Ambrozuk described fatal crash to friend

Details come from recorded phone call

Between the time that he was reported missing in Canada and the time that the plane he rented there was found in Bitterroot Lake, Jaroslaw "Jerry" Ambrozuk called a friend and discussed how a teenage girl drowned in the plane.

"I didn't kill her or nothing," Ambrozuk says on a transcript of the call.

Ambrozuk was 19 then. Dianne Babcock, 18, drowned in the Cessna 150 that Ambrozuk said he swam away from on Aug. 22, 1982. The plane, containing Babcock's body, was found a few weeks later. Ambrozuk was found 24 years later. He was arrested in Texas last week on a Flathead County negligent-homicide warrant.

Canadian authorities notified Flathead County Sheriff's Office on Aug. 31, 1982, that Ambrozuk had called a friend in Vancouver, B.C., Canada, from Whitefish and again from New York. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said Ambrozuk told his friend that he had crashed the plane into the lake as part of a plan to disappear.

Brock Wilson of Whitefish was a sheriff's deputy then.

"Nobody believed it," he said of the Canadians' information. But then-Sheriff Al Rierson took it seriously and the plane was later found.

Before the plane was found, Ambrozuk's friend consented to a phone tap. When Ambrozuk called again - this time from Texas - he identified himself as Lewis Gomez.

Everyone was looking for Ambrozuk and he knew it.

According to a transcript of the phone call, Ambrozuk's friend urged him to come home.

"Why don't you come back, Jerry?" his friend asked. "They're looking for you all over the place… They're gonna look for you, you know, forever."

"… and they'll never find me," Ambrozuk said.

Ambrozuk wanted to know if the plane had been found. His friend had passed along directions, but the plane had still not been recovered.

"They don't know what, what happened to her, right?" Ambrozuk's friend asked of Babcock.

"Well, she's dead," Ambrozuk said. "If they find the plane, she'll be inside.

He said he burned his identification. He talked about friction with his father. At times, when people walked intrusively close to one of the men, they spoke in Polish. Ambrozuk was born in Poland.

His friend told Ambrozuk to think about his parents. And he talked about Babcock, a friend whom Ambrozuk called "Skinny."

"I went because I was going and she went because I guess she was in love with me or something like that," Ambrozuk said.

"I wanted to get away, that's all… She tagged along."

They had maps and plans, Ambrozuk said. He wanted to land a plane on a lake that was big enough to find from the air, but small enough that they could swim to shore. He thought he would have 10 minutes to an hour before the plane sank, he said. It didn't work that way.

He killed the engine. The wheels caught the surface of the water. The plane flipped over, he said. Ambrozuk got free. He went to the other side of the plane. Babcock couldn't get her seat belt off.

"She was calling out," he said. "There was no God damned time."

The plane sank.

"She's gone and I'll never see her again in my life," Ambrozuk said. "It's like half of you is dying."

But he blamed Babcock, too.

"It was her fault that she died," he said, wondering about a "person so stupid" that they can't unclick a seat belt.

Ambrozuk described to his friend how he camped out with gear the couple had prepared for the trip.

They had packed clothing. They had money, according to Sheriff's Detective Sgt. Pat Walsh, who has been investigating the case for years.

The investigation has intensified in the past week, but nothing yet has changed his opinion about what happened.

"He did something unbelievably reckless," Walsh said of Ambrozuk.

Wilson never believed Ambrozuk purposely killed Babcock.

"My thought was they were in love and they planned to disappear," he said.

The transcript from Ambrozuk's call included his friend's expression of the hope that Babcock's parents harbored.

"Her parents, they still think that she's alive. They still hope for it. I was sometimes hoping for that, too."

"So do I," Ambrozuk said.

Later, the transcript reflects what appears to be a slender measure of wistfulness held against the hulking reality that Ambrozuk was living with.

"I was hoping they'd find the plane," Ambrozuk said, "and she'd be gone. She wouldn't be in the plane… and she'd be still OK somewhere."