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Michigan couple's remains found in U.P. after plane crash 21 years ago, funeral planned

Mackinac County Medical Examiner Dr. Carl Hawkins said the couple died instantly upon crash impact.
Credit: Submitted
Janet and Mark Davies on Christmas Day, 1996. The Howell couple died in a plane crash less than a year later. Their plane and remains were not discovered in the U.P. until this summer.

Janet Davies will finally be laid to rest on Sept. 13, her birthday and the day before the 21st anniversary of her death.

Her remains and those of her husband Mark were recovered by forensic anthropologists on Aug. 7 and 8 at the site where their plane crashed in the Hiawatha National Forest in the Upper Peninsula in 1997.

“The remains are at Western Michigan University (pathology department) and have been positively identified,” said Linda Legeret, Janet’s sister, on Wednesday. “We are hoping to have a funeral on Sept. 13, which is Janet’s birthday. She would have been 73-years-old.”

Mackinac County Medical Examiner Dr. Carl Hawkins said the couple died instantly upon crash impact.

The National Transportation Safety Board has concluded their on-site investigation, although analysis continues, said Mackinac County Sheriff Scott Strait.

The wreckage of the plane was discovered on July 11 by park rangers surveying the 896,836-acre Hiawatha National Forest.

Legeret said the phone call from the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office notifying her that her sister and brother-in-law’s plane had been found after all these years “was a terrible shock.”

The tail of Janet and Mark Davies' plane, discovered in the U.P. more than 20 years after it crashed. (Photo: Submitted)

“We are all happy she can be laid to rest, but it was a big shock and it brought it all back,” she said. “My dad was so sure she went into the water. We never dreamed she would be in the woods and we would

find her after all this time, but we’re all happy.”

Janet, the daughter of Charron and Mary Smith, was the oldest of six children. Besides Linda, her surviving siblings include Michael (Patricia) Smith, Nancy Yeckl, Kerry Anne (Guy) Pierce and Kenneth Joseph (Sheri) Smith.

“You think, ‘They may never be found in my lifetime,’ and life goes on,” Michael Smith said. “You’re not going to dwell on it, but it’s always in the back of your head — where are they? What happened? Now we know.”

Mark Davies, who was 45 when he died, was an assistant service manager at Marty Feldman Chevrolet in Novi. Janet Davies was an art teacher at Scranton Middle School in Brighton for 27 years.

The couple took off in their single-engine Cessna Piper plane shortly before 4 p.m., Sept. 14, 1997 from the Drummond Island Airport. Mark was at the controls as they headed for home 300 miles to the south in Howell. A flight plan was not filed. When the plane never arrived the Civil Air Patrol launched a search.

Leo Burke, the Great Lakes region director of Homeland Security for the Civil Air Patrol, was part of that mission as a pilot.

Now 53 and a Berkley resident, he recalls looking for the missing plane.

Because there was no flight plan, search pilots mapped out different routes the couple could have taken to get home and took into consideration the plane they were flying, amount of fuel and how fast it would burn, and how far they could have gone to determine the search area.

“Most pilots don’t like to fly over water, there are not a lot of alternatives if there is engine failure – the chances they would fly across Lake Huron are slim,” he said. “They are a middle-aged couple, so probably they aren’t going to do anything wild and crazy.”

They watched for wreckage to wash ashore, but none ever came.

Janet and Mark Davies' plane, discovered in the U.P. more than 20 years after it crashed. (Photo: Submitted)

The CPA volunteers used a grid search with each search plane flying possible routes, with three observers in addition to the pilot. But the terrain of the northern lower peninsula and the Upper Peninsula is dramatically more difficult to search than southern and central Michigan, he noted.

What they were looking for, he said, was not the plane as people imagine, but what equates to something similar to the backend of a Ford F150 super cab crew truck three feet into the dirt.

“You can’t really see that, but it would leave a scar on the Earth – fresh black dirt in the ground,” Burke said. “You’re looking for broken branches, for how the environment is damaged, rather than the wreck itself.”

Strait said people often don’t realize just how vast and remote the wilderness is in his jurisdiction in the Upper Peninsula. He recalls another single-engine plane that was discovered in the UP several years ago that had been missing for 12 years.

“Unless you experience the cedar swamps in the U.P., you can’t imagine how thick it is, how far – you can’t see more than 15-20 yards because of trees, foliage, and all kinds of stuff,” he said. “Compounding the difficulty is the acreage, the lack of roads and difficulty in traversing the terrain.”

“Have a starting point is one thing, but in this case, there is no starting point. Drummond Island is 40 miles away, but you can’t do an effective ground search for 1,000 square miles. It’s worse than finding a needle in a haystack… We have untouched forest in some areas, it is not unusual to have trees knocked over. There is not that much difference between storm damage and a man-made event.”

Burke agreed.

“Really tall pine trees are flexible -- a plane could crash into them and the trees could bend and come back and plane could go down between those trees and be almost impossible to see,” Burke said. “Early on the weather was a contributing factor, too.”

They focused on the UP shoreline, as well as a 20-30 mile area of northern Michigan near Rogers City. They found no clues and they heard no signals from the plane’s transmitters.

“We continue to search as long as there is a possibility that we will be able to rescue somebody,” Burke said. “At some point, we’re done, with little chance of survival and we’ve exhausted all the resources we have. We have to assume they perished.”

The families of Janet and Mark Davies held funerals for them in the fall of 1997. Mike Smith said Mark Davies' remains will likely be returned to his surviving brother, Paul.

Janet's remains will be cremated and interred with her mother, Mary, who died two years ago and father, Charron, who died just this past February. The family shares a headstone, on which her parents put her name and birth and death dates, along with “lost at sea” shortly after she disappeared.

An addition will be made on the headstone at Evergreen Cemetery that Janet Davies was laid to rest Sept. 13, 2018.

“We’d rather have it on her birthday than on the day she died,” said Legeret. “It means a celebration of her life, rather than her death.”

Contact Susan Bromley at sbromley@livingstondaily.com Follow on Twitter @SusanBromley10

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