SKYJACK: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper

by Geoffrey Gray

  But that was forty years ago! I plead with Tina for an interview. She agrees to a follow-up call.

  Never going to talk to her again, I think. But she picks up.

  “I’ve made a decision,” she says.

  I’m sending warm vibes through my fingers into the plastic receiver of my phone. I am ready to shop for plane tickets. I can be at her doorstep in Oregon in twenty-four hours—less, when you factor in the time change.

  “I won’t be part of the journey,” she says.

  It’s not fair. Why?

  “I don’t think I have to explain the reason why I’ve chosen what I’ve chosen,” she says.

  I try to persuade her. She’s part of history here. Her experience counts.

  “I will honor the decision I’ve made,” she says. “It’s about my personal choice.… It’s final for me.”

  I find stewardess Flo Schaffner in South Carolina. She is living here under a different name and prefers to keep it anonymous after what has happened to her. I fly into Columbia and walk out of the airport, and there she is, waving from behind the wheel of her car.

  The air is hot and sticky. I push through it and get in the car. Flo looks different than she did on the front page of the Minnesota Star the day after the hijacking. Her hair is short and frosted. She wears a tank top, and her biceps are ripped. A workout fanatic, she teaches classes at her local gym. That’s where she met Art Rish, her boyfriend. He’s a cop. He is sitting in the front seat.

  We drive to Lizard’s Thicket, a restaurant near the airport.

  It is Sunday morning and the booths at Lizard’s are filled with a post-church rush of dusted-off suits, dresses, hats, girls playing tag in Mary Janes. The menu is Southern and deep fried.

  Flo is also paranoid. Too many strange things have happened to her: agents knocking on her door, a pair of convicts approaching her on her wedding day. She feared for her life. She was the only witness to see the hijacker’s eyes. She could testify against him in court, put him away for the rest of his life. The first thing he would do, she worried, would be find her and, gulp, eliminate the witness. She’d look under her car for bombs. Turn over the keys real slow.

  I remove a few photos of Kenny. I place them on the table.

  She reaches for the image of Kenny in his Northwest Orient uniform. She stares deep into the grain of black and white as if trying to reacquaint herself with that night. Her hands are trembling. She reaches for another photo. She lays the image flat on the sticky countertop. Her eyes zoom in on Kenny’s face. She rubs it with her fingers as if she is touching up a charcoal drawing.

  Well, is it him?

  “The ears, the ears are right,” she says. “Yes, thin lips. And the top lip, kind of like this, yes.… A wide forehead, yes.”

  Then the hair.

  “Receding, yes, the two areas—yes, yes—sort of like this.”

  Flo is pushing down on the photo hard now, rubbing the image as if she is a medium and is now trying to summon the spirit of Kenny.

  “There was more hair, though.”

  The eyes?

  “About like that.”

  The eyebrows?

  “About like that.”

  I want to give Flo space. I look up and around the room. Tables are getting cleared. The smell is heavy on lard, collards, Sunday-morning ham. Older men are hunched over their food, sipping sugary soda from straws. The hijacker would be about their age by now, mid to late eighties. I wonder if I could recognize Cooper now if I saw him in the back of a plane forty years ago. I doubt it.

  “I think you might be on to something here,” Flo says.

  “Really?”

  “But I … I can’t say … ‘Yea.’ ”

  That’s not what I want to hear.

  What about the other suspects she’s seen? How does Kenny compare?

  Of all the suspects, Kenny is the closest match, Flo says. But she doesn’t feel comfortable saying definitely, absolutely, without question, this is the guy. It doesn’t mean no. It also doesn’t mean yes.

  I ask her about Tina’s silence. Why does Flo think Tina won’t talk about the case?

  “She’s hiding something,” Flo says. But what? Flo doesn’t know.

  I don’t either. Tina, what are you hiding?

  I ask Flo about the hijacker’s manner, his vibe. Was he alpha macho tough guy or soft and bashful? Did she think he could have been, as Ken Christiansen was, gay?

  No, Flo doesn’t think so. But how could she know for sure?

  Plus, the case was bizarre. So many strange things happened after. She took a month off from work to clear the night from her mind; then a man started following her like a shadow. He boarded Northwest planes she was flying on. Why was he stalking her?

