SKYJACK: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper

by Geoffrey Gray

  Charlene is not moved.

  “He’s not who you think he is,” she says. “He’s a lying, manipulating … You don’t know what he’s done. He’s threatened me.”

  Jerry is standing tall, his back stiff, as if lining up for roll call.

  “He wants to be famous,” Charlene says. “He wants to be a hero.”

  Tom asks Charlene if she likes the woods as much as Jerry.

  Charlene closes her mouth and shakes her head no no no.

  “I was grounded to the woods,” she says. “When I was fourteen, for using hairspray.”

  “It was the watch,” Jerry says.

  “I almost blew up the entire forest. I was trying to use kerosene for the lantern and my dad insisted I do it the redneck way, by siphoning the gas out of the truck. I couldn’t see and I had a candle and …”

  A terror creeps over her face.

  “The whole truck was on fire,” she says. “I tried to put it out with a cup. I thought I’d get spanked for that one.”

  Charlene looks at us as if we have arrived from another planet to save her.

  “The caves,” she says with a shiver. “I still have the scars.”

  The next morning, I follow Jerry out to his pickup. He places the powder blue suitcase in the back. We are driving to Seattle to examine the physical evidence in the case. Jerry isn’t coming. He is scared of cities and has to get home. His wife Shelly’s horse died last night. He needs to dig the grave. He’ll have to rent a backhoe.

  “It was a big old horse,” he says.

  I think about the way Charlene looked at him, what she said. He’s a lying, manipulating …

  Jerry claims to have been trekking into the woods for the past twenty-two years to hunt for Cooper’s money, but how can we prove he was there all the times he says he was? And if he is making some of it up, why? What is he really looking for?

  He hops into his rig. He turns the keys over. I ask when he’s coming back into the woods.

  “Summer,” he says. “The trees change, everything changes.”

  Brian and I drive to Seattle in my rental. A few miles up the highway, I ask him about Jerry. Is it possible he’s making it all up?

  Brian can’t say. But it is strange how much Jerry knows about the case.

  Like what?

  Like the reason Brian sold his Cooper bills. Jerry used the word alimony. How did he know Brian needed to sell the Cooper bills to pay his first wife?

  Brian met her in high school, at a roller skating rink. She was shy, religious. He’d push himself on her.

  Not until we’re married, she would say.

  He has memories of how things went wrong, like the time she visited when she was in college and he had enrolled in the Army. He was training to become a medic, and they had been away from each other for so long. Finally, they were together and alone in his barrack at Fort Benning and he was touching her and she was touching him back, and when they embraced he told her, though not very convincingly, “We don’t have to do this.”

  Or the time after the wedding, after Kara was born, when he was installing electrical and sewer components for mobile homes around Oklahoma. One night, he was at a friend’s trailer for dinner, had too many beers and got a little drunk, heard something he didn’t want to hear, pushed over the table, nearly got into a fight and disappeared.

  For months, he was missing. He’d driven into Oklahoma City and pulled over at another friend’s house. He knew there would be crank there. He liked crystal meth best. Hillbilly crack. It was the cheapest to buy and lasted the longest. There was cocaine in the house, too, and if someone offered it to him, he would cut it up and snort it. Or drop acid. One night he took thirteen tabs. He was so high he wanted to get naked and ride the moon. Or kill himself. He was on a bender. He was awake for twenty-three days once. It was an eerie and ugly existence, living with other addicts as they moved in and out of the house, peering down at the street, paranoid, thinking the cars that were passing by were undercover cops.

  His parents couldn’t find him. His wife didn’t know where he was.

  Some nights he was home. He’d escape from the drug house and drive his car to a spot behind his home that was just far enough so his wife couldn’t see him if she stepped out the door, but close enough so when the lights were on in the living room he could the silhouettes of her and the baby girl as they moved around. He did not have the courage—to sober up, to tell them what had been bothering him, what sent him on the drug binge. Six months passed before he finally knocked on the door.

  Where had he been? His wife thought he had deserted them. The girl was crying. She had filed for divorce, she told him, and he never came home again.

