Laura had called me with a request to help her find her mother in-law’s diamond ring. She believed that her 7 year old son had removed it from a counter in the house. When she confronted her son, he admitted taking it and throwing it off the second floor balcony into a rose garden. No one in the house saw him with the ring. He was terrified that he had done something wrong and kept insisting that the ring was in the rose garden, 30 ft. away.
Laura was desperate for my help to search for the ring as this had created a family crisis. I met her that same morning, where she showed me a large rose garden that had maybe 50 roses in full bloom. After about an hour and a half of searching with a small coil on my detector that could get into tight areas around the base of the plants, I could not locate the ring. I expanded the search to the lawn and other landscape shrubbery.
There was a possibility that the ring could have hung up into rose plants. I threw a test ring several times into the plants and it fell through each time. Walking through the plants more than three times during the search could have dislodged a ring hanging in the bush? We also took time to probe each plant with a hand held pinpointer to no avail.
As I was getting ready to tell Laura that I had run out of places to search. I showed her how the only possibility ( if the ring was really thrown), would be that the ring hand been stuck in one of the plants. I tossed my test ring into a nearby plant to show her how it falls through the plant each time. This time it didn’t seem to pass through the plant. I couldn’t get a signal at the base of the plant, so I probed into the plant several times. After that I got a strong signal on the ground at the base of the plant. Laura was close so I asked her to retrieve the test ring.
She reached under the rose plant grabbed the ring and handed to me. Guess What? It was not my test ring, it was her mother in-law, Lucy’s very sentimental wedding ring , which she had worn for 28 years. It had been hung up in the bush and I knocked it free with an aggressive probing with the detector coil. The test ring had passed through the bush and was about 18” away on the ground.
Lucy was in the house when Laura walked in to hand her the ring that had seemed to be lost forever. When Lucy came out to thank me, she still had tears of joy streaming down her cheeks. It was awesome to help them find the ring but I know it was a miracle that I didn’t walk away. You can’t tell how these small end up. There’s so many places a ring can hide. Finding rings takes a some skill and a lot of luck.
