I'd like to know the whole Dick Lepsey story: his girl friends, their friends, money deals, who did he owe money to, drugs, etc. Also, where did he learn everything that DBC knew about 727s and skydiving. Also, what did the cops do? What did their investigation turn up?
Keys in the ignition and cigs on the dashboard suggest to me a hijacking of Dick, not the other way around.
Great questions Bruce. The youtube video above explains much, but also leaves many questions. The only thing the police investigation revealed is that a man fitting Lepsy's description left the Traverse City Cherry Capitol Airport the day Dick disappeared with a final destination of Mexico. Charges were never filed. There were rumors of an affair.
The two years between Lepsy's disappearance and the skyjacking are a complete mystery. The only military connections Lepsy had were ROTC in high school and the town he lived in, Grayling Michigan, had a large National Guard base there. He grew up in Chicago, giving him street smarts, some say, and relocated to Northern Michigan at age 17. He was considered as having above average intelligence and was a voracious reader. Could he have met someone who possessed certain knowledge and shared it with him or did he read something to give him the information needed for the skyjacking? I don't know, and I'm not sure we'll ever know.
If someone were looking for a suspect who came from the mid-west, was rumored to be living in Mexico, hasn't been seen since the skyjacking, wasn't missed after the skyjacking because of strange circumstances and loosely fits the physical description of the skyjacking suspect, then someone like Dick Lepsy might be worth looking into.
There's no smoking gun here, no connection to the skyjacking whatsoever. And Lepsy was only 35 at the time of the skyjacking, and I think the opinion of most around here peg Cooper as being in his 50s.
