“What does he mean I wasn’t part of the Team? Not part of the Team! He invited me!”
Three months after the trip, Jerry returned to the Washougal area to see how far the river had moved the packet of bills Tom had thrown in. Jerry walked down the path under the small bridge like we had done and followed the current as it moved. He scanned the water, looking for the money bundle with: REWARD IF FOUND!
Jerry found it. Didn’t take long. It had traveled only about a hundred yards downstream. It was trapped in a pool of water, under a boulder. Tom was right. The Washougal was too weak to move the money to the Columbia. It would have taken a biblical flood to get the bills there.
Jerry is unfazed. Once the seasons change, he’ll be back and get his feet moving through the woods. If he can find the time.
His daughter, Charlene, is now living with him. After our trip, she split up with her husband and lost custody of her children. She slept on park benches and on the street for a few weeks. She was spending any money she had on drugs. She decided to walk the I-5 bridge that spans the Columbia River and commit suicide.
On the bridge, she called Jerry.
“Either help me or come to my funeral,” she said.
She later moved into a trailer on his land.
“It’s hard,” she tells me. “I’m not a bad person. He won’t let me do anything. Like the other night I want to go dancing. He tells me, ‘A mother your age should not be outside dancing.’ But it’s like, there are people fifty and sixty years old at that bar.”
Charlene overdosed a few months later. She had hitchhiked into town to go to a bar. When Jerry arrived at the hospital, the doctor told him that Charlene had died at least twice before she was resuscitated. After checking out of the hospital, Charlene moved into town to look for a job. I ask her why she thinks her father has spent so long looking for Cooper.
“At first it was the money, he wasn’t doing too good then,” she says. “Now I think it’s the publicity. He’s a bragga-muffin.”
“The Curse, the goddamn Curse,” Tom Kaye says when we meet six months after the trip at his ranch. He’s in his basement lab. He is shaking his head.
“I’ve become one of them,” he says. “What separates me from Jo Weber?”
His forensic investigation has backfired. The implosion started when he returned from Seattle and had a conversation with another metallurgist about the high amount of silver in the Cooper bills.
The metallurgist was not surprised. In the 1980s, the FBI used silver nitrates to locate fingerprints on criminal evidence. Tom raced to Wal-Mart to get a nitrate test. He came home and tested the bills.
“They were loaded,” he says.
It was a gut-wrenching blunder. How did he manage to make such an epic mistake? He spent six months and thousands of dollars to discover the Bureau’s own fingerprint dusting solution.
“It was like finding a treasure map to the Lost Dutchman’s Mine, and digging and digging and there’s nothing there but dirt,” he says. “I don’t want to be part of that story. I want a success story.”
The pollen tests were revealing. Once Tom analyzed the sticky tape he’d used on the tie, he did not find traces of pine. The lack of pine pollen suggests the tie did not come from the Pacific Northwest. Relying on the expertise of a pollen expert in Belgium, Tom was able to ascertain the species of flower the pollen had come from: impatiens.
“The problem is, there’s about a thousand different varieties of impatiens,” Tom says. “It happens to be one of the most common flowers.”
In his lab, he pops a slide in a microscope to show me a grain of pollen. The slide is of a flower from outside his old house in Chicago. He brings the sample into focus. He discovers another problem. The pollen from his house flower looks similar to the pollen he saw on the Cooper bills. Was the expert in Belgium wrong? Could he be sure the pollen on the tie was actually impatiens? Even if he could, what would that prove? The pollen is another bust.
And what about the gunk he found in the tie?
“Just gunk,” he says.
What about the hair he found in the tie knot?
“Wool.”
Wool?
“It came from a sheep.”
And the dandruff?
“Plastic, or white paint from the clip of the clip-on tie.”
Analyzing the evidence, he was able to make one conclusion. Cooper did survive the jump, he thinks. Under the microscope, Tom noticed the money had been bound for so long, the ink of serial numbers on the bills had bled into each other. When he looked at them further, he found that they lined up precisely behind each other in the stack.
