A routine cover letter, sent twenty-seven years after Paul died, admits two things — and the second is far harder to explain than the first.
Admission one
“Records that may have been responsive to your request were destroyed. Since this material could not be reviewed, it is not known if it was responsive to your request.”
FOIPA 1572723-000, third interim release, July 24, 2026. Signed by Christina Driver, Acting Section Chief, Record/Information Dissemination Section. Verified against the page image.
The letter cites the general legal authority for destroying federal records and stops there. What a destruction admission normally carries, and this one does not, is the whole of the problem:
A lawful destruction leaves a paper trail. We are asking for that trail. Without it there is no way to know whether the destruction happened under the original 1999 case number or under the one the evidence was moved to in 2008.
Admission two
“a search of the indices to our Central Records System reflected there were additional records potentially responsive to your Freedom of Information/Privacy Acts (FOIPA) request. We have attempted to obtain this material so it could be reviewed to determine whether it was responsive to your request. We were advised that the potentially responsive records were not in their expected location and could not be located after a reasonable search. Following a reasonable waiting period, another attempt was made to obtain this material. This search for the missing records also met with unsuccessful results.”
FOIPA 1572723-000, third interim release, July 24, 2026. Verified against the page image.
Destroying a record and losing track of one are different problems — and the second is worse. Destroying records has a lawful procedure behind it, with a schedule and an approval and a certificate. Records that the Bureau's own index says exist, that are not in their expected location, and that two separate searches failed to produce, have no procedure behind them at all.
We are asking for the index entries themselves, the serial numbers of the missing records, and the dates, methods and results of both searches.
The ledger of absences
We found each item below in the FBI's documentation. We want this missing information to be released so we can gain a more accurate picture of the events surrounding Paul's death.
The letter states 250 pages were reviewed and 160 released. The two Deleted Page Information Sheets account for the other 90 exactly. Eighty are stated as being withheld as duplicates. The remaining ten are marked Referral/Direct and were handed to the National Transportation Safety Board to answer separately.
The askThose ten pages, from the NTSB, whose FOIA service center the FBI named in the same letter.
An agent-to-agent fax in the FBI's own file passes along aviation law attorneys recommended by a university safety program. Both names sit behind a redaction block applied under the personal privacy exemptions at 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(6) and (b)(7)(C).
The askRelease the two names. Privacy is balanced against public interest, and who an agency recommended as counsel to the widow of a man it had killed on its own training program is squarely a public interest question.
The hand-drawn probable flight path is the single most useful page released. The Bureau's copy is clipped at the right edge, and what falls off is exactly what a person would need to measure the turn: the printed scale ratio, which reads only SCALE 1:2 before the page ends, and the contour interval, which is gone entirely.
The askAn unclipped copy. Whether the clipping was careless or deliberate cannot be told from the page, and we are not claiming to know.
The review board's memorandum describes the Government Purchase Order used to buy the Colorado Skyways training: the $19,000 figure, the choice of a GPO instead of a contract, the absence of any minimum requirements. That description is secondhand. The purchase order itself, the document that would show who signed it, what it actually specified, and whether anything a contract would have required was done anyway, has not been part of any release.
The askThe purchase order itself, and any solicitation, quote, price comparison, or acquisition plan records tied to it.
The review board memorandum records that a Management Study of the FBI Aviation Program was carried out by the Inspection Division in May 2000, producing fifty-five recommendations for improving the program. It is named inside a document we now hold. The study itself has not been released.
The askThe study, and the fifty-five recommendations, and the record of which of them were adopted.
A property record shows photographs of the Piper Archer and an envelope of original interview notes acquired on 01/13/2000 but entered on 05/08/2008 under case number 321D-IR-8062. The original number for this material was 66H-IR-A5346.
The askThe full 321D file, the reason for the transfer, who authorized it, and the retention schedule applied before and after. Renumbering is when material becomes easy to lose and when retention clocks can be restarted.
In February 2000 FBI Phoenix sent the NTSB copies of two re-interviews of the Colorado Skyways instructors. The covering letter asks that they be returned when no longer needed, and the footer states that the document “is the property of the FBI and is loaned to your agency; it and its contents are not to be distributed outside your agency.”
The askThe records of that loan and its return. A restrictive legend on a document does not settle who controls it.
The same letter
The letter that contains both admissions also refuses us a public interest fee waiver and attaches a condition to the bill.
“Failure to pay for this release within thirty (30) days from the date of this letter will close any pending FBI FOIPA requests from you. Non-payment will also cause an automatic denial of any future FOIPA requests.”
FOIPA 1572723-000, July 24, 2026, page 1. The amount is $26.50.
Twenty-six dollars and fifty cents, for the duplication of three interim releases. Non-payment would have closed every request we have open and barred every one we might file later.
We are not disputing that the Bureau may charge for copies. We are appealing the refusal to waive the fee, which a court reviews afresh if it comes to that.
A note on what is not here
There are things we have carried for a quarter of a century and still cannot document. We are working on them, and they are deliberately absent from these pages. An accusation we cannot source would cost our father's case more than it gains us.
What is here is what a document says. Where a document points somewhere without arriving, this site says so and stops.