It was Sunday morning May 30, 1976 when Andy “Joe” Lepley got up very early, a day after he had gone camping with his family.
Denver Post archivesAndy Lepley, 18
Joe, who had two older brothers and a younger sister, had long chestnut-colored hair that covered his ears and went below his shirt collar in the back. His friends nicknamed him “Taco” because of his copper complexion. He was 150 pounds and stood 5-feet-9.
His mother Betty Lepley said he was a happy-go-lucky boy who loved to be in the middle of action. Joe enrolled in a motorcycle mechanics course at the Area Vocational Center in Pueblo and loved to pop a wheelie. He had made the state finals in Cañon City as a pole vaulter, was a starter on the Rye High School basketball team and played football. He was an honor student at school.
His father Bob Lepley was a plumber in the small foothills community of Rye.
That Sunday afternoon, Joe was going to ride his motorcycle with his brother Jim after he got off of work at noon. In three days Joe was to graduate from Rye High School where he had been a multi-sport athlete and scholar. In a little more than a month he would have joined in the nation’s bi-centennial festivities. Joe was planning to work as a plumbing apprentice for his father that summer. Then he wanted to enlist in the U.S. Air Force and go to Adams State College in nearby Alamosa.
Joe never got to ride his motorcycle that afternoon. He didn’t receive his high school diploma on June 2, 1976; nor did he work with this dad that summer, watch fireworks on the nation’s 200th birthday or go to college.
That Sunday morning he drove to the Crow Junction Texaco gas station 20 miles south of Pueblo just off of Interstate 25 in his 1967 pickup truck. He parked and left the keys in the ignition.
Joe opened the station at 6:30 a.m. He took a newspaper through a corridor to a restaurant adjoining the gas station and joked with a waitress.
He was last seen wearing a green Texaco shirt, blue jeans and hiking shoes under a gas station canopy near the gas pumps at 6:45 a.m. Witnesses at the restaurant also saw a middle aged man at the gas station at the time.
A witness saw the unidentified stranger driving off at 7 a.m. By then Joe was nowhere in site.
Customers who went to the gas station called the Pueblo County Sheriff’s Department.
Deputies discovered that a microphone to the gas station’s citizen band radio had been ripped out of the radio.
Someone had broken into a cash box that had held about $100.
Betty Lepley said she believes that her son caught whoever stole the money and when he went to call authorities he was attacked. Someone could have knocked him unconscious with a wrench or kidnapped him, she said.
Officers found Joe’s car parked at the gas station. His pickup truck keys were still in the ignition.
Joe was 18 at the time. He was never seen again. His remains have never been identified.
Courtesy of familyAndy "Joe" Lepley, 18, was on Rye High School basketball, track and football teams
Joe’s family knew immediately that Joe had been kidnapped.
“For a few days we felt Joe could be tied up somewhere and would die if we didn’t get to him right away,” Bob Lepley told a Denver Post reporter in 1977.
At first, Rye High School officials talked about postponing commencement exercises while Andy was still missing. But that Wednesday night the ceremony went on without him.
“Joe would have wanted it that way,” a school spokesman was quoted in a June 1, 1976 newspaper article.
The Colorado City Lions Club donated $100 and an anonymous donor gave $1,000 to pay for a reward for information leading to the arrest of whoever kidnapped Joe. Within a week the reward climbed to $8,000 for Joe’s “safe return.”
The reward would later climb to $10,000 “leading to location of Joe regardless of the circumstances involving his disappearance.”
The FBI joined the Pueblo County Sheriff’s Office in the search for the young man. There was some speculation that Joe was kidnapped for ransom, but there had been no ransom note or other demands for money.
Volunteers searched for Joe’s body. For three days a helicopter was used to scan ranches and prairies around Pueblo.
Pueblo and Cañon City psychics participated. Some said he may be still alive and within 20 miles of Rye, which is 33 miles southwest of Pueblo.