Tom did not expect this. When he used his fishing rod to cast a packet of bills into the Columbia River, what happened was clear: The bills fanned out in the water, like the fins of an exotic fish. So if the Cooper bills had floated loosely in the water, when they dried and stuck together, the serial numbers would not be in perfect alignment. They would be slightly off.
Which means what exactly?
“The money did not float down the river,” Tom says.
So how did it get to Tena Bar?
“Nonnatural means,” he says.
Which means?
“People … If there’s one story the money tells us, it’s that.”
He does have more information. A new lead, he says. He found it by accident, under his microscope. I can see he is getting excited just talking about it. The lead, he says, “could end the case once and for all.”
I push him. Is he telling me the truth? What kind of forensic matter could Tom have discovered that would be such a case closer?
He won’t tell me.
I push harder. He won’t budge. He and the Team are thinking of writing their own book.
“Either it’s the biggest and best thing to happen to us, or the biggest and worst,” he says. “The stakes are so high, success or failure, the balance is on a knife edge.”
I call around Cooperland. Tom did find something under his microscope. The forensic matter was in the fibers of the Cooper tie. It is titanium sponge.
Among the elements, titanium sponge is rare. Its primary use is in very fast airplanes. Titanium is extremely resistant to heat. So, engineers crafted planes such as the SR-71 and prototypes for the Boeing Supersonic Transport from titanium.
In light of the timing of the hijacking, the discovery of titanium sponge is curious. In the fall of 1971, Boeing canceled its Supersonic Transport program and laid off the program’s workers. Was it conceivable that a Boeing worker handled the titanium sponge while working on the Supersonic Transport, got particles of titanium sponge on his tie, then boarded Northwest 305 in a grudge-fueled moment after getting canned? More enticing is that extremely few companies processed titanium sponge for Boeing. The leading company is Timet, based out of Dallas. Was Dan Cooper a Timet employee?
Once I learn about Tom’s discovery of titanium sponge, I ask him about it. He refers me to his lawyer.
“This is business now,” he says. “Once it’s business, the guns come out.”
I call a few experts on titanium sponge. While Timet handled the bulk of titanium sponge, other companies handled it, too, they say. Titanium was also used on submarines as well as airplanes. A lot of people could have handled titanium sponge prior to the hijacking.
Titanium sponge was also prevalent in household items, especially white paint, experts say.
White paint? Tom told me the dandruff he thought he found had turned out to be flecks of white paint off the clip of the clip-on tie. Was this the source of the titanium sponge? Did Tom waste his first investigation on the FBI’s silver-heavy fingerprint solution, and his second investigation on flecks of white paint? Is Tom chasing himself around the case in circles? Am I?
Later, I get a call from Jerry Warner (aka Georger). He’s upset, needs to talk. In his own lab, Jerry Warner has made a new discovery on the Cooper bills, he says.
What is it?
“Silver.”<
br />
Silver again?
“There are other forms of silver in the fiber threads of the money,” he says. “Completely separate and distinct from the silver nitrate issue. Okay? And these little beauties are sitting there in patterns—oh, it is a sight to behold! It’s absolutely nature at its best!”
I need a minute to get this straight. Basically, there is natural silver in the Cooper bills, and it was there the entire time, masked by the silver nitrate that was contained in the FBI fingerprint solution that Tom found and ruined his hypothesis.
Warner is cackling with laughter. “It is absolutely hilarious. We finally proved there was silver! From a lab standpoint, this is really funny.”
Can he describe what the natural silver looks like under the microscope?
“Like little doughnuts.… And these little buggers are just being held in there by those cotton fibers like babies in a bassinet.”
So what does it all mean for the case? Does the natural silver suggest the money has been at Tena Bar the entire time?
“Not the whole time. I have reasons to believe it maybe came down in different stages,” Warner says.
But from where?
“We’re pursuing that,” Warner says. He claims to have interviewed scores of former agents and air traffic officials. Warner’s theory on the flight path is that Northwest 305 came west of the flight path, and close to Tena Bar.
