Sturgis convinced Rorke to meet with Nicaraguan officials and clear the way. The four men rented an airplane and planned to leave for Nicaragua the following day. That morning, Rorke’s wife drove him to Opa-Locka Airport in Fort Lauderdale. On the way, they picked up another man. According to Geoffrey’s daughter, Sherry:
“Mrs. Rorke didn’t know who this gentleman was. He spoke broken English. But she drove the both of them to the airport where my father was, and dropped them off.”
The twin-engine plane took off from Ft. Lauderdale with Geoffrey, Rorke, and the mysterious stranger. Sturgis and his associate stayed behind. Geoffrey’s activities over the next 48 hours still cannot be fully explained. According to the FAA investigation, his flight activities were highly unusual. He returned to Ft. Lauderdale three times. For some reason, on his third trip to the airport, the plane’s landing gear remained up. After the control tower warned him not to land, Geoffrey did not attempt to return to Ft. Lauderdale again.
Geoffrey finally landed at North Perry Airport, a mere thirty miles away from Ft. Lauderdale. But he took a suspiciously long time getting there. What should have been a twenty-minute flight had taken nearly five hours. No one knows where the plane was during that time. After refueling, Geoffrey and his passengers took off again around 1:30 P.M. The flight plan listed Tegucigalpa, Honduras, as their final destination.
A little more than two hours later, Sullivan radioed the Tower at Miami International Airport. This time, he filed a new flight plan, with Tucuman, Panama, as his destination. Search party member Howard described the unusual radio calls:
“Sullivan attempted to file a flight plan for a destination that was some two hours beyond the normal range of his aircraft. When he was informed of this by the air traffic controller on duty, he then changed his destination. However, this destination was also well beyond the range of the aircraft he was flying.”
Seven more hours passed with no contact from the plane. Finally, at 10:22 P.M., Sullivan again radioed the Miami Tower. This time, he filed a flight plan for Belize, British Honduras. The FAA says that Sullivan refueled just after midnight in Cozumel, Mexico. This was the last sighting of the plane. Geoffrey and his companions were assumed lost at sea. Despite a massive search, no trace of the plane or its passengers was ever found.
More than two decades later, Sherry Sullivan and her attorney petitioned the government for information concerning her father. They have received over 5,000 pages of documentation from fourteen federal agencies, including the FBI and the CIA.
More than a third of the 800 pages received from the FBI were censored. According to Sherry, information found in these documents indicates that at least 400 more pages exist, but were withheld for National Security reasons. For Sherry, it was the confirmation she was looking for.
In the FBI documents, Sherry found the name Floyde Park. When she finally reached him by phone, Park told Sherry that he had seen her father two days after he supposedly disappeared. But Sherry explained that she had a hard time getting any further information from him:
“Floyde Park had indicated that he had seen my father and Alex and the Spanish fellow in Belize. We have not been able to verify the identity of Floyde Park, who he is and what he was involved in during the sixties, how my father would have known him, why they would have stopped to see him. We weren’t really able to get those answers from him.”
Sherry only talked to Park once and has not been able to reach him since. But Park did say that her father and Rorke might have been taken prisoner in Cuba. According to Sherry:
“Fidel Castro, from what I’ve heard, had a bounty out on my father and Alex because he knew what they were involved in. He knew they were going in and out of his country. So it’s a very good possibility that they could have ended up in Cuba.”
In 1986, during her investigation, Sherry spoke with journalist Marty Casey. Marty said that he was in Cuba two years after her father disappeared:
“I was with two Cuban exiles from Miami, and they met a fellow that they knew from the area. He was working in the compound. He recognized my American accent even though I was speaking Spanish, and he asked me, “You know Rorky?’ And I said, “What, do you mean O’Rourke?'”
According to Marty, he asked the man if he was talking about the pilot:
“He said, ‘No, no, the other guy was the pilot, Sullivan.’ And I said, “Well, how do you know them?’ And he said, ‘I was in jail here with them two years ago.'”