A Diver Finds a Ring and Accidentally Solves a 60-Year-Old Mystery

You can find some things in the most unexpected places. A lost set of keys or some loose change can turn up when you least expect it. We’re also surprised by the discovery.  

Berube, who was not a professional diver, had an interesting hobby. He would don his diving gear and go to local bodies of water to search for anything that had found its way to the bottom. 

Back in the water, Berube dove to the bottom once again to see if he could find anything else. He had to fight the sludge and mud at the bottom, but his underwater metal detector was beeping.  

He could tell immediately that this was some sort of high school or college ring. After he cleaned it off a bit, he saw that the ring came from an old high school in Boston, Massachusetts. 

While the term “treasure-hunting” sounds like something out of a children’s book, it is actually a full-time career for many businesses and individuals. And it can be very lucrative. There are companies that search for old sunken ships, for example.  

There are still a substantial number of salvage businesses that are actively seeking derelict ships in the waters all over the world. And there’s a good reason that they spend so much on their salvage voyages.

However, there are those who don’t put much of an emphasis on the financial gain of treasure hunting, despite the fact that there are opportunities to make money from it. Instead, all that is necessary to satisfy them is the simple excitement of looking for something in an unusual location.

Some amateur treasure hunters devote themselves to the hobby almost full time, and make it their business to identify lost items and return them to their owners. One such man is Chris Turner. 

After gaining experience in searching for lost possessions, Turner took on an ambitious project. It was his impression that people around the world, in many countries, have lost valuable and important items. 

Chris Turner, a native of Vancouver, British Columbia, has been honing his skills in the art of metal detecting for over 51 years, and throughout that time, he has devoted more than 29 of those years to assisting other people in discovering their lost rings. 

The Ring Finders is an online database of people whose hobby is finding lost items. These hobbyists specialize in finding lost items left at such places as beaches, parks, and backyards – all over the world.  

Turner enjoys talking about the success of the directory. The statistics of items found and returned are quite impressive. In most cases in which they become involved, the hunters have indeed found the lost items.

“My goal is to help you get reunited with your lost jewelry,” Turner states on his website.. “The Ring Finders’ members have recorded over 5,610 successful recoveries to date and…I personally have had the honor to find and return over 316 lost rings to their very happy owners.”

Turner is especially proud of the tales and anecdotes that clients share with him. These stories, to him, are the most important part of the task. It’s great to find a lost item, but when the individual who lists it is reunited with it, the scene can be emotional.

Furthermore, according to what Turner writes on his website, “I have heard the stories that these rings come with and what it means to people to have a second chance to find what they thought was lost forever.”

On his website, Turner applauds the talents of all of the specialists listed in the directory. These specialists are highly experienced and have had many successful hunts for lost objects. 

The point that Turner emphasizes is that each treasure hunter on the website is independent and sets their own rates and terms. Although they share their experience, they do not work as a company.  

In addition to this, Turner has one more thing he would like to convey to the people who are interested in the services that he offers. The owner of The Ring Finders directs website users to a part of the business’s website titled “Book of Smiles,” which has images of Ring Finders’s past clients wearing jewelry that was lost but later discovered and given to them. 

Turner encourages visitors to his website to look at the Book of Smiles. His dearest wish is that each person checking the site will once again see his or her lost item.  As he writes, “It is my sincere hope that you can be reunited with your lost jewelry and that your smile could also be added to the many we have documented over the years.” 

Turner mentioned in a recent post that the online service offers access to a range of professionals, each with their own specialized level of competence and years of experience. Luke Berube is now considered to be one of the members of the user community of the website because he joined that community in 2018 when it was first established. 

The following is an introduction to Luke Berube that was posted on the directory page of the website. It was written by Luke, “My name is Luke Berube I am from Orleans Massachusetts I have been detecting for approximately 12 years,

Luke Berube further added the following statements in his bio: “I am 28 years old, I have been spraying Line-x truck bed liners for 11 years as my profession, which takes up a lot of my time, but I always find a way to take some time to pursue my hobbies of detecting, diving, and biking”

There is more fascinating material on Berube’s profile page. Actually, the recreational scuba diver writes blog posts about his adventures which shed more light on his work and his clients.

And among all of these varied posts, there is one that stands out as particularly outstanding in comparison to the others. Berube’s abilities were put to the ultimate test after he made a discovery in Hanson back in June 2019. He found something there, and it was there that he was tested.

Berube said in one of his blog postings that he had not been very successful in his treasure searching over the previous month, with the exception of finding a few old silver coins. This was, to say the least, a bit depressing.

In his blog, Berube described what the water was like when he got to the pond. “The water temperature was about 70 at the surface and 65 at about eight to ten feet deep.” 

According to Berube’s blog, he remained underwater, hoping to find something else. He was willing to look around since he was on no particular schedule.  After all, since he’d found one ring, maybe there were more items around the same area.

Berube recalled and described that after a couple of hours, his air supply was getting dangerously low, so he got back in his truck to return to Cape Cod. He remembered another pond where he’d had some success in the past, so he was heading for that.   

That moment of indecision and turning back to the pond proved vital. He writes, “While heading back [into the pond], I got a solid mid-tone on my Minelab Excalibur II.”

Berube’s instinct to go back to the pond proved correct – he’d discovered two rings that day, but the one he had just dug up was much more interesting. 

Berube wrote, “It turned out to be a class ring from Gate of Heaven high school in South Boston, class of 1960, with the initials WJW.”  He began to search for the ring’s owner but failed to find anyone who graduated that year with those initials. 

Berube was savvy about social media and decided to use it to find the owner of the ring. After all, as he knew, once you post something on social media and your friends see it, the request begins to be shared by many others.

On Facebook, he found a group of the school’s alumni. He explained to the owner of the group why he wanted to join, even though he was not a graduate of the school, he was allowed to post to the group.  

Berube did not have to wait much longer than that to get the response he was looking for; he got it within just a few hours. By noon he had received a text message from a woman named Christine Wadel. 

After learning about the post that Berube had made on Facebook, Wadel contacted her father in order to inquire whether or not he was aware of the post. Then she asked him to look at the post to see if the ring was his.  

In 1960, Wadel’s father graduated from Gate of Heaven High School and received his graduation ring, as did all of his classmates. Sometime after that, the ring had become lost, and Wadel had never found it.

Berube learned from Wadel’s daughter that the return of the ring had a profound emotional impact on her father. She was so touched and moved by the effort Berube had undertaken to return the ring that she decided to tell him more about her dad.

After having that discussion, Berube and Wadel discussed how he would get the ring to Mr. Wadel, who lived in Virginia, hundreds of miles away from Berube’s home in Massachusetts.

So Christine Wadel set off for Cape Cod to retrieve the ring. She wanted to give it to her dad that weekend when she planned to visit him. Christine was imagining how happy her father would be to see that old ring.   

For Berube, this was one of the high points of his life as a treasure hunter. It might even have been a high point in his life. One doesn’t always believe that a hobby that you simply enjoy every once in a while will end up making another person so happy.