Lifestyle

Jonnie Threw Away Her Husband’s Wedding Rings by Mistake. Then Landfill Workers Searched the Trash by Hand: “Are You Kidding?”

By Mike Harper · November 14, 2026

Jonnie Ashby met Bill on the Fourth of July in 1956. She was a teenager, and he was shy enough that he asked her out with a simple card.

“We never dated anyone else after that,” she told WTVR CBS 6 reporter Tracy Sears in 2017.

The couple married two years later in Richmond, Virginia, and built a home and a life in Stony Creek. They had a son and a daughter. They also had a private sign between them, a drawn hand that Bill would sketch on his notes to her. “It means never ending love,” Jonnie said. “My husband and I did this to each other all the time.”

Bill died on Dec. 23, 2013. That is why the rings from their 1958 wedding meant so much, and why what happened in June 2017 hit her so hard.

She had been doing dishes when her hands swelled, so she took off her rings and set them by the sink, wrapped in a paper towel. On June 26, heading out to the store, she grabbed the paper towel without thinking and threw it in the trash, according to WTVR.

“On Tuesday morning, I realized that I had thrown my rings away,” she says in the station’s video report.

She went to the nearby dumpster and dug through mounds of trash with family, but construction materials piled on top kept them from reaching the bottom. So she called the Sussex County Municipal Utilities Authority for help.

By Wednesday, the dumpster had been hauled to the Sussex County Landfill and Recycling Center. Staff kept it separate from the other loads so it could be searched. After the landfill closed for the day, county employees Matt Venable and Jason Williams went through the trash bags one at a time, by hand, WTVR reported.

One detail helped. Jonnie had tossed the paper towel into a bright yellow Dollar General bag, which stood out in the pile.

At home, she was starting to lose hope when the phone rang. “Are you kidding? You’re not kidding me, are you?” she remembers saying in the video. Venable told her he was on his way with her rings.

She hugged him when he arrived and wrote thank you notes to every worker who had helped, according to the station. “I got on my knees and said thank you to God for giving them the eyesight to find these rings,” she told WTVR. That night, she said, she looked at Bill’s picture by her bed, as she always did to say goodnight. “I said you sent your guardian angel down here today, I know you did.”

It was a lucky outcome, and the numbers show why. The Environmental Protection Agency’s national overview of waste says Americans generated about 292 million tons of municipal solid waste in 2018, roughly 4.9 pounds per person per day, and that more than 146 million tons of it went to landfills.

If you ever throw away something precious by mistake, speed matters most. Call your trash hauler or county solid waste office right away and ask where the load is going and when. Give them a clear description of the bag or container, since a distinctive color helped here. Ask whether the truck or dumpster can be set aside before it is emptied.

Jonnie said the rings are only things. But to her, they are also symbols of her family and of 56 years with Bill.

This article is for general information. Jonnie Ashby’s story and quotes are from WTVR CBS 6’s 2017 article and video report; waste figures are from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. This article was produced with the assistance of AI and fact-checked against the sources cited by LightWave Reports.