SKYJACK: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper

by Geoffrey Gray

  This can’t be. There must be some genetic matter in the case. What about the Raleigh filter-tip cigarettes agents found in the ashtray near the hijacker’s seat? The filters of the smokes, I imagine, are probably soaked in saliva.

  Gone, Carr says.

  Gone? Where are they?

  Not in the Seattle evidence room. The cigs were in Las Vegas, where agents had deposited them after searching the plane in Reno. They must have gotten lost, Carr says. Or most likely thrown out.

  Thrown out? It doesn’t make sense. How could agents toss arguably the most critical piece of evidence in one of their most infamous unsolved cases? The rest of the evidence—the tie, the deployed parachute, the in-flight magazine—have all been preserved in evidence baggies. So why not the eight Raleigh filter-tip cigarette butts?

  We march up the hilly streets, away from the market. No longer in an old bank near the piers, the Bureau field office is on the corner of 3rd and Spring.

  Carr removes his wallet, swipes his badge, presses his finger against the pad. Now we’re in. Holy of holies. Here we go.

  Over the past few months, a letter-writting campaign—coupled with Carr’s desire to attract media attention to the Cooper case—has resulted in an I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening moment of unprecedented access to the confidential Cooper files. For years the file has been gathering dust in the basement archives of the field office building. Now, Carr has selected the major case files for my perusal.

  I follow Carr up the elevator and down the hall to another finger-scan pad and—voilà!—we are on the floor. On the far wall is a gallery of mug shots. Agents pass and I solemnly nod—should I really be in here?—and follow Carr to his desk. He collapses in his chair.

  I sit across from him and wait. Over the walls I can hear other agents talking about a case. I close my eyes and listen in. The agents are talking about a spy case. I strain my ears to listen harder.

  “Here,” Carr says, “This is the meat and potatoes of it.”

  He drops the files in front of me. They are as thick as phone books.

  I rub my hands together, blow on the fingertips. The cover is yellow and waxy. The pages are brittle. I read the words on the first page as if secrets are buried in the typeface.

  THE HIJACK, it reads.

  The dossier reads like a play. There’s Flo Schaffner, telling the feds about the bourbon and Seven-Up the hijacker ordered. And Alice Hancock, describing the hijacker’s hair as wavy. And Tina Mucklow, relaying the hijacker’s motive verbatim.

  “I don’t have a grudge against your airline, miss,” he said. “I just have a grudge.”

  I just have a grudge? I read the line again. Is this Kenny? It doesn’t sound like him. According to Lyle, Kenny’s grudge was not vague or universal. It was specific: Northwest. Is Lyle wrong about the motive? Or was Kenny playing coy with Tina?

  I dash off an e-mail to Lyle about the grudge line.

  “It sounds very like what he would have said,” Lyle writes back. “Kenny was at a time in his life when he hit a low and was wondering where his life was going. His siblings were having family life and he was still alone. I think he was so lonely that it hurt.”

  I plow through the file, reading hundreds of pages over several days. What I find is not evidence supporting Kenny. I find more Lyle Christiansens. The file is littered with suspicious brothers, parents, neighbors, business associates, scorned ex-lovers.

  “You’ve meant so much to me this past year,” one man writes in a letter, which his ex-girlfriend apparently submitted to the Bureau for analysis. “I’ll always love you (which you have to hear) but always felt that this is temporary and we would both move on.” There are names to go through, too many names. Maurice Chevelle. Dennis Panther. John Gortel. Bobby J. Brummett. Robert P. Carter. Billy Dean McConnell. James R. Parker. Donald Earl Collins. Ed Adkins. Scott Kaye Kingsworth.

  February 12, 1980

  Portland, Oregon

  Cameron David Bishop. Richard J. Jaquish. Gordon Dale Erwin. John Emil List. Earl Gene Larson. Doyle Wayne Harvell. Frank Taus. Russell Lee Cooper. Fred Angelo Catalano. William Francis Johnston Jr. Dan O’Halloran. Joseph Gilpatrick …

  At the Bureau field office in Portland, agent Ralph Himmelsbach is bombarded with leads. Himmelsbach can’t understand how one man could parachute out of an airplane and vanish. It’s as if D.B. Cooper never existed. Maybe he didn’t exist. Maybe that was the clue. Perhaps Cooper faked his own death?

