A newly released surveillance video has sharpened the search for Elizabeth Waddell, showing the 44-year-old physical therapist from Cary, North Carolina, walking toward the beach in Grenada at 11:45 a.m. and jumping into the water two minutes later, hours before she was reported missing.
The footage gives investigators a fixed starting point in a case that had already drawn urgency because Waddell vanished while staying at an Airbnb with a friend in the Grand Anse neighborhood of St. George's. In the video, she returns to the camera’s view 19 minutes later, while her friend remains on the beach adjusting a chair under the trees. That sequence matters because it frames the last confirmed moments before the search for her moved beyond a missing-person report and into a narrow timeline that now drives every lead.
Cailen Waddell, who flew down to Grenada to help look for his wife, said he went out and made the swim himself and found it easy. On findliz.com, he wrote that there were rocks a swimmer could stop at if needed and that the water was shallower near shore, where Liz could touch if she wanted. He also said the water there is more like a lake than the ocean conditions people know in North Carolina. His account is important because it matches the geography of the beach and helps explain why the swim, on its own, did not immediately answer what happened next.
That is where the case becomes harder. Police were looking into reports that a group of jetskiers may have interacted with a woman matching Waddell’s description away from shore at 5:30 p.m., a possible later sighting that sits well after the beach video and has not been publicly resolved. Cailen Waddell said police were trying to connect with those people and collect security footage from hotels along the beach, while local officials also concluded there was no foul play. Those two facts sit side by side: the search continued, but the official view had already ruled out a crime.
The result is a case defined by a gap, not a conclusion. The Royal Grenada Police Force first reported the U.S. national missing on July 23, and loved ones set up a GoFundMe, a website and a tip line as the search expanded. After about a week, friends and family were flying back home, but the missing person investigation was still open, with the unanswered question now narrowed to what happened between the last clear image of Waddell in the water and any later sighting that may or may not have been real.
