evidence, and connect them to relatives still searching for answers.

The case also underscores how missing-person cases tied to poor records, distance, and time can linger for generations, especially when families are left with little more than a last sighting and a date. Gayhart’s identification turns one of those long-open files into a homicide inquiry, and it adds her name to the growing list of cold cases being reopened by DNA and persistence rather than by chance alone.