Tulsa Couple's Discovery Reunites Woman With Lost Ring 50 Years Later

Ashli Sims, News On 6

TULSA, Oklahoma -- A Tulsa couple has proven treasures lost can be found, even half a century later. It's a mystery that spans generations and must have taken several turns along the way.

It sounds like a fairytale: young love, a tropical beach and buried treasure. Kristen Oyler and Gary Fennema were walking in the crystal clear surf of the Bahamas, when something caught their eye.

Gary Fennema, OSU Sophomore: "So I grabbed a stick."
Kristen Oyler, OU Sophomore: "I was afraid to touch it, so I made him do it."
Gary Fennema, OSU Sophomore: "I grabbed a stick and started poking at it and it didn't move."

The sparkly object wasn't a crab or a shell.

"It was just kind of crusted over, there was a growth on it. So I started washing it off and we realized it was a ring," Fennema said.

A Bacon County High class ring from 1959 engraved with some initials.

"It was either ZMH or HWZ," Oyler said. "So we thought it would be fairly easy to find someone with a first or last name starting with the letter Z."

The couple did a little internet sleuthing and tracked down the small Georgia high school. And with the help of its principal and a dogged newspaper reporter, they found ZMH, known to family and friends as Zandra Huey.

"She lost it in 1961 and hadn't seen it since," Fennema said.

The bizarre twist was that 70-year-old Zandra Huey has never been to the Bahamas.

"Nope. Kentucky. In her dorm room, it somehow disappeared. And showed up 50 years later in the Bahamas," Oyler said.

Oyler sent the ring to Georgia along with a couple of pictures and Huey's family surprised her.

Gary Fennema, OSU Sophomore: "She probably didn't even think about it and then all of a sudden it shows up."
Kristen Oyler, OU Sophomore: "They said her face lit up the second she opened the box."

Her fairytale ending took 50 years, but one couple was finally able to give her a happily ever after.