SKYJACK: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper

by Geoffrey Gray

  Did this really happen? Was the enemy “completely routed,” or was this fiction? Are medal honors always this detailed? Or are McCoy’s military records fake?

  The facts in McCoy’s case file are curious. Why did he travel to Las Vegas during the Cooper hijacking? Who did make the collect call to his home from the Tropicana hotel?

  Karen McCoy must know a lot. Was McCoy Cooper? Did McCoy have a hand in the Cooper case? Did she and McCoy ever live in Bloomington, Minnesota, and happen to know a picture-framer named Bob Knoss?

  After a few months of digging, I find her attorney in Salt Lake City. He won’t tell me where Karen lives, how to reach her. She doesn’t want to talk about the Cooper case, or about her dead husband, he says. I write letters. No response. Karen, what are you hiding?

  I find Floyd, McCoy’s father, in the obituary section of the Charlotte News & Observer. The obituary is brief and lists all of McCoy’s family members except McCoy. Why did the family choose to leave out Floyd’s first and only son?

  I find Russell, McCoy’s brother, living in North Carolina. I leave messages. No reply.

  I need to talk to Karen. Or Chante. Or Richard Jr., his son. They must know something.

  I can’t find them. I hire a private investigator. He gets the numbers. I call each one. I leave messages. I leave more messages.

  I fly to Minnesota in a snowstorm. The story Bob Knoss told Jo Weber about a conspiracy and McCoy handling Duane Weber had sounded absurd. But what about the Cooper case so far hasn’t been absurd?

  Besides, Knoss has references. After the U.S. News story on Duane Weber was printed in 2000, he contacted Don Nichols, a prominent lawyer in Minneapolis. Knoss worried he might be criminally liable. He claims he witnessed McCoy engineer the hijacking.

  Nichols was at first puzzled by Knoss’s story. The hijacking was in 1971. Why didn’t Knoss come forward sooner?

  Knoss couldn’t remember. His memory was blocked.

  Blocked? Nichols asked how that could be.

  He’d been hypnotized, Knoss said. By the military. At least he thinks it was the military. He can’t be sure.

  Knoss’s recall started after his accident on the beach. A wave crashed over him, broke his back. Knoss could barely walk. It was the heavy painkillers, he thinks, that unlocked the memories of the hijacking that he had been ordered to forget.

  Lawyer Nichols was suspicious. Was Knoss making this all up? Then again, how could anyone spin a yarn so fanciful?

  They met in the lawyer’s office. Knoss told his story again.

  “He presents well,” Nichols tells me.

  Knoss’s second reference is R. A. Randall, a former public defender who became a judge on the second-highest court in Minnesota.

  I meet Randall at a Perkins outside Minneapolis for breakfast. He is wearing a camouflage hunting cap and sweatshirt. His fingers are covered in turquoise rings, mementos from Indian reservations.

  I ask the retired judge whether he thinks Bob Knoss is telling the truth about witnessing the planning of the hijacking.

  “If there were two men in Minnesota that I would expect not to fabricate or lie, they would be Homer and Bob Knoss,” Randall says.

  Randall grew up with the Knoss family. Bob’s father, Homer, repaired old clocks. Homer taught his son the trade. They both had mechanical minds, like engineers, not storytellers.

  “If Bob Knoss says, ‘I tried to dodge the draft,’ I’d bet lunch he tried to dodge the draft,” Randall says. “If Bob Knoss says, ‘I got hypnotized,’ I’d bet dinner he was hypnotized. The question is, what happens to the mind when you get hypnotized?”

  The sun is coming in bright off the snow in the parking lot and through the window.

  “I believe he perceived it. The question is, what did he perceive? The question is, are we dealing with a case of the seven blind sisters, where, you know, one grabs the head and one grabs the neck and one grabs the dick and they think they have got their hands on a snake but really they are holding on to an elephant built like a wall of mud?”

  Randall takes a slug of coffee.

  “The question is, is Bob Knoss after the last digit of pi?”

  Bob Knoss lives in Anoka, an exurb forty miles north of Minneapolis. After a few turns, I see a narrow, wooded driveway covered in snow. My rental careens on the ice and just misses the trees as I make my way down the slippery driveway.

  I see a sign out front. PICTURE FRAMING, it says.

