SKYJACK: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper

by Geoffrey Gray

  I look over at Himmelsbach. I feel good that I am here. I can finally end the retired agent’s uncertainty about the case. I anticipate the moment of monumental joy that will sweep over the old man when he sees a photo of Kenny and looks into the eyes of the man he’s been hunting for four decades. Hallelujah!

  I reach into my bag. I retrieve the mischievous-grin photo of Kenny. I place it on the table, grin side down. I ask Himmelsbach if during the investigation he and his fellow G-men ever investigated anybody at Northwest Orient—say, a lone-wolf employee who had an ax to grind with Northwest management?

  “No,” Himmelsbach says. “We had an awful lot of suggestions by people who said, ‘I think it’s an inside job.’ ”

  So why didn’t he look in to it?

  “It is inconceivable for several reasons,” he says. The main one is character. “If you were acquainted as I was with many of the people in the airline industry, they are exceptional people. They are head and shoulders above the standards and values and the character of normal average Americans.”

  So maybe that’s why Kenny was never investigated?

  I finger the photo on the table. I ask Himmelsbach to offer his expert opinion on my suspect. He turns the image over and eyes Kenny for the first time.

  “Not bad,” he says.

  I gush. I tell the agent about Kenny’s experience in the Paratroops, his jumps for extra money. I can see the ends of the old man’s mustache curl.

  I pass him Kenny’s records from the Paratroops, which prove much of what I’m telling him. They also contain details of Kenny’s physical description.

  Himmelsbach squints at the military form, ingesting the information. I think of the Pulitzer Prize committee again. Are there acceptance speeches? If so, what will I say?

  “Well,” he says.

  Well?

  “He’s too short, too heavy, and has the wrong-color eyes.”

  I leave Himmelsbach’s farm in a huff. I haven’t gotten my blessing, and the world’s foremost expert on the case has dismissed my suspect.

  It’s true. Himmelsbach has a point. Kenny is on the short side for a suspect. Most witnesses pegged the hijacker to be between the height of five-foot-ten and six-foot-one. According to his military records, Ken Christiansen was five eight. According to an old driver’s license that Lyle had, Kenny was as tall as five nine. That jibed with the description at least one witness, paint company owner Robert Gregory, had given. And how much can we trust the descriptions of the eyewitnesses on the flight? Aren’t eyewitnesses notoriously wrong, especially in dramatic situations? And how could they really tell how tall the hijacker was when he was sitting down throughout most of the flight? In photos, Kenny also seemed to have a longish torso, which would have made him appear taller than he was.

  It was unfair to dismiss Kenny because of his height.

  Plus Himmelsbach didn’t have all the facts. Kenny was not fat. At least not yet. The mischievous-grin photo was taken years after the hijacking, in the mid-1970s, Lyle said. In the fall of 1971, Lyle claimed Kenny was in decent shape. About 175 pounds, the same as the hijacker.

  And what was wrong with the color of Kenny’s eyes? On military records, they are described as “hazel.” Flo Schaffner reported them to the feds as “brown.” On a hijacked flight, who could tell the difference between hazel and brown?

  As an expert, Himmelsbach presents his own problems. As a pilot, his bias is toward the airlines. He confesses to not investigating leads about inside jobs because airline people are “head and shoulders above the standards and values and the character of normal, average Americans.”

  Bullshit. Somewhere in the airline industry, there have to be a few criminal minds. And considering Cooper’s familiarity with airplanes, and the venom Northwest employees had against Northwest, how could the feds not look at insiders?

  I pull onto the freeway. I follow the signs to Seattle, retracing the flight path of the hijacked plane. The landscape here is not a mythical tangle of impenetrable forest. This is the Willamette Valley, an agricultural wonderland prized for its rich soil, hops, berries, hazelnuts, Christmas trees, and pinot noir.

  I can see the land is flat and the grass is thick. The fields of farms are arranged in well-groomed squares. I get it now. This area along flight path Vector 23 is the ideal drop zone for a parachute landing. I imagine the hijacker, forty years ago, driving the same route north to Seattle, planning the hijack and peering out the window at the verdant land, wondering where to parachute down.

  Across the border into Washington, en route to Seattle, the landscape changes. Inside the forest, there are mossy thickets and brambles and vines. It’s dark and alive, a forest that watches you. I think of a line from a reporter who followed the first search teams into the woods after the hijacking. “The country is like a beautiful and moody woman,” he wrote. “It is itself a character in the story of D.B. Cooper.”

