Angler/Sonar Expert Rick Krueger Solved a Mystery from My Childhood

   My dad’s oldest brother, Donnie, worked at Kellogg’s cereals in Battle Creek, Michigan.

   Each summer, he pulled his boat and its twin 50-horsepower Mercury engines 320 miles to a cabin he and Aunt Jeanie rented for two weeks on Madison’s Lake Monona.

   That was the early 1960s, when rental cabins bordered the beach at Esther Park. Our family didn’t own a boat until 1968, so Uncle Donnie’s vacations offered us rare treats to waterski and fish from a boat. He especially liked fishing a rockpile just north of the cabin.

   When Uncle Donnie took me, my dad and three brothers bluegill fishing one morning in Summer 1964, we started on the rockpile. I was 8, and if I ever caught a fish before that day, I don’t recall it. My brothers and I fished with cane poles. Dad taught us how to poke those bamboo poles skyward while holding our worm-baited hook, and then dipping the pole and flipping the bobber and worm beyond the pole’s reach.

   When the bluegill action ebbed at the rockpile, Dad suggested fishing in front of Madison Gas and Electric’s towers on Monona’s northern shoreline. Dad was a Madison firefighter, and knew the guys at No. 9 fire station often caught bluegills there.

   Minutes later, after our cousin Jerry dropped the anchor, I swung my cane pole and plopped its red-and-white plastic bobber into the water. A fish tugged it under. I snapped the cane pole hard, yanking a bluegill into the boat and earning unique praise from Dad.

This 1950 Ford coupe held the remains of two Madison men, Ronald Wick, 19, and Carl Stolz, 21, who vanished in February 1961. The car was recovered from Lake Waubesa on Aug. 9, 2006. — Rick Krueger photo

    When my line broke as he unhooked the fish, Dad taught me to retie it using a “blood-knot.” I learned later it was an improved clinch knot, but Dad never claimed to be a great fisherman, and he certainly wouldn’t quibble over a name if the knot held.

   After I landed a second bluegill, Dad critiqued my hook-set, saying it was way too hard and might tear the hook through the fish’s lips. If you’ve seen my icefishing hooksets, you know Dad’s advice never took.

   I share those memories because they helped create my life’s most vivid fishing story. And except for his hook-setting advice, everything Dad said that morning stuck, including the haunting tale he told his brother in between bluegills.

   Dad said two guys had vanished 3½ years earlier (Feb. 21, 1961) after telling friends they intended to drive on the lake after the bars closed at 1 a.m. Many people believed their intended lake was Monona. Many folks also thought Ronald Wick, 19, and Carl Stolz, 21, had driven into an ice-free area caused by warm-water discharges from the MG&E power plant. Dad said searchers never found a sign of the guys or their car, and they’re still “down there somewhere.”

   I couldn’t shake that image of two dead men trapped inside a car, possibly near Uncle Donnie’s boat. Flash forward to August 2006, when news accounts said divers from the Dane County Sheriff’s Department were working on nearby Lake Waubesa, recovering the remains of two young Madison men from Wick’s car. The reports said a local diver, Rick Krueger, had located the car, solving the 45½-year mystery.

   Unfortunately, I was too consumed with other deadlines and writing obligations in the weeks that followed, and never tracked down Krueger for his story.

     “Radio Shop Rick” Krueger monitors his side-scan sonar screen while searching Lake Monona in June 2017. Eleven years earlier on July 21, 2006, Krueger solved a 45½-year mystery by finding the car that entombed two young Madison men after it broke through the ice on nearby Lake Waubesa.     — Patrick Durkin photo

   After another decade passed, I misidentified a speaker at a Madison fishing show in February 2017. I emailed the speaker to apologize, and promised to make up for it. When we met on his boat in June 2017 for my do-over, I had long forgotten someone named Rick Krueger had found Wick, Stolz and Wick’s 1950 Ford coupe 11 years before.

   I just knew the Rick Krueger I was interviewing was a side-scan sonar expert who loved pike, walleyes and muskies as much as anyone. However, I soon realized he was more interested in searching lakes Mendota, Monona, Wingra, Waubesa and Kegonsa for reefs, sunken boats, illegal fish cribs and other cool stuff.

   In fact, Krueger had already recorded over 1,400 GPS waypoints for items he found with his sonar units. That list included I-beams, boulders, rock piles, sunken logs, fractured pontoons, marl trenches, work barges, antique boats, fishing tackle, dredging pipes, a dredge bucket, fuel barrels, boat engines, ice-fishing shanties, century-old cars, demolished boathouses, matching cups and saucers, and sundry items too small to catalog.

   As we motored past the MG&E towers while I took notes and snapped photos, I shared my father’s story about the missing men, and said I was amazed they had been found four decades later on Waubesa.

   Krueger smiled and said: “That was me. I found them.”

   “No crap?! That was you?!”

   Yep. He was that Rick Krueger. He was also one of the first people anywhere to own a Humminbird 987c SI sonar unit after its 2005 launch. He worked for decades in the city of Madison’s radio communications division, retiring in 2011. He had always answered his work phone with, “Radio shop (pause), Rick,” prompting divers with the Madison police and county sheriff’s departments to dub him, “Radio Shop Rick.” He helped the officers whenever possible, whether to find drowning victims or tweak electronics gear for their boats.

   After all, Krueger spent over 100 days each year searching the lakes with his sonar gear. He knew better than anyone how to interpret sonar shadows on a display screen. On July 21, 2006, Krueger was on Waubesa, searching for a fishing boat that sank in rough waters years earlier 600 yards off Brams Point on the western shoreline.

   “I spotted something big sitting at a 45-degree angle 35 feet down,” Krueger said. “I figured it was a boat, but when I dove on it, I found an upside-down car. When I saw its rear license plate expired in 1961, I knew what I had found. I was only 8 when Wick and Stolz disappeared, but every diver around Madison knew about them.”

   Well, another decade has passed since I first interviewed Krueger. Earlier this year, I finally got an assignment to write a comprehensive two-part series about the sad search for “the two boys,” and how divers hoisted their car out of Waubesa on Aug. 9, 2006.

   That series is five times longer than my weekly newspaper column, but you can read it on MeatEater media’s website, www.themeateater.com.