  Brian can talk about it now, because he’s proud about the way he was able to stomach the pain of drug addiction, to beat it, to work again. He’s been on the lines in front of a sewing machine. He’s worked in the freezing cold to build pipelines. His specialty now is roofing. He’s also built a mausoleum to Cooper, collecting every artifact he can find that’s related to the hijacking: T-shirts, toys, matchbooks. He hopes the hijacker is never caught. He enjoys the speculation. It’s also better for his investment. The longer the case goes unsolved, the more his bills might be worth.

  The interstate to Seattle is a blinking mess of indoor water parks, Chinese buffets, Indian casinos, and porn shops that border the military bases. I ask Brian to recall every detail he can think of about the day he found the money.

  He remembers the faces. Tipper, the old fisherman; George, his dog with the smelly breath; and the feeling of the sand against his forearm.

  But as he got older, Brian says, he wondered about these memories. How much of what he knew was really what he knew? Were his memories his own? Or was his mind imbued with the stories of those around him? How much can one remember at eight?

  He wondered about his parents. Did they lie to him? Was his doubt natural? Was he the boy who became famous around the world for actually finding buried treasure? Or was he a fraud?

  He didn’t think so. But how could he be sure?

  Before he sold the Cooper bills, Brian approached his parents. He asked his mom, Patricia, if he really found the money. He did, she told him. His father told him the same.

  Still, Brian was unsure. When his grandmother got sick, Brian went to Florida to visit her in the hospital. His cousin Denise was there at the hospital, too. It was Denise’s mother, Crystal, who had always claimed Denise was the one who found the Cooper money. Brian hadn’t seen Denise in years.

  Brian remembered how close he and Denise had been as kids. They watched movies together on the couch. They built a fort underneath the sheet on his bed.

  Brian felt that part of his recovery from drug addiction and other turmoil in his life was to be honest with himself and those around him. He was willing to accept the fact that he wasn’t the boy who found the money, if that was true.

  In the hospital, Brian pulled Denise aside. He asked her what happened. Was he the one who found the money in the sand? Or was she?

  Denise didn’t want to talk about it.

  “We both know what happened, Brian,” she said.

  But he really doesn’t.

  In Seattle, the evidence is waiting for us in the Bureau field office. Special Agent Carr has spread out more files, photos, the parachute canopy, the clip-on tie.

  Tom places a loupe on his eye. He examines the reserve parachute first. The canopy is watermelon pink. Tom inspects each incision. He counts the number of cut shroud lines.

  That’s strange, he thinks. Five shroud lines are cut. According to the Bureau file, agents first discovered that only three shroud lines had been cut during the hijacking. Who cut the other two? Did Bureau agents snip them as souvenirs?

  The clip-on tie is next for inspection. Tom uses sticky tape and presses it against the polyester fabric to collect pollen samples. Despite its age, the pollen he finds could tell him where the tie has been.

  He studies the fab
ric under his loupe. He rolls his eyes upward and inspects the clip of the clip-on tie. The hook is painted white. It is stripped in spots.

  Nothing here.

  He scans the fat part of the tie. Under the loupe, Tom’s eye combs the polyester fields of microscopic fibers. How incredible it would be to stumble upon a flake of dandruff! A hair follicle!

  Tom thinks of the dandruff and hair on his own computer keyboard back on his ranch in Arizona. He is always amazed at how much of it finds its way into the keys and how annoying it is to clean it all out. How does so much gunk get in there? As he thinks about this, he moves on from the fat part of the tie to the fake knot of the tie. Then he gets the idea.

  The feds missed it! In the lab at Quantico, Bureau scientists looked for forensic matter on the tie. Where they didn’t look is where a good DNA sample may have been hiding all these years. In the tie.

  A brief argument ensues. Metallurgist Alan Stone isn’t sure they should do this. If they break open the knot of the tie to extract samples, Tom and the Team could be criminally liable, right? Isn’t this tampering with evidence? Stone can’t go to jail. He has a wife. He’d have to hire a lawyer. At the very least, Tom and the Team need to protect themselves: get approvals, sign forms. They can’t rush into this.

