Uncle John’s True Crime

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  In 23 years on the air, the TV show America’s Most Wanted helped capture 1,153 fugitives.

  LOUNGE LIZARD

  In March 2002, 47-year-old Susan Wallace, a former British Airways flight attendant, was convicted of animal cruelty after she threw Igwig, her three-foot-long iguana, at a doorman and then later at a policeman following an altercation in a pub. Wallace maintains that she is innocent because Igwig acted of his own volition. “He probably jumped in defense of me. He’s done that before,” she said. (Igwig is now banned from the pub.)

  STRAIGHT SHOOTER

  David Duyst of Grand Rapids, Michigan, was convicted of murdering his wife and was then sentenced to life without parole. Yet to this day, Duyst insists that he’s not guilty, despite a mountain of forensic evidence against him. So how’d she die? According to Duyst, she committed suicide by shooting herself...twice, in the back of her head.

  SIDE ORDER OF COMPASSION, PLEASE

  Professional boxer Waxxem Fikes, 35, served five days in an Akron, Ohio, jail after assaulting a waiter at Swenson’s restaurant in 2001. According to testimony, Fikes was “aggressively complaining” that the onions on his double cheeseburger were unsatisfactory. “I told him that I expect the onions to be crisp, tender and succulent, and bursting with flavor,” Fikes testified. “They were not. My hands are lethal weapons or whatever, I know that. But he had no compassion for what I was talking about.”

  BODY OF EVIDENCE

  In March 2001, a woman in Munich, Germany, saw a neighbor carrying a dead body into his apartment. She called the police. When the suspect answered the door in a “surprised and disturbed state,” officers thought for sure that they had a murderer on their hands. Not quite. As the embarrassed man explained, the “dead body” was actually a life-sized silicon doll that he’d just purchased from an adult bookstore.

  Pittsburgh cops once investigated a crime scene for 8 hours before realizing it was a movie set.

  D. B. COOPER

  Modern-day Robin Hood? Or high-flying robber? He hijacked an airplane, stole a small fortune, then parachuted out of sight...and straight into legend.

  DAREDEVIL

  The day before Thanksgiving in November 1971, a nondescript man wearing a plain dark suit, white shirt, narrow black tie, and sunglasses stepped up to the Northwest Orient Airlines ticket counter in Portland, Oregon. He paid $20 in cash for a one-way ticket to Seattle on Flight 305.

  Once the 727 was airborne, the man summoned the flight attendant, Tina Mucklow, introduced himself as “Dan Cooper,” and handed her a note. It said he had a bomb in his briefcase and would blow up the plane if they didn’t grant his demands. He wanted two parachutes and $200,000 in $20 bills. When the plane landed in Seattle, Cooper kept the pilot and crew hostage but let the passengers off in exchange for the chutes and the loot. Then he ordered the pilot to take off and set a course for Mexico with these instructions: Keep the landing gear down, and the flight speed under 170 mph. Somewhere over the Lewis River, 25 miles northeast of Portland, Cooper strapped on a parachute, tied the money to his waist, and jumped out the rear stairway of the plane. He was never seen again.

  THE BIGFOOT OF CRIME

  In the ensuing investigation, the FBI questioned a man named Daniel B. Cooper. Although that person was never a serious suspect, the FBI reported to the press that they’d interrogated a “D. B. Cooper.” And those initials became forever linked with the skyjacker.

  The FBI manhunt that followed was unprecedented in scope and intensity. It was a showcase investigation, meant to display the competency of the world’s greatest law enforcement agency. Every inch of ground in the vicinity of the purported landing site was searched from the air and land, with teams of trackers and dogs, for 18 days. So it was a humbling moment when, after weeks of tracking down leads, the FBI admitted that they had come up with...nothing. No credible suspect. No trace of the loot or the parachute. No further leads to follow. A complete dead end. One frustrated FBI agent referred to Cooper as the “Bigfoot of crime” because there was no proof of his existence anywhere.

  If Cooper survived, he’d pulled off the crime of the century.

  First high-profile kidnapping in Canada: beer baron John Sackville Labatt in 1934.

  A STAR IS BORN

  Something about the hijacking caught the public’s imagination, as the media reports raved about the audacity of the crime and the calm, competent way in which Cooper carried it out. According to the flight attendants, Cooper behaved like a gentleman throughout the ordeal, even requesting that meals be delivered to the crew while they were stuck on the ground in Seattle, waiting for the ransom money to be delivered.

  He became a folk hero, a latter-day Jesse James. Songs were written about him, and a movie was made, starring Treat Williams as Cooper and Robert Duvall as the FBI agent on his trail. Half a dozen books, mostly by former FBI agents, provided theories about what happened to him. He was living the high life on a beach in Mexico. Or he’d slipped back into his former life somewhere in the States, undetected and unnoticed.

  On February 13, 1980, a family picnicking on the Columbia River, 30 miles west of Cooper’s landing area, found three bundles of disintegrating $20 bills ($5,800 total). The serial numbers were traced to the ransom. The rest of the cash has never been found.

  ...SO WHO DUNNIT?

  • Possible Suspect #1. On April 7, 1972, four months after Cooper’s successful hijacking, another hijacker stole a plane in Denver, using the same M.O. as D. B. Cooper. The Denver flight was also a 727 with a rear stairway, from which the hijacker made his getaway by parachute. A tip led police to Richard McCoy Jr., a man with an unusual profile: married with two children, a former Sunday school teacher, a law enforcement major at Brigham Young University, a former Green Beret helicopter pilot with service in Vietnam, and an avid skydiver. When FBI agents arrested McCoy two days after the Denver hijacking, they found a jumpsuit and a duffel bag containing half a million dollars. McCoy was convicted and sentenced to 45 years.

  In August 1974, McCoy escaped from prison (he tricked the guards into letting him out of his cell with a handgun made from toothpaste and then crashed a garbage truck through the prison gate). The FBI tracked him down and three months later killed him in a shootout in Virginia.

  Officially, the murders of Lizzie Borden’s parents remain unsolved. (Lizzie was acquitted.)

  In 1991 former FBI agent Russell Calame claimed in his book D. B. Cooper: The Real McCoy that McCoy and Cooper were the same person. He quoted Nicholas O’Hara, the FBI agent who tracked down McCoy, as saying, “When I shot Richard McCoy, I shot D. B. Cooper.” But there’s no conclusive evidence. In fact, McCoy’s widow sued for libel and won.

  Possible Suspect #2. In August 2000, Jo Weber, a Florida widow, told U.S. News and World Report that shortly before her husband Duane died in 1995, he told her, “I’m Dan Cooper.” Remembering that he’d talked in his sleep about jumping out of a plane, she checked into his background and discovered he’d spent time in an Oregon prison. Then she found a Northwest Airlines ticket stub from the Seattle-Tacoma airport among his papers. She found a book about D. B. Cooper in the local library—it had notations in the margins matching her husband’s handwriting.

  She relayed her suspicions to FBI agent Ralph Himmelsbach, chief investigator on the D. B. Cooper case. To this day he insists Weber is one of the likeliest suspects he’s come across. More recently, facial recognition software was used to find the closest match to the composite picture of Cooper. Of the 3,000 photographs used (including Richard McCoy’s), Duane Weber’s was identified as the “best match.”

  Possible Suspect #3. Elsie Rodgers of Cozad, Nebraska, often told her family about the time she was hiking near the Columbia River in Washington in the 1970s and found a human head. They never really believed her until, while going through her things after her death in 2000, they found a hatbox in her attic...with a human skull in it. Was it Cooper?

  Possible Suspect #4. In 2011 an Oklahoma woman na
med Marla Cooper told the FBI that when she was eight years old in November 1971, her uncle, L. D. Cooper, said he was planning “something big.” He returned two days later with severe wounds. As Marla’s father was tending to him, L.D. said, “We did it. We hijacked an airplane.” They told little Marla her uncle was in a car accident. She never saw L.D. again after that, and put it out of her mind for nearly 40 years. Then in 2009, Marla’s elderly mother talked about her “long-lost brother who’d hijacked that plane.” Marla gave the FBI a guitar strap belonging to her uncle, as well as a Polaroid of him. Like Weber’s, it looks eerily like the suspect in the composite drawing. The Feds couldn’t get any prints off the strap, however, and L. D. Cooper has been dead since 1999. The case remains open.

  In 2006 a Florida school’s mock CSI field trip accidentally discovered a real dead body.

  HOW TO RIG A COIN TOSS

  A long-held secret of carnies and hucksters. With a little practice, it really works.

  WHAT YOU NEED

  A large coin. The bigger and heavier, the better. When you get really good at it, you can use a quarter, but until then, a fifty-cent piece or silver dollar is best. The trick is nearly impossible with a nickel, dime, or penny.

  HOW TO DO IT:

  1. Place the coin in the middle of your palm with the side you want to win face down. For example, if you want “heads” to win the toss, put the heads side of the coin face down in your palm.

  2. Hold your arm straight out and clench all the muscles in your arm so it’s as stiff as possible.

  3. While holding that arm out tight, toss the coin into the air.

  4. Here’s the tricky part: As you keep your arm clenched and toss the coin up, jerk your hand slightly back. In other words, very subtly pull your hand ever so closer to your body. The move may be somewhat noticeable, but don’t worry. Nobody will be watching your hand—all eyes will be on the coin in the air.

  5. Catch the coin in your palm. Result: The coin will turn over in the air exactly one whole time. It will land exactly the same as it was before the toss—with the predetermined winning side face down in your hand.

  6. Slap the coin onto your forearm to reverse the coin and reveal the winning side—which is what was face down in your palm when you started and what you rigged it to be.

  It takes some practice to learn when and how hard to jerk back your hand to spin the coin only once. The heavier the coin, the easier it is—a small coin weighs so little that it tends to spin too many times. With a heavier coin, you’ve got more control. Now get out there and cheat...er, uh...amaze your friends.

  What do Fiji, Chile, and Egypt have in common? You can be jailed there for not voting.

  INFAMOUS WEAPONS

  We couldn’t find Uncle John’s old Fart Bazooka, but we managed to find some other famous weapons.

  THE SARAJEVO PISTOL

  On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip shot and killed the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo, Bosnia. The assassinations caused a chain reaction of events which, within less than five weeks, led to the start of World War I. The gun was a Browning semiautomatic pistol, model M1910, serial #19074.

  Princip, just 19, was a member of the Serbian nationalist group called the Black Hand. He fired seven shots into the royal couple’s car from five feet away, then attempted to shoot himself, but was stopped by passersby and quickly arrested. Princip died in prison of tuberculosis in 1918 (the disease was one reason he took the mission). After his trial, the pistol was presented to Father Anton Puntigam, the Jesuit priest who had given the archduke and duchess their last rites. He hoped to place it in a museum, but when he died in 1926 the gun was lost...for almost 80 years.

  In 2004 a Jesuit community house in Austria made a startling announcement: they had found the gun (verified by its serial number). They donated it to the Vienna Museum of Military History in time for the 90th anniversary of the assassination that started a war that would eventually kill 8.5 million people. Also in the museum are the car in which the couple were riding, the bloodied pillow cover on which the archduke rested his head while dying, and petals from a rose that was attached to Sophie’s belt.

  JOHN WILKES BOOTH’S GUN

  The gun that Booth used to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln now resides in the basement museum of Ford’s Theatre, in Washington, D.C. The gun is a single-shot flintlock, made by Philadelphia gunsmith Henry Derringer. It’s tiny—just six inches total in length with a 21/2" barrel—but it’s powerful, firing a .44- caliber bullet. The gun was found on the floor of the theater box where Lincoln sat. Also in the museum is the knife with which Booth stabbed one of Lincoln’s companions, Major Henry Rathbone, in the arm before Booth jumped from the box to escape.

  “Machine Gun” Kelly’s 1933 trial was the only federal criminal trial that allowed cameras.

  What about the bullet that killed one of the most revered figures in American history? You can see that, too. It was removed during a postmortem autopsy and was kept by the U.S. War Department until 1940, when it went to the Department of the Interior. It can be viewed today at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C.

