Car Owner Reunited With Her “First Love” 43 Years After Corvette Stingray Was Stolen

(via Allstate)

In a rare, heartwarming tale of the return of a valued possession once thought to be lost forever, the owner of a 1972 Corvette Stingray that was stolen 43 years ago was finally reunited with her “first love.” And she is not going to let it out of her sight ever again.

The Duluth, GA resident bought the car when she was 19 using money from her first job toward a down payment and owned it for just six months, according to a statement from Allstate, which had paid out a claim on the car decades ago after it was stolen while she was at work.

The insurer worked with the used-car dealer who realized there was something funny about the car’s title and government officials to reunite the owner with what she calls her “first love.”

“That car, I hope, will never leave my sight again,” she told Bloomberg. “It needs a lot of love and attention. I want to restore that car, I want to bring it back to life.”

The car dealer said he bought it from a widow in 2014 for $10,000, and noticed something was suspicious while going through the documents that came with the car.

“It wasn’t a convertible, but the title had ‘CN,’ like a convertible should have,” he told Bloomberg. “And then, I looked at the year model on the title, and it said 1969. Well, that body had not been modified at all, and that was a ’72 model car.”

He called the authorities, who traced the car’s ownership back to Allstate. Although in these cases the insurance company will often auction off recovered property, the original owner was able to buy it back for an undisclosed sum, an Allstate spokesman said.

“In the history of Allstate, at least, which goes back 80-some-odd years, we had never come across something like this,” he said. “Almost all stolen cars are either found within the first five or six weeks, or not at all.”

Allstate Reunites Customer with 1972 Corvette Stingray Stolen 43 Years Ago [Allstate]
Corvette Owner Reunites With ‘First Love’ 43 Years After Theft [Bloomberg]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist