SKYJACK: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper

by Geoffrey Gray

  One fall night, making the drive from Tuskegee back to Virginia Beach, McCoy gets a strange feeling. He is talking about God, the Mormon church, the stillness of the ocean.

  “Tell me again,” McCoy says, “what’s the name of those evergreens along the front of the house?”

  “Arborvitae,” Walker says. Means “tree of life.”

  “Arborvitae. Arborvitae,” McCoy says, forcing himself to remember the name.

  McCoy pulls onto Great Neck Road. He does not want to enter the house. What if somebody has given them up?

  “It’s your turn,” Walker says.

  McCoy pulls over the car. He places a pistol in his waistband. He jogs toward the house, strolls up the front walk. He turns the key.

  The orange glow of streetlights floods the window in the front room.

  He hears the crackle of a radio in the other room. It is blaring voices.

  He reaches for his gun. He hears a scream.

  “FBI! … Close the door. Be quiet.”

  Gun sparks fly in the dark. It sounds like cannonballs have gone off.

  “I’m killed,” McCoy says.

  He stumbles. He falls back through the front door, onto the porch, into the Arborvitae bushes.

  “Somebody run!” an agent says. “Get some bath towels! Before this man bleeds to death.”

  “Fuck him,” another agent says. “That son of a bitch just tried to kill me.”

  The agents hover over McCoy’s body. It is too late for a D.B. Cooper confession. The coroner is called.

  February 28, 2009

  Battleground, Washington

  I pull into the parking lot of the Best Western in southern Washington. It’s my fifth trip to the state—no, my sixth. I can’t remember. I can’t remember what I am looking for. The ghost of a closeted airline purser who lived with young boys and looked exactly like an FBI sketch that may not have looked like the hijacker at all? Or a gold-obsessed trans-gender librarian-pilot who had a grudge against the airlines? Or am I after a fanatic of Dan Cooper the comic book hero? Or should I stop looking and wait for scientist Tom Kaye to break open the case with his microscopic scientific thinking?

  I am here to document Kaye’s fieldwork. I am not alone. Tom has assembled a team that has traveled across the country to help him analyze the money. The technical brain will be Alan Stone, a metallurgist from Chicago whom Tom knows from the dinosaur world. Another dinosaur buddy is Carol Abraczinskas. She is a scientific illustrator from the University of Chicago. She’s here to help in the field and draw pictures for Tom’s planned scientific paper. Also with us is the little boy who found the money, Brian Ingram, who is not so little anymore. Tom flew Brian in from Mena, Arkansas, and offered to pay for his trip. Brian knew the area; after all, he found the money there. He is also press bait. The story of the boy-turned-man who returns to the spot that changed his life, Tom hopes, will entice reporters to cover his fieldwork.

  The last member of the team is a last-minute addition: Jerry Thomas. For help navigating the woods in the Washougal area, Jerry is a natural choice. He’s been looking in the area for Cooper’s body and ransom for the past twenty-two years.

  Tom is ready to get started. Tall and lanky, he wears simple blue jeans, a blue sweatshirt, and black sneakers that are worn out from walking across Montana hunting for T. rex teeth. He is hungry because he gets hungry when he is anxious. Tom buries his head in the rear of a rental minivan. It’s stuffed with science equipment: test tubes, notebooks, sample jars, and a fishing rod to which he’s affixed a bundle of cash to test its buoyancy. The equipment and tests, he hopes, will confirm his “explosive” hypothesis—which he revealed to me, under the provision that I not reveal it until now. So, here it is.

  Think of the plaque on your teeth. It forms, over time, from bacteria that grow and collect. Well, the silver on the Cooper bills that he saw under his microscope formed in a similar way, Tom hypothesizes.

  His first step was to call Alan Stone (“my metal guy”), who looks exactly how you would imagine a metallurgist to look: spectacles, mustache, fanny pack. He runs Aston Labs, a metals research firm in Chicago. When Tom discovered silver on the bills in his lab in Arizona, he sent the images to Stone for his opinion.

  Yes, definitely silver, Stone confirmed. But how did it get there?

  Together, the scientists gazed at Tena Bar on Google Earth. The sand on the beach where Brian Ingram found the Cooper bills, they saw, was not white and powdery. It was black.

