Photo by Linda Harris Sheriff Fred Abdalla Jr., seated in his office, confirms that a truck pulled from the Ohio River on Monday belonged to Charles Hanlon, who went missing in 1999.

STEUBENVILLE — Charles Hanlon’s family is sleeping easier tonight.

Late Monday, Sheriff Fred Abdalla Jr. gave them the news they’d waited 23 years to hear: the second vehicle pulled out of the river at the Steubenville marina by divers from Chaos of Southern Illinois and Green’s Towing had been positively identified as the 1999 Ford Extended Cab Hanlon was driving when he disappeared in October 1999.

Hanlon’s family said they’re “excited about this development.”

“It has been a long time coming,” the Hanlon family said in a brief statement released Tuesday. “We hope this leads to the apprehension of the people involved. We hope to gain some closure. We would like to thank Sheriff Abdalla and the Chaos dive team, without their involvement none of this would have been possible.”

Hanlon, then 58, was last seen Oct. 27, 1999, when he left his home for a road trip to Florida, where he was supposed to pick up a motorcycle. He never made it.

His niece, Carolyn Parr, said the truck’s discovery is, in her mind, vindication “that he didn’t just up and disappear on his own.”

Abdalla wouldn’t say what he thought happened to Hanlon, but he did say that now that they matched the VIN number they found under years of dirt and debris on the truck’s windshield to the VIN number Ford Motor Co. had supplied them years ago after Hanlon turned up missing, their mission is to figure out exactly how the pickup ended up in the river.

“Today we met with BCI, they’re going to forensically process it,” Abdalla said. “It’s going to be a tedious, time-consuming operation because we’re going to want to go through every piece of dirt and silt and debris that’s in that vehicle.”

He also said the sheriff’s department “worked the case pretty extensively” over the years, following leads.

“Now, we’re going to revisit some things from the past,” he said. “…We’ll see what happens as BCI starts to process this stuff.”

Abdalla said he’s glad he was able to call the family Monday and give them the news.

“It’s heartbreaking and sad, but at the same time, it starts to offer some closure to them,” he said. “Now our office is going to get to work-this is a really crucial piece to figuring out what happened to him.”

He admits he gets chills when he thinks about how much this particular case meant to his father, Fred Sr., who died earlier this year after 37 years as sheriff.

“I don’t want to always be talking about my father as sheriff, but have to say he never gave up on this case,” Abdalla said. “I remember him losing sleep, working this case whether he was here, in the garden, driving his car…he was continually trying to solve this case, he wanted wanted to solve it so bad. Had things not worked out the way they did with Chaos coming here when did, him beginning a relationship with them, they may not have happened yesterday. And if I wouldn’t have known from listening to my father what he told me after meeting with Chaos, how he felt about those individuals and how important their works was and how impressed he was by them, I might not have said, ‘Hey, let’s bring them back.’ To me, honestly, this was my dad guiding us.”