  Knoss squeezes out the front door. He is big like a linebacker and wide like a billboard. Across his chest is a football jersey. “Hawaii 00,” it reads. His eyeglasses are off center and smudged. A bushy goatee hangs from his chin in the style of old pharaohs.

  Knoss can’t remember exactly where he was hypnotized. We drive around, pull into a few strip plazas. He thinks it was in here, a makeshift office amid pizza parlors and surgical supply stores.

  We finally give up. Knoss can’t remember. That was part of his hypnosis. He was told to forget everything.

  Our next stop is Aqua Court Apartments, in Bloomington.

  On the way he grooms over the story once again, careful to separate what he witnessed (“Now that’s fact”) and what he has extrapolated (“Now that’s me trying to piece things together”). He insists everything he tells me is true and that he’d take a lie detector test to prove it.

  I ask him why he cares at all.

  He has a grudge, against the government, he says, for subjecting him to hypnosis in the late 1960s. He was placed in a small room, he says. The doctor showed him a sparkly crystal and there was a metronome, and just like in the movies the doctor snapped his fingers and—poof!—Knoss was under the spell.

  The hypnosis poisoned his mind and he wants payback for his nightmares. D.B. Cooper ruined his life, he says. He thought he would go to prison for what he witnessed in the late 1960s.

  In Bloomington we pull into the back parking lot of Aqua Court. “Coop,” or Duane Weber, lived in the 9120 building with his wife, Knoss says. He can’t remember her name. Knoss lived in 9150 with his wife, Cheri. They were the caretakers at Aqua Court. Knoss mowed the lawns, cleaned the filters on the swimming pool. Rent was $105 a month. He points to a snowy patch of grass between 9120 and 9150.

  “That’s where they practiced,” he says. “The parachute—it was white—was unfolded on the grass.”

  There was another figure involved, an employee of Northwest Orient airlines, Knoss says. He told them what to ask for, how the pilots would react. Mr. Northwest was interested in airplane safety. Airplanes were getting hijacked on a regular basis and pilots were getting killed and airline bosses were not doing anything about it, only joining together to break the unions.

  It was true. The high-profile nature of the Cooper case and others did in fact prompt legislators and administrators to install magnetometers in airports. But were McCoy and Weber behind it together? Couldn’t be. What was in it for Weber? With McCoy’s help, Duane Weber was released from prison, Knoss says. Duane wanted to keep his freedom. A professional thief, he also wanted to keep the ransom money. His jump, his reward. Then, according to Knoss, Duane Weber lost the ransom on the first jump—so McCoy decided to try pulling the job himself on United Airlines Flight 855.

  How could I trust Knoss? The whopper he was telling could not be accurate. But what if it was? Or part of it was? How could I afford not to listen?

  Knoss has files back at the house. Do I want to review them?

  Sure.

  The snow is picking up. Heavy flakes. The rental slides on the highway back to Anoka and down the driveway to Knoss’s home.

  I follow Knoss through the front door, and he shuffles up the stairs. The house is a wreck. Boxes are everywhere, closets are stuffed with old toys, more boxes, framing equipment, cases of V8. The dining room is buried under papers, antiques, tchotchkes.

  I use the bathroom. The cabinet over the sink is open, and the shelves are lined with empty pill bottles. I try the spigot to wash my hands.
It doesn’t work.

  What happened to Bob Knoss?

  I walk into the living room. It is a graveyard of old clocks and bronze statuettes, a small army of figurine soldiers that stand guard on the shag carpet. The soldiers are designed to protect the clocks, he says.

  “That one’s Don Juan. That’s Don Cesar.”

  He is sitting at his computer, trying to find the documents on his hard drive. He spins around in his chair to explain the business of repairing old clocks. As he talks, the screen saver on the computer screen behind him flashes on.

  I see breasts. Huge breasts. Colossal jugs. The screen changes. Now it’s a thong buried in the crevice of an oiled-up butt. Now it’s a vagina. Now another vagina.

  I look around Knoss’s computer station. I see a copy of Domination Nation, a porn movie that features women taking over the world. Richard McCoy played a role in Domination Nation under a different name, Knoss claims.

  Wait now. How could McCoy play a role in a porn film if he was shot dead by FBI agents back in 1974?

