This story by Lisa Scagliotti was first published in the Waterbury Roundabout on Oct. 7.
A truck belonging to Donald Messier of Waterbury was pulled from the Winooski River in Duxbury during an all-day recovery operation on Thursday that so far has not turned up any evidence of human remains.
The 12-hour effort ended around 9 p.m. with the red Ford F-150 pickup truck carried away on a flatbed truck. It also included an emergency call to Waterbury Ambulance Service when a tow truck operator was hit in the head with a piece of equipment after the pickup was out of the water. The driver was with the towing company E&S Transport, according to state police Capt. Matt Daley. He was taken to Central Vermont Hospital and the extent of his injuries was not known late Thursday.
Messier has been missing since Oct. 15, 2006, when he was last seen at a party in Waitsfield and afterward failed to return home or to work. At the time he disappeared, the then 34-year-old was last seen driving his red Ford F-150 pickup truck.
Thursday’s recovery operation included the Vermont State Police Scuba Team and Crime Scene Search Team. State police divers used dredging equipment provided by the independent group Adventures With Purpose that located the missing pickup earlier this week. The team visited the area for the second time in a year to look into the Messier case after it came up empty-handed when it searched the Waterbury Reservoir on Oct. 2, 2021.
Likewise, extensive fruitless searches happened in the days, weeks and months since fall 2006, looking for any sign of Messier along miles of roads and waterways that Messier may have traveled following the long-ago party, as well as places he was known to frequent.
Now, just days before another anniversary of that disappearance, luck changed when Adventures With Purpose returned to search additional bodies of water with its divers using sonar equipment.
A five-man team on Tuesday traveled to several locations including Blueberry Lake and several ponds in the Mad River Valley. A late-afternoon visit to the Winooski River in Waterbury and Duxbury turned up the missing red F-150 pickup upright and facing upstream in about 11 feet of water near the riverbank below the Duxbury Community Garden.
On Wednesday, the Adventures group divers returned to the spot and inspected the vehicle more closely, locating a license plate matching Messier’s registration. The recovery mission then shifted over to the Vermont State Police which has had an open missing person case for Messier for nearly 16 years.
So far, ‘nothing significant’ found inside
The state police team on Thursday confirmed that the vehicle was Messier’s truck. And while the head of the scuba team declined to comment on whether any trace of the missing man’s remains was found, a press release later Thursday evening said that no evidence was found yet indicating that Messier was in the submerged truck. “An examination of the vehicle located personal effects, but investigators have uncovered no obvious human remains at this point in the search,” the police statement says.
Thursday’s mission began shortly after 9 a.m. with divers using dredging equipment to remove accumulated material from inside the truck and around it where it sat lodged in the river bottom.
“(Adventures With Purpose) lent us their dredging machine which actually was super-helpful to remove some of the silt and debris,” said Daley, the State Police Scuba Team commander. “Essentially we stuck the hose in there and it would suck up any of the silt and debris and… our crime scene (team) tried to run it through screens so that if any debris came out, possibly bones or anything like that, it would catch it in the screen.”
The sifting process didn’t go particularly smoothly, however. “We tried to sift through that at different stages, and some things worked and some things didn’t and we just had to adjust and move on,” Daley acknowledged.
The team siphoned up material around the vehicle as well. “We had to do both because it was so far in the muck and debris that it was stuck in there,” Daley explained. “They wanted to break it free of that suction of the mud but also inside the cab they wanted to get any of the debris out of there that they could.”
Daley described how the divers used mesh bags to collect some objects from the underwater site. He did not comment on specific items recovered other than to say there was “nothing significant” among the personal items in Messier’s truck. They amounted to “nothing out of the ordinary that wouldn’t be in anybody else’s truck,” he said.
Once the dredging operation ended, tow trucks and a flatbed wrecker were brought to the edge of the bank overlooking the river. Divers in the water positioned tow lines on the pickup, readjusting them multiple times. That part of the process proceeded slowly between 3 and 6 p.m.
Throughout the day, TV news crews were set up observing the activity from spots along the riverbank and across the water on the Waterbury side of the river. Some onlookers took up spots on the Waterbury bank while a group of friends and family members of Messier assembled just upstream on the Duxbury bank where they had an unobstructed view. That group grew to more than two dozen by the time the truck was hoisted out of the water.
Initially, a small tow truck from E&S Towing began the job before a larger wrecker from Elite Towing arrived, prompting cheers and applause from the crowd on the bank.
Not all according to plan
Speaking with reporters Thursday night around 7:30 p.m., Daley acknowledged another aspect of the recovery that didn’t go according to plan: the orientation of the pickup as it was removed from the water.
As the tow trucks pulled the lines attached to the pickup, the vehicle emerged from the water upside down. The pickup also was missing its roof, windshields and hood — none of which were present when the vehicle was discovered.
“It did flip over,” Daley said, noting that the truck originally was resting right-side-up underwater. “We were trying to keep it that way, but I think there was a ledge there that it got caught on and then it started to tip… and once it started to tip, it went over.”
When asked whether the team looked to the Adventures group members for guidance on retrieving the vehicle, Daley said, “I talked to those guys throughout the day and they gave ideas about how to remove it… it was a conversation back and forth.”
Adventures With Purpose founder Jared Leisek said the group began its missing person searches in December 2019. So far, the group has found the remains of 24 missing individuals in vehicles in water around the United States, 12 of them in the past year. The Messier case was their 25th find, although it so far has only yielded the missing vehicle.
Daley acknowledged that the retrieval wasn’t ideal. “It’s tricky. You start moving it … you don’t want to disturb the scene, so you’re trying to do that the best way you could and that’s the way it came up,” Daley said.
After the truck was detached from the towing cables, the state police divers returned to the water and crime scene team members scoured the bank, working with lights once darkness fell.
“That’s why we sent the divers back in, so if anything did come out of the vehicle they were searching with their hands and siphoning that dirt,” Daley said.
The material collected will be turned over to the crime scene team, he said, to be photographed and inspected as part of the ongoing investigation.
An emergency and the investigation continues
An unexpected development unfolded right around 7 p.m. when a tow truck driver was getting the pickup onto the flatbed. “The piece that the tow hook was attached to broke free and the hook hit the gentleman in the head,” Daley said. The man was briefly unconscious and state troopers on the scene performed first aid. An ambulance was called and Daley said that the driver was awake and talking by the time he was being transported to the hospital.
The state police press release also noted that members of the Waterbury Fire Department and the Duxbury town Highway Department were on site during the day on Thursday providing assistance. A state victim’s advocate also worked with Messier’s family members.
E&S Transport ultimately transported the pickup to a secure lot at the state police barracks in Berlin. Police noted that the crime scene team would continue to process the truck on Friday “to look for any additional evidence that might be useful in the search for Messier.”
Finally, Daley was asked what theories police may have on how Messier’s pickup came to be in the Winooski River. “There’s going to be plenty of time for that,” Daley said. “Right now, it’s just been trying to get the truck out of the water and see if we could find any remains in there.”
Much time has passed since Messier was reported missing, he added, and the investigation remains open. “How that truck got there — who knows? Irene has come through here. There’s been a ton of things that could have happened,” he said referring to flooding from Tropical Storm Irene in August 2011. “Why that truck was there now? We don’t know.”
Anyone with information that may assist investigators in this case is asked to call the state police barracks in Berlin at 802-229-9191 or leave an anonymous tip online at vsp.vermont.gov/tipsubmit.