  December 5, 1971

  Woodland, Washington

  The weather is taking over. The search teams are stuck. Daily Teletypes are sent back to headquarters.

  FOR INFORMATION OF BUREAU, TERRAIN IN SEARCH AREA VARIES FROM A RIDGE LINE WHICH AVERAGES SEVENTEEN HUNDRED FEET AND DENSE WOODS WITH EXTREMELY HEAVY UNDERGROWTH.… THERE ARE MANY STREAMS AND HILLS AND MUCH OF THE TIMBERLAND IS ALMOST IMPENETRABLE.

  AIR SEARCH COMPLETED WITH NEGATIVE RESULTS. A TOTAL OF EIGHT HUNDRED SQUARE MILES WAS COVERED IN THIS SEARCH WITH NEGATIVE RESULTS AND IT WAS NOTED THAT IT CONSISTS MAINLY OF EXTREMELY ROUGH TERRAIN WITH A NUMBER OF LOGGING ROADS IN EXTREMELY POOR CONDITION.

  In Seattle, more names come in for agents to vet. Charles G. Whitaker, Donald Lewis Coleman, James Wayne Wallace, Monroe John Wobick, Daniel McCall Allen. In photos, some have greasy pompadours, combovers, long shaggy ponytails, crew cuts, spiky ears, bug eyes, droopy chins, snaggle teeth, cheap suits, ruddy faces, skinny faces, pale faces, hawkish faces.

  Bernie Condon is a bridge worker in Wichita with thick forearms. Frank Charles Emhoff has fat lips and a gap between his front teeth. Donald Wayne Vebeck is a Mississippi cop, Highway Patrol. Bobbie Lee Campbell has done time in San Quentin. Joseph Royce Stagg escaped from federal prison. Randall Ralph Snyder was arrested in Las Vegas. John Marl Nealer is another escaped prisoner. He has a paratrooper tattoo.

  In family photos turned over to the authorities, it is difficult to decipher the intent of the man on the couch gripping a beer or dressed up for a night out dancing. John Donald Page is cutting up a pumpkin for Halloween. Donald Eugene Collins has a name similar to the hijacker. D for Dan, D for Donald. C for Cooper, C for Collins. Someone overheard him talking about how to escape from a hijacked plane via parachute. Collins, the feds later learn, is training to be a sky marshal.

  More tips come in.

  In Cougar, another logging town, two men are reported to have checked into the Fir Motel late on the night of the hijacking. The men told the night clerk they were going fishing—but the area had been closed down for years. The next morning, they were gone. Who were they?

  One tip comes from a hitchhiker. Says he was picked up by a man named Monsebrotten, who was holding a lot of $20 bills. The call is a crank.

  Another tip, confirmed and verified, concerns a fixed-wing plane. On the night before the hijacking, the plane took off from a landing strip within the Cooper drop zone. Cooper’s getaway vehicle?

  “I was a little surprised to see a plane flying so low through the storm,” a witness says. “I thought to myself, What’s that nut doing up in the air on a night like this?”

  The feds locate the plane. It’s registered to a local pilot. The pilot is interviewed. He’d gone up for a ride in bad weather.

  A hunting cabin is searched. Agents trek deep into the woods to find it.

  The cabin is a dump. The walls are falling apart. Dust and grime coat every surface. On a countertop, agents find a receipt. It’s dated a month before the hijacking, for a purchase of $23.07 from Tweedy and Popp, a hardware store in Seattle. Ma
ybe Cooper purchased his bomb-making supplies at Tweedy and Popp? The owners of the store (Tweedy and Popp) are questioned and shown the Bureau sketch. They can’t identify the hijacker. A lot of customers look like the sketch.

  Arrests are made. One night, police pull over a car for speeding. A chase ensues. The driver is pushing 130 miles per hour. His tires blow out. His wheels burst into flames. The car grinds to a charred stop.

  Searching the driver in custody, police find an unusual amount of foreign currency: Canadian, Mexican, Chilean, Peruvian, Australian, Brazilian. All together, the foreign notes must be worth the same as Cooper’s ransom.

