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| Suffolk County homicide police outside the Carrolls' home. Stringer News Service |
On the eve of Halloween, they appeared to get the answer — and it was right under their noses the whole time.
Bones that look human were unearthed three feet below the basement of the Lake Grove home, thanks in part to a psychic who helped guide the dig.
Mike Carroll, 57, has no doubt they are his father’s.
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| Michael Carroll. Victoralcorn.com |
Carroll was about 8 months old in 1961 when the father vanished from their Olive Street home in the quaint Suffolk County village.
He and his three older siblings, a brother and two sisters, could never get a straight answer out of their mom, Dorothy, about their dad.
“I was always told, ‘Don’t ask,’ ” Carroll said. “So I stopped asking.”
But the mystery haunted Carroll, who bought the family home from their mother shortly before her death in 1998.
A missing persons report was never filed for the dad, leaving only theories that the siblings whispered to one another.
One of them was that Dad was buried in the basement, and Carroll decided to seriously investigate about three or four years ago.
“There is, of course, premonitions, gut feelings, things like that,” he said. “There was a chance I was going to do this and nothing would come of it.”
He enlisted the help of experts, both scientific and paranormal, including workers equipped with radar, and psychics.
But Carroll did most of the heavy lifting, excavating the thick concrete floor in his spare time. When he suffered a stroke two months ago, his two adult sons took up the grim, piecemeal work.
At one point, “there was a guy who came to my basement, and he went to the right spot and said, ‘The energy is here,’ ” Carroll recalled.
They dug elsewhere first, but came back and dug in the spot flagged by the psychic, with his sons hitting pay dirt Tuesday night.
In a 3- or 4-foot-deep hole, Carroll, a respiratory therapist at St. Charles Hospital in Port Jefferson, LI, saw what he immediately recognized as human remains.
“They were twisted in a knot, weird-looking,” he said. “It was down and twisted in the dirt … not totally exposed, either.”
Carroll took the night to confer with his siblings, and called Suffolk cops on Halloween to alert them to the spooky find.
Neither Carroll nor authorities could immediately specify what parts of the body the bones appeared to be from. But police say they look human.
If the remains are confirmed to be George Carroll’s, the family hopes to bury the Korean War vet, born in 1934, in Calverton National Cemetery in Riverhead, LI.
While Mike Carroll may have solved one mystery, he continues to guard many more dark family secrets.
“The murder is a story,” he said of the case, which police have not officially ruled a homicide. “But all the little stories are bigger than this 57 years of stuff.
“When all five of us put it together, it is an amazing story.”
Asked who “the five of us” was referring to, Carroll said, “There are four siblings and one other kid, but I’m not going to talk about him.”
“No family is perfect, [but] we have an interesting story,” he said. “This story is not your average story.”
“I need to talk to my family,” he said. “My sisters know more, but they’re very broken girls . . . Not by this story, but by this life.”
A phone message left for one woman believed to be one of the Carroll sisters went unreturned Thursday.
A working number couldn’t immediately be found for the other.
The fourth sibling, 61-year-old Steven Carroll, also declined to delve into the murky family drama, focusing on having apparently found a little long-sought closure.
“It just struck me that he has been here the whole time and it’s wonderful,” he said. “The grandchildren can now say Grandpa was found.”
Additional reporting by Stephanie Pagones and nypost.com
