After a four and a half year search that alarmed the neighborhood and piqued the interest of cold case experts, a car carrying Janet Walsh’s body was recovered from the Allegheny River in Oakmont on Sunday. Walsh, who was 70 years old when she vanished, is the owner of the remains, the family verified on Monday, even though the Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office has not yet made an identification.
As is typically the case with discoveries made in rivers, it was a fisherman who made the breakthrough rather than law enforcement. According to Oakmont Volunteer Fire Department Chief Joe Flanick, when fire fighters arrived about 5 p.m. on Sunday, they discovered another submerged car after responding to a report of an overturned vehicle near California Avenue.
Emergency personnel from the Monroeville Water Rescue Team and Blaxnox Fire Rescue collaborated with other agencies to retrieve at least one vehicle, though the specific vehicle containing Walsh’s remains has not been disclosed by the authorities. According to divers, the mud- and algae-caked automobiles had probably been in the river for years.
When Walsh’s daughter arrived at her mother’s house for a planned dinner on January 20, 2020, she discovered her SUV and smartphone missing in the upstairs of her Dolores Drive home. She reported Walsh missing at around 8 p.m. As they asked for the public’s assistance in finding Walsh, investigators released a comprehensive timeline of her movements prior to her being reported missing.
On January 19, 2020, Walsh was last seen by her son-in-law, Nathan Duke, and daughter, Erin Duke, over supper at her house. She was returning from Bethlehem Lutheran Church when a license plate reader earlier that day detected her driving south on Mt. Royal Boulevard in her silver 2018 Chevy Trax.
The last time her daughter heard from her was when they were making plans for dinner that evening on January 20, 2020, at 8 a.m. Investigators discovered that Walsh had canceled a scheduled doctor’s visit for that afternoon, around two hours later. By January 2021, diving crews from several organizations had searched the river four or five times, concentrating especially on the Pittsburgh area between the 31st Street and Highland Park bridges. Her car was found on Sunday close to the Dormition of the Theotokos Greek Orthodox Church, approximately five miles upriver from the Highland Park Bridge.
Since Walsh vanished, Adventures With Purpose, a sonar search and recovery dive team that specializes in cold case investigations, has searched underwater multiple times for her. In 2022, while on one of their missions, divers discovered human remains in an unrelated car. The remains were ultimately identified as those of Tod DiMinno, a prominent businessman in Butler County, who was 54 years old.