  News of the arrest leaks to newspapers and radio stations. Cooper is caught, early reports say. But agents learn the driver is Dutch and speaks little English. Witnesses on the hijacked plane would have detected his accent.

  In Portland, Ralph Himmelsbach’s house phone rings. A bartender reports another customer buying drinks for the bar and waving around a stack of $20 bills. Improbable. Himmelsbach gets up and gets dressed and checks it out anyway. No surprise. Another prank.

  Himmelsbach worries about copycats. If Cooper isn’t caught soon, others might hijack airplanes for cash and parachutes. The feds will have to fight off an epidemic of skydiving robbers.

  He thinks of D.O. Guerrero, a character in the bestselling novel and hit film Airport, which came out last year. A sweaty, nervous passenger, Guerrero is down on his luck, so he loads up on life insurance and tries to blow up himself and a plane on the way to Europe. Like Cooper, he fashions a bomb inside his briefcase. Himmelsbach thought the film shouldn’t have been aired. It could inspire imitators. Heck, Cooper himself could have watched it and decided to hijack Flight 305.

  In weeks, the agent’s fears prove true.

  Everett Holt is twenty-five. He made high grades, was the lead in school plays. A Quaker, he attended meetings. On Christmas Eve, roughly a month after the Cooper hijacking, Holt boards a Northwest plane in Minnesota and wields a revolver and fake bomb. He demands two parachutes and a $300,000 ransom, before surrendering.

  “It surely couldn’t be the same kid,” a friend says of Holt. But it was.

  Billy Hurst is twenty-two. On a Boeing 727 from Dallas to Houston, he pulls a pistol and claims to have a bomb. He wants parachutes and a ransom of $1 million.

  Richard LaPoint is twenty-three. He uses a fake bomb to hijack a DC-9 from Las Vegas to Reno. He demands $50,000 and parachutes. He jumps. On the ground, he is captured.

  Merlyn St. George is on parole from San Quentin. He uses a starter pistol and a fake bomb to commandeer a Mohawk Airlines plane from Albany to New York. Just like Cooper, he asks for $200,000 and parachutes. He holds a stewardess hostage by placing a pistol to her head. An FBI agent opens fire with a shotgun. St. George is killed in the blast.

  Stanley Speck is thirty-one. He is a National Merit scholarship winner and a Stanford graduate. He wears blue fatigues and threatens to blow up a Boeing 727 with a hand grenade. He wants four parachutes and $500,000. “He must have flipped his lid,” Speck’s mother says after his surrender. “I just can’t understand it.”

  February 18, 1970

  University Of Washington, Seattle

  There are complications. Another surgery is planned. That way, she won’t have to use a colostomy bag. From the nurse’s notes:

  Talked with Barbara for approximately 2 hours about her concerns. 1) Surgery. She feels that up to now most of it has been a failure. Wonders whether another attempt will be made at creating new vagina—hesitant to question doctors for fear it may anger them.… She asked if she could wear [a hat] as she was concerned about the appearance of her hair and the fact that it has gotten so sparse.

  8-11p [Patient] doing well. However was somewhat upset tonight after [unclear] phone calls from former “friends” asking that she no longer visit them.

  The second surgery is a success. Barb leaves the hospital to recover. She is living in a small house in Renton, south of Seattle. The sky is filled with Boeing airplanes. Renton is where the legendary 707 and 727 are manufactured. Renton is also where Boeing’s engineers are now busy trying to perfect the Supersonic Transport, a futuristic jet that can ferry passengers to London in only a few hours, and at the sound-breaking speed of 1,900 miles per hour.

  Designed to compete with the French Concorde and the Russian Tupolev, the Supersonic Transport program is controversial. The jet will fly too fast. Over time, the Supersonic will shorten the life expectancy rate, one scientist warns. Humans are not supposed to live life at those speeds. And the jets will be noisy and dirty. Across the country, activists and environmentalists complain that the sonic boom the jet will create will be a constant disturbance. Already, civic groups are complaining about the noise pollution of bigger planes and new airports.

  In Washington, President Nixon wants to keep the program going.Already, the government has given Boeing $1 billion for development costs. In Renton, the program employs some 1,500 people. Most domestic jets are made from aluminum, but one challenge for the jet’s engineers is to build the airplane out of titanium. It is heat resistant, and is a relatively new material for the Boeing engineers to work with. Titanium sponge, which is where the ore comes from, is mostly found in Russia. When Boeing competitor Lockheed was building spyplanes out of titanium in the early 1960s, the CIA used an elaborate network of cutouts to funnel the material out of the Soviet Union.

