A Delco cold case stymied investigators for nearly two decades. Then a YouTube dive team solved it in hours.

The out-of-town divers had barely conducted a 10-hour investigation into a missing-person case that had stymied Ridley Township investigators for nearly 20 years, and most of their interviews were conducted in the back of an RV parked outside a local restaurant.

But by Saturday afternoon, Doug Bishop and his crew of skilled divers and amateur detectives from Adventures with Purpose, a search-and-recovery team that travels the country helping families find missing loved ones free of charge, and then films their investigations for YouTube, were confident that their sonar had found the Ford Explorer that James Amabile had been driving when the father of two vanished.

So Bishop, of Oregon, and diver Anthony Giampetro, of Long Island, donned their drysuits and full-face masks on a boat ramp behind Stinger’s Waterfront, a trendy restaurant inside the Ridley Township Municipal Marina, and plunged into the icy water. By following a long cable they had affixed to the dock, they descended nearly 25 feet below the surface of a swift-moving Darby Creek, and felt for the wreck in debris-filled water so dark and murky that Bishop said it was like swimming through chocolate milk.

In moments, Bishop had traced his hands over the algae-covered license plate.

“We have discovered Jimmy,” he radioed up.

And soon, they discovered human remains still seatbelted in the driver’s seat.

By Sunday, the Adventures with Purpose team returned to the Ford and, working with township officials, were able to retrieve most of the remains, including teeth that were sent to the Medical Examiner’s Office for identification. The divers also sealed the SUV with a mesh netting to protect any remaining physical evidence for recovery.

Ridley Township Police Sgt. Marc McKinney said Sunday that the township would decide this week whether to recover the vehicle, but that his department would not comment in detail about the case until a positive identification had been made. The marina had been redeveloped a few years after Amabile disappeared, McKinney said, with the upscale eatery and new boat ramps. Bishop said the builders had unknowingly drilled a pylon directly through the Ford’s engine bay.

“You would think someone drilling pylons into riverbed would have done a survey of the riverbed,” Bishop said.

The discovery brings near-certain closure to the mystery of what happened to Amabile, who was 38 and worked at the United Parcel Service center on Oregon Avenue in South Philadelphia. He had just awakened after working a nightshift and was rushing to pick up his daughters — then 5 and 8 — when he disappeared on a December afternoon in 2003. He had called the babysitter to tell her he was running late. His cell phone last pinged off a local police tower, but he was never seen again.

At the time of Amabile’s disappearance, his family said he wore an implanted insulin pump for his diabetes, and could become confused and lose sense of where he was due to low blood sugar. They said they had come to believe he was dead because they knew he would never abandon his daughters.

On Saturday, after the volunteer divers signaled their discovery, Stephen Amabile said he now believes his brother must have slipped into a diabetic coma and drove into the creek after making a wrong turn.

On Sunday, returning to the dock, he said all those years of not knowing had felt like “purgatory.”

“Your brain goes crazy, and you try to figure it out, but there was never any closure, zero, none,” he said. “Not until I was standing on that dock and he was 20 feet below me.”

Other family members had also gathered at the dock, but declined comment.

Bishop said one of Amabile’s relatives contacted Adventures with Purpose last year, after watching one of the diving group’s YouTube shows. Based in Portland, the group was formed two years ago and, Bishop said, they’ve relied on skilled volunteers, top-notch sonar, common-sense investigations, and community help to solve 20 cold cases across the country.

The YouTube shows get about 20 million views a month, he said. And while on the East Coast, they’re working on two other local cases. Last week, they dove for evidence in the case of Michael Carty, 50 — who was last seen in 2019 driving in Cape May and suffers from a cognitive disease that causes psychiatric disorders — but were unsuccessful. And this week they plan to search the Delaware River in the case of Danielle Imbo and Richard Petrone, who went missing in 2005 after they were last seen walking to Petrone’s truck parked on South Street in Philadelphia.

When Adventures with Purpose arrived in Ridley Township, its members set up their camper and got to work. On Saturday morning, they interviewed Amabile’s family, then drove the route he would have taken to the babysitter’s. They focused their search on Darby Creek after deciding two other creeks were too shallow to conceal an SUV — and researched the tides and currents from the day Amabile disappeared to settle on the stretch of water by the marina, gliding back and forth in their 14-foot inflatable boats. Within moments, their sonar screens showed the image of what was clearly an SUV in the water.

On Sunday, after huddling with the Amabile family one last time, Bishop and his divers packed up their gear.

“It’s an absolute honor and privilege to provide this service to families,” he said.