  “I know the hijacker, from prison,” the man said. “He wants to talk to you.”

  Flo pushed the man away, told him to leave her alone.

  He resisted.

  “I want to tell you, this guy is not just a hijacker,” the man said. “He was in the Bay of Pigs. This guy works for the CIA.”

  June 29, 1972

  Salt Lake City, Utah

  Richard Floyd McCoy Jr. has no good closing arguments. In fact, he has no legitimate defense. Agents found $499,970 of the ransom in his closet. They matched handwriting samples. The question before jurors is not whether McCoy is guilty of air piracy. The question is whether he should be sentenced to death, or serve out forty-five years in federal prison. The official who may have the most control over how much prison time McCoy serves is Bernie Rhodes, chief probation officer. If jurors opt to spare McCoy’s life, Rhodes will interview McCoy and prepare a sentencing report for the judge.

  Throughout the trial, Rhodes has been observing McCoy’s behavior in the courtroom. Rhodes notices McCoy is making funny faces at his daughter, Chante, and toddler, Rich, in the front row of the courtroom, making them laugh. One morning, before the judge and jurors and lawyers arrive, a pair of marshals escort McCoy into court and Chante sidles up to him. McCoy holds out his palm. Inside is a yellow spinning top. How did McCoy manage to get the toy in jail, Rhodes wonders, and smuggle it in for his daughter?

  During closing arguments, the judge makes an announcement.

  “Something that pleases this court and I’m sure has been weighing heavily on you people’s minds,” he says, “is whether or not you’d eventually have to give this fellow the death penalty. Well, the court’s gonna help you solve that little problem right now. You can, as of now, dismiss that dilemma from your minds.”

  This morning in Washington, the Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional. McCoy’s life has been spared.

  In handcuffs, McCoy is escorted out of the courtroom. He walks past Rhodes, who will interview him in jail the next day. McCoy then passes a female journalist. McCoy can’t miss her. Blond, tall, leggy. She wears red ladybug lipstick and matching red heels.

  “Wish me luck, ma’am,” McCoy says to the goddess.

  She nods, stomps out her cigarette, and turns to Rhodes.

  “Was it Hemingway?” she says. “Damn it! Or Steinbeck? Or who in the hell was it? Well, whoever it was that had the good sense to come up with it must have been thinking of our boy McCoy when he came up with the line: You show me a hero and I’ll show you a tragedy.”

  The jury finds McCoy guilty in under two hours.

  After the courtroom closes, the feds camp out in the law library. The agent who investigated McCoy’s case, Jim Thiessen, lights a Winston and paces in his penny loafers. Russell Calame, who recently ran the Bureau field office in Salt Lake City, removes an initialed handkerchief and mops his brow. The agents discuss the case they failed to make. All along, they have been convinced McCoy is D.B. Cooper.

  They’ve been able to match up physical evidence. During his investigation, Thiessen showed the photos of Cooper’s black clip-on tie left in the rear of the Northwest 305 plane to Denise Burns, McCoy’s sister-in-law, and Mildred Burns, his mother-in-law; both identi
fied the tie and tie clasp as belonging to McCoy. Thiessen also showed the photos to Robert Van Ieperen, McCoy’s state trooper friend. From Thiessen’s report:

  ROBERT VAN IEPEREN advised that MCCOY likes to wear conservative solid-colored clip-on ties similar to the tie recovered after the hijacking of a Northwest plane on November 24th, 1971. VAN IEPEREN stated he had been out socially with MCCOY and recalled that at a movie one night MCCOY wore a clip-on tie and removed the tie when he sat down to watch the movie.

  Thiessen paces, thinking about how to come up with enough evidence to charge McCoy with NORJAK.

  Probation officer Bernie Rhodes walks in the room. Thiessen and Calame get an idea: Maybe Rhodes can get McCoy to confess to the Cooper hijacking.

  Rhodes is familiar with the Cooper case. He wonders what proof the agents have.

  “That area isn’t as rough or forestlike as some people think,” Calame says about the Cooper drop zone in southwest Washington. “He should have been just fine. He walks or hooks a ride into Portland, next day catches a plane, or bus or whatever, back to Vegas.”

