Leonard Neal Dirickson, known to everyone as Lenny Dirickson, was a 39-year-old man living near Strong City, Oklahoma, with his 19-year-old son Jared. Lenny was a dairy farmer, and his farm was near Cheyenne, Oklahoma.
On the morning of March 14, 1998, Lenny prepared breakfast for himself and his son Jared, and they ate together before heading out for work. Around 9 o’clock, an unexpected guest arrived in a white pickup truck. Neither Lenny nor Jared knew this man.
Lenny went outside to talk to him, and although they didn’t know each other, they spoke in a very friendly manner. After a short while, Lenny came back inside and told Jared that the man wanted to see his stud horse. The man didn’t seem strange to Lenny. Lenny told Jared to go and feed the cows while he went with the man to Mobeetie, Texas, to show him the horse. He said he would be back by noon. However, Lenny never returned.
Lenny wasn’t immediately considered missing; someone saw him having breakfast with a man in a café two hours after he left home. This was very strange since Lenny had already had breakfast with his son. Why was he eating again? According to the witness, the man who took Lenny did most of the talking, while Lenny just listened and nodded along. The alias given by the witness matched the one mentioned by Lenny’s son. Despite these odd circumstances, the man’s behavior didn’t seem suspicious.
The police investigated the barn where Lenny kept his stud horse and discovered that Lenny hadn’t visited there that day. Further investigation revealed that Lenny had never advertised his horse. Six months after Lenny went missing, someone saw him at a highway bar in Amarillo, Texas. The caller informed the police that Lenny was wearing a blue checkered shirt and seemed coherent. The caller claimed to know Lenny and that he was from Elk City. The caller didn’t reveal his name and said he would wait for the police, but when they arrived, both the caller and the person identified as Lenny were gone.
In the following days, the Roger Mills County Sheriff’s Department questioned the bartender, who confirmed that the caller was indeed the same person who reported seeing Lenny. According to some investigators, Lenny was there that night, raising questions about what he was doing in that bar six months after his disappearance and whether he disappeared voluntarily.
Lenny had gone through a divorce and was distressed, and his dairy farm was struggling. Could this have been why he chose to disappear? But according to Lenny’s son, “Me and my dad, we was together every day. Every morning, we’d go work, do the chores, and I’d go to school. I don’t think he would’ve ever left me and not ever come back to see me or nothing, ’cause…we was close, and I don’t think he’d have ever done that to me.”
If Lenny didn’t disappear voluntarily, as his son suggests, suspicion falls again on the unknown man. Why did he come to inquire about the horse when Lenny hadn’t advertised it, and what was his motive? The police are still investigating this case.