Oct 03, 2024
ATLANTA, Ind. — The town of Atlanta in Hamilton County announced that it has placed its Utility Superintendent and Building Commissioner on administrative leave pending an Indiana State Police investigation. It's not town-related business that has Andy Emmert in trouble. But it is possibly one of the two Oldsmobile Cutlass automobiles towed off his property during an ISP investigation Wednesday. Cutlasses that may be related to a decades-old missing persons case. At least, Tony Bledsoe's son sure thinks so. ”The ball is rolling now and I can give a big thanks to the Indiana State Police for that,” Justin Robinson told FOX59/CBS4 News. RELATED: ISP spends hours investigating at Atlanta home in Hamilton County Bledsoe was a 24-year-old father of two young boys when Arcadia police said he set out from his hometown to Noblesville along Indiana 19 on the morning of March 16, 1992, with $8 in his pocket and an eighth of a tank of gas in his car… and disappeared. ”My dad didn’t leave,” said Robinson. “My dad didn’t just leave.” After his father’s disappearance, Robinson said he and his older brother were abandoned by their mother to the care of an aunt in Tipton County. ”The only thing that we were ever told growing up by our mother or by anyone was that he disappeared. Basically, it was a script of what was on the police report. He just disappeared, he had eight dollars and he’s gone. That’s it.” All Robinson remembers of his father was his love of cars. ”Gasoline ran through his veins, that type of stuff. He was just a car guy through and through. ”His Cutlass was black, if I can show you this picture,” said Robinson, holding up a keychain photo. “This is actually my dad’s Cutlass.” Even in 1992, the sleek black car from the early seventies would have stood out in northern Hamilton County. The car and its owner were never seen again. Then, Wednesday afternoon, Indiana State Police troopers serving a search warrant at the corner of Meridian and Walnut streets in Atlanta towed away two Oldsmobile Cutlasses, neither of them black, but potentially repainted. Photo of a Cutlass towed from Atlanta, Ind., as part of an investigation. (Photo by John Ringley) Neighbors told FOX59/CBS4 News they had never seen those cars on the streets of Atlanta before. A search of property records indicates the house and garage where detectives served the search warrant are owned by Andy Emmert. ”It actually kind of blows me away that that car was a few doors away from my aunt’s house,” said Robinson. Emmert does not currently face any charges. ISP hasn’t confirmed the search or the seizure of two cars are related to the disappearance of Tony Bledsoe, but the missing man’s son thinks he’s getting closer to an answer for the decades-old mystery. ”I think we just saw the white flag. I think we got one lap to go,” he said. “I think it's coming. I’m ready for it to be over. I’m ready for the people who had anything to do with this for them to be held accountable.” Robinson said the first clue that there had been a break in his father’s case was several months ago when he realized that Bledsoe’s name had been removed from a website tracking missing persons in Indiana. “It made me ask another question like, ‘Why is he not on there anymore?’ So then I ended up calling Arcadia Police Department and I inquired about my dad’s case and they wouldn’t talk to me. They said, ‘We can take down your name and number and we can have the person that’s in charge reach out to you but we don’t handle that here.’ I just assumed it was a dead end and I wasn’t gonna hear anything. “The next morning I get a call from the detective or the district commander or whatever telling me that he’s been in charge of this case and he’s been working it roughly since 2018 and within a year or so, give or take if that, more or less it was pretty much not solved but it was pretty well, ‘We know where we’re going with this thing.’” Thirty-two years later, Robinson still grieves for the father he barely remembers. “He was taken when I was 5-years-old. I didn’t get a chance to get to know him or meet him,” he said. ”I’ve never had the thought of my dad being out there somewhere. I never felt like my dad was in California or somewhere else living another life. I think I just knew deep down he was gone. ”And then it just hit me. I don’t have closure. I don’t know what happened to my dad. ”No one in my family will talk about it. Why?”, Robinson is convinced his father’s car was so distinctive, and the population of Arcadia and Atlanta in the early nineties so limited, that there is someone still around who knows what happened to Tony Bledsoe and why. ”This isn’t just a clear cut…I think there’s a lot going on here.”
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