A MIAMI LAWYER VANISHED IN 1962. HIS GRANDDAUGHTER IS STILL LOOKING FOR ANSWERS

'We’re at the point where it’s now or never'

On October 16, 1962, former Miami City Attorney Olavi Hendrickson — a wiry, fair-haired, bespectacled World War II combat vet — walked out of his front door, never to be seen again.

Forty-six years later, granddaughter Dana Dean is hoping a Florida Bar member with a very long memory, or the descendent of one, might hold a clue to the family mystery.

“We’re at the point where it’s now or never,” she says. “Every time I find a name, and I go to Google it, I’m finding an obituary.”

Chances may be slim that the name Olavi Hendrickson still rings a bell, Dean acknowledges. He’d be 111 today.

But he vanished in a swirl of controversy with elements so tawdry for the time — a seedy Miami night club, “B-Girls,” suspected mob ties — that his story competed with the Cuban Missile Crisis for national headlines.

A former St. Louis TV reporter, Dean will map out the fruits of her five-year investigation in the October 12 debut of “Miami Mystery: The Disappearance of Olavi Hendrickson,” a podcast available on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, to name a few.

“It’s a fact-finding mission with me and my sister,” Dean says. “We have some answers, but we don’t have all of them.”

If the episode jars a memory loose, listeners can scroll to the bottom of “Miamimystery.com” and fill out a tip box.

Dean never met her grandfather and quickly learned while growing up in California that any inquiries would generate only a stony response from her father, Leonard Hendrickson.

A biotech executive who died of cancer at age 56 in 2004, Leonard was a 15-year-old Miami Central High sophomore when his father disappeared without a trace, and more importantly, an explanation.

“He went on to the University of Pennsylvania and never looked back,” Dean says of her father. “He led a wonderful life, and I admire the way he was able to compartmentalize something that must have been so painful.”

For years, Dean harbored a vague notion that her grandfather might have left for another woman.

Five years ago, Dean was typing family names into abandoned property search engines, when, on a lark, she typed Olavi Hendrickson into the Florida portal — “And up popped $1,400.”

She was intrigued.

“As a legal heir, I went to go claim it, thinking it’s not life-changing money, but I can split it with my family,” Dean says. “It asked for a death certificate, and I’m like, well, there is no death certificate, there is no body, and really, there are no answers.”

Putting on her reporter’s hat, Dean combed an online newspaper archive and found hundreds of articles, interviewed a Miami historian, and took a deep dive into Miami-Dade Public Library microfiche records. Minutes from a 1961 Miami City Commission meeting proved invaluable.

Astonished by what she found, Dean grew more determined than ever to honor her father’s memory with some closure.

Olavi Hendrickson “was the son of Finnish immigrants, and his parents owned a restaurant in Miami, he was a World War II veteran, he worked his way up through the ranks as an assistant city attorney, and then he was the city attorney,” Dean says.

Records show that Olavi Hendrickson earned a JD from the University of Florida Law School in 1936, served as an Army Air Forces intelligence officer in the South Pacific for 34 months, earned four battles stars, and was discharged as a first lieutenant in 1945.

From 1948 through 1961, Hendrickson rose from assistant Miami city attorney to Miami city attorney.

In February of 1961, Hendrickson made the crucial mistake of visiting the “Clover Club,” a once respectable dinner club on Biscayne Boulevard that had deteriorated into a seedy eyesore, and that the city was preparing to declare a public nuisance. The Clover Club was well-known for its “B-Girls,” or bar girls hired to lure patrons to buy drinks at outrageously inflated prices.

“They were serving more than just drinks,” Dean says. “You can use your imagination. The management wasn’t treating them well, and the conditions were pretty horrible. Organized crime was everywhere.”

Dean believes Hendrickson wanted to investigate conditions at the club before launching an enforcement action. Somehow, Hendrickson’s visit lasted eight hours, culminating with a ride home with police at 4 a.m. Someone tipped off the local media.

“The headlines wrote themselves, something to the effect of ‘Olavi’s Big Night Out,’” Dean says. “It looked really bad, and that was the story, at least on the surface.”

Hendrickson resigned his $17,000-a-year post under a cloud but agreed to stay on as a special legal assistant to Mayor Robert King High, who cited Hendrickson’s 13 years of experience as an asset. In the Summer of 1961, the Clover Club was torn down. Months later, Hendrickson vanished.

A Miami Herald story marking the anniversary of Hendrickson’s disappearance suggested that before he left, Hendrickson was receiving threats and had once been the victim of a beating.

Dean’s grandmother told the reporter that after her husband disappeared, she received a letter postmarked Jacksonville, but with no return address. The letter was in Hendrickson’s handwriting and listed the family assets. It also suggested the Hendrickson was tormented.

A Miami Yacht Club associate told the Miami Herald that he may have seen Hendrickson walking alone on a street in St. Thomas. Curiously, Florida Bar membership records show that Hendrickson’s law license remained active for several years after the disappearance, until it finally lapsed.

The trail goes cold for decades. Then, records indicated that in the early 1990s, Dean’s father filed a public records request with the Social Security Administration, possibly following up on a lead from a private investigator.

“The Social Security Administration responded in January of 1992, saying, ‘we have in our records that your father, Olavi, died in Missouri in 1979,’” Dean says.

But alas, more research resulted in another dead end, Dean says.

“I went to get the death certificate in Missouri or Kansas, and both came back that they had no record of a death certificate for Olavi, despite what the Social Security Administration said.”

There’s always the possibility that Hendrickson bolted to protect his family, Dean says. But without proof, she doesn’t know what to think.

“I’ve learned a lot about him, but I’m just still trying to figure him out,” she says. “As his granddaughter, I want to see the good in him.”

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