For the last twelve years, her family wondered what happened to 35-year-old Gail Schoening.
Had their daughter, who struggled with the death of a younger sister and was dependant on anti-depressents, suffered some sort of breakdown? She was due to fly from Fort Lauderdale to North Carolina for a job interview, a bright spot for the recently divorced Plantation resident and IBM analyst.
Had Schoening, whose car was also missing, accidentally driven into a canal on her way to the airport? Her parents hired a pilot to fly over local bodies of water while police divers went to work, but there was no sign of her.
Had something more sinister happened? A year after she went missing, a pin number was requested for Schoening's 401(k) account, but the lead went nowhere.
Her parents now have an answer, though it may not be what they hoped: advanced sonar technology found Schoening's body, entombed in her 1997 Mitsubishi Eclipse, in a pond just 100 feet from her front door in the Gatehouse on the Green development.
"We're happy she was found, but sad about the circumstances," her mother, Arlene Schoening, said from her home in New Jersey. "We'd been going through all the possibilities."
The discovery doesn't tie the case up entirely. Details of how Schoening ended up on the pond are murky: police say she drove between two parked cars and plunged into the water, where her car flipped upside down before coming to rest about 12 feet deep. But during the original search, no mention was made of any signs a car had left the road and gone into the pond, and Arlene Schoening says she has been asked by police in Plantation and New Jersey not to discuss details of the case.