“Whatever you do, I beg you, do not talk to Jerry Thomas about this information,” Warner says. “If the flight path points west, the Washougal, as you know, is out for good. Once he got wind of where we were going, he was not happy.”
I ask Warner why he thinks Thomas is trying to defend the Washougal theory so fiercely. Is it because he doesn’t want to look foolish after somebody proves he has been looking for Cooper for the last twenty-two years in the wrong place?
“It’s Himmelsbach,” Warner says. “He wants to protect Ralph Himmelsbach, who really put out the idea that Cooper died in the woods. If Cooper landed west of the flight path, well, then, heck, of course he could survive the jump.”
I call Himmelsbach. I ask him about his relationship with Jerry. They are close. “His father wasn’t very nice to him, so I try and be as helpful as I can,” Himmelsbach says. He still believes Cooper perished in the woods and landed in the Washougal River basin. “I haven’t seen a lick of evidence to suggest otherwise,” Himmelsbach says.
I fly to Arkansas. I want to meet and interview Brian’s parents, Dwayne and Patricia. I want to know if they are telling the truth about what happened on Tena Bar. Did Brian find the money or not?
I land at Fort Smith and drive through the Ouchita mountains. An endless brigade of motorcycle riders passes me into Mena, near the Oklahoma border. It has been ravaged by a tornado. Debris lines the streets. Families are homeless.
The Ingram house is on the outskirts of town. Dwayne does not live here anymore. He lives in a trailer in Texas and works as an industrial painter. Water towers are his specialty. Before he paints each one, he climbs to the top of the tower and does a headstand.
He’s also been drinking himself to death. It’s not healthy to have him around the house. On a recent visit, Brian had to tackle him and wrestle a gun out of his hands.
Dwayne has a long white beard that reaches down to his belly button, and hippielike bracelets around his skinny wrists. He rolls a cigarette and we go outside to talk about the case.
Dwayne wants to figure out what the case means. He is not religious like Brian, but what was God trying to tell him when Brian found the money? What was the test? Why would he lose out on the ransom, get arrested, win a chance to have grandparents, lose that, lose the money, win it back in court? What was the deeper message in all that went wrong?
Back in the house, over a tank of goldfish, I see portraits of the Ingram family on the wall, before the money was found. I wonder how they might be different if they hadn’t gone on that picnic on Tena Bar.
“What good is fame without the fortune?” Dwayne says.
“They treated us like criminals,” Patricia says. She sits in a wing-backed chair and Dwayne sits in another across from her. Once again, they repeat the story of how Brian found the three packets of bills at Tena Bar, all the media attention they received after Dwayne’s arrest, and their court victory getting the bills back.
“I always wanted to meet Connie Chung, but not like that,” Dwayne says.
Dwayne is about to cry. He talks about Nan and Tap and how comforting it was to think about having a family again. He wonders if Brian found the buried treasure so that Dwayne could somehow find his real father. If Nan and Tap saw him in the news, then maybe his own father would too. But would Dwayne’s own father even recognize him? He rolls another cigarette.
“The Cooper Curse,” he says.
“Oh, it exists,” Special Agent Larry Carr says of the Curse. He’s no longer the agent on the case. In Cooperland, Carr is considered something of a hero for pushing the case forward. The discovery, on American soil, of the French comic book is largely a result of the media splash he made when he leaked that a parachute (albeit the wrong one) had been found. Carr also released data that exposed another fed bungle: the Missing Minute, which puts the hijacker over a not-as-wooded area. As significant as these discoveries have been, Carr’s bosses at the Bureau couldn’t have been too happy. Bureau culture frowns upon media attention for case agents. Whatever happened, Carr was reassigned to the most tedious detail in the field office: surveillance. Since, he’s relocated to Washington, D.C.
Am I losing my bearings here? I want to talk to the other journalist who came close to unearthing Cooper. His name is Karl Fleming. Before he got involved in the case, Fleming had started his own newspaper, married a cute brunette—she was twenty-two, he was forty-four—and his life seemed to be peaking. He placed a classified ad in local newspapers in the Pacific Northwest, attempting to lure the hijacker into an interview. The two men who responded were later charged with fraud and sentenced to prison after Fleming promised them immunity and then turned them in in the hopes of not getting arrested himself.
