A wood-paneled station wagon was found abandoned at Cherry Capital Airport Nov. 2, 1969, the keys in the ignition. 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.

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.

Lake Ann Author Ross Richardson believes Lepsy and the famous D.B. Cooper are one and the same, and spells out his case in his new book, "Still Missing: Rethinking the D.B. Cooper Case and Other Mysterious Unsolved Disappearances.”

Even before Richardson noted his subject’s uncanny resemblance to 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.

“It really struck a chord with me in a couple different ways,” Richardson says. “He’s probably Michigan’s most obscure missing person’s case.”

The Cooper 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, but there were indications of a midlife crisis, including a potential extramarital affair. 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.

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 says. “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 says.

“He wasn’t your typical guy who would run and abandon a family,” Richardson notes. “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.”

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, she says he was extremely intelligent. 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,’” says Lepsy, who now lives near Port Huron.

This article is an excerpt from a feature in the December 8 Northern Express. Click here for more about Richardson and his books.