  I offer the position, unsolicited, that Tom and the Team move now and fast and quietly. Our window is small. An approval could take weeks.

  I’m getting pushy. We aren’t coming back here, folks. Open up the sucker. Get the damn sample. And let’s get out of here.

  Larry Carr agrees. As official Cooper case agent, he’s been stymied by the Bureau’s watch-your-ass-at-all-times attitude. Besides, Carr already received permission to have the Cooper money delivered to Tom for analysis. Isn’t allowing Tom to open up the tie (and potentially destroying it) the same thing?

  It isn’t. At least not technically. But it’s a good enough rationale for Carr, which is good enough for Tom, which is good enough for Carol. Alan folds. The scientists go to work.

  “Is there a light here somewhere?” Tom says.

  “Turn that projector on,” Alan says.

  “Don’t talk as much if you can.”

  “Don’t open it up too much.”

  “WE GOT GUNK.”

  “Wait, wait, Tom,” Carol says. “There, I got a light. Seriously. Where do you want it?”

  “WE GOT GUNK.”

  “Whoa.”

  “There’s some hair.”

  “Hold on. I don’t have the focal … oh yeah, I see.”

  “Oh yeah, there’s some hair in there.”

  “I don’t think we got the hair we saw.”

  “Pull it apart.”

  “You see the hair?”

  “Nope.”

  “Ah yeah.”

  “And some dandruff flakes.”

  “Hold it, shine it in there.”

  “I SEE GUNK! The tie is loaded!”

  “So that ties it all together.”

  “Look at this cheap tie.”

  “I can photograph into that.”

  “That’s good. One more.”

  “I got a gazillion megapixels.”

  “Hold it right there.”

  “Oh yeah. We be the bad D.B. Cooper investigators. Yeah, baby, yeah. Show me the money.”

  “It’s in the Columbia.”

  “How do they look?”

  “There’s obviously stuff in there. Mmmmmm.”

  “You got the hair?”

  “There’s a hair in there.”

  “At least one. Now we got some horsepower. Yeah, baby, yeah. We be the bad D.B. Cooper investigators.…”

  Later that night we sit on the bed in Tom’s motel room. We toast each other as if an imaginary bottle of champagne has been uncorked to honor the Team’s improbable coup. In a few hours, Tom was able to do what the FBI couldn’t: find evidence that could reveal the genetic makeup of the hijacker. If the gunk Tom collected is good enough (and Tom believes it is), the DNA can be grown and identified and run through millions of gene libraries. A match could be imminent.

  “I don’t want to get carried away, guys,” Tom says, “but we might actually solve this thing.”

  September 15, 2009

  New York, New York

  Jimmy’s Corner is a dive bar in midtown that is as narrow as a subway car, and the walls are crowded with boxing photographs. The back area is a stockroom of sorts. Skipp Porteous and I sit here to discuss the case. More than two years have passed since Porteous told me about the envelope he delivered to Nora Ephron for Lyle Christiansen. Now, more than ever, the Manhattan PI is convinced Kenny Christiansen is D.B. Cooper.

  “I’d say with ninety-five percent certainty it’s him,” Porteous says.

  I have doubts.

  Himmelsbach was right. Kenny was too short. In the Bureau’s Cooper file, I found an interview with Tina Mucklow in which agents had asked the stewardess her height. “Five eight,” she replied. And the hijacker, she added, was taller than she was.

  Ken Christiansen also did not have enough hair. While the sketch showed a balding man, the hijacker was described by at least two witnesses (paint man Robert Gregory and first-class stew Alice Hancock) as having wavy hair. “Marcelled,” Gregory had said. In 1971, Ken Christiansen had thin straight hair.

  Kenny looked like the Bing Crosby sketch, but so did a lot of people. Besides, it isn’t clear if Dan Cooper resembled the Bing Crosby sketch. Or the next composite. Or the next one. There were multiple sketches, all different.

