Mom Told Her Kids That Their Dad Abandoned Them. 55 Years Later, They Found His Body Buried in the Basement By Liam Quinn

Normally stoic under pressure, Chris Carroll was pale and visibly shaken when he emerged from the basement of his family’s house in Lake Grove on Long Island, N.Y.

“Dad, I think we found something,” he told his father, Michael, in the living room. “You have to go downstairs.”

Together, Chris and his brother, Mike Jr., had been digging in the basement for months, searching for clues in the mysterious disappearance of their grandfather, George Carroll, more than five decades before that Halloween eve in 2018.

Michael, who had recently suffered a stroke, required help walking down the stairs but made his way to the large hole in the floor and peered inside.

“I thought maybe it was a root or a dog bone,” the retired critical care technician recalls. “Then I looked again and realized, yeah, that’s definitely a pelvis bone.”

While it was no cause for celebration, Michael, 64, and his family were deeply satisfied that they had finally found what they were looking for.

In 1963, when Michael’s then-30-year-old father vanished without a trace, he left behind a wife, Dorothy, and four children under age 10. Family lore had it that he left home one day to buy cigarettes and simply never returned — and Dorothy steadfastly refused to give a real explanation up to her death in 1998. Finally, based on family speculation and a psychic medium’s vision of a body buried under a house, Michael and his sons literally unearthed the family’s darkest secret.

“Our father was in the ground for 55 years while we just thought he abandoned us,” says George’s eldest son Steven Carroll, 68. “But somebody murdered him.”

The remarkable search for George Carroll is now seen in a new documentary, The Secrets We Bury, premiering on ID and streaming on HBO Max on Dec. 16. The film captures how the siblings came together to gain closure after an unfathomable loss.

“It is rare to see people love each other so well through such dark, terrible circumstances,”
says the film’s director Patricia E. Gillespie.

A New York native, George returned home after serving in the U.S. Army in the Korean War (where he was Marilyn Monroe’s driver on a USO tour, his children later learned) and settled in Long Island, where he and Dorothy raised their family — daughters Jean and Patricia and sons Steven and Michael.

By 1963, they also had a live-in handyman, Richard Darress, whom George hired to help with a construction project.

Soon after telling her kids that their father had abandoned them, Dorothy married Darress. Their rocky marriage produced a son, Rich, but ended in divorce.

That was a relief to the Carroll kids — the boys claimed their stepfather was physically abusive and both girls said he sexually assaulted them.

Over the years, questions about their missing father went unanswered. Dorothy brushed them aside, tersely saying only that George wasn’t “a good guy.”

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She didn’t file a missing person’s report, so police never looked into his disappearance. Some people suggested that George had reunited with a woman he met during the war in Korea and was raising a family with her.

But other relatives proposed a more sinister scenario. In the mid-2000s, Michael had a chance meeting at a hospital with his father’s brother, who told him that his side of the family believed George was killed and buried under the house.

“It turns out my grandmother was actively pursuing” answers and hired a detective in the 1960s, says Michael.

The Carroll siblings and Rich Darress lost their beloved mother Dorothy, 63, to cancer, ending any chance of learning more from her.

Despite speculation that she may have been involved in George’s death, her children defend her to this day.

“I know who she was, and if she had any part in this, she definitely had a reason,” says Rich, 54.

In a last-ditch effort, Dorothy and George’s daughter Jean Kennedy, 71, who believes in the supernatural, persuaded Michael, a skeptic, to accompany her to a psychic reading in 2010.

Both were stunned when the psychic said their father had been murdered and was in the basement of the family home, which Michael bought from his mother.

Michael immediately called Steven.

“This woman described exactly where Dad was and something that used to be on the wall,” Steven says. “I remembered that — but nobody else would know.”

In time, the startling claim prompted the family to start digging, leading to the discovery of George’s skeletal remains by Chris, 33, and Mike Jr., 35, who were determined to help their father solve the life-long mystery.

“There was so much raw emotion,” Mike Jr. recalls.

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On Oct. 25, 2019, the siblings laid their father to rest with military honors at a national cemetery in Long Island.

And though the question of who killed him remains the focus of an investigation by Suffolk County Police, his family — most of whom are convinced that Richard Darress, since deceased, was the killer — is at peace.

“I think we hit the grand slam the day we found my dad,” says Michael. “We found the prize. He was still here.”

ID’s THE SECRETS WE BURY premieres Tuesday, December 16 at 9/8c on ID and will be available to stream on HBO Max.