A maintenance worker found an old ambulance car in a damn riverbed.

When the retrieval team inspected the interior, what they saw sent the whole crew into panic.

Dam technician Chris Hayes was surveying the dried riverbed during a historic drought that exposed sections unseen for 50 years.

He spotted a rusted metallic shape half buried in the mud.

Chris repelled down and confirmed it was a 1980s ambulance lodged in the silt.

Since the mud was soft, a heavy lift helicopter was deployed to hoist the chassis out.

Inspectors at the bank noticed the windows were painted black and the VN plates were deliberately filed off.

Mechanics used angle grinders to cut the corroded rear locks with sparks flying as the metal resisted.

When they pried the heavy doors apart, they pulled out their flashlights and aimed them at the interior.

The moment they realized what was in the ambulance, they immediately screamed for the police.

Inside, authorities found skeletal remains in a shredded prison guard uniform, still buckled into the driver’s seat alongside tunnel digging tools.

FBI agents confirmed the vehicle was the getaway car for a notorious inmate who vanished during the infamous 1998 state penitentiary breakout.

While everyone believed he had successfully escaped, the discovery proved he had taken a wrong turn and crashed into the flooding river.

The ambulance became his steel coffin, finally closing the decades old mystery of the fugitive who never actually made it