  All a hoax, Knoss claims. McCoy never died in the shootout. His death was faked.

  I want to get out of here. Fast. But I have more questions. I wonder what Knoss thinks about Albert Weinberg’s comic Les Aventures de Dan Cooper. What possible connection could a career con like Duane Weber and a war hero turned porn star like McCoy have with a French cartoon?

  The puzzle of the French comic book is easy to explain, Knoss says. McCoy was an avid comic book collector. Some of his friends were comic book artists. McCoy gave Duane Weber the name Dan Cooper to use as an alias. McCoy must have been a fan of the strip.

  Can any of this be true?

  I go to the libraries in Bloomington and Minneapolis. I scan old phone books for the names McCoy and Weber and Dan Cooper. I search for other aliases. I search the microfiche at the Minnesota Historical Society for stories in the local Bloomington Sun that Knoss claimed were printed in the summer of 1968 or 1969 about Duane’s wife getting arrested for stealing checks. I can’t find anything in the old newsprint. Have I missed it? Are my eyes so tired that I glazed over the magic words that would place Duane Weber and Richard McCoy in the same town before the hijacking, and prove that Knoss is telling the truth about his hypnosis after he dodged the draft?

  I look again in the Minnesota microfiche. Nothing. I have the rolls sent to New York. I go to the public library. I look one more time. I can’t find anything.

  Is Knoss lying? If so, why? Have the painkillers created these whoppers? Or are his facts off?

  Late one night, I find myself scanning the film credits of Domination Nation. What am I doing? It is simply not possible for McCoy to be in the porno movie. He was shot dead by FBI agents seventeen years before Domination Nation was produced. But here I am, looking anyway. And right there, in the credits of the post-apocalyptic porn—in which “women rule and men live like wild animals,” according to one write-up—I find the name: Tommy Gunn.

  Wasn’t that Duane Weber’s friend? Didn’t Jo Weber claim to meet Gunn once in Mobile, Alabama? Didn’t he tell her that Duane knew people in high places? Is Gunn McCoy? Is McCoy still alive?

  “Believing in Bob Knoss is like believing in the tooth fairy,” Jo Weber tells me. “I only found one truth in ten years of talking to that man. He must have known Duane.” But how?

  I fly into Pensacola, Florida. It’s taken over two years of phone calls—most of them late at night, all of them long—to secure an interview with Jo Weber. In Cooperland, Jo is widely considered a madwoman. She has talked to every Cooper hunter, witness, agent. Her posts to the Drop Zone are endless, miles of text and rants in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS or new bolded clues that make no SENSE! as her streams of thought go on. I don’t know who I am going to find: the widow of Dan Cooper, or another Bob Knoss.

  She lives outside of Pensacola. It’s an hour’s drive across the panhandle. As I pass churches and doughnut shops and parking lot barbecue pits, I think of Jo’s rule. She made it clear before I left: no pictures. Jo does not want people to know what she looks like. She rarely leaves her house. Has her obsession with the case turned her haggard? Or is she so paranoid that she doesn’t want any of Duane’s spooky associates to know what she looks like?

  I pull into the driveway.

  She is in the garage, smoking a Doral. She wears lipstick and blush. Her white hair is swept up into a bun. Her shirt is a pattern of pink and purple plaid, the sleeves rolled up as if she’s been gardening. She is not haggard. She is an attractive woman. She seems strangely … normal. Maybe Jo Weber isn’t such a loo-loo after all?

  “Oh, it’s ruined my life,” she says about the case as we go inside. She cracks open a Diet Dr. Pepper and takes me on the tour.

  Her home is immaculate. The carpets are groomed and dirt free. The sheets of the beds are made and taut. Kitchen counters spotless.

  She shows me her bedroom. Also spotless. On the bureau is a picture of her third husband. She married him after Duane. He died several years ago.

  “Hi, Jim,” she says and waves to the photo.

  Her files are in order. The binders are stored in suitcases she keeps in the trunk of her car. Jo doesn’t leave her home without taking Duane’s files with her. How could she? What if there was a fire? What if she was robbed? These files are all she has to show for her fifteen-year odyssey exposing her ex-husband’s secret past.

