On August 24, 2007, Henry 'Brooke' Stauffer, a 56-year-old male from Washington D.C., and his fiancée, Karen Dodds, were passengers in a small plane that tragically went down in the Straits of Mackinac. The couple was en route from Mackinac Island to Bad Axe, Michigan, to visit Karen's family. The flight, piloted by Dodds, should have taken approximately two hours, but the aircraft, a Socata TB-20 Trinidad, never reached its destination. In the days following the crash, some debris from the plane was discovered along the shoreline of Bois Blanc Island, confirming the devastating event.
An extensive search was launched involving multiple agencies, including the U.S. and Royal Canadian Coast Guards, but the main wreckage of the plane and its occupants remained elusive. A significant development in the case came nearly two months after the incident when the remains of Karen Dodds were found east of the Mackinac Bridge.
This discovery brought a painful partial closure to the families, but the whereabouts of Brooke Stauffer and the aircraft itself were still unknown, leaving his loved ones in a prolonged state of uncertainty.
For seventeen years, the case remained unresolved until the family requested a private company, Great Lakes Search & Recovery, to resume the search in October 2023. In August 2024, their persistent efforts paid off when the search team discovered the plane's wreckage near Bois Blanc Island, lying 70 feet below the surface of Lake Huron. Michigan State Police divers were then able to investigate the crash site, where they found skeletal remains. Through the use of dental records, the Center for Forensic Anthropology at Northern Michigan University confirmed the remains belonged to Henry Brooke Stauffer. This long-awaited discovery finally provided answers and a sense of closure to Stauffer's family after years of waiting. The cause of the crash that claimed both of their lives remains unknown.
Henry Brooke Stauffer Jr., a 56-year-old man whose missing-person case was associated with St. Ignace, Michigan, was last seen on August 24, 2007. Stauffer, who was widely known as H. Brooke Stauffer Jr., lived in the Washington, D.C., area and was traveling in northern Michigan with his fiancée, Karen Dodds. On that August afternoon, Stauffer was the passenger in a Socata TB-20 Trinidad single-engine airplane piloted by Dodds, who was 52 and held a private pilot certificate with an instrument rating. They departed Mackinac Island Airport intending to fly south to Huron County Memorial Airport near Bad Axe, Michigan. Accounts published after the disappearance indicated that the couple had been vacationing on Mackinac Island and planned to visit members of Dodds's family in the Lower Peninsula. The flight also had a sightseeing element; according to information later documented by the National Transportation Safety Board, Dodds told another pilot that she wanted to follow the coastline so Stauffer could see the scenery. Stauffer's missing-person listing recorded him as a male, age 56, missing from St. Ignace beginning that day, and the Michigan State Police became the investigating agency.
Conditions around the Straits of Mackinac were complicated as the airplane left the island. The NTSB investigation found that the flight departed under visual flight rules without a VFR or IFR flight plan on file, while low clouds and marginal visual conditions were present in the region. One pilot who had spoken with Dodds before departure later told investigators that the weather was concerning enough that he questioned the decision to leave under visual rules. Another pilot recalled hearing the Trinidad announce its departure and reported that Dodds described the ceiling as approximately 1,000 feet overcast; that pilot encountered marginal conditions southwest of Mackinac Island and believed the cloud ceiling became lower in that direction. No further radio communication from the Trinidad was heard. At approximately 1:30 p.m., the airplane was believed to have gone down in Lake Huron in or near the Straits of Mackinac, in the vicinity of Bois Blanc Island and the waters east of Michigan's northern Lower Peninsula. The NTSB ultimately described the precise event and phase of flight as undetermined, and even after the wreckage was eventually located, investigators did not establish a definitive probable cause. The circumstances left Stauffer's family facing an especially painful kind of uncertainty: there was compelling evidence that the aircraft had crashed, but for years there was no recovered airplane and no trace of Stauffer himself.
The initial response was extensive. Michigan State Police personnel searched an area where a witness reportedly heard what sounded like an airplane striking the water, and the Underwater Recovery Unit examined locations selected through witness information, drift calculations and side-scan sonar. Pieces identified as coming from the missing aircraft, including cushion material, later washed ashore near Cheboygan. Difficult weather and wave conditions interfered with the underwater effort, however, and the main wreckage could not be found. On October 8, 2007, Dodds's remains were recovered in the Straits of Mackinac east of the Mackinac Bridge and were subsequently identified, confirming the terrible outcome for the pilot. Stauffer remained missing, as did the principal wreckage of the airplane. The search was eventually suspended without locating either one. For the people who loved him, Stauffer was far more than the passenger named in an aviation report. He had spent much of his professional life in the electrical industry and served as director of standards and safety for the National Electrical Contractors Association. He was also a prolific writer whose work included technical books, magazine articles, fiction and a guide to Washington, D.C. His obituary remembered his appreciation for music and the arts, his enjoyment of camping and hiking, and his devotion to his children. Those details give weight to the seventeen years during which his physical whereabouts remained unresolved even though his family had long believed he had died in the crash.
The case changed after Stauffer's and Dodds's families asked for another effort to find the missing aircraft. In October 2023, the private organization Great Lakes Search & Recovery resumed searching the area, using information from earlier searches together with improved technology and additional analysis. During the renewed search in 2024, the team located airplane wreckage near Bois Blanc Island and notified authorities. Michigan State Police divers then examined the site and recovered skeletal remains associated with the wreckage. Those remains were taken to the Center for Forensic Anthropology at Northern Michigan University, where specialists used dental records to positively identify them as H. Brooke Stauffer Jr. The NTSB's subsequently revised final report likewise records that the missing passenger's remains were found within the airplane wreckage and classifies both the pilot and passenger as fatalities. Although published accounts differ somewhat on the precise timing of the wreckage discovery, they agree on the essential conclusion: Stauffer was found deceased, ending his long-standing missing-person case and providing his family with an answer after nearly seventeen years. The Michigan State Police credited the renewed private search with helping bring long-awaited closure to the families, while the NTSB continued to list the cause of the crash as undetermined. In overview, Henry Brooke Stauffer Jr.'s case began when a 56-year-old passenger vanished with a small airplane after leaving Mackinac Island on August 24, 2007, became a prolonged missing-person investigation after his fiancée was recovered but he was not, and finally ended when the lost aircraft and Stauffer's remains were located near Bois Blanc Island and formally identified, confirming that he had died in the 2007 crash.Last Seen: Aug 24, 2007
