Without A Trace
Is a Missing Grayling Grocery Store Manager D.B. COOPER?A wood-paneled station wagon was found abandoned at Cherry Capital Airport Nov. 2, 1969, the keys in the ignition and a half pack of Chesterfield Kings on the dashboard. It belonged to the manager of the Glen’s Market in Grayling.
Days earlier, the man had phoned his wife to say he was going to go for a drive rather than come home for lunch; he called his assistant saying he wouldn’t be back to the store that day.
That was the last anyone ever heard from 33-year-old Dick Lepsy who left behind a wife and four children, an empty bank account and a safe at Glen’s missing $2,000.
DISAPPEARNANCE UNNOTED
Author Ross Richardson was researching the Lepsy case in addition to several dozen other missing persons cases for a book about people and things that have vanished in northern Michigan.
Even before the Lake Ann author noted his subject’s uncanny resemblance to D.B. Cooper, something about the Lepsy case stood out.
Local media ignored Lepsy’s disappearance because it was considered an embezzlement case, not a missing persons case, and police kept it quiet.
The focus of Richardson’s book–"Still Missing: Rethinking the D.B. Cooper Case and Other Mysterious Unsolved Disappearances"–narrowed until it included just three cases. Most of the book’s 238 pages are absorbed by the Lepsy-Cooper similarities.
"It really struck a chord with me in a couple different ways," Richardson said. "He’s probably Michigan’s most obscure missing person’s case."
If a connection to D.B. Cooper could be confirmed, the Lepsy case would no longer be obscure.
QUIET DESPERATION
Richardson believes Lepsy could be Cooper, the infamous skyjacker who jumped from a commercial airliner on Nov. 24, 1971 into the dark Oregon night with $200,000 in ransom money. No trace of Cooper or his parachute has ever been found.
Today, the case is passively investigated by the FBI and furiously debated online.
Richardson believes Lepsy should be taken seriously as a suspect.
In Grayling, Lepsy lived a quiet, middle class life in a modest house where six people shared one bathroom, but there were indications of a midlife crisis.
Lepsy loved the film "Easy Rider" about two scruffy hippies who make easy money in a drug deal, then take off on motorcycles in search of freedom. Lepsy bought his own motorcycle, a Harley Davidson, a luxury his wife would be forced to return when she could not afford the payments.
There were rumors Lepsy had been having an affair, perhaps with a pretty young cashier.
"He got married when he was 19, from what I could see, didn’t date a whole lot, married his high school sweetheart, they had four children right away," Richardson said. "So he started working. He was never able to go to college, even though he was considered highly intelligent by everybody who knew him."
BOUND FOR MEXICO
Maybe Lepsy took the money to Mexico or maybe he was murdered before he left northern Michigan.
The police files in the embezzlement case have long since been purged, but Richardson interviewed the only surviving member of the Grayling Police Department from that era, as well as others who knew Lepsy.
"Even though charges were never filed, he was considered a voluntary flight, so they wouldn’t take him as a missing person case," Richardson said.
Glen’s Market storeowner C. Glen Catt and his son Glen A. Catt speculated for years about what happened to the likable store manager, Richardson explained.
"It was $2,000. The Catts weren’t really concerned about that," he said. "He could have taken ten times more if he wanted to."
The police interviewed employees at the airport and determined that someone who looked like Lepsy embarked from Traverse City bound for Mexico. He was possibly traveling with a woman.
Yet, many believed a shady friend and an employee of the grocery store was somehow involved with Lepsy’s vanishing or, at least, knew more than he ever said.
This was the same person who suggested that Lepsy’s wife check the parking lot at Cherry Capital Airport in the search for his station wagon.
"People had a lot of bad things to say about "˜Jay.’ Nobody had anything good to say about the guy," Richardson said, using a pseudonym he invented for the book. "I can’t find him and I’m assuming he’s dead because of a couple of different things: an injury he suffered, which would have shortened his life span, and the alcohol and cigarettes."
AN UNUSUAL SUSPECT
Richardson’s book catalogs the similarities between Lepsy and Cooper.
The men were of similar height, about six feet tall and 180 pounds, and they both had brown hair and brown eyes.
Lepsy was at least a decade younger than the age witnesses guessed Cooper was, but Lepsy looks older than he is in photos taken when he was in his early 30s, and Richardson believes life as a fugitive in Mexico would have aged him.
