Kalispell, Mont. – Teenage lovers from Canada, they were flying south to elope and begin new lives in the United States.
Their plan was to ditch a rented Cessna in a remote lake in the Flathead Valley of northwest Montana. They had packed a rubber dinghy and extra clothes in watertight bags, along with about $20,000 in cash.
The girl drowned.
Dianne Babcock, 18, of Vancouver, British Columbia, sank with the plane to the bottom of Bitterroot Lake. When sheriff’s deputies fished her out of 244 feet of water, she still had her seat belt on. That was 24 years ago.
The boy vanished.
Jaroslaw “Jerry” Ambrozuk, 19 in 1982, fled with his extra clothes and the money, withdrawn from the young woman’s savings account in Vancouver, according to Flathead County Sheriff James Dupont.
And Ambrozuk stayed hidden – even after charges of negligent homicide were filed against him, even after being featured on “America’s Most Wanted.”
Until late August. That’s when police in the Dallas suburb of Plano arrested him at his home.
He had found his way to Texas just a few days after the plane sank in Montana. For 23 years, he had used a generic American name, Michael Lee Smith.
He was single. For the past six years, he had been living in Plano on a wide residential street that one neighbor described to reporters as resembling Wisteria Lane in “Desperate Housewives,” with big houses, big cars and young moms at home. He reportedly ran a company out of his home that designed computers for racing cars.
Smith told police his real name was Ambrozuk and asked for a lawyer. Late last month, a Montana sheriff’s deputy fetched him back to Kalispell, where he is being held without bail. He is due in court Thursday to face the negligent-homicide charge.
An online personal ad, it seems, did him in.
“A couple of things about me: I am honest and don’t cheat or play games,” Ambrozuk, a.k.a. Smith, wrote in an ad. He listed his age as 34, although he is 43.
A woman who remains anonymous read the ad and met the man who wrote it. He gave his real name and real date of birth.
She Googled him and found a year-old online story from the Daily Inter Lake, a newspaper in Flathead County, about the mystery of the girl at the bottom of the lake and the boy who vanished. She telephoned Dupont in Kalispell on Aug. 28.
“She was very legitimate- sounding and knew things that only Jerry could have known,” said Dupont, 59, who retires at the end of this year.
Within two days, Plano police had Ambrozuk in handcuffs.
As a sheriff’s deputy, Dupont was at Bitterroot Lake when Babcock was pulled up. She was pretty, with long brown hair, he recalled, and the cold, deep water had preserved her beauty.
Her seat belt was fastened, its buckle turned inside out, but it was not jammed. He easily unsnapped it. Her collarbone had been fractured, but he said there was no indication – her fingernails were unbroken, her hands unscratched – that she had panicked and fought to try to unsnap the belt.
An autopsy found that she had drowned; it also found signs of a recent abortion, Dupont said.
“He managed to get himself out, but he didn’t manage to get her out,” Dupont said.
“Why did he run, and why has he been missing for 24 years? What deep, dark secret does he have that he doesn’t want anybody to know?”
Answers to those questions may emerge as Ambrozuk deals with the felony charge of negligent homicide. Conviction could result in a 10-year prison term.
He also faces federal charges of having a fraudulent U.S. passport.