  Barb Dayton does not like the SST or Boeing’s planes. They clog up the sky and make it far too difficult for Weekend Warrior pilots like herself to simply take off on an afternoon. Near the giant Boeing fields and hangars, Barb Dayton rarely leaves her house. She wants to wear feminine clothes but can’t because short sleeves will expose her tattoos. She wants to wear lipstick but can’t because lipstick draws attention to her bad teeth. When she returns to the hospital for checkups, doctors remark how morose she is.

  She is aware that she is isolating herself from society. Lives alone in house in Renton ($60/mo. Rent), prior to this lived in trailor [sic] but moved when man threatened to kill her after she told him about her surgery “people like you don’t deserve to live.”

  She is broke. She needs a job but is too ashamed to apply for one. She cashes her welfare checks and shops at the Goodwill. Her clothes don’t fit. She considers suicide again.

  Volunteer, her doctors tell her. A job—any job—could restore her confidence.

  Her clothes aren’t nice enough for volunteer work, she says. Besides, how can she volunteer? She can’t afford the gas to drive to a job. And no, she doesn’t want help, doesn’t need any, won’t take any, it’s not her way.

  Her father, Elmer, offers her money to repair her teeth. No thanks, she says. She wonders about her children. Meanwhile, Dennis shipped out. He is in Vietnam. He looks like a boy wearing his Army helmet. He is addicted to heroin. Her daughter, Rena, ran away at age fourteen. She was living in a trailer with her mother, Dixie, and Dixie’s new husband. Rena was scared. She feared sexual abuse. She disappeared. Now she is living in Texas with a woman who tries to prostitute her.

  A year passes. Spring turns into summer and now it’s fall and soon it will be Thanksgiving. Barb has always spent Thanksgiving at home with her family—but as Bobby. How can she go home? Now her brother, Bill, won’t even talk to her. “My brother is dead,” Bill says.

  Barb is truly alone. She writes a letter to her children. She tells her parents to give the letter to them “some day.” It reads:

  Dennis and Rena,

  I know you have both wondered why I’ve remained so distant and never tried to contact you the last few years. To be brief, no matter how hard I’ve tried in the past, I have never been able to accept myself as a male, and nearing the brink of possible suicide, I submitted myself to extensive medical and psychological research. It was determined that I was a transsexual. Physically a male, but more basically a female. In December 1969, I underwent conversion surgery for sex reassignment. I am no longer a would-be
man and I have my true identity now, and am much happier for it.

  Please don’t hate me for what I’ve done. Life is full of the unexpected.

  BARBARA DAYTON

  ROBERT DAYTON

  January 6, 1972

  McChord Air Force Base, Tacoma, Washington

  On the tarmac, the Northwest jet is waiting. The goal of the test flight is to find out where Cooper’s parachute came down. Agents want to determine why the “pressure bump” occurred in the cabin of the hijacked plane, and when, to pinpoint a more accurate drop zone. Harold Anderson, the flight engineer on the Northwest 305 flight, is here to monitor the dials of the cockpit, to see if the reactions are similar.

  The original plan was to have a parachutist mimic the hijacker’s jump and see where he landed. That plan has been scrapped. What if the test parachutist is speared on a tree? What if his chutes don’t open and he dies? And do they need him anyway?

  The same results can be achieved, agents feel, with a simulation. They’ve built two sleds that weigh more than 200 pounds, roughly the same weight as the hijacker plus his cash bundle. The plan is to drop the sleds over the Pacific Ocean and monitor the jet’s gauges.

  Inside the cabin, agents wear headphones to protect their ears from the blast of engine noise once the aftstairs are released. They snap photos of Air Force personnel as they don parachutes and parachute helmets. Another Air Force plane flies alongside the Northwest jet to record the experiment on film.

  It’s sunny and clear above the clouds. Over the Pacific Ocean, the jet stabilizes at ten thousand feet. In the cabin, agents watch as the aftstairs are opened and released. A blast of air and noise rips through the cabin. The stairs do not lower on their own. As Northwest engineers predicted, the slipstream under the jet’s belly pushes up against the hydraulics. The stairs cannot get into the locked position. They are suspended in midair.