  After studying the properties of silver, Tom and Alan learned that microscopic traces of silver can seep out of sand. And when silver comes into contact with a porous and natural element—like the linen that money is made from—a chemical event takes place. “Bacterial ooze,” as Tom puts it, would seep out of the sand and form on the bills and protect them from the elements. This ooze, like a plaque, would explain all that black stuff he first saw.

  But the Silver-in-the-Sand theory, if true, is limited. Other questions remain. How long had the money been at Tena Bar to develop the microscopic plaque? And perhaps more important, how did the money get there in the first place?

  Tom thinks the feds goofed. Tom is not the first Cooper hunter to suspect that the real drop zone was not where the feds were looking.

  After reviewing data about the flight path, amateur sleuth Wayne Walker (Sluggo_Monster) found the error on a timeline that charted Northwest 305’s position. A licensed pilot, Walker found minutes 8:01, 8:02, 8:03, and 8:05 all accounted for. So where was minute 8:04?

  The Missing Minute, as Walker’s catch came to be called, suggests that Cooper had to have landed, at the very least, three miles farther south than what agents first thought. Using the Bureau’s old data and modern mapping techniques, Walker composed a digitally enhanced drop zone. Walker now believes Cooper landed thirty miles south of Ariel, around the town of Orchards, roughly fifteen miles from the Columbia River.

  Tom envisions a different scenario. Teetering over the night sky on the aftstairs of Flight 305, the hijacker sees the glow of city lights from Portland. He jumps. Not being able to steer the NB6 a great deal, he floats down toward the Columbia River and lands in it. He floats downriver toward Tena Bar and loses the money. Or loses some of the money. Tom does not know how. Perhaps the hijacker died of hypothermia in the Columbia and got washed out into the Pacific as the wakes of freighter boats pushed the ransom money to shore. Or perhaps the hijacker sank to the bottom of the Columbia and then got shredded in the giant blade of a passing cargo freighter, which cut up the money bag and sent two hundred packets of ransom bills floating through the water.

  Tom is not the first to arrive at this conclusion. A number of Cooper hunters spent years analyzing the case and came to believe the hijacker landed in the Columbia. One retired federal agent even went through the hassle of having the riverbed raked. But until now, nobody has been able to prove it. Tom feels he is on the verge.

  “Hey, Tom?”

  “Yes, Jerry.”

  Jerry Thomas has stepped out of his massive pickup truck. He drove five hours over the Cascades from Baker City, where he now lives, to be with us. He clutches a vintage-looking suitcase that is powder blue.

  Jerry looks different than I thought he would. I expected a hiker type with a long beard, a ponytail, dressed in microfleece made from tennis balls and late-edition hiking boots. But Jerry’s cheeks are clean shaven. He wears dark trousers, an untucked button-up that drapes over his belly. On his feet are Wal-Mart sneakers that Velcro shut; they are the only shoes Jerry can wear because of his swollen feet, one of many postcombat ailments. Jerry is a few years older than Tom, and there is silver hair under a baseball cap that says THE WALL, a memento from one of his many trips to the Vietnam War memorial. His eyes are his most noticeable feature: dark, unyielding. Drill-sergeant eyes.

  “I know you’re an archaeologist, Tom,” Jerry says, “so I brought back a coin for you I found up in the woods.”

  Jerry hands Tom the coin. It is s
heathed in plastic.

  The coin is a test. Jerry is skeptical of Tom. He wants to find out how serious a scientist Tom is. Jerry knows there is no conceivable way in the universe a coin like this one could be found in the Washougal area. It’s an Asian piece, hundreds of years old and from Jerry’s coin collection. So how will Tom react? Will he respond in a glib way, look at the coin briefly and say, Oh, wow, Jerry, that’s really neat? Or will he see the markings on the coin and, in a sincere and astute way, call Jerry’s bluff?

  Tom inspects the coin. He hands the coin back.

  “I appreciate that, Jerry,” he says, “but I’m a paleontologist. The difference is that archaeologists deal with uncovering the history of people that goes back hundreds of thousands of years, and paleontologists study everything before that. We like to say, ‘We don’t have to deal with people’s problems.’ ”

  Jerry moves on. He scans Carol Abraczinskas with the drill-sergeant eyes. Carol: late thirties, bookish glasses, North Face jacket.