People rode horses and four-wheel drive vehicles in a five-square-mile area in mountains south of Pueblo at the instruction of the psychics.
A psychiatrist hypnotized two waitresses who may have seen a witness to the kidnapping to see if the women could lead authorities to Joe.
The woman described the possible witness, who ate at a restaurant next to the gas station, as being about 47 years old; 5-feet-11 and weighing about 175 pounds. They said he was graying with sandy-colored hair, blue eyes, with a medium complexion.
The man had told the waitresses that he was waiting at the gas station to open while on a trip to Wyoming.
He was seen leaving the station only minutes after entering it. He drove away pulling what was described as an “odd trailer” that appeared to be homemade, according to a Denver Post article.
It was built of plywood, about four or five feet long and was covered with a tarp, the waitresses had said.
The car was “eye-catching,” a “flashy” late-model two-door hardtop, possibly a Grand Prix Pontiac. It was silver gray or white with maroon trim and a maroon laundau top.
The waitresses hadn’t noticed whether there was anyone else in the car with the driver.
Bob and Betty Lepley drove to Cheyenne, Wyo. and left posters. They went to police stations along I-25 and spoke to police and sheriff’s deputies about their son. They also went south on I-25 to Las Cruces, N.M. and Texas, speaking with officers along the way and leaving posters, according to a Denver Post article. They also spoke with officers as far away as Juarez, Mexico.
“There’s been lots of false leads and horrible rumors but nothing concrete,” Betty Lepley told former Denver Post reporter Glenn Troelstrup. “We just don’t have anything.”
A psychic named Dixie Veterian said the mystery man was a bisexual who hit Joe with a wrench and took the money on a spur-of-the-moment thing, according to a 1977 Denver Post article. She claimed the killer put the unconscious youth in his trailer, drove to a spot along the Republican River near Concordia, Kan., where he beat him to death and buried him.
Sheriff’s investigators searched along the river for the burial site but could not find Joe’s remains.
The sheriff’s office continued to receive false sightings in New Mexico, Oklahoma and Utah of the missing youth, but no useful tips.
In the coming years, Pueblo County deputies sent Joe’s fingerprints to South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, West Virginia and Alabama when bodies of young men were found.
Deputies investigated numerous suspects with violent records.
The Lepley family hired a Colorado Springs private investigator named G.C. Erianne to search for their son. Nothing came of it. Reward posters were distributed in all 50 states and in Mexico and Canada.
New tips and theories continued to dribble in to the Pueblo Sheriff’s Department over the years. Investigators have tirelessly followed many of them.
A Colorado college professor who lived in the same county came under suspicion, said Jeff Lepley, Joe’s older brother.
Four days before Joe disappeared the professor’s wife vanished. The professor remarried and his second wife died under suspicious circumstances. The remains of the professor’s first wife was found four years after she and Joe had disappeared. The man committed suicide.
Betty Lepley said law enforcement officials including a group of retired FBI agents and detectives who reviewed his case in 2005 believe the professor is somehow linked to the case.
But Betty Lepley said she believes that it was someone her son caught stealing from the till.
“We don’t know,” she said.”It’s been awfully hard.”
About three years ago skeletal remains were discovered between Colorado City and Walsenberg. The Lepleys provided DNA samples, but no DNA could be extracted from the weathered bones, Betty Lepley said.
Whatever happened may remain a mystery forever.
But what tortures Joe’s mother are the factors that should have stopped it from happening in the first place. Joe went missing in broad daylight. It was a Memorial Day weekend so there were a lot of vacationers on the highway. People across the road at another gas station could have seen something as well as waitresses in the restaurant adjoining the gas station.
“This is something that absolutely should not have happened,” Betty Lepley said.
People with information that could help solve the case are asked to call the Pueblo Sheriff’s Office at 719-583-6125.
Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206 or Facebook.com/@kmitchellDP or Twitter.com/@kmitchellDP for updates on this cold case and others.