CHEBOYGAN, Mich. (WJMN) — A passenger and plane remained missing for 17 years after a crash over the Straits of Mackinac despite extensive search efforts. After finding both in 2024, the president of a non profit marine search and recovery team explains what made it possible for them to find what evaded Michigan State Police investigators for over a decade.
On the afternoon of August 24, 2007, pilot Karen Dodds left with her fiancée H. Brooke Stauffer Jr. took off in a Socata T-20 Trinidad, a small single-engine plane, from Mackinac Island Airport.
Dodds had two brief conversations with other pilots over radio about the weather, and then was never heard from again.
If you haven’t already, you can read our previous story outlining what investigators knew about the day the plane crashed.
The first clue for investigators came by way of an ear-witness; a man on Bois Blanc Island who told them he heard the sound of the plane hitting the water south of the island.
Months later, the only signs of the crash investigators would discover washed ashore near the north pier of the Mackinac Bridge. It was the remains of the pilot and a few cushions they believed were from the Trinidad.
A new search begins
Jim Scholz is a longtime Great Lakes diver, shipwreck hunter, and president of Great Lakes Search and Recovery. He founded the non profit seven years ago after he realized that his advanced sonar equipment was more advanced than the gear nearby law enforcement agencies were using while looking for missing people and objects in the water.
“Since then, we’ve gotten calls from family members where we’ve been asked to go to different parts of the state, look for cases,” said Scholz.
He said in many cases, local sheriff’s departments are using deputies off the road or out of the jail, taking people away from their normal roles and responsibilities to form dive and search teams.
“At some point they have to return to their normal duties, but that may be before they’ve been able to close the case,” said Scholz. “Quite often we will come in after that, working with the information they’ve provided to keep searching and potentially make the find that could return the loved ones to the family.”
Even in cases like Dodds’ and Stauffer’s where state police have more abundant resources, searches like the one for their missing plane can be as much about luck as anything else. Scholz likened it to finding a needle in a haystack.
After the initial search was called off, MSP still maintained search efforts by training members of their dive team in the area of the Straits of Mackinac they believed the wreckage of the crash to be in, but with little success.
In October of 2023, family of Dodds and Stauffer reached out to Scholz to see if he could help them. He told them he would try.
Searcher shares key details to finding plane
“We spent a good part of the fall and winter researching as much information as we could about the plane, the weather conditions, and the search that had been done by the Michigan State Police, Coast Guard, and Civil Air Patrol,” said Scholz.
From that research, the most helpful pieces of information they found were records of previously-searched areas, testimony of a witness who heard the crash, and the location of where the remains and plane cushions washed ashore.
It was all information that investigators have had through the years, but Scholz said the passage of time had given him something the initial searchers didn’t have.
‘The new drift data was a game changer’
“The new drift data was a game changer,” said Scholz. The data came from an experiment some years prior where researchers dropped buoys from different points of the Mackinac Bridge and monitored their course out into Lake Huron.
Pairing that with the discovered location of the pilot’s body and plane debris, his team was able to run a backward drift analysis to predict where it had come from.
They also consulted with a man who worked near an airport and paid keen attention to the sound planes made as they departed. The man gave them his opinion of where the crash could have been based on the testimony and location of the person who heard the crash.
With a trajectory and potential search area, the team looked for places that MSP had not yet searched.
“That pointed us to an area basically close to the shore of Bois Blanc Island,” said Scholz.
Found in 70 feet of water
Beginning on Friday, August 23, Scholz and his team began canvassing their new search area with two types of sonar; one that created broad, rough pictures of the lakebed about 600 ft wide, and another that used high frequencies to make a more detailed picture about 100-150 ft across.
“Normally they call this ‘mowing the lawn,’” said Scholz. “And, you know, sometimes you get a little wide on one way and you come back the other direction and you’re a little wide again, and you’ve got a little gap in the middle.”
It was when they were filling in one of those gaps that they found the anomaly that would turn out to be the missing plane.
“[The anomaly] was much larger than anything we had seen before, and it was such a unique shape that we immediately stopped, broke off from the search pattern and hit this thing from multiple angles,” said Scholz.
Saturday afternoon, the crew sent down an ROV to take a look.
Seventy feet below the surface of Lake Huron and on the edge of a shelf going much deeper, they saw what was left of the Trinidad.
“At first we weren’t quite sure what it was until we started reviewing the video,” said Scholz. “When [the ROV] was back on the boat we realized we had what we believed to be the plane we were looking for.”
Scholz said it was near the edge of where MSP searchers had looked years earlier.
He said while the impact and waters had taken its toll on the aircraft, the Trinidad had a very unique window in the rear of the plane—and in the wreckage they found a frame matching that shape.
On Sunday the crew sent a diver down to the wreckage to confirm what they saw on the ROV, then notified MSP that they had found the missing plane.
MSP divers soon followed suit, finding on their dive the likely bones of Stauffer, the missing passenger. A dental record analysis would confirm the finding.
‘This was providence’
Not far from where the plane was found was a drop-off. If the plane had sunk down there instead, it could have ended up in a trench nearly twice as deep as the water it was found in.
“I’m a religious person, and God’s hand was guiding us,” said Scholz. “I want to believe he wanted us to help this family and have more closure.”
For other families who are still hoping for new findings on someone believed to be lost in the water, Scholz said they can contact him through the Great Lakes Search and Recovery Facebook page.
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