Two people who vanished from the small town of Wright City in September 2022 have finally been found, more than four years after their disappearance set off a search that went cold until a submerged car surfaced in McCurtain County last month. The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation announced Thursday that skeletal remains recovered from Pine Creek Lake have been positively identified as 64-year-old Terry Woodman and 65-year-old Timothy Woodman.
According to the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation
, the McCurtain County Sheriff's Office asked OSBI to investigate located skeletal remains on October 15. Earlier that same day, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol had retrieved a vehicle from Pine Creek Lake, where the remains were discovered. From there, the remains were transported to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for further evaluation, a process that stretched on for roughly three weeks before investigators could confirm who they had found.
That confirmation came Thursday, when OSBI announced the remains belonged to Terry and Timothy Woodman. During the course of the investigation, authorities determined both had been reported missing to the Wright City Police Department back in September 2022 — a case that had sat unresolved for more than four years before the lake gave up its answer.
Oklahoma’s Missing Persons Clearinghouse, housed within OSBI, coordinates resources for law enforcement and families; the agency says a 2019 state law requires missing-person cases to be entered into the national NamUs database within 30 days. The law is named for Francine Frost, whose remains were found two years after she disappeared but were not identified for more than three decades. Oklahoma’s medical examiner also compares identifying records and, in some cases, family-reference DNA to identify remains. The state’s missing-persons program and medical examiner’s identification procedures show the systems that can help resolve long-running cases.
A Trail That Went Cold in 2022
Details about exactly how the Woodmans disappeared remain sparse in official accounts, but a non-government case-tracking page, Oklahoma Cold Cases, offers a glimpse of their final known movements. The site states that Terry Woodman was last seen on September 20, 2022, in Wright City, and that she was with relative Timothy Woodman that day, traveling in a white 2010 Chrysler Town Country minivan bearing license plate CH67126.
The minivan may or may not be the vehicle recovered from Pine Creek Lake, and the circumstances of how or when a vehicle might have entered the lake remain unclear.
In September 2013, Oklahoma Highway Patrol personnel pulled two cars from Foss Lake, where remains were found; CNN also reported that six people had vanished decades earlier, in 1969 and 1970.
Oklahoma has seen a similar discovery at Foss Lake: sonar training led troopers to two submerged cars in 2013, and DNA testing later identified all six people inside as members of two groups reported missing in 1969 and 1970. Investigators used DNA even though the vehicles and occupants appeared to match the old cases, because they could not assume everyone who originally left in each car was still inside. The medical examiner determined those deaths were probable accidental drownings—a finding that does not establish what happened to the Woodmans. The Foss Lake identifications offer a precedent, not an answer to the Pine Creek investigation.
OSBI Asks Public for Tips
As the investigation into the Woodmans' disappearance continues, OSBI is asking anyone with additional information to contact its tip line at [email protected] or 1-800-522-8017.
For now, the identification closes one chapter of a case that had haunted Wright City since 2022, even as the central question of what happened to Terry and Timothy Woodman remains open.
