Patrick Joseph DiFrancesco

• Missing Since 08/26/1985
• Missing From Fort Pierce, Florida
• Classification Endangered Missing
• Sex Male
• Race Hispanic
• Date of Birth 03/17/1961 (63)
• Age 24 years old
• Height and Weight 6'1, 170 pounds
• Clothing/Jewelry Description A button-up shirt, jeans and gray cowboy boots.
• Distinguishing Characteristics Hispanic male. Black hair, brown eyes. DiFrancesco has scars on both legs from burns and skin grafts. His nickname is Pat.

Details of Disappearance

DiFrancesco and a friend, James Johnson, disappeared from Fort Pierce, Florida on August 26, 1985. He had a student pilot's license and reportedly left in a plane with Johnson, a pilot, for an overnight trip.

They were supposedly going to pick up a shipment of marijuana in the Bahamas or at St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. Neither man has ever been heard from again and no wreckage from their plane was ever discovered. There was a rumor that DiFrancesco had been found in jail in Jamaica after his disappearance, but this was never verified.

The plane DiFrancesco and Johnson supposedly flew away in was owned by Howard "Jay" Crouch Jr., who was then 31 years old and had used a wheelchair for mobility since he was paralyzed in a 1970 accident. DiFrancesco was a concrete worker who supplemented his income by flying cocaine for Crouch into St. Lucie County.

Crouch was never charged in Johnson and DiFrancesco's cases, but in 1988 he pleaded guilty to cocaine trafficking charges in 1988 and sentenced to five years in prison. The previous year, Crouch and two other men, William Andrew Biggers and James Leonard King, had arranged to have an airplane drop 150 kilograms of cocaine at an airstrip in western St. Lucie County. This was same airstrip Johnson and DiFrancesco took off from on the day of their disappearance.

DiFrancesco's brother, who remains active in trying to find him, believes he may have never left Fort Pierce and that he and Johnson may have been murdered and buried in the local area. He left behind two daughters and nine siblings, and his family stated he was devoted to them and wouldn't have abandoned them. Both men's cases remain unsolved.