Sonar Company Solves 25-Year-Old Sunrise Cold Case

A private underwater recovery company appears to have solved a mystery that has haunted a Sunrise family for 25 years when divers located the remains of Libby Ann Dibenedetto on Sunday, April 6.

St. Petersburg-based Sunshine State Sonar announced the find late Tuesday after finding Dibenedetto's body in 13 feet of water in a pond near W. Sunrise Boulevard and N. Flamingo Road in Plantation. She was still in the gold 1996 Toyota Camry in which she'd gone missing.

Dibenedetto, a 35-year-old nurse, was reported missing by her family after she failed to return home from celebrating a coworker's birthday at Duke's Bar and Grill in Davie on April 11, 2000. Her family, including her three young children, would never again see her alive.

Neither Plantation nor Sunrise police immediately responded to calls for comment Wednesday. But Sunshine State owner Michael Sullivan tells New Times foul play isn't suspected in this case, which he says is identical to most missing-persons cases his company has solved in which a person was last seen driving home alone from a bar.
"Her kids have been very quiet about the case," Sullivan says. "She died a day before her youngest son's tenth birthday."

Sullivan says Dibenedetto's last known action was calling her therapist from a pay phone near N. Pine Island Road and W. Sunrise Boulevard. He says his company confirmed that she'd been living with her mother in Sunrise while finalizing a divorce when she disappeared.

The recovery company began searching Broward County bodies of water for Dibenedetto in 2022, undertaking more than 30 deployments from St. Petersburg and searching about 400 different bodies of water. They made a breakthrough on Sunday afternoon when they found skeletal remains submerged in a small Plantation pond.

"It was one of the hardest cases we've worked," Sullivan says. "We didn't know which direction she went when she left the bar."

Armed with so little information, the team began searching all bodies of water in the area. They'd already packed up and were heading out of town on Sunday morning when he decided to check one last pond, he says.

"It was over — game over," Sullivan says. "It was the fourth quarter and we were on our way to the airport when I said, 'You know what, let's throw the boat in one more pond.'"

Sullivan's sonar gear identified a 15-foot-long sedan in the water, matching the description of Dibenedetto's car. He was certain it was her when he spotted a Miami Dolphins bumper sticker, still intact.

According to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, Florida has more than 2,400 active missing-persons cases, including 252 in Miami-Dade County, 167 in Broward County, and 249 in Palm Beach County. The system is a database maintained by the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Justice Programs.

Sullivan says that thanks to the invention of OnStar and other roadside-assistance technology, cases of missing persons like Dibenedetto's are becoming less commonplace.