Photos (above) from February 1978 show a Dino 246 GT being unearthed from the front yard of a home in Los Angeles. How did it get there in the first place & where is it now? Find out after the jump!!

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In May, 1977, Sandra Ilene West, dressed in her best lace nightgown and seated upright at the wheel of her powder-blue 1964 Ferrari 330 America, was lowered into a concrete mausoleum — just as her last will and testament had instructed.

The 37-year-old widow of a Texas oilman had died of an accidental overdose of prescription drugs at her home in Beverly Hills. She and the car had been shipped to San Antonio for burial next to her late husband’s grave. After workmen placed the car, containing Ms. West, in its final resting place, two trucks poured cement into the bunker to discourage car thieves from digging it up.

The story of Ms. West’s subterranean Ferrari made national headlines that year, and in the decades that followed became part of Ferrari lore. But it wouldn’t be the only underground Italian sports car to capture the country’s attention in the late ’70s.

Nearly a year later, a group of kids were digging in the mud outside a house at 1137 W. 119th St. in the West Athens section of Los Angeles. Just below the surface, they struck something that felt like the roof of a car. They flagged down a sheriff’s cruiser.

Priscilla Painton, staff reporter for the Los Angeles Times, recorded what happened next for history. The story unfolded of a strange, four-wheeled treasure that two sheriff’s detectives would unearth from the front yard of a suburban house. When the story hit newspapers around the country, it reminded many of Ms. West’s odd Italian coffin, only this time the driver’s seat was empty.

Attacking the yard with a skip loader and a small team of men with shovels, detectives Joe Sabas and Lenny Carroll uncovered a dark, metallic green, Dino 246 GT (serial number 07862) from the the sandy Los Angeles loam. In her article, which ran on Feburary 8, 1978, Painton wrote the car appeared to be in “surprisingly good condition,” and estimated its worth at around $18,000 (around $63,500 in inflation-adjusted 2011 dollars). Ferrari enthusiasts would later note the Dino had been fitted with the optional Campagnolo wheels and Daytona seats.

Investigators dug into the provenance of the Dino — license plate 832 LJQ — discovering it had been bought in October, 1974 by Rosendo Cruz of Alhambra, California. On December 7, 1974, Cruz had reported the car stolen, and the police report was kept on file at the Rampart division of the Los Angeles Police Department.

But the mystery remained. How did the Dino get there? The house’s then-current tenants (who’d only lived there for three months) offered no explanation, and none of the area’s residents said they’d had noticed anything odd happening at the house back in 1974. That struck detective Sabas as odd. After all, he joked, burying a Dino is “not like planting cabbages.” Whoever buried it had obviously expected to claim it later; they’d attempted to mummify it in plastic sheets and had stuffed towels into its intakes to keep the worms out.

With no leads, the case of the stolen, buried Ferrari fizzled soon after the car’s strange uncovering. Cops had years before declared the original incident a “righteous theft.” Farmers Insurance Group had agreed with the police and paid off a loss of $22,500 to the Dino’s legal owner, the Hollywood branch of the Bank of America. There was no more to be done. The unearthed Dino was returned to the insurance company, which would perform its own sorting-out process.

Photographer Michael Haering shot the story for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. He remembered the case for its odd newsworthiness and coincidental connection to Ms. West’s Ferrari burial.

At the time we (the press) were puzzled and amused that a thief would bury a car, especially in his back yard. Many jokes we passed around at the time: One customer to car salesman, “Say, I’d like to buy a Ferrari, got any leads?” Salesman, “Let me get back to you, I’ll see what I can dig up.”

During that period there was a story of [Ms. West and her Ferrari coffin] and a question emerged if this could be accomplished legally. The press compared the two stories and played them off one another. Story drew lots of attention as a novelty. Then of course, it played itself out.

But that’s not the end of the story. Read the rest HERE.