Searchers had combed the brutal back country of rural Ontario for the housewife from the city of Hamilton, who had left her home three days earlier in the middle of a blizzard to grocery shop.
Alongside his search-and-rescue dog Ace, Ray Lau on Monday tramped through the thick, ice-covered brush of a farmer's field, not far from where Molnar's van had been found a day earlier.
He kept thinking: Negative-20 winds? This is a search for a body.
"Then, oh, all of a sudden, Ace bolted off," said Lau. "He stooped and looked down at the snow and just barked, barked, barked."
Lau rushed to his Dutch shepherd's side.
"There she was, there was Donna, her face was almost totally covered except for one eye staring back at me!" he said. "That was, 'Wow!' There was a thousand thoughts going through my head. It was over the top."
With one ungloved hand near her neck, Molnar, 55, mumbled and tried to scream as Lau yelled to other rescuers. Dressed in a leather coat, sweater, slacks and winter boots, Molnar was carefully extracted from a 3-foot-deep mound of snow that had apparently helped to insulate her.
Then, rescuers got their second shock.
"She was lucid, and said, 'Wow. I've been here a long time!' and then she apologized and said, 'I just wanted to take a walk, I'm sorry to have caused you any trouble,' " said Staff Sgt. Mark Cox of the Hamilton Police Department, one of the leaders in the hunt. "And we're all thinking this is incredible, this is really something."
"I've been doing search and rescue for seven years, and this is the wildest case I've had in finding someone alive," he said.
She was rushed to a hospital and immediately sedated to begin the agonizing steps of hypothermia treatment.
"I think the snow must have worked to trap her body heat, and that's what really saved her," Cox said. "This really speaks to what's possible."
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