Did Don Crash Into the Gulf?

 

Letter to Detective Lingo and Fernandez:

 

Doug Edwards said that he tried to run this theory of his past me when Don first disappeared but apparently I didn’t pay close enough attention to him because it makes a lot of sense.  This is his scenario:

 

Don finds an experimental airplane for sale and the non local person selling it has built it in their garage so it’s not properly licensed or equipped, or perhaps the owner is not licensed and he decides to meet Don somewhere close to our home so Don can try it out.  Don or maybe the seller doesn’t want anyone to see him leaving the airport, so they make it for early light.  Don likes the plane and decides to buy it, so he pays the guy and flies the seller home.

 

Don wouldn’t care about a title search, or paperwork and a bill of sale could have been with him.  If the guy lived in the panhandle Don would fly straight across the gulf just like we always did to avoid that weather balloon in Cross City.   We were completely out of fuel on the last trip we made across the gulf, but just kept flying and praying until we landed.  Maybe Don wasn’t this lucky this time.  Depending on how far he went and the tank capacity of what he was flying, and the accuracy of the gauges, this is pretty feasible.

 

I’ve thought something similar out time and time again, but I was always thinking that if Don crashed over the gulf, he was practicing with the plane because the air is so much more stable there.  I hadn’t thought about him flying low because the plane itself might be illegal and I hadn’t thought about a water crash being due to low fuel.  Doug Edwards’s twist on my theories is this:  Three days after the sale, the plane’s creator/owner hears that Don Lewis is missing and his van is found at the airport where this person met Don.

 

Fearing the worst, the guy keeps quiet and stays glued to the news to find out if his plane is ever connected to Don in any way.   This guy can’t come forward because he can’t explain to the authorities something about himself or the plane.  Since he’s already been paid, even if the connection is somehow made to him, he is far enough away that he can claim ignorance of Don’s disappearance.   Meanwhile he finds out that Don was worth a fortune.  Now he’s really scared because he can just see the liability mounting up and he gets real quiet about what ever became of that plane.

 

This is the first theory that I haven’t been able to see holes in.  My dad has had a similar theory but that the seller was connected to the airport, maybe even Dewey Gallop himself, since he was thrown out of Tampa International for keeping such flying junk heaps in the air.  This would explain Dewey changing his story about when the van arrived and what tag was on it.  Had the van been left in the parking lot, right in front of the door, then Gallop couldn’t have said they didn’t know when it was left, being a tall guy he may have moved the seat to move the van to the grass behind the FBO so that it would be less obvious that the van had been left unattended.  To keep from being too obvious, when Don didn’t come back as planned, he then would have called and reported an abandoned vehicle.

 

 

(Added 2019 Screenshot above is the last time I saw Doug Edwards.  I was looking for his contact info and can’t find anything for him.)

 

 

Tim Bengston arrived in Tampa today to help look for Don.  He’s a bounty hunter.  He has checked the prisons in Costa Rica and had an associate begin checking in Nicaragua.  I offered him 100,000.00 to find Don alive or in the worst case to convict Don’s killer(s).  I asked him to come up with an hourly figure in the event that Don is found dead by his own doing.

 

 

 

(Photo of Tim Bengston found online and added 8/2/2019)

 

A question you asked me, that I don’t feel I answered, was whether I would benefit by Don’s disappearance.  From a personal standpoint, the answer is an obvious “no”.  He’s my lover and my best fri