Suzanne Hodges thought she would never know what happened to her stepfather.
On Labor Day morning in 1986, Howard Gratteau, 39, told wife Rejane Gratteau that he needed to do a quick repair job in Davie and would be back within an hour or so. The besotted couple had everything ready for later that afternoon to go out sailing for the holiday on their new Hobie Cat, Hodges said of her mother and stepfather.
He didn’t return home. Later that afternoon, Gratteau’s B&H Air Conditioning got a call that he never showed up at the job site.
“And that’s when my mom started panicking,” Hodges told the South Florida Sun Sentinel on Tuesday. “Howard was not a person to be late.”
Hodges recalled her mother almost immediately believed her husband, who was an acute diabetic, must have had a diabetes-related emergency. Rejane Gratteau told the Sun Sentinel at the time of her husband’s disappearance that she gave him his morning dose of insulin and did not know how long he could survive without it. Gratteau often went into diabetic shock and would have been in a coma without his insulin, Hodges said.
“I know she knew from the very beginning that he was dead somewhere in the canals,” Hodges said. “I know that. Because she was always adamant that he didn’t have his insulin on him.”
After decades without any answers, the Sunshine State Sonar team found Gratteau’s 1995 Toyota pick-up truck with his remains inside, submerged 42-feet-deep in a lake near Southwest 12th Street and Shotgun Road in Sunrise on Saturday night — almost exactly 39 years to the date of his disappearance.
Sunshine State Sonar, an independent organization that uses sonar technology to find missing people and cars in South Florida, began working on Gratteau’s case in 2022 and made multiple searches for his pick-up truck in the years since, said Mike Sullivan, one of the founders of the group. Their divers found more than 50 submerged cars in their search for Gratteau’s truck in Davie and Sunrise, a post on the group’s Facebook from July 2024 said.
The group first searched along Gratteau’s route to the job site in Davie’s Honey Lakes subdivision, then found his truck while scouring areas within a 10-mile radius.
Divers found the truck lying on its side on a cliff. Off the edge of that cliff, the lake becomes nearly 100 feet deep. It was clearly Gratteau’s truck, which had “B&H Air Conditioning” lettering on the side and the distinctive license plate of “Howard2,” he said.
Lettering on the side of Howard Gratteau’s 1995 Toyota pick-up truck is seen as Sunshine State Sonar located the truck on Saturday, Sept. 13, 2025, more than 40 feet deep in a lake in Sunrise. (Sunshine State Sonar/Courtesy)
Divers swam through the truck’s windshield and found Gratteau’s remains in the driver’s seat, Sullivan said.
The truck had significant front-end damage, Sullivan said, as if it crashed into the water at high speed. At the time, the sharply-curved road near the lake had no guardrails, trees or other objects obstructing the water. There are many cars submerged in the water along that road, he said.
Hodges, who was 23 at the time; her mother; other relatives and his friends searched the roads he should have traveled in the immediate aftermath, she recalled. Her uncle took a boat out to search one canal and found a similar truck, but it wasn’t Gratteau’s. A Davie Police detective flew in a helicopter twice over the western part of the city in the week following his disappearance.
“Because he was in such deep water, they couldn’t have found him then like they can now,” Hodges said.
Howard and Rejane Gratteau had been married for four or five years by then, Hodges said, and “were crazy about each other.” She described him as someone who was naturally happy and rarely upset by anything.
A South Florida Sun Sentinel article from Sept. 4, 1986, about Howard Gratteau’s disappearance while on his way to a job site in Davie three days earlier. (Newspapers.com)
“Howard was extremely generous, very easygoing, always happy,” she said. “He was a great stepdad. He was so well liked.”
Hodges didn’t say that the family gave up hope of ever having any answers. But after decades pass, “you don’t think at that point you’re ever going to hear or see anything.”
For Rejane Gratteau, life never fully moved on, her daughter said. While living in a nursing home with dementia later in her life, she still kept a photo of her husband there.
She died in 2023.
DNA testing still needs to be done before family can claim Gratteau’s body, Hodges said. She said she would like Gratteau to be buried with her mother.
“It’s a blessing to have found his body. It’s just bittersweet that my mom wasn’t around to be able to see the closure of it,” Hodges said.
Information from the South Florida Sun Sentinel archives was used in this report.