  Jerry moves on to Brian Ingram, scans the little boy who found the Cooper treasure. Brian is thirty-eight now. It’s hard to imagine—in Cooper lore, Brian is forever a young boy in the newspaper pictures. Photographers captured him on his knees in the sand on Tena Bar, showing agents where he found the money. He had bowl-cut hair, a toothy grin. He’s achieved what all boys dream of: finding buried treasure.

  As a grown man, Brian remains strangely youthful, as if his life peaked when he was eight and he has been trapped in that moment ever since. The toothy grin is the same, only now Brian is a bit overweight, has a goatee, and wears a jockey cap that covers thinning hair.

  Brian has been in the news recently, having auctioned off several Cooper bills.

  “Shame you had to sell those bills,” Jerry says. Alimony can be a bitch and he knows all about it.

  Brian has to think. Did Jerry use the word “alimony”? How does Jerry know the real reason Brian auctioned off those bills?

  In the lobby of the Best Western the front-desk girl peers into the screen of her phone, the silver shine of her nose ring illuminated by its glow, waiting for the next text message to appear. The guests who rent rooms here are truckers hauling freight, high school kids on prom night.

  It is late, almost midnight. We are in our War Room, which doubles as the Best Western’s complimentary breakfast room. Tom is at the head of the table, Jerry at the other. The plastic silos of cereal are behind us.

  I look out the window. A freight train rumbles by.

  “Fuck the word ‘oscillations,’ ” Tom says.

  Our conversation is about when the hijacker jumped, and the language the Northwest pilots used around the time the cabin pressure gauge began to spiral out of control. The lack of clear data bothers Tom. As a scientist, he needs exact measurements and exact terms. What does some of the vague language in the flight transcriptions mean?

  “The whole story is the ‘pressure bump,’ ” Tom says. “Are ‘oscillations’ and ‘pressure bump’ the same thing?”

  He picks up two salt shakers and a pepper shaker. He points to a crack in the table.

  “Okay,” he says. “The crack right here is the flight path.”

  He holds up the salt shaker.

  “Salt number one,” he says, “is where Cooper took off in Seattle. Salt two,” he says, “is where the FBI thinks he bailed.”

  And pepper?

  “Pepper,” he says, “is where Brian found the money.”

  Brian remembers it—or, he remembers moments. He remembers Tipper, the old fisherman who had a gray beard so long he could tuck it into his pants. Tipper showed Brian how his fishing rod worked, how the bell at the end of the rod rang when a Chinook tugged his line. Brian remembers George, the family dog, and his smelly breath. George was part timber wolf; he was a watchdog for a gas station until the Ingrams won him in a card game. George would trap Brian under his legs and lick his face and not let him go.

  He remembers his father wanting to cook up hot dogs. He remembers getting down on his knees and clearing out the sand and smoothing it out with his arm like a broom, and then his arm touched the corner of the first packet of bills.

  He wonders how he remembers these things. He was only eight.

  There is another version of the story. After Brian’s discovery was reported in the news, members of his family came forward. Brian didn’t find the money, his aunt Crystal said. It was Denise, Brian’s five-year-old cousin. Crystal Ingram went to the FBI shortly after Brian’s parents did. She was entitled to a reward too, she said.

  Himmelsbach questioned her. What evidence did she have that it was her Denise who found the Cooper bills?

  Crystal produced four additional Cooper bills.

  Asked about the four additional bills, Brian’s parents said Crystal was out for the reward and made the story up. Himmelsbach came to believe that it was Brian who actually found the money, but how could the agent really know? And how could Brian?

  My motel phone is ringing. I look out the window. It is dawn, the next morning. Who is calling? Who knows I am here?

  I roll over, pick up. Hello.

  It’s Jerry. He’s talking fast, as if he’s been up all night. He says he wants to get out of the hotel and get up to the Washougal area and get our feet moving through the woods up there and to hell with the sand tests at Tena Bar and water samples that Tom has planned for us this morning because really, what’s the point of that?

  He’s ready to go, whenever I am. Am I ready?