I find Fleming living in Los Angeles. I leave more than a dozen messages for him and his wife, Anne Taylor Fleming, now a writer who also contributes to the The Newshour with Jim Lehrer. No response.
Why not even a courtesy call to say no thanks? Is Fleming ducking me? Is Anne Taylor? Why?
Fleming has written a memoir, I learn, published in 2005. I get it. I open the first page and read his dedication.
To All the Reporters Who Did the Right Thing
I find the chapter on the Cooper case. “A Fall from Grace,” it’s called. I want to find out what happened to Fleming after the Cooper story collapsed on him. I find this passage.
I slid into a dark depression, spending hours prone on the sofa in my little office, unable to function, often in tears, begging for night so that I could sleep. I often thought of suicide and considered how to go about it. I didn’t like heights and a gun would be too messy. A pill overdose would do it.
His wife and her father forced him into a car. They drove him to a mental health facility. Orderlies strapped him to a gurney.
As I lay there with a partially free hand I tried to stuff the corner of a sheet down my throat to kill myself.
Institutionalized, Fleming was given heavy doses of antidepressants. He spent a significant amount of time in therapy. None of it worked. He began electroshock treatments.
I didn’t have a choice and I was too far down to be scared. Finally, slowly, I began to get better, began to see the sun shine again.
On a lark, I call Fleming again.
He picks up. Of course, he’d be happy to meet and talk about Cooper.
“You know, to this day, I still believe I had the right man,” he says.
I fly to Los Angeles. I call to confirm the date and time. I call again. I leave several messages. I finally reach him several days later. He can’t talk about D.B. Cooper. His wife�
�s orders.
“Sorry to have led you down the primrose path,” he says.
I check out another lead. Another confession. Bryant “Jack” Coffelt was a confidence man who spent much of his life in prison. A charmer, he was known to stuff wads of hundred-dollar bills in the roof of his Cadillac. He later worked in Washington as the chauffeur to the last descendant of Abraham Lincoln. The Lincoln heir had a reputation “as a dirty old man,” according to one account, and with Coffelt at the family estate they organized “modern-day Roman orgies.” Years later, Coffelt confessed to the Cooper crime, and witnesses claimed that after the skyjacking he mysteriously walked with a limp.
Socially, Coffelt was said to be close to a number of Washington elite, including J. Edgar Hoover, and was suspected by many to be working as an informant. Coffelt would conceal evidence in the most unsuspecting places. He once stuffed a note from his lawyer with the message “Burn This Letter!” inside a cookbook.
I had seen Coffelt’s name in the Bureau file. According to the FBI, Coffelt had a lock-tight alibi. I spent a few weeks checking him out. I couldn’t find much that jibed. At the time of the hijacking, the feds found, Coffelt was in a mental institution in the state of Illinois. Coffelt was a dead end.
I get more leads. A son tells me his father, a former air-traffic controller, once confessed to him in the family basement. Former Northwest employees tell me a lone-wolf employee who matched the hijacker’s description disappeared after the crime, prompting widespread suspicions. Another private detective and lawyer tells me about Wolfgang Gossett, a former Air Force man and gambler turned priest who, among other things, helped the FBI investigate cults.
Another lead. I must have overlooked it. Buried in a book is another Cooper confessor who, after a stint in the Paratroops, enrolled at Rutgers and joined the varsity track team. He was, according to a witness, “a steady third-place finisher.”
I drive to Rutgers. I camp out in the basement of the massive library on campus, flipping through old yearbooks. I scan the faces of the track runners, jumpers, pole vaulters, looking for my steady third-place finisher. I have to squint to see the details of the boyish faces in the team photos. I crack open another yearbook, and another. Focus now. If the clue to the Cooper mystery is here, I can’t afford to miss it.
SKYJACK: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper Page 24
