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

Normally calm under stress, Chris Carroll was pale and shaken when he came up from the basement of his family’s home 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.”

For months, Chris and his brother, Mike Jr., had been digging through the basement floor, searching for any trace of their grandfather, George Carroll, who had vanished more than half a century earlier. It was Halloween eve in 2018 when they finally hit something that changed everything.

Michael, who had recently suffered a stroke and needed help getting around, carefully made his way down the stairs to the large pit they’d opened in the concrete. When he looked inside, something caught his eye.

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

It wasn’t a joyous discovery, but for Michael, then 64, and the rest of the family, it brought a grim sense of relief: after decades of questions, they had finally found what they’d been looking for.

Back in 1963, when George was 30, he disappeared without a trace, leaving behind his wife, Dorothy, and four young children all under the age of 10. The story that circulated in the family was simple — and unsatisfying: George had gone out to buy cigarettes and never returned. Dorothy refused to elaborate and carried that silence with her until her death in 1998.

Over time, suspicion and whispered theories took the place of answers. Eventually, those suspicions — and the vision of a psychic medium who insisted a body was buried under the house — pushed Michael and his sons to literally dig into the foundation of their family’s past.

“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 extraordinary search for George Carroll’s remains is the focus of a new documentary, The Secrets We Bury, premiering on ID and streaming on HBO Max on Dec. 16. The film follows the siblings as they confront their shared trauma and fight for closure after an unimaginable 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.

George Carroll, a New York native, had returned home after serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War — where his children later learned he once drove Marilyn Monroe on a USO tour. He eventually settled on Long Island with Dorothy, raising their four children: daughters Jean and Patricia and sons Steven and Michael.

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

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

For the Carroll children, the separation was a relief. The boys say their stepfather was physically abusive, while both girls have said he sexually assaulted them.

Questions about what really happened to George never went away. Whenever the children pressed their mother, Dorothy shut them down, offering only a curt judgment: George wasn’t “a good guy.”

She never filed a missing person report, so police never opened an investigation into his disappearance. Over the years, some people speculated that George might have returned to Korea to reunite with a woman he’d met during the war and started a new family there.

Others in the extended family believed something darker had occurred. In the mid-2000s, Michael happened to run into his father’s brother while working at a hospital. During their conversation, he learned that his father’s side of the family was convinced George had been killed and buried beneath the house.

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

The siblings — and their half-brother Rich Darress — later lost their mother, Dorothy, to cancer at age 63, closing off any chance of hearing more from her directly.

Despite lingering speculation that Dorothy may have had some involvement in George’s death, her children still defend her.

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

In 2010, in a final effort to find the truth, Dorothy and George’s daughter Jean Kennedy, 71, who believes in the supernatural, convinced Michael — a skeptic — to attend a psychic reading with her.

What they heard stunned them both. The psychic said their father had been murdered and that his body was in the basement of the family home — the very house Michael had 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 recalls. “I remembered that — but nobody else would know.”

In time, that chilling reading pushed the family to act. Michael and his sons began breaking through the basement floor, slowly excavating the packed earth beneath. Eventually, Chris, then 33, and Mike Jr., 35, uncovered skeletal remains — the moment that triggered the emotional scene Michael walked into that day in 2018.

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

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

The question of who killed George Carroll remains open, and Suffolk County Police continue to investigate. Most of the family, however, believes the likely culprit was Darress, who has since died.

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