Suzanne Hodges thought she would never know what happened to her stepfather.

On Labor Day morning in 1986, Howard Gratteau, 39, told wife Rejane Gratteau that he needed to do a quick repair job in Davie and would be back within an hour or so. The besotted couple had everything ready for later that afternoon to go out sailing for the holiday on their new Hobie Cat, Hodges said of her mother and stepfather.

He didn’t return home. Later that afternoon, Gratteau’s B&H Air Conditioning got a call that he never showed up at the job site.

“And that’s when my mom started panicking,” Hodges told the South Florida Sun Sentinel on Tuesday. “Howard was not a person to be late.”

Hodges recalled her mother almost immediately believed her husband, who was an acute diabetic, must have had a diabetes-r

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