Sole Witnesses: The Disappearance of Peggy and Patty McDaniel

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

December 17, 2025

Peggy Leslie and Patty Lisa McDaniel were fraternal twins, seventeen years old, raised in New Jersey by their mother, Joyce Rivituso, after their parents divorced. At some point Rivituso made a decision that would end up shaping the rest of both girls' short, documented lives: believing the twins were too emotionally dependent on each other, she separated them, sending Peggy to live with their father and his new wife in Live Oak, Florida, while Patty stayed behind in New Jersey. The separation did not take. The twins missed each other enough that Patty eventually joined Peggy in Florida as well, reuniting the sisters in their father's household in early 1979.

A Move to Pompano Beach

That summer, the twins befriended a 19 year old named Marvin Warren and his older associate, 36 year old Eddie Gross. Sometime in the following months, Peggy and Patty left Live Oak with the two men and relocated to Pompano Beach, Florida, roughly 365 miles from their father's home. Investigators later found no evidence the twins had actually been living in the apartment associated with Warren, though their bicycles eventually turned up at his mother's residence, one of the few physical traces connecting the girls to that period of their lives before everything went wrong.

A few weeks into their time in Pompano Beach, Peggy and Patty wrote to their mother asking for help getting back to New Jersey. Rivituso, alarmed, contacted the Pompano Beach Police Department and asked officers to perform a welfare check on her daughters. What she was told back was not reassurance. Officers with the Lauderhill Police Department informed her that the twins may have witnessed a homicide.

A Cancelled Report and a Disco Invitation

The days leading up to the twins' actual disappearance were chaotic even by the standards of an already troubled situation. On September 13, 1979, Peggy filed a missing persons report for her own sister, Patty, who had gone briefly unaccounted for. Patty reappeared the following day and personally went in to cancel the report herself, suggesting whatever had happened during that brief separation was resolved, at least outwardly, without incident. That same period, a 25 year old man named Nelson George Johnson had reportedly accused Eddie Gross of concealing Patty somewhere during her two day absence, an accusation that placed Johnson directly and specifically into the middle of the group's growing tensions.

Despite that friction, Johnson told his own family he planned to take both twins out to a disco on the night of September 15, 1979. All three of them, Peggy, Patty, and Nelson Johnson, disappeared that night. Four days later, Johnson's body was discovered stuffed in the trunk of his own car, parked behind a tire store. He had been shot to death. The vehicle had been wiped clean of fingerprints, and a briefcase he had been known to carry, containing eleven hundred dollars in cash, was missing entirely.

Witnesses to Something They Never Got to Describe

Investigators working the case developed a theory that has anchored it ever since: that Peggy and Patty had been present when Johnson was killed, whether as witnesses to the shooting itself or simply the last people confirmed to have been with him before his death, and that whoever was responsible for his murder had taken the twins as well, either to silence them or because leaving them behind was no longer an option once things had gone that far. One police sergeant working the case put it bluntly at the time, saying he believed the twins had seen what happened, and that he believed they were alive somewhere, simply too scared to come home.

That theory gained some support from a possible sighting reported not long after the twins vanished. A woman working at a truck stop along the Florida Turnpike later said two girls matching Peggy and Patty's description had come through and that she let them stay with her for a period out of concern for their safety, after they told her they believed they were being stalked. Whether that sighting genuinely involved the McDaniel twins has never been confirmed, and it produced no lasting trail investigators were ever able to follow further.

A Family's Theory, Never Proven

Peggy and Patty's family has continued developing their own working theory of the case over the decades since, centered on the belief that the twins encountered men connected to their earlier life in Live Oak who lured them away under false pretenses, potentially into some form of trafficking situation. Rivituso has said she received a letter at one point stating only that the girls had run into trouble, a vague and unverified piece of correspondence that has never led to any confirmed answer about where either twin actually ended up.

A Car in a Canal

The case resurfaced with new public attention in July 2023, when a dive team from an organization called Sunshine State Sonar located a 1970s Chevy Vega submerged in the Lake Tarpon Canal in Pinellas County, Florida. The twins had reportedly last been seen in a white Chevy Vega around the time they vanished, and the discovery briefly raised the possibility of a genuine break in the case. The vehicle had deteriorated so badly after decades underwater that divers were only able to retrieve a handful of tires before the wreck became too fragile to extract any further, and no human remains were found in or near it. Sunshine State Sonar itself was careful to state there was no confirmed evidence tying the specific vehicle to Peggy and Patty's disappearance, and the Broward County detective assigned to the case said no police records referenced a vehicle matching that description in connection with the investigation.

Even so, the discovery hit the family hard. Peggy and Patty's sister, Paula Hovley, told reporters she could not describe what it had been like living forty four years without knowing where her sisters had gone or what had happened to them. Their mother, Joyce Rivituso, by then eighty three years old, said she became physically ill and nearly collapsed when she heard the news of the discovery. Hovley has said plainly that her mother has essentially been holding on to life specifically in hopes of finally learning what happened to her daughters before she dies, describing the decades since 1979 as, in her words, a pure living hell for Rivituso specifically.

Still Waiting

The Broward County Sheriff's Office has confirmed the investigation into Peggy and Patty McDaniel's disappearance remains open and active, more than forty five years after the twins vanished the same night Nelson Johnson was murdered. No arrests have ever been made, no bodies have ever been recovered, and the Chevy Vega pulled from Lake Tarpon Canal in 2023 has never been definitively connected to the case at all. What remains is a family still describing their situation in exactly the terms Paula Hovley used publicly, that all they have left is hope, and that actual closure, whatever form it might eventually take, would be nothing short of life altering for a mother who has spent nearly half a century simply waiting to find out what happened to her girls.

Sources