  Las Vegas?

  As part of McCoy’s background investigation, Thiessen assembled McCoy’s financial, telephone, school, National Guard, and auto records. On the morning of the hijacking, Thiessen found, McCoy used his Bank of America credit card to fill up the tank on his Volkswagen bug. The location, Thiessen found, wasn’t Provo, Utah. It was Cedar City, which is several hours south and east of Provo, directly on the way to Las Vegas.

  McCoy was in Las Vegas. That’s fact. On Thanksgiving, a day after the Cooper hijacking, McCoy’s home in Provo received a collect call from the lobby of the Tropicana Hotel. The time of the call was 10:41 p.m. Who else would have called McCoy’s home from the lobby of the Tropicana other than McCoy?

  McCoy was near the Tropicana, and on Thanksgiving, Thiessen found. The same day the collect call was made to McCoy’s home, McCoy purchased 5.6 gallons of gasoline only two miles away from the Tropicana, at the Power Thrust Service Station. The Power Thrust, Thiessen found, is located alongside the airport.

  The agents speculate. On the morning of November 24, the day Northwest 305 is hijacked, McCoy drives to Cedar City and then on to Las Vegas. Here, he boards a flight to Portland, where he then boards Northwest 305 as Dan Cooper. A genius setup.

  After bailing out, McCoy gets back to Portland the next morning, flies back to Las Vegas, picks up his Volkswagen bug waiting for him in the airport parking lot, tops off his car with gas at the Power Thrust, calls Karen collect from the Tropicana, and drives home to Provo.

  Rhodes is suspicious. He’s read up on the Cooper case.

  “How do you get around brown and blue eyes?” he says.

  Cooper had brown eyes. McCoy’s are blue.

  “First of all, we’re not sure they were brown,” Calame says. “The stewardess could have been mistaken.”

  And the Raleigh filter-tip cigarettes?

  The feds have researched the smokes. Raleigh is produced by Brown & Williamson and is the least popular of all the company’s brands, representing only 1.5 percent of all brands sold. So Cooper must have a connection to them.

  “If McCoy, a Mormon, smoked as part of his disguise,” Calame says, “he would have needed to buy a pack of cigarettes in the Portland airport. What brand would he choose? Well, it’s naturally going to be Raleigh, his hometown, his home brand, isn’t it?”

  The signatures of the hijackings were also similar. Both McCoy and Cooper sat in the last row of the plane, in front of the lavatory. Both used notes and one stewardess to relay information.

  Rhodes has a question. If McCoy was Cooper and got away with $200,000, then why four months later would he risk the death sentence and hijack United 855 for $500,000?

  “He lost it,” Thiessen says. During the first jump. “He lost the damn money!”

  “Got away from him,” Calame says.

  The jail in Salt Lake smells of stale coffee and cigarette butts. In an interview room, Richard McCoy waits for the questions. Probation officer Rhodes lights a Marlboro. He holds out his pack.

  “Do you smoke? Do you smoke cigarettes?”

  “Nope,” McCoy says. “I don’t use tobacco, but it doesn’t bother me when you do.”

  “Do you gamble? Shoot dice? This sort of thing.”

  “No. I don’t gamble. Don’t have the money to shoot dice. Don’t know how.”

  “Do you drink alcohol?”

  “Nope. I’ve had liquor a few times in my life, but when you’re ready to jot these things down for Judge Ritter, give him the truth: Richard Floyd McCoy Jr. doesn’t drink, smoke, or gamble.”

  Rhodes reaches into his bag and removes the Bureau’s sketch of D.B. Cooper. He places it on the table in front of McCoy.

  “If you can,” Rhodes says, “and I know this was a while back, but try to remember where you were last Thanksgiving, November twenty-fifth, and the day before, Wednesday, November twenty-fourth, 1971.”

  “Thanksgiving is still a holiday, isn’t it, so naturally I would have been around the house. I didn’t have school and I didn’t have Guard. I was home. Why?”

  “Cook or clean, or help Karen with anything she might remember?”

  “Yes. I cooked, yes, and helped Karen with Thanksgiving dinner.”

  Rhodes doesn’t waste time. He wants a confession.