"This is, at the very least, the type of guy that they should be looking for–a missing person who hasn’t been seen since the skyjacking, who fits the physical description and who, for some strange reason, just wasn’t considered at the time," he said. "He just happened to fall through the cracks. Nobody put two and two together. It could be him."
If Lepsy was D.B. Cooper, and if he died in the fall from the plane, it would settle one of the great mysteries of the Lepsy case: why there’s been no trace of the man since he left home.
Loved ones expected he would return after the statute of limitations ran out in the embezzlement case, which was in 1976. Everyone who knew him believes he would have returned to his family someday if he could have, Richardson said.
"He wasn’t your typical guy who would run and abandon a family," Richardson said. "I’ve studied some of those guys and they’re typically narcissistic egomaniacs, and Dick Lepsy doesn’t show any signs of being that type of person."
MYSTERIOUS VISIT
Something happened in the late 1980s that deepened the Dick Lepsy mystery.
His daughter Lisa Lepsy lived in Tennessee and a relative who worked at a hospital was able to enter her father’s social security number into a database to check for activity. There had been none.
Two days later, two stern men in suits knocked on Lisa Lepsy’s door, wanting to know if she had heard from her father. Startled and terrified, for a second, Lisa thought they had news about where he was, but she was soon deflated.
The men claimed they represented an insurance company that had paid a fraction of a $10,000 life insurance policy to Lepsy’s widow years earlier.
Before the men hastily left, Lisa asked for a business card. Then, she checked with the insurance company. Not only had they never heard of these men, the company explained that they would have no interest in such a small policy after so much time had passed.
CITIZEN SLUETHS
Lisa Lepsy believes it’s possible that her father was D.B. Cooper. Though he was merely a grocery store manager with a high school education, he was extremely intelligent, she said. His children have all become highly educated. The family has never been able to get over the resemblance.
"You have no idea how many times over the years we have looked at D.B. Cooper and thought, "˜Oh my gosh, it’s just unbelievable how he looks just like him,’" said Lepsy, who now lives near Port Huron.
A group of scientists and experts called Citizen Sleuths were sanctioned by the FBI several years ago to look at the evidence in the Cooper case. They determined that Cooper was likely a French Canadian who worked in the titanium industry.
There were microscopic titanium fragments on a bowtie left on the airplane and the hijacker asked for $200,000 in "negotiable American currency," a foreign-sounding term.
A Citizen Sleuth named Tom Kaye was presented with a brief summary of the Dick Lepsy disappearance and asked to consider it in connection with the Cooper case.
Kaye dismissed Lepsy. "The number of people with suspects are legend in the Cooper case," Kaye wrote in an email. "Matching the sketch means little since there were multiple sketches and we know there are details wrong "¦ For us to be interested, he would have to have had a history in the titanium industry and come from a foreign country."
NEGOTIABLE AMERICAN CURRENCY
The Citizen Sleuth dismissal doesn’t deter Richardson. He says the bowtie could have been attained secondhand.
"You know, I get a lot of my clothes from thrift stores and garage sales and stuff. That’s what I wear," he said. "So I wouldn’t exactly pin it down to that."
Richardson also notes that witnesses did not detect that D.B. Cooper had an accent.
He believes it’s easy to imagine how Lepsy could have gotten the idea for the skyjacking. The Cooper skyjacking was just one of a string of skyjackings in the early 1970s. This one seemed to be modeled after a skyjacking that had occurred 10 days earlier.
Suppose Lepsy made it to Mexico after he left Grayling. He could have lived for a couple of years on the $2,000. In today’s dollars, that amount was just less than $13,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ inflation calculator.
Maybe he needed more money and decided to try one of those skyjackings he’d read about. Perhaps he picked up the term "negotiable American currency" while he was living in Mexico.
In addition to the debate over D.B. Cooper’s identity, there is also disagreement over whether the hijacker survived.
Richardson believes if Lepsy was Cooper, he didn’t survive the fall from the plane. He probably landed in the Columbia River, perhaps without even opening his chute.
As a diver who looks for missing people and shipwrecks, Richardson knows bodies of water can swallow people without a trace.
"Once a body lays down in a body of water, they don’t always rise to the top," Richardson said. "Think about it: there are drowning victims in Glen Lake, Crystal Lake and Green Lake that haven’t been recovered. They’re still down there."
View On Our Website