Woman's diamond engagement ring found in piles of garbage by recycling attendants

A woman from Walpole has her diamond engagement ring back after it accidentally ended up in the trash.

Leanne Hettinger thought her 1.5-carat diamond engagement ring was gone forever when she realised.

She called the recycling center and they got to work digging through mounds of frozen garbage hoping to find the ring and other jewelry she said she accidentally threw out.

Watch the video above.

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The odds of find her jewelry were slim but Hettinger was lucky that Don Tretler was the recycling attendant on duty that day.

"I'm good at this stuff. When I was when I was in the service, we used to have these things called foreign object damage walks on the runways," Tretler, a retired Marine, said.

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"And, you would have to look for the most minute things in case something got lost, because otherwise it could get sucked into the intake of the airplanes, and I, I was really good at finding things."

Recently, a woman named Samantha called into Nova 96.9's Fitzy & Wippa with Kate Ritchie to share a similar story of her own.

"So when I was about eight or nine, it was Christmas time, and we were holidaying up at Umina Beach Caravan Park," Samantha began.

"I was in the surf, and my mum and dad had bought me this beautiful little first diamond ring for Christmas, and I was sort of in the waves up to sort of my knees, and I thought, Oh, I better take my ring off and put it around my necklace, because if I get dumped or under the waves, I might lose it."

Samantha explained that she had taken her ring off when a "freak wave" came and knocked her over, causing her to drop the ring in the ocean.

"I'm crying... my mum's crying, we're all crying, and I lost the ring," she said.

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But the story took a turn when she returned to that same beach 15 years later with her own kids.

"My daughter's collecting shells, and she picks up this big shell, and I said, 'Oh, that's beautiful. Like, that's a big one. We don't find them up this way'," she told the radio hosts.

"And she said, 'Oh, hang on. I think there's like a creature or something in it'... So I said 'Put it down, put it down', and I picked it up and just make sure she wasn't going to get bitten or anything.

"And I looked inside, and my ring was inside the shell."

Samantha told the hosts that she remembered her mum giving her the ring and telling her, "when you grow up and you have a daughter, you can give this to her."

"When we found it, I think I cried for like, a week, it's a story that we still don't believe."

Kate, Fitzy and Wippa were all in shock, Kate telling Samantha that the ring was "meant to be" with her.

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