  “What I’d like you to tell me is how you can be in Provo cooking Thanksgiving dinner and make a collect call from the Tropicana Hotel-Casino in Las Vegas at 10:41 p.m. that same night?”

  “And how do you know it was me who made the call? Could have been anybody.”

  “For the sake of argument, let’s assume for a minute that you’re right. You didn’t make that call. Someone else made it, okay? Well, I’ve got an even better one for you. Explain, if you can, how someone driving your green Volkswagen bug, North Carolina license plate number SA 1334, purchased 5.6 gallons of gas just after eleven p.m. Thanksgiving night at the Power Thrust Service Station in Las Vegas, using your credit card—Bank Americard #4763160217773—which is yours, isn’t it?—signed your name, Richard Floyd McCoy Jr., to that credit charge slip. How about it?”

  McCoy is picking his teeth with a paper clip.

  “How about it?” McCoy says. “You seem to have all the answers. You tell me.”

  “Why were you in Vegas during the Cooper thing?”

  McCoy holds his hand in the air as if swearing on the Bible.

  “How many times do I have to tell you? I helped Karen cook turkey dinner.”

  The next morning, Rhodes arrives at the jail for a follow-up interview. McCoy is crying. “I can’t even comprehend forty-five years,” he says. “Even if I got out in, say, thirty years.… Chante would be thirty-five years old; Rich, thirty-two. I don’t think I’ll put them through that. Or me either.” He is contemplating suicide.

  Again, Rhodes removes the Bureau’s sketch of Cooper. He lights a cigarette and goes through the routine questions: financial statements, statement of offense. Six, seven hours pass. Rhodes packs up his things.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” McCoy says.

  He is holding up the Bureau’s sketch of Cooper.

  “I don’t know,” Rhodes says. “Am I?”

  “That’s up to you. You wanted to talk bad enough yesterday about—you know, the other thing?”

  “What other thing?”

  “This thing. This guy here.”

  McCoy is flapping the Cooper sketch in the air like a Polaroid.

  “Do you or don’t you want to talk about this thing?”

  “What other thing? Be more specific.”

  “This other thing.”

  “Are you absolutely sure you know what you’ve got there?”

  “Yes. I know what it is, but I’m beginning to wonder if you do.”

  “You tell me then, what is it?”

  “Let’s just forget it,” McCoy says. He flicks the sketch across the room. “I think you’re having
a harder time, for some reason, than I am.”

  At dawn the next morning, McCoy is wrapped in six feet of belly chain that is threaded through his belt loops, handcuffs, and leg irons. He is escorted by federal marshals into an unmarked car. In the backseat, he watches the sun as it rises over the Wasatch range and the soft light flashes against the smokestacks of the Kennecott Copper Corporation, into Parley’s Canyon, past the Mormon temple.

  Six hundred miles later, it is dark. The marshals stop in Brighton, Colorado, and escort McCoy into the county jail where he will spend the night. The Drunk Tank, it is called. The next morning, the marshals come to take him to federal prison. He is not there. McCoy has escaped.

  November 23, 2007

  Seattle, Washington

  I’m back West again. Down the street, tourists descend on the ice beds of Pike Place Market to watch the mongers throw fish. The neon lights of diners and strip clubs like the Lucky Lady blink in the early darkness of the afternoon. It’s not raining yet. The Vietnamese noodle house is loud and crowded.

  Over a bowl of broth and beef and sprouts, Special Agent Larry Carr has news to report. The lab results are in. The physical evidence has come back from Quantico, and Bureau scientists have made a determination about the DNA evidence in the Cooper case.

  What is the news?

  There isn’t any. The samples aren’t reliable, Carr says.

  He’s bummed. His hope had been that the Bureau’s forensic scientists would be able to detect a fleck of genetic material—a hair, say, or dandruff—to use as a sample. Once Carr had the genetic code of the hijacker in place, he could easily rule out (or rule in) suspects.

  On the tie, Carr reports, the Bureau’s lab technicians did find a faint trace of saliva. But the sample is too weak to extract a full DNA code. Now Carr cannot use DNA to identify the hijacker. So much for his plan to send a grave-digging crew to Utah.