  Kenny’s motive was also weak. Despite being a loner, Kenny, according to Lyle, seemed to carry a balanced if not sunny outlook on life, a naive Midwestern optimism. I can’t see him in the back of the plane, holding the wire with a clip on the end and telling Tina, “They’re not going to take me alive.”

  Porteous disagrees. And he has proof. It’s a photograph that Lyle found after Kenny’s death.

  I look at the photo. Kenny is wearing a black raincoat. In his left hand, he holds a briefcase. In his right hand, he holds a white canvas sack.

  Now, Porteous asks, why would Kenny wear the same outfit as the hijacker, and carry what looked like a replica of the briefcase bomb and a cloth bank bag? Analyzing the photo closely, Porteous also noticed a Christmas wreath on the door. He asked Lyle when the photo was taken.

  “1971,” Lyle told him.

  If the Christmas wreath was up, that means the image must have been taken just after the hijacking. So who took the picture?

  Kenny did. It was taken on a self-timer, Lyle told Porteous.

  So why would Kenny take this extremely weird picture of himself that seems to connect him to the hijacking? Or was it all just another coincidence?

  The answer, Porteous says, is in a tree. Or was in a tree. Porteous spoke with Dan Rattenbury, owner of the Priced Right print shop. Before he purchased the property from the former owners, Rattenbury told Porteous a young boy had once found $2,000 in $20 bills buried inside the crack of a tree in Kenny’s backyard.

  So Lyle was right! Kenny did bury the money in the backyard! Fuck. I knew I should have rented that metal detector.

  I ask Porteous for more information. Were the bills in packets? Or loose? Were there any rubber bands? Did Porteous find the boy who found them?

  “I can’t tell you,” he says.

  Can’t tell me? Why not?

  “I’m writing my own book,” he says.

  “In the older models, I feel like a bird because I can feel every little gust on the wing,” Barb Dayton says. She is talking about flying to a reporter from the University of Washington newspaper. Ron and Pat Foreman found the clip, which confirms Barb’s claustrophobia, her general hatred of the airlines, and her fear of commercial planes.

  “I don’t like being under someone else’s control,” she says. “In my plane I feel like I’m totally inside the sky, totally free.”

  I liked Barb as a suspect. She had the grudge that Kenny didn’t. As an electrician, she knew
how to rig a bomb. She knew dynamite from working in the logging camps. She was suicidal. A civilian pilot, she knew the air routes across the Pacific Northwest. She knew how to parachute. She even found it “boring.”

  She was also a chain-smoker who didn’t have money, who would have smoked coupon cigs like Raleighs. I could see her in Dan Cooper’s out-of-date clothes: the russet suit with the wide lapels, the skinny clip-on tie. It all could have come from the Goodwill bin where she shopped for clothes after her sex-change operation. As a woman, she also had access to makeup. She could powder her face bronze. Or she could be herself: part Native American. Most of all, Barb was cocky. I could see her reading about hijacker Paul Cini ten days before Thanksgiving Eve and saying to herself—just as she told her doctors about her father—“I can do anything he can do.” And do it better.

  Skyjackers, I learned, were not creators. They were imitators. After interviewing dozens of skyjackers, Hubbard found that the crimes were last-minute rush jobs, conceived to cure a feeling of emotional despair.

  “All of the forces in life converge in one moment in which there is an impulsive act,” Hubbard wrote.

  Yes, Barb Dayton was D.B. Cooper. She had it all!

  Except the hair (blond), the height (five eight), and the right color eyes (blue). And what was her connection to the French-Canadian comic book character Dan Cooper? And if Barb got away with the hijacking, why did Brian Ingram find the Cooper bills at Tena Bar? Did Barb plant them there? Was it Barb who tossed them off the bridge upriver from Tena Bar and not Duane Weber?

  Richard Floyd McCoy Jr. is a phantom. It’s as if any evidence of him has been scrubbed from history. Sure, there are legal files from his case. I spend weeks poring over them. I reread the official statements for his military medals that were submitted as evidence in his trial.

  With the position of the compound marked by a flare and the firefight marked by tracer rounds, McCoy began a series of firing passes, launching rockets directly into the Vietcong positions until all his ammunition was expended.