  THE MUSSOLINI MACHINE GUN

  On April 28, 1945, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Claretta Petacci, were captured while trying to flee into Switzerland. They were executed by an Italian communist named Valter Audisio, who shot the pair with a French-made MAS (Manufacture d’Armes de St. Etienne) 7.65mm submachine gun.

  The gun disappeared until 1973, when Audisio died. He’d kept it in Italy until 1957, when, during a resurgence of Mussolini’s popularity, he secretly gave it to the communist Albanian government for safekeeping. With Audisio’s death, the Albanians proudly displayed the gun “on behalf of the Italian people.” Its home is now Albania’s National Historical Museum. Audisio once wrote that the only reason he used the machine gun was that the two pistols he tried to use had jammed. He also said that he had no orders to shoot Petacci—but she wouldn’t let go of Il Duce.

  LEE HARVEY OSWALD’S GUNS

  The gun that Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly used to assassinate President John F. Kennedy is a Mannlicher-Carcano .38 bolt-action rifle, 40 inches long, and weighs eight pounds. He bought it through a mail-order company for $12.78. Something with as much historical significance as Oswald’s rifle would become the property of the people of the United States, right? Wrong. Murder weapons are normally returned to the families of their owners, and Oswald’s gun was no exception—it was returned to Oswald’s widow. The National Archives purchased the rifle from Marina Oswald. The Archives also has the .38 Special Smith & Wesson Victory revolver that Oswald had with him that day and used (allegedly) to kill Officer J.D. Tippett before being arrested. Two days later, Oswald was shot and killed by Jack Ruby.

  First child to be recovered via an AMBER Alert: 8-week-old Rae Leigh Bradbury (1998).

  JACK RUBY’S GUN

  Ruby was a Dallas strip-club owner and small-time mobster who killed the alleged killer of the president. Just why he did it remains a mystery. But on November 24, 1963, in the basement of the Dallas jail—which at the time was crowded with police officers, reporters, and cameramen—Ruby walked right up to Oswald and shot him once in the side. The gun he used was a .38-caliber Colt Cobra revolver that he bought at Ray’s Hardware and Sporting Goods (on the advice of Dallas police detective Joe Cody).

  The gun was returned to Ruby’s family, where it promptly became tangled in a legal battle over Ruby’s estate between the lawyer who was appointed executor and Ruby’s brother, Earl. It wouldn’t be resolved until 1991, when a judge found for Earl Ruby, who immediately put the gun up for auction and it sold to a collector named A. V. Pugliese. Price: $220,000. In 1992 a friend of Pugliese’s brought it to Washington, D.C., and offered to show it to Speaker of the House Thomas Foley. The gun was seized by police and almost destroyed, per D.C.’s strict gun-control laws, but lawyers were able to get it bac
k. On November 24, 1993, the 30th anniversary of the shooting, Pugliese had Earl Ruby fire 100 shots with the gun and offered the spent shells for sale. Price: $2,500 each. (They only sold a few.)

  SADAAM HUSSEIN’S PISTOL

  When former Iraqi president Sadaam Hussein was captured in a “spider hole” in Iraq in December 2003, he had several weapons with him. One was a pistol. Major General Raymond Odierno reported that Hussein was holding the loaded pistol in his lap when he was captured, but didn’t make a move to use it. The Army had the pistol mounted and, in a private meeting, the Special Forces soldiers who took part in the capture presented it to President George W. Bush.

  When news of the war souvenir broke in May 2004, reporters asked President Bush if he planned to give the pistol to the next Iraqi president. No, he said, it “is now the property of the American government.” The gun is kept in a small study off the Oval Office, and, according to one White House visitor who later spoke to Time magazine, the president “really liked showing it off. He was really proud of it.”

  Is this some kind of joke? In Quitman, Georgia, it is illegal for a chicken to cross the road.

  COPS STORY

  COPS has been a Saturday night TV staple for so long—24 seasons as of September 2011—that it’s easy to forget what a groundbreaking show it was when it debuted in 1989.

  FIRST-PERSON PERSPECTIVE

  In the early 1980s, an aspiring filmmaker named John Langley began work on Cocaine Blues, a documentary about the crack cocaine epidemic sweeping the country. As part of the project, he filmed law-enforcement operations, including drug busts and police raids.