Kayakers paddling a Cape Coral, Florida, canal in 2024 found human remains that DNA testing has now confirmed belong to Rose Marie Gayhart, a 23-year-old New York woman who vanished more than 40 years ago, and police say the case is an active homicide investigation.
Cape Coral police announced Friday that their Violent Crimes Unit received DNA confirmation in May 2026 linking the remains to Gayhart, who was reported missing by her parents in Dansville, New York, in March 1985. The discovery came two years after kayakers stumbled on the remains in a canal in northeast Cape Coral in May 2024, the New York Post reported.
For four decades, Gayhart's family had no answers. Now they have one, and it points to foul play.
Gayhart moved from New York to a trailer park in North Fort Myers, Florida, on Christmas Day 1984. She traveled with her boyfriend and his mother. She found work at a Cape Coral restaurant called Big Howie's Hot Dogs.
Three months later, in March 1985, her parents in Dansville reported her missing. She was 23 years old. Between that report and the canal discovery in 2024, the public record on the case went largely quiet, save for one interview nearly a decade ago.
Gayhart's sister, Laurie Travis, spoke to the local news outlet WINK in 2017 about her decades-long search for answers. Travis described the anguish of not knowing her sister's fate.
"I mean, there's always that wondering, where are you? Where are you?"
Travis told WINK she believed her sister had been killed. She said neighbors at the trailer park described frequent disturbances.
"Also, there was a lot of crashing and banging and fighting going on at the trailer park all the time."
Travis also recounted a letter that her mother received from the boyfriend's mother. In Travis's telling, the letter claimed Gayhart had been bought a bus ticket and was being sent home, but Gayhart never arrived.
"My mother got a letter from his mom, stated that she got the bus ticket for her and everything, that she was hanging in bars and she was no good and this and that and she was sending her back to my mother and then she never came back."
That letter, and the bus ticket it described, remain unverified by investigators, at least publicly. No one has confirmed whether the letter was ever recovered or authenticated.
Southwest Florida Crime Stoppers reported that some neighbors at the North Fort Myers trailer park believed Gayhart was pregnant at the time she disappeared and was trying to return home. Those same neighbors believed her boyfriend refused to let her leave.
Travis echoed that account in her 2017 interview, telling WINK plainly what she believed happened.
"I think she was murdered, the neighbors were all saying when they did the investigation."
Neither the boyfriend nor his mother has been publicly named by police. No suspect or person of interest has been identified in the case. The boyfriend's mother was described by neighbors as having "her own reasons for wanting Gayhart gone," but that claim also comes from unverified neighbor accounts relayed through Crime Stoppers and the 2017 WINK interview, not from police.
After kayakers found the remains in May 2024, the Cape Coral Police Department and the District 21 Medical Examiner's Office began working to identify them. The breakthrough came from across the country.
Cape Coral police credited the Livingston County Sheriff's Office in New York with playing what they called "an integral role" in the identification. That agency secured the familial DNA sample used to match the remains to Gayhart.
The Violent Crimes Unit received confirmation of the match in May 2026, two full years after the discovery and more than 41 years after Gayhart vanished.
Cape Coral Police Chief Anthony Sizemore framed the identification as both a resolution and a beginning. In a statement accompanying the department's press release, Sizemore acknowledged the family's ordeal.
"For more than forty years, Rose Marie Gayhart's family has carried the weight of not knowing what happened to her. While this identification brings long-awaited answers, it also strengthens our resolve."
Sizemore pledged that the investigation would continue.
"No matter how much time passes, even after four decades, our investigations do not stop, and our pursuit of justice does not end. This is now considered an active homicide investigation, and we are committed to following every lead."
Police have not disclosed a cause of death. They have not named any suspects. They have not said what condition the remains were in when found, or what specific DNA technology was used to make the match. The department has asked anyone with information to call its tip line at 239-574-3223.
Several gaps in the public record stand out. No investigative steps between 1985 and 2024 have been described publicly. The boyfriend and his mother, the last known people to live with Gayhart, have not been publicly identified or located. Whether Gayhart was in fact pregnant at the time of her disappearance, as neighbors reportedly believed, has not been confirmed.
And the letter from the boyfriend's mother, the one that told Gayhart's family she was coming home, sits as an unresolved piece of the story. Either Gayhart got on a bus and something happened to her afterward, or she never got on a bus at all. Either way, she ended up in a canal in Cape Coral, and no one answered for it.
Laurie Travis spent decades asking one question. She finally got part of the answer. The rest, who did this, and why, is the part that matters now. Forty years is a long time to wait for justice. It would be unconscionable to let it take any longer.
