KALISPELL, Mont. - Teen-age lovers from Canada, they were flying south to elope and begin new lives in the United States.

Their plan was to ditch a small, rented Cessna in a remote lake here in the Flathead Valley of northwest Montana. They had packed a rubber dinghy and extra clothes in watertight bags, along with about $20,000 in cash.

The girl drowned.

Dianne Babcock, 18, of Vancouver, B.C., sank with the plane to the bottom of Bitterroot Lake. When sheriff's deputies fished her out of 244 feet of water, she still had her seat belt on. That was 24 years ago.

The boy vanished.

Jaroslaw “Jerry” Ambrozuk, 19 in 1982, fled with his extra clothes and the money, which had been withdrawn from the young woman's savings account in Vancouver, according to Flathead County Sheriff James Dupont.

And Ambrozuk stayed vanished - even after charges of negligent homicide were filed against him, even after being featured on two episodes of “America's Most Wanted.”

Until late August. That's when police in the wealthy Dallas suburb of Plano arrested him at his home, where a $70,000 Dodge Viper was in his driveway and a swimming pool was in his back yard.

He had found his way to Texas just a few days after the plane sank in Montana. For 23 years, he had used a generic American name, Michael Lee Smith.

He was single. For the past six years, he had been living in Plano on a wide residential street. that one neighbor described to reporters as resembling Wisteria Lane in “Desperate Housewives,” with big houses, big cars and young moms at home. He reportedly ran a company out of his home that designed computers for racing cars.

Smith told police his real name was Ambrozuk and asked for a lawyer. Late last month, a Montana deputy sheriff fetched him back to Kalispell, where he is being held without bail. He is due in court on Thursday to enter a plea on the negligent-homicide charge.

A personal ad on Yahoo, it seems, did him in.

“A couple of things about me: I am honest and don't cheat or play games,” Ambrozuk, a k a Smith, wrote in a man-seeking-woman ad that was posted until late August. He listed his age as 34 in the ad, although he is 43. “I also believe that there are people that you come across in your life that are very special, but there are very few of them that you can call `soul-mates.”'

A woman who remains anonymous read the ad and met the man who wrote it. He told her his real name and his real date of birth. She Googled him and found a year-old online story from the Daily Inter Lake, a newspaper here in Flathead County, about the mystery of the girl at the bottom of the lake and the boy who vanished. She telephoned Dupont in Kalispell on Aug. 28.

“She was very legitimate-sounding and knew things that only Jerry could have known,” said Dupont, 59, who retires at the end of this year and whose career had been vexed by his long hunt for Ambrozuk. Within two days, Plano police had Ambrozuk in handcuffs.

As a deputy sheriff, Dupont was at Bitterroot Lake when Babcock was pulled up. She was pretty, with long brown hair, he recalled, and the cold, deep water had preserved her beauty. Her seat belt was fastened, its buckle turned inside out, but it was not jammed. He easily unsnapped it. Her collarbone had been fractured, but he said there was no indication - her fingernails were unbroken, her hands unscratched - that she had panicked and fought to try to unsnap the belt. An autopsy found that she had drowned; it also found signs of a recent abortion, Dupont said.

“He managed to get himself out, but he didn't manage to get her out,” Dupont said. “Why did he run, and why has he been missing for 24 years? What deep, dark secret does he have that he doesn't want anybody to know?”

Answers to those questions may emerge as Ambrozuk deals with the felony charge of negligent homicide. Conviction could result in a 10-year prison term. He also faces federal charges of having a fraudulent U.S. passport.

Ambrozuk, who immigrated to Canada from Poland at 12, did try to explain the death of his girlfriend to at least one person. In the weeks between the crash and the discovery of her body, he placed several calls - from Montana, from New York and from Dallas - to a friend in Vancouver.

That friend notified the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and when the last call came in, from Dallas, on Sept. 11, 1982, it was recorded. The rambling 71-page transcript suggests that Ambrozuk, a novice pilot, had made a hash of the landing in Bitterroot Lake.

Flying into Montana from British Columbia on a “pitch dark” night, he was using instruments, dodging canyons and could not see the lake before the plane hit water and flipped over, he said. “I am not sure which way I came out,” said Ambrozuk, but he said that within three or four seconds he was free of his seat belt and outside the aircraft, which began to sink.

His girlfriend was upside down in her seat, and “she said she could not take the belt off,” he said. He said he could not save her before the plane went under.

He did not mention in that phone conversation how he managed to get his baggage and the money out of a fast-sinking plane.

More than anything, those are the questions Dupont wants answered - along with why the 19-year-old ran away to Texas, changed his name and stayed gone until police knocked on his door.

AP-NY-10-03-06 1352EDT