SKYJACK: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper

by Geoffrey Gray

  One afternoon, Dixie came home and found Bobby wearing one of her dresses. He tried to calm her down. He told her about his sickness. After a while, she came to understand, and they faked the marriage to protect his secret. When Dixie got pregnant again, Bobby knew he wasn’t Rena’s father, but he treated the baby girl as his own.

  The claim he purchased did not yield the gold he hoped. So Bobby traveled. Once, he went to prospect gold in the Yukon. A small plane dropped him into the bush, along with a guide he called the Crazy Indian. After a while, the Crazy Indian got sick. Bobby left to find help.

  Alone in the bush, he was without food and shelter. The natural world devoured him. The mosquitoes attacked in swarms. He stripped out of his clothes and jumped in a river to keep them from eating his skin. When the pilots of the rescue helicopter spotted him, Bobby was naked and running toward them. His first postcard home read:

  Had to be rescued. Out of food for eight days.… Need rest here for awhile. Any money would be appreciated.

  A few days later, he wrote again.

  I was the last one rescued. They dropped me some food by air and picked me up the next morning. I had gone about 8 miles back to see if there was any of the moose left we had killed about ten days before but the bear had eaten it … I had passed out several times that day trying to reach the moose and had wandered aimlessly four miles out of the way … All fine now.

  When Bobby came home from his trips, the world he left behind had changed. Once he learned Dixie had an affair with his brother, Bill. Another time, Bobby discovered she had taken up with another man from the Mother Lode and was divorcing him.

  He moved to Seattle. He found work in the shipping yards and lived in a boarding house. It was liberating for him to be alone, to cross-dress in peace. Then he met Cindy. She was a waitress. Eventually, she and Bobby married. They were a poor family. On the shipping yards the workers were striking and paychecks were scarce. They went bankrupt. The electricity and gas in the house were shut off. They used a gas lantern and camping stove to prepare meals. Finally, Bobby decided to go back into the Merchant Marines for extra pay. It was the summer of 1967, and he shipped out to Vietnam.

  When he got off the boat, the poverty was overwhelming. Bobby got jumped by a gang of kids, who stole six dollars from him. He woke up lying on the street in his own blood, watching the Vietnamese walk by. Why had nobody offered to help him up? What was wrong with this country?

  When he came home, Cindy was missing. She had taken off with another man. She had cashed all of the checks that Bobby had sent her. She had also taken his car. Bobby filed a report with the police, claiming she stole it. The police refused to file a charge. Isn’t she your wife, sir?

  Finally, he found her. They agreed to stay together as friends. At night, Bobby would wear a dress and cook dinner for Cindy and her boyfriend. Then they would all sit around the table and play cards.

  He moved to Baltimore, to be near Johns Hopkins University, where doctors were performing sex change operations. Bobby had no money. He didn’t eat for days. Doctors rejected his application for the surgery. How could Bobby adapt into society as a woman? His features were too manly. His teeth were bad. His body was covered in tattoos. He couldn’t be a pilot. He hadn’t found gold. He’d lost his family. He was broke. What was there to live for?

  Months later, at the training hospital on the University of Washington campus, Bobby finishes his written remarks before his operation.

  Society dictates that I live and work as a male, but laws cannot bend deep feelings and longings that tear me away from the maleness they stab me with. If I seem rough and coarse, blame it on society. They forced me to live in a man’s world. A world I’ve despised from the beginning. I no longer care what people think when they meet me, for I choose to stay the way I am now. When I venture out into the world again, it shall be as a female.

  November 26, 1971

  Woodland, Washington

  The morning light is a curtain of gray. The air is damp. The forecast is for more rain and sleet and snow. Seventeen squad cars are parked outside the police station. The sheriffs and their deputies have come from Clark, Cowlitz, Lewis, and Wahkiakum counties. A posse is in place. A media circus is forming, too, as reporters from across the country descend on southwest Washington to document the manhunt for the missing hijacker.

