Circumstances
At about 8:30 p.m. on March 15, 1974, Perry Otto Corlew got into a fender-bender in front of Grayling's Rialto Theater in a car he had just purchased. Instead of waiting for police, he took off. And that was the last anyone saw of him.

About 90 minutes later a passing trucker alerted police that Corlew's car was sitting on the side of I-75 about 15 miles south of Grayling. The engine was still running, the headlights were on and the driver's side door was open. But Perry Corlew was nowhere to be seen.

Police from Crawford and Roscommon counties called to the scene were baffled. There were no footprints in the snow and no witnesses to what happened.

The family has speculated that Corlew fled the scene of the accident because he was on probation for a breaking and entering and had a poor driving record.

A police report said Corlew may have gone to downstate Michigan or to Florida. And friends said he had talked of going to California.

In 1978, his parents thought they spotted him standing in an unemployment line on a national television newscast. They tracked down the report but could not verify the place where the footage was taken because it was shot by a free-lance photographer.

Local police and the FBI reopened the case in 1992 and a photo was generated of what Corlew would look like at the age of 40.

Also in 1992, his brother Michael received a telephone call from someone mimicking cartoon character voices, which Michael and Perry used to do. The caller asked Michael what he thought of the voices, but hung up without identifying himself.

When the Corlews tried to get a copy of Perry's dental record, they found that the Grayling Police had sent the originals of the records to a sheriff's department in Louisiana in connection with a case involving an unidentified suicide victim in 1975. The Louisiana department, in turn, lost the records.

Investigating Agency
Crawford County Sheriff's Department
989-348-4616

Source: Traverse City Record Eagle
Source: The Doe Network