  I want to go back to sleep.

  Jerry starts to complain about Tom, how he is so controlling.

  “Everyone needs to have a few beers,” Jerry says. “Get the keys out of their butts.”

  I drive with Jerry to breakfast. I’m in the backseat of his pickup and he’s got his foot on the gas, cranking his rig, blazing past the Radio Shack and Mexican strip mall taco joints and empty Main Street storefronts.

  Somewhere in the backseat is a 9-millimeter pistol Jerry claims he keeps when he camps out near the Washougal River. I look on the floor. I spot the biggest package of economy-size frankfurters I have ever seen, a case of Dr. Pepper, and the small powder blue suitcase. What’s in there?

  Brian is in the front seat. He has his headphones on. Jerry is talking to him. Brian takes off the headphones.

  “I’m going to blast something into their minds,” Jerry says. “I’ve been holding it long enough. I have to tell it to him straight.”

  “No need to be crooked,” Brian says.

  Jerry smacks his hand on the steering wheel. The louder he talks, the faster he drives.

  “Murphy’s Law,” he says. “That’s what nobody has talked about. MUUURRR-PHEEZZZ Law. What can go wrong?”

  He’s interested in the errors of the case, what mistakes the hijacker made. On every mission, at least something goes wrong.

  “Nobody has talked about that,” Jerry says. “I haven’t heard any talk about that.”

  He complains about Tom.

  “He’s too damn controlling,” Jerry says again. “I’ve spent twenty-two years out there. Today I’m going to bring it up. I’m not going to let him get away that easy. We’re asking the wrong questions to get the right answers.”

  “Jerry,” Brian says, “can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure, Brian. You go ahead. You ask me anything you want.”

  “Jerry, tell me how it feels … I mean, seriously, tell me how it really feels … to know that for the last twenty-two years you’ve been up in those woods looking in the wrong place.”

  Jerry believes Cooper landed in the Washougal. But Tom is on his way to proving Cooper landed in the Columbia, several miles away. If Tom can prove his theory, he will also be proving that Jerry’s quest has been off. Way off. In a way, Tom’s science is threatening the identity and reputation Jerry has built up looking for Cooper along the Washougal all these years. Tom’s science is also threatening the theory Ralph Himmelsbach had espoused, a theory that Jerry has
devoutly followed, and one that’s triggered an almost paternal relationship Jerry has formed with Himmelsbach.

  These are high and personal stakes, and the battle brewing between Tom and Jerry is becoming a fight between logic and intuition. As a scientist, Tom is looking for data to prove his case. As a former soldier, Jerry is using the raw instincts of a hunter to challenge Tom’s methods.

  In his pickup, Jerry pushes the gas. He’s getting upset.

  “If they don’t like it, fuck ’em,” Jerry says. “Can’t take a jab, shit.”

  After breakfast, I ride with Tom, metallurgist Alan Stone, and Carol to Tena Bar. Tom’s minivan was special ordered to come with power outlets. His laptop is plugged in and propped up. Tom watches the computer screen and follows our movements via satellite. One eye is on the road, the other on the virtual road on the laptop. Tom is anxious to get there on time because a local television station will meet us at Tena Bar, and a documentary crew from National Geographic.

  Tom looks in the rearview mirror. He fixes his hair into place.

  “For those of us who haven’t been on TV much, you take pictures of us and we’ll take pictures of you,” he says.

  Noticeably missing from Tom’s team is Jerry Warner (Georger), who had referred him to Larry Carr at the FBI. Before the trip, there was a falling-out. Tom’s issue was confidentiality. After his discovery of silver on the bills, he e-mailed a copy of his microscopic scan to Warner, who posted it on the Drop Zone website. Tom felt the leak was a violation of trust. According to Tom, that’s why Warner chose not to come.

  Warner’s story is different. He says he lost confidence in Tom’s judgment and scientific methods. He felt Tom was more concerned with attracting attention to himself and his role in the D.B. Cooper investigation than with executing his assignment.

  “We were asked to analyze the money and we agreed to analyze the money–that’s it, not mug in front of any cameras,” Warner will tell me later.

  I look out the van window. I see wetlands and geese. Tom tracks our position on his laptop.