  Inside the Woodland police station, the searchers wear Stetsons and boots to navigate the muddy floor of the forest. On the walls are maps of the search area. The air search will be conducted by six fixed-wing planes, flying in a pattern. Helicopters will hover over the treetops. By radio, the planes and choppers will communicate with search teams on the ground. Boats will patrol Lake Merwin, a dammed-up reservoir.

  It is still unclear where the hijacker landed. In Minnesota, Northwest officials have their conversation with the Northwest pilots on the company radio transcribed. Within the transcript, they find this line: WE NOW HAVE AN AFT-STAIR LITE ON. The light from the aftstairs in the rear of the jet means the stairs had been lowered during the flight. According to a Teletype copy of the transcript, that report was delivered from the Northwest cockpit before 7:42 p.m. The transcription also bears this line: GETTING SOME OSCILLATIONS IN THE CABIN. MUST BE DOING SOMETHING WITH THE AIR-STAIRS. That report, 8:12 p.m.

  This data is at once precise and vague. What does oscillations mean? According to the flight’s engineer, Harold Anderson, the oscillations in the cabin refer to a “pressure bump” he noticed on the Northwest jet’s air cabin pressure dial. But what caused this pressure bump? Was it a change in the jet’s aerodynamics? A stormlike gust of wind? Or the hijacker bailing out?

  In Minnesota, Northwest’s engineers imagine a likely scenario. Hovering at 10,000 feet in the night sky, Cooper walks down the aftstairs. His own weight (plus twenty pounds of stolen cash) pushes the stairs down. But the combined weight of the hijacker and the ransom (roughly two hundred pounds) is not enough to force the aftstairs into a locked position—the slipstream of air running underneath the jet is pushing the aftstairs up. That leaves the hijacker teetering on the edge of the aftstairs, hovering on a perch over the dark forest below.

  He leaps. He slips and falls. However it happens, the Northwest engineers believe that after the hijacker departs the aircraft, the weight from the aftstairs is released; then, like a springboard, the slipstream pushes the aftstairs up toward the cabin of the jet. By closing the size of the open hole in the jet during flight, the cabin pressure changes. The meter inside the gauge oscillates. Hence, the pressure bump.

  But: when did the pressure bump happen? Was it at 8:12 p.m., the time recorded on the Northwest Teletype transcript? Or was 8:12 p.m. the time when the pilots reported it? How much time had elapsed between the bump and the report? What if the transcription was off? If so, what was the range of error? One minute? Five? Ten?

  In other crimes, the preciseness of a singular moment might not matter. But with an airplane moving 200 miles per hour, and thousands of acres of wilderness for the searchers to cover by foot, determining the exact time in which the hijacker jumped from Northwest 305 is critical. Engineers estimate the jet was traveling along the flight path at roughly three miles a minute. Given that the flight path itself is ten miles wide, a conservative estimate that the hijacker jumped between 8:11 p.m. and 8:16 p.m. would mean the drop zone in which the feds had to search for Cooper would be roughly 150 square miles. A drop zone that big is impossible to search by foot. Maybe the military can help?

  The largest base in the area is Fort Lewis, a massive Army compound that houses some twenty thousand troops. The military’s aeronautical engineers use flight information from Northwest 305 and other data, and with their most advanced computer systems produce a search area that is roughly twenty-five square miles. It is shaped like a diamond, and straddles Clark and Cowlitz counties in southwest Washington.

  Using this newly enhanced drop zone, agents dissect the diamond into six sectors—one per search team. At the cente
r of the diamond is Ariel, a logging hamlet that borders Lake Merwin. To get there from Woodland, sheriffs and deputies drive down country roads and pass the welcome sign:

  THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH: BUT … GOD’S GIFT IS ETERNAL LIFE.

  The forest is a fortress. The brambles are thick and untamed. It is hard to keep the line together as the searchers maneuver around fallen logs and sharp crevices. It is dark, even in the daylight, under the evergreens. On the ground, the fronds of giant ferns hide what lies underneath. The plumes of breath come out of mouths and noses like cigarette smoke.

  “You’ve got to look straight down,” a police officer says. “It sure limits the possibility of seeing anything.”

  The rain turns to snow.

  “If he was smart enough to plan it out this far,” a sheriff says, “he sure as hell won’t leave the parachute around for us to find.”