  One tip of this sort comes in about a boater who went out on Lake Shasta and never came back. After a search, he was pronounced dead. Two years later, the same man is spotted pumping gas at a service station in Southern California. Going through records, agents find the man had serviced his car in Portland, and before the hijacking.

  Agents locate the man in Los Angeles, go to the address. It’s a porno bookstore. The man looks nothing like the Bureau sketch.

  More names, more leads. Peter A. Parlo. Everett R. Coovert. Paul Alan Van Riessen. Garnett Hollish. Lawrence Allison Hobart. Robert Hampton Keely. William Johnson Mason. Joseph Royce Stagg. Anthony Lambert Cole. John Henry Marlin. John Galvan Douglas. Robert K. Bertsch. Ronald Ross Newman. Max Arnold Freeman …

  There are others, arrested and questioned. Like the drunk man in Madras, Oregon, who was found sleeping on the street with $9,000 in cash in his pockets. Or the man who ordered coffee in a Fresno diner at 4:30 a.m. and tipped with a $50 bill. Or the steelworker who always wanted to be a paratrooper and never came back to work. Or the retired special agent living in a Washington boarding house.

  D. F. Franklin confesses. Franklin is the notorious skyjacker, he tells police. But when they interview him about what he remembers about the hijacking, his details are all wrong. A phenomenon is emerging. In the Cooper case, citizens are turning themselves in!

  Himmelsbach receives letters from psychics and patients in asylums. They knew Cooper personally, they claim. Some spoke directly to God.

  One letter comes from an inventor. After years of research, he tells Himmelsbach, he has created a machine that finds missing people. A sniffer, he calls it.

  Himmelsbach agrees to meet and check out the man’s sniffer.

  The inventor arrives at the field office carrying a black box covered in dials and gadgets.

  The way the sniffer works, the inventor explains, is that it smells an object that once belonged to the person. Then, using the inventor’s patented system, it computes a location.

  The inventor asks Himmelsbach for an object that belongs to the hijacker.

  Himmelsbach hands him a flashlight that belongs to his younger daughter.

  The inventor rubs the flashlight along the black box. Nothing happens.

  Professional treasure hunters emerge. Diving expert John Banks conducts his hunt for Cooper under the waters of Lake Merwin. To avoid publicity, Banks launches his custom-built submarine into the lake at night. Its high-power search beams illuminate the murky waters like a ballpark outfield.

  On his first dive, Banks descends. He sees giant trunks of dead trees through the sub’s observation portal. It is like maneuvering through an ancient forest. Diving deeper, he sees he is headed into the trunk of a massive tree. He braces himself for the crash.

  The trees are so waterlogged, his sub snaps through trunks and branches like pretzels. At the bottom of the lake, he catches his breath. He monitors his equipment. Then he hears the sound.

  Thump.

  What was that?

  Thump, thump.

  He looks out the portal. The branches of dead trees he broke through are now crashing around him. Thump thump thump …

  Banks spends months searching the ancient underwater forest. He finds nothing.

  The case almost dies. The statute of limitations for air piracy is five years. Before the deadline date, agents from the Bureau and prosecutors from the Department of Justice debate whether they should file a “John Doe” indictment and charge the hijacker in absentia. Technically, this woul
d make Dan Cooper a fugitive and extend the statute indefinitely. Internally, agents and prosecutors quarrel over what to do until the day of the anniversary. In Seattle, a prosecutor rushes to a grand jury to present the case. But Seattle doesn’t have a grand jury sitting. Portland does.

  Himmelsbach is the only witness. An indictment is returned in hours. The hunt is on for Dan Cooper, indefinitely. Himmelsbach wonders if the feds made a mistake in their calculations. Did Cooper land somewhere else and survive the jump? Could it be that the man they’re after is a local, living in the area, hidden in plain sight?

  Two weeks away from retirement, Himmelsbach is past the realization he may never catch that rotten sleazy bastard Cooper, may never take his elk. Then he gets a phone call.

  “Money has been found,” an FBI secretary tells him.

  The agent pays little attention. He’s been pranked dozens of times before. He asks the secretary to match the serial numbers of the found money to the list of Cooper bills.

