“What’s more chickens—t than f—king with a man’s automobile?” John Travolta’s Vincent Vega asks his drug dealer, Lance (Eric Stoltz), in a scene from Pulp Fiction. “I mean, don’t f—k with another man’s vehicle,” he continues. “It’s just against the rules.” Vince is, of course, referring to the cherry red Chevrolet Chevelle Malibu that he crashes into Lance’s house later on in the movie. Ironically, the car went missing shortly thereafter, stolen while the film was still in production.It would take another 19 years for the 1964 convertible, which belonged to Pulp Fiction director Quentin Tarantino, to finally turn up. In April 2013, The San Bernardino Sun reported that a Victorville, California deputy spotted two men stripping an old Chevy Malibu near an elementary school earlier that month. When the officer approached the men, one claimed to have owned the vehicle since the 1970s, despite the VIN tracing back to someone from the Bay Area. The investigation was then turned over to the San Bernardino County Auto Theft Task Force, who made an interesting discovery.The ‘Pulp Fiction’ Car Mystery Took 19 Years to SolveAlthough the VIN number belonged to the Chevy found in Victorville, it hadn’t been registered with the Department of Motor Vehicles for decades. Investigators in the Bay Area contacted the owner of the car with the matching VIN, only to learn it had a cloned VIN. Before long, detectives learned that the Bay Area Malibu was the one that was stolen from Tarantino in 1994. At the time, it was said that the man who was in possession of the vehicle was a victim of fraud.In 2014, Bill Hemenez of San Leandro, California, revealed that he owned the car and had purchased it from a collector 12 years earlier. “They took the car and gave it back to Tarantino,” Hemenez told Yahoo Autos, noting that he’d spent $40,000 restoring the Chevy since he first bought it. Hemenez went on to say, “He can keep the car, it wasn’t mine after all, but take care of the little guy who took good care of your property. I was ultimately left screwed by it all.”The post The Crazy True Story of the ‘Pulp Fiction’ Car That Vanished for 19 Years appeared first on VICE.