  “We’re either looking for a parachute or a hole in the ground,” an agent says.

  Overhead, the searchers can hear the engines of the fixed-wing planes and the helicopters. Back and forth and back again.

  In the woods, the searchers are not alone. Treasure hunters are after the ransom. At a gas station, a reporter from Seattle finds a college student filling up her tank. She drove up from Portland with two friends to hunt for the missing loot.

  “You start thinking about it,” she says, “and you realize maybe he didn’t live through the fall and there’s two hundred thousand dollars sitting all alone in the woods.”

  “Even a good Christian man” would keep the money, a farmer says. “A lot of people in Clark County are having to go on welfare because they lost their jobs. A man could buy himself a pretty nice farm with that kind of money—even if he had to go to Australia.”

  A reward is offered. The airline promises $25,000. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is offering $5,000 for information (and exclusive rights to the story) that leads to Cooper’s conviction.

  Throughout the Pacific Northwest, the hijacker is becoming a hero. One local paper declares: “While the FBI scrabbles for clues, America canonizes its new patron saint of system-fucking.” In small towns, civic groups include the hijacker in weekly programming. One sign reads:

  Thurs—Pops Concert

  Wed—Dad’s Club

  Tue—

  Mon—CONGRATULATIONS! D.B. COOPER

  “That guy is smart,” a waitress in Woodland says. “He’s probably in Mexico laughing about all these federal agents looking all over Washington for him.”

  D.B. Cooper. The name is everywhere. A bowling alley organizes the D.B. Cooper Sweepstakes. An unknown prankster places a classified ad in The Barometer, Oregon State University’s college paper: “David B. Cooper will be available to autograph his book Night Skydiving for Fun and Profit 8:30 p.m. at the bookstore, weather permitting.” Others build a mock grave on a country road east of Woodland, with a corpse fashioned out of driftwood. D.B. COOPER’S GRAVE, the sign says. DIED NOV 24 1971 FROM A FREE FALL. Entrepreneurs manufacture T-shirts. One design: “D.B. Cooper Fan Club.” Another: “Cooper Lives!” A local songwriter, Judy Sword, records “D.B. Cooper, Where Are You?” The song gets constant airplay.

  With your pleasant smile

  And your dropout style,

  D.B. Cooper, where did you go?

  In Woodland, in Battleground, in Ariel, in the logging towns that make up southwest Washington, agents knock on doors and stop drivers at roadblocks. Strange sightings are reported.

  “You don’t catch me sleeping very sound,” Jess Hatfield says. The seventy-five-year-old has been sleeping with his rifle next to his bed since the night of the hijacking.

  “I was up reading when I heard a noise at the side window.”

  He perked up in his chair. He fetched his shotgun. He watched the back door and saw the knob turn. Then the back door started to move.

  Hatfield had his gun up, finger on the trigger.

  “One more push and he would have had a bullet through him. I was ready to shoot him right through the panel … Yeah, it could have been [Cooper] alright.”

  The next morning, Hatfield looked for tracks. There were none.

  The forest here has a way of keeping its secrets hidden.

  “Right outside town is an old cemetery so grown up that the city can’t even find it,” one Woodland resident says.

  Overhead, loggers hear the constant rumble of search planes and helicopters rattle the windows of homes. A young girl listens to her parents talk about the man who jumped out the plane with all that money and is now missing. The girl mounts her horse, meets her friends, and gallops into the woods to find him. Amid the trees the children find a plane, a rusted-out two-seater. The windshield is gone. The cloth on the seats has deteriorated.

  “This is D.B. Cooper’s plane,” one of the girls says.

  In Seattle, reporters flood the city for local reaction quotes.

  “I hope he isn’t caught,” a military private says about the missing sky bandit.

  “The way I see it, anybody smart enough to take two hundred thousand just like that ought to make a clean getaway,” a taxi driver says. “I’m not saying he’s right, understand, but he plain had guts.”

  “Technically, of course, he should be caught,” a sailor says. “But in a way, I’m glad he got away. I can’t help thinking: If I were going to do something like that, I wish I could do it as well as he did.”

