Jerry Nyman couldn’t shake the feeling there was something amiss in a Wellington pond.

WELLINGTON -- When Jerry Nyman pulled up Google Maps on his computer Aug. 28, he didn’t expect to solve a 22-year-old missing person case.

But that’s what happened, when a request to review bus stops lead him to find the final resting place of William Earl Moldt, who had been missing since Nov. 7, 1997, when he disappeared at age 40 while heading home from an adult nightclub.

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Nyman, an IT specialist for the Palm Beach County School District, was looking into a bus stop situation with Polo Park Middle School, which sits just west of the Grand Isles neighborhood.

As he scanned over the area, he noted how close Grand Isles is to the school. His ex-girlfriend lives in the neighborhood, and he moved over her house on the map.

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That’s when he saw it: A white shadow under the water in the pond behind her house.

"I thought, ‘That kind of looks like a car,’" he said.

He called over his coworkers, who pooh-poohed his observation.

"They said, ‘You’re crazy, it’s nothing. That’s not a car,’" Nyman said.

But he couldn’t shake the feeling there was something under the water, and it wasn’t just fish.

So he dug deeper, looking at old aerial photos of the neighborhood on the Palm Beach County Property Appraiser’s website. They were too grainy, but he could see something there under the water going back at least four years.

That’s when he took a few screenshots and sent them to his ex-girlfriend, asking her if she thought it could be a car.

She, in turn, sent them to her neighbor, Barry Fay, behind whose house the car seemed to be positioned. Fay looked into the water behind his house but couldn’t see anything from the shore, so he enlisted another neighbor to launch a drone-mounted camera.

That’s when they confirmed it: There was a car under the water behind their homes. In a photo shared with The Post by Fay, the white Saturn appears to be just beneath the surface.

But the water was deep, Nyman’s ex-girlfriend said in a text message. She continued to text with him as Palm Beach County sheriff’s deputies, called by Fay, hauled the car from the water.

"I was very shocked," Nyman said.

She kept her phone camera rolling as deputies broke the front driver’s side window, finding Moldt’s skeletal remains inside.

Nyman credits improving satellite imagery -- which he uses daily for work -- with revealing the car’s position under the water.

"That is just so crazy, that we can now see the car," he said.

He also believes if Moldt’s car had been any color other than white, it would not have been so easy to see.

"I’m very happy," he said of his role in solving Moldt’s disappearance.

He plans to look beyond streets, sidewalks and bus stops from now on when reviewing Google Maps.

"We are looking at those maps everyday," Nyman said. "We’re so used to looking at the streets, maybe we need to start looking at other things, too."

kwebb@pbpost.com

@kristinawebb