Rose Marie Gayhart was a 23-year-old woman whose disappearance from the Cape Coral and North Fort Myers area of Florida became a mystery that endured for more than four decades. NamUs records March 14, 1985, as her date of last contact and lists Cape Coral in Lee County as the location connected to her disappearance. Rose had originally come from New York and had moved to the North Fort Myers area with her boyfriend.
By 1985, she was living and working in Southwest Florida, far from her parents in Dansville, New York. Contemporary missing-person information described Rose as a white female with brown, curly hair and brown eyes, approximately 5 feet 2 to 5 feet 3 inches tall and weighing roughly 110 to 115 pounds; she also had pierced ears and several small scars. Public accounts indicate that she was employed at a Cape Coral restaurant that was once known as Big Howie’s Hot Dogs. After Rose vanished, she never returned to work, and accounts preserved during the years she was missing indicated that she left behind a life that had seemed, at least shortly beforehand, to be moving forward. Her parents reported her missing, beginning a search that would eventually involve law-enforcement agencies in both Florida and New York.
As investigators and Rose’s family tried to reconstruct the period before she disappeared, a troubling picture emerged, although many of the details came from recollections and reports rather than findings that had been established in court. Rose had been staying in a North Fort Myers trailer park with her boyfriend and his mother. Her sister, Laurie Travis, later remembered that Rose had seemed happy not long before she vanished and had even encouraged her sister to visit her in Florida. According to Travis, however, the situation appeared to deteriorate rapidly during the final weeks before Rose disappeared. She recalled learning from people in the trailer park that there had been frequent arguments, loud crashing and other disturbances around the residence. Travis also said her mother received a letter from the boyfriend’s mother indicating that Rose was no longer welcome and that arrangements were supposedly being made to send her back to her family in New York. Rose never arrived home. Other public accounts said she was last seen around the Cape Coral restaurant where she worked, and later reporting described a possible sighting of her getting into a red truck with an unidentified man. These details generated suspicion among Rose’s relatives and others who knew about the circumstances, but for decades there was no publicly announced physical evidence establishing exactly what had happened to her, who had been with her during her final hours, or where she had gone after leaving the area where she lived and worked.
The uncertainty stretched across generations. The Livingston County Sheriff’s Office in New York continued working the case because of Rose’s ties to the Dansville area, while the Cape Coral Police Department ultimately became the primary Florida agency associated with the investigation. Rose’s family continued searching for information, living with the painful possibility that someone knew more than had ever been disclosed. Investigators preserved an important avenue for identification through DNA: relatives provided familial DNA samples that could be compared against unidentified remains. That painstaking work became decisive decades after Rose disappeared. In May 2024, kayakers discovered human remains in a canal in northeast Cape Coral. The discovery did not immediately answer the question of identity, and investigators, the District 21 Medical Examiner’s Office and cooperating law-enforcement agencies undertook the process of examining and identifying the remains. The Livingston County Sheriff’s Office played a significant role by helping obtain the familial DNA necessary for comparison. Authorities also excavated the area around the canal with assistance from the Cape Coral Department of Public Works, the Lee County Sheriff’s Office, the Broward County Sheriff’s Office and the District 21 Medical Examiner’s Office, reflecting the effort to recover and preserve whatever additional evidence the location might hold.
In May 2026, the Cape Coral Police Department’s Violent Crimes Unit received confirmation that the remains recovered from the canal belonged to Rose Marie Gayhart. The District 21 Medical Examiner’s Office assisted in confirming the identification, while the familial DNA secured through the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office provided a crucial connection between the remains and the family that had spent more than forty years waiting for answers. The discovery finally established what had become of Rose in at least one important respect, but it did not answer the central question of how she died or who was responsible. Cape Coral police announced that Rose’s death is being investigated as a homicide and that the investigation remains open. Police Chief Anthony Sizemore acknowledged the extraordinary length of time Rose’s family had lived without knowing what happened to her and emphasized that identifying her remains did not end the investigation; instead, authorities said they were continuing to pursue leads in an effort to establish accountability and provide her family with fuller answers. No person has been publicly identified by Cape Coral police as responsible for Rose’s death in the department’s announcement, and the circumstances surrounding her final movements remain an important part of the inquiry. Rose’s case therefore spans more than forty years: a 23-year-old woman disappeared after building a life in Southwest Florida, her family searched and waited through decades of uncertainty, remains discovered by chance in a Cape Coral canal were eventually identified through forensic work and family DNA, and what began as a long-term missing-person investigation has become an active homicide investigation. The identification restored Rose Marie Gayhart’s name to remains that otherwise might have remained unknown and ended one devastating uncertainty for her loved ones, but the broader case remains a search for the truth about what happened to her after she was last known to be in Cape Coral on March 14, 1985.Last Seen: Mar 14, 1985