  An elderly woman in Seattle compares the skyjacker to John Dillinger.

  “Dillinger had a mean streak,” she says. “This man fortunately didn’t hurt anybody and somehow that seems to make a difference.… He was either very talented or very crazy.”

  At the University of Washington, Otto Larsen, a sociology professor, explains the phenomenon. “We all like adventure stories,” the professor says. “That hijacker took the greatest ultimate risk. He possessed real heroic features—mystery, drama, romanticism, a high degree of skill—all the necessities for the perfect crime.”

  March 1995

  West Florida Regional Medical Center, Pensacola, Florida

  She does not recognize him. A feeding tube is in Duane’s nose. His belly is bloated and big because his kidneys have stopped working. Duane is refusing treatments. His face is ashen and sallow. He sits in a wheelchair in his hospital room. Jo follows the doctor into the hall. How long will Duane live without treatments?

  “Five days,” the doctor tells her.

  She’ll have to plan the funeral, call his friends, his brother John, his sister Gwen. When will she pack up his clothes? Sell the antiques?

  Jo walks back into his hospital room. Duane’s hand is raised.

  “Come here, Josephine,” he says. “Come here.”

  He wants to sneak another cigarette, she thinks. She reaches inside her purse for her pack. They’re smoking Salems these days.

  He does not want a cigarette. He wants to talk. It’s important. He needs her to pay attention. Are they alone in the hospital room?

  She looks behind the curtain. The other bed in the room is empty.

  “I’ve got something to tell you,” he says.

  Soon his body will be pumped with morphine. Soon she will be making plans for his funeral. Which funeral home will she call? How many people will come? Who will write the obituary? Will the newspaper even print a story about his life?

  “I’m Dan Cooper,” Duane says.

  Dan who? She is confused. Did the doctors slip Duane a pill while she was gone? His abdomen is so bloated.

  Duane says the name again and says it different. He has a deep voice and when he says the name the second time he gives it a coo-koo sound, as if imitating the call of an owl.

  “I’m Dan Cooooooper,” he says.

  He rambles on about things he says he did, like jumping out of an airplane. She is not paying attention. What will life be like when he is really gone? Will she date again? Five days!

  Duane is furious. Jo is not paying attention. Jo always suffered from DBS, he s
aid. Dumb Blonde Syndrome. He is nearly screaming now. The nurses rush into his room.

  “Oh fuck,” Duane says. “Let it die with me.”

  She finds the morphine pills under his pillow a day later. Duane is hiding them, fighting the doctors. They place a morphine patch on his back. He gets sleepy. Woozy. Whoa. Out of it.

  One afternoon, Anne Faass, who worked for Duane at the Peddler, their antiques store, comes to see him in the hospital. Duane talks about a bucket.

  There was money in the bucket, Duane says. A lot of money.

  “$178,000,” Jo hears him say. “$173,000,” Anne hears him say.

  The bucket is gone, Duane says. He forgot where he put it.

  Day five. Day six. There is a military chaplain in the hospital. Duane wants to confess. Jo wheels him into a room to be alone with the chaplain.

  Day ten. Or is it day nine? She is sitting with Duane in the hospice room. He pulls her close.

  “I love you,” he says.

  The way he says it sounds as sincere as anything that has ever come out of his mouth. She cries.

  An hour later, Duane is jumpy, paranoid.

  “They’re gonna kill me, Jo! They’re gonna kill me!”

  He won’t stop talking. What are the doctors giving him?

  “Let’s get on down the road, Jo! Let’s get on down the road!”

  “The mommy wants to kill the baby, and the baby wants to kill the mommy.”

  “Take the baby downstairs. No, bring the baby back up. I can’t go until the baby gets here.”

  Jo sells what she can. After Duane’s death, she puts an ad in the paper for the Astro van he used to haul antiques to flea markets. Gets $3,800 for it. She also goes through his papers. She finds a receipt for a safety deposit box. Was Duane trying to hide money from her? She goes to the bank, presents Duane’s death certificate and their marriage license. A bank official goes to retrieve the contents of Duane’s safety deposit box for her. When he returns, he is holding a magazine.