  She already did. They match.

  The next morning, Himmelsbach waits for the finders of the money to appear. He is annoyed because they are forty-five minutes late.

  Dwayne Ingram and his wife, Patricia, drove here all the way from Vancouver, Washington, where they live. They recently moved from rural Oklahoma. Dwayne has a job painting trailers and cars. Patricia stays home and takes care of their eight-year-old son, Brian.

  Himmelsbach wants to see the money.

  Patricia removes a plastic baggie. She hands it to the agent. Inside he can see three clumps of old bills. They are caked together, dark around the edges like burnt toast.

  We were all on a picnic on Tena Bar, Dwayne Ingram says.

  Tena Bar is a sand bar along the north shore of the Columbia River. It’s where fishermen run lines for chinook and hippie kids go to swim, play drums, drink beer.

  On the beach, Dwayne wanted to build a fire, so he asked his son Brian to clear space in the sand. Brian dropped to his knees, smoothed out a patch and knocked the first bundle over. Then he found two more. The Ingrams wanted to take the money to a bank and cash it out, but a friend noticed the bills were twenties.

  “That’s Cooper’s money,” he said.

  The Ingrams asked about the reward. How much money will there be?

  Himmelsbach needs to check the bills first, to see if they are real. They’ll be easy to eliminate, he thinks, because the real ransom bills were issued in the years 1950, 1963, and 1969.

  Himmelsbach picks up a packet of bills. He reads the series number.

  “1963,” it reads.

  He writes down the serial number.

  “55376548.”

  He leaves the room to fetch the booklet that contains the serial numbers of the bills the hijacker was given. He goes through all ten thousand serial numbers, hunting for a “55.”

  It is a long search. The ransom money was used. The serial numbers aren’t in order. He looks for a 1963 bill combined with a “55.” He finds one. He compares the remaining serial numbers. It’s a match.

  Where did little Brian Ingram find that money again?

  Tena Bar, the Ingrams tell him. Along the Columbia.

  Himmelsbach looks at a map. The location doesn’t make sense. Tena Bar is roughly forty miles south of where the feds thought the hijacker bailed, and around five miles from the Northwest 305 flight path. How in the world did the money end up there? And where’s the rest of it?

  November 23, 2007

  Seattle, Washington

  “The real mystery is the money,” Larry Carr tells me. “The mystery of the money is almost more interesting than the mystery of who Cooper was. If you can figure out the money, that leads you to Cooper. It’s all about the money. The money is our only shot.”

  I ask Carr what his plan is now. Like the tie he sent to the Bureau lab in Quantico for a fresh forensic analysis, the money could be reanalyzed with modern techniques. Carr’s problem, though, is that the lab is backed up. Scientists don’t have time or resources to burn on cold cases.

  So what’s the strategy?

  Carr’s gone undercover, he says, in cyberspace. Under a fake name, he’s joined the Drop Zone, an Internet forum run by amateur D.B. Cooper sleuths. One of the most inquisitive (and caustic) is Snowmman, who refuses to identify who he is or what he does for a living. The most user-friendly is Sluggo_Monster, a nuclear lab consultant from Alabama named Wayne Walker who built N467us.com, or “Sluggo’s Northwest 305 Hijacking Research Site.” There is also 377, Orange1, an assortment of parachutists, former parachutists, parachute experts, and scientists. One is Georger, a retired lab whiz and entrepreneur named Jerry Warner. He grew up in the Cooper search area, and remembers talking about the Cooper case every Thanksgiving dinner.

  Carr’s plan is to leak information about the case on the forum for the cyber gumshoes to devour. If his bosses at the Bureau aren’t willing to spend resources on the Cooper Case, then maybe the Cooperites in cyberspace will help him. Carr’s handle: Ckret. It won’t be long before his cover is blown.

  377: I get the distinct feeling that Ckret is giving us taxpayers a free ride on much of the Cooper investigation.… Am I right Ckret?

  Ckret: You don’t trust me? I am from the government and here to help. How could you not trust an FBI agent … By the way, that book you checked out is two days late and at the moment your cell phone is off. Oh, and that web site you have minimized right now, I didn’t know people could do that, very strange.

