What happened to Sabine Musil-Buehler?

ANNA MARIA — A legal battle has just begun between her estranged husband and a life insurance company over legally declaring her dead.

Her ex-boyfriend will spend the next decade of his life behind bars — not for her disappearance, but for fleeing Manatee County while on probation amid the investigation into his girlfriend’s disappearance.

Another man is also in prison for stealing her car just days after the last time anyone saw her.

And the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office is no closer to finding her body, but continue to say someone killed her.

But it is not the fallout from the disappearance of 49-year-old Sabine Musil-Buehler that is on the mind of many islanders. It’s the desire to have her back and the longing to know what happened to her.

It will be one year Wednesday since anyone has seen Musil-Buehler alive, a fact that still brings gut-wrenching pain to those who knew and loved her.

The hope among them is still for closure, to at least find her body and learn the fate of a woman well-known and respected on Anna Maria Island.

A hope that some still have, but some have lost.

The car thief

It was election night, Nov. 4, 2008, and no one had heard from Sabine Musil-Buehler, making at least one of her best friends immediately uneasy.

For days, all Musil-Buehler had talked about were her hopes that Barack Obama would be elected president. She had planned to attend a party to watch news coverage, but never showed.

“I knew something was wrong right then and there,” recalls friend Silvia Zadarosni.

Two days later, no one had seen Musil-Buehler, but she had not yet been reported missing. That would change when a Manatee County Sheriff’s Office deputy pulled her Pontiac Sunfire over in an area of Bradenton known for drugs and prostitution.

But Musil-Buehler wasn’t in the car. Instead, the driver stopped and fled, only to be caught a couple of blocks away hiding under a truck. Deputies arrested Robert Corona on charges that he stole the Sunfire.

Corona told a tale that would initially point investigators in the wrong direction. He claimed he had been doing drugs with Musil-Buehler and she let him drive her car. He later changed his story when he realized he was being investigated for her disappearance.

Corona had, in fact, stolen the car after finding it with keys in the ignition outside Gators Lounge, on 14th Street West. Deputies had pulled him over just a few blocks from the bar.

That traffic stop led detectives to the door of Musil-Buehler’s estranged husband, Thomas Buehler.

The estranged husband

When deputies came to Thomas Buehler’s door and told him they had found his wife’s stolen car, he reported her missing. In previous interviews with the Bradenton Herald, Buehler said it was at that moment he believed his wife to be dead. He did not respond to requests for an interview for this story.

“The minute they found her car, I knew she was dead,” Buehler said a month after Musil-Buehler disappeared.