Geoffrey Sullivan

Real Name: Geoffrey Francis Sullivan
Nicknames: No known nicknames
Location: Waterbury, Connecticut
Date: September 1963

Bio

Occupation: Pilot
Date of Birth: 1935
Height: 5'11"
Weight: 180 lbs.
Marital Status: Married
Characteristics: Unrevealed

Case

Details: Geoffrey Sullivan was a commercial pilot who left an airstrip in Waterbury, Connecticut, on September 23, 1963. He told his wife that this would be his last flight because he was going to stop being involved in such operations. However, four days later, he disappeared with a man named Alexander Irwin Rorke somewhere over the Caribbean. Rorke had first hired Geoffrey in 1961 as a pilot to fly covert Anti-Castro missions for the CIA. Later that same year, the unsuccessful Bay of Pigs invasion occurred. After that occurred, the CIA began conducting their missions much more secretly, and these were the missions that Geoffrey and Alex were involved in.
However, the US government soon released a public warning, issuing people like Geoffrey and Alex to stop their anti-Cuba operations. Eight days after this warning was issued, Geoffrey and Alex left Connecticut. The next day, they arrived in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where they met two men. One of the men was Franks Sturgis, who would later become involved in the Watergate Scandal. Sturgis said that Alex told him that he had a B-25 bomber and that he was planning to take it to Nicaragua, which would become a base of operations for bombing missions on Cuba.
Rorke soon rented an airplane and the next day, his wife picked up an unidentified man and took the five men to the local airport. Geoffrey, Alex, and the mystery man boarded the rented plane while Sturgis, his companion, and Alex's wife stayed behind. For unknown reasons, the plane returned to Fort Lauderdale at least three times. The last time, the landing gear remained up, and the controller instructed them not to land. Five hours later, they landed at North Perry Airport, which was only thirty minutes away.
At 1:30pm that day, the plane left again, scheduling to land in Honduras. However, two hours later, Geoffrey radioed Miami International Airport and told them that he was re-routing to Panama. Finally, at 10:22pm, Geoffrey said that he was once again re-routing the plane, this time to Belize. The FAA stated that Geoffrey re-fueled the plane in Cozumel, Mexico, around midnight. This was the last sighting of the plane, and despite a massive search, neither the plane nor the occupants were ever found.
Over two decades later, his daughter, Sherry, now a private investigator, began to search for her father's fate. She and her lawyer petitioned the government for information about Geoffrey. More than a third of the papers that she received from the FBI were censored. She believes that even more documents were withheld for national security reasons.
In the FBI documents, she found the name of "Floyde Park". She contacted Floyde, and he claimed that he had seen Geoffrey, Alex, and the unidentified man in Belize two days after they were last seen. However, Sherry was able to get little other information from Floyde, and she is uncertain of his true identity or his connection to her father. The only other information that she got from Floyde is that Geoffrey and Alex may have been taken prisoner in Cuba, and that Fidel Castro was aware of their operations and placed a bounty on the two men.
In 1986, Sherry came in contact with Marty Casey, a journalist who was in Cuba in 1965. While in Cuba, a Cuban exile told him that he knew two men from the United States, one he called "Rorke" and the other "Sullivan". The man said that he was with the two men in a Cuban prison in 1963, around the time that the two men had vanished. Sherry believes that the two men in the prison were her father and Alex Rorke.
Another name that Sherry found in the FBI documents was "Enrique Molina Garcia". Garcia was supposedly a double agent for Castro's government. Sherry believes that Garcia was the mysterious unidentified man that flew with Geoffrey and Alex when they vanished. She believes that Garcia tricked them into flying to Cuba, where they were then captured. Unconfirmed reports placed Garcia in Havana, Cuba, several years after Geoffrey and Alex vanished. Sherry Sullivan will not give up until she finds out what truly happened to her father and Alex Rorke.
Suspects: Enrique Molina Garcia is suspected of tricking Geoffrey and Alex into flying to Cuba. Sherry believes that they were held prisoner there for several years. Floyde Park is another person that she would like to identify and locate.
Extra Notes: This case first aired on the December 19, 1990 episode.
Results: Unresolved. In 2003, a commemorative marker for Geoffrey was unveiled in the Veteran's Memorial Cemetery in Augusta, Maine. In August of 2009, a Maine court found Cuba guilty of the wrongful death of Geoffrey Sullivan. Sherry believes now that her father was shot down by Cubans, was taken prisoner, tortured for at least a decade, and finally executed. However, in 2012, a federal court reversed the decision. Sherry is continuing to fight to get the case back in court and hopes to recover her father's remains.
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Geoffrey Sullivan

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