  We set up in the kitchen. She removes her evidence from a box. She shows me the Soldier of Fortune magazine she found in his safety deposit box. I touch it. It’s real. She shows me the ostrich skin wallet that was recovered in Duane’s van, along with the fake licenses, Navy ID. It’s all real. I read the gobbledygook of newsprint hidden away in the billfold: “Bombproof and crowded with oxygen … terrace, volcallure at casa Cugat, Abbe Wants Cugie Gets.”

  All of it is here, just like she said. I want to hear her taped phone conversations with Mary Jane Ross, who was married to Duane at the time of the hijacking. I want to hear Mary Jane’s alleged confession that she lived with James Earl Ray’s wife while Duane was in prison.

  I’d read up on Ray. I couldn’t find evidence of him marrying until he was back in prison, for shooting Martin Luther King. Jo goes into her safe, produces the cassettes and a recorder. She presses play. The conversation is the same as she has said.

  Within the binders, Jo has printed out volumes of old e-mails, messages in which she has desperately tried to enlist the help of others on her hunt. In some messages, she refers to topics he might have said or somebody might have told her, like “Operation Mongoose,” the covert CIA attempt to assassinate Castro. But too many years have passed. She can’t remember who told her about Operation Mongoose. She has talked to too many people, sent too many e-mails. It’s all part of a trap she’s built for herself. She can’t prove Duane was Cooper. She can’t prove he wasn’t.

  Duane Weber has been vetted. The Bureau has checked out his background, some physical evidence such as hairs from a razor Jo sent in. They have ruled him out. Using the partial DNA strain found on the tie, Carr says he was also able to rule Duane out.

  Jo is unfazed. If the DNA sample on the tie is incomplete, how could the Bureau trust it? Besides, how do the feds know the traces of saliva on the tie are Duane’s? What if he borrowed the tie before the hijacking? What if he stole it? What if an agent drooled on it?

  She can’t scrub the lyrics from her mind: “If you don’t know me by now,/You will never never never know me …”

  Was this another clue Duane had left her?

  “Perhaps [Duane] sang that song to me for a reason,” Jo says. “Damn him for ever telling me anything. Damn him! Why couldn’t he have just kept his damn secret?”

  Jo Weber has enemies.

  Orange1: “Plenty of people were listening to Jo’s story … until it became clear that what there wasn’t so much a ‘story’ as a hodge podge of unverified statements, suppositions, grasping at straws and wild theories.”

  georger: “Jo,
the mistake you make is thinking YOU are important. The rest of the world is laughing or trying to avoid you, trying to work around you, or without you. You are living a lie here. The emotional part of your brain is running the rational part of your brain.”

  nigel99: “When the threads started your story was really interesting … over the last few months a very different picture has emerged and I strongly believe that you have been hoodwinked … I feel very sorry for you as I think you are probably an innocent old lady …”

  Sluggo_Monster: “Yes Jo … Whatever you say Jo. It’s obvious that you ‘Just Don’t Get It.’ Oh yeah … for everybody else: Did you know the FBI lied to Jo? I hadn’t heard that!”

  snowmman: “Oh and one more thing. Jo: you’re a nut case.”

  Jo’s biggest enemy in Cooperland is Cooper hunter Jerry Thomas.

  Jerry Thomas: “Jo your still here shocking. I don’t Know why But it is cool that you are. Your funny in a ignorante way But still ypour post and fiction, Is refreshing. Have fun Kiddo. I’m sure everyone on this forum enjoys your fiction stories … One more thing leave this forum. Jerry”

  Jerry’s cyber assaults bring Jo to tears. “That man is evil,” she tells me one night, crying. “He’s like the interrogators they use in Iraq.”

  Why can’t she ignore him?

  “You can call me anything you want, but you can’t call me a liar,” she says.

  Jerry is unapologetic. The Drop Zone, which he recently discovered, is a place for a serious exchange of information. It should be presented accordingly. Jo has taken over the case with her hysterics, he and many others feel. She’s simply getting in the way.

  So is Tom Kaye, Jerry thinks. After our field trip, they had a few conversations about Tom’s findings and the paper Tom was planning to write. Jerry expressed interest in being a bylined contributor on his paper. Tom told Jerry he was not “part of the Team,” meaning his team of science buddies: Alan and Carol.

  Jerry was offended.