  The cyber sleuths want to examine the money. Scientist Jerry Warner has a proposal. If the Bureau is too cash strapped for resources to investigate the money, why not farm it out? Warner has all the equipment in his lab. Plus Warner knows other scientists with equipment as advanced as anything the Bureau has in Quantico.

  Other agents might scoff at the idea of bequeathing criminal evidence to civilians in order to investigate a criminal case. Not Carr. Best-case scenario is they find something. If the Bureau holds on to it, nothing happens. With Warner, Carr makes plans to have the evidence examined outside the Bureau. But Warner is too old to conduct the forensic examination himself. He’ll need to take on a partner, and he knows the scientist for the job: Tom Kaye.

  The next day, I head south to attend the annual D.B. Cooper party at the Ariel Tavern.

  The Tavern is the only store in Ariel. It sits along the roadside, its shingled blue siding and clap-tin roof battling gravity. Out front, plants grow from a urinal. The entrance is covered in signs: THIS BUSINESS SUPPORTED BY TIMBER DOLLARS and UNATTENDED CHILDREN WILL BE SOLD AS SLAVES.

  Conventional wisdom is that the party’s origins are pure, an event based on admiration for the hijacker’s guts, and the celebration has taken on the feel of a séance. Each year, there is hope that if the partygoers dance hard enough and drink enough beer, the guest of honor—D.B.—will walk through the front door.

  “They always say the criminal comes back to his old haunts, and I think he’ll come back,” Germaine Tricola, the founder of Cooper Days, would say. In time, the Cooper party became part of the Cooper legend, and they’ve both worked to keep each other alive for the past four decades. President Jimmy Carter called in once.

  Some years, before the bands played, hundreds of partygoers were offered search tours, parachute jumps, seaplane rides, a D.B. Cooper look-alike contest. Lunch and dinner were the same: buffalo stew served with slices of buttered white bread.

  News clippings are spread along the walls. In the old photographs, loggers with mutton-chop sideburns sit around the store’s woodstove. One man presses two beers against his head to simulate antennas. A band is jamming, playing the Cooper ballads.

  He said I beg your pardon ma’am a big bad bomb it’s true,

  But I won’t set if off if you don’t put me in the mood.

  Just take me to Seattle and we’ll put down for to land,

  And I’ll sell you back your airplane for a cool two hundred grand.

  I am not drunk. I should be. I sho
uld be cursing Ken Christiansen and his brother, Lyle, for sending the wacky letter to Nora Ephron. Is this the final scene of Lyle’s The Bashful Man in Seattle? The gullible reporter who flies around the country hunting for the ghost of a purser.

  I look around the room. The light in the tavern is soft and murky, like the glow of an old Coleman lantern. A parachute canopy hangs over picnic tables and twinkle lights are laced through old license plates and taxidermy. Near the cash register is Cooper gear: T-shirts, matchbooks, mugs. Inside a hot dog roaster, a lone frankfurter spins away. The band is on break. I’m on my second bowl of logger stew and chasing it down with a cold can of beer when I see them. They are standing at the tavern door.

  The older man is shorter. His hands are buried in his pockets.

  His friend is younger, taller, stout. He is holding a three-ring binder.

  I introduce myself.

  The shorter man is Ron Foreman. He’s an airline mechanic.

  The taller man is Cliff Kluge. He is a Delta pilot.

  “The reason we’re here, is my friend Ron has a story to tell,” Kluge says.

  Ron can’t get the words out of his mouth.

  “Yeah, you see, it’s just one of those things that when I tell people, the first thing they do is just, well, freak out, and their mind closes up and they say, no way, you’re crazy.”

  “You have to have an open mind,” Kluge says.

  “Nobody takes us seriously, not even the FBI! We went to them, we got a lawyer. They didn’t even call us back!”

  We sit down. Kluge opens the three-ring binder. He points.

  The photo is of a man standing in front of the propeller of an old Piper Super Cub airplane. The man has light sandy hair. He is thin and lean.

  Kluge thumbs through the pages. He points again.

  This photo is of a woman. She is middle-aged. Light hair. Dark horn-rim glasses. She is standing in front of an old Cessna 140. Her pose is similar to the man in the previous picture. Behind her are tall trees. I squint. I can see she is holding a cigarette in her right hand.