by Albert Jack
But as her financial situation improved, other aspects of her life took a further turn for the worse. In April that same year, Agatha, en route to visit her mother in Torquay, felt a strong premonition that her mother was dead. Then, upon her arrival in Torquay, she was informed that her beloved mother had, in fact, died suddenly and unexpectedly, from bronchitis. Later that year, returning from a foreign holiday, Agatha got wind of her husband's adultery. She immediately confronted Archie and collapsed in shock when he admitted that he had indeed been having an affair for the previous eighteen months. Agatha begged Archie to stay so that they could try to save their marriage, but Archie refused, moving out of the family home and into his club in London.
Then, on the morning of December 4, a cold and wintry day, the Surrey police were called to the scene of a motor accident at Newlands Corner in Guildford. Agatha Christie's car had been found halfway down a bank and partly buried in some bushes. The headlights were blazing, a suitcase and coat had been left on the backseat, but there was no sign of the author. Upon discovering that the police suspected either suicide or murder, the press descended on Guildford and the Christies’ Berkshire home, thrilled at the prospect of a real-life mystery. By the following morning, the disappearance of the still relatively little-known author was a front-page story on every national newspaper. Agatha Christie was suddenly big news.
In one of the finest publicity coups of all time (intentional or otherwise, but for her publisher the cheapest), members of the public were offered rewards for sightings, and newspapers reveled in their ongoing real-life whodunit, with new “evidence” regularly being reported. Some observers suggested that it must have been Archie—with much to gain from his wife's death— who had been responsible for her disappearance. But then it was discovered he had been at a weekend party with his mistress. The focus then moved on to Nancy Neele, and she was hounded by the press, eager to find a culprit. For ten days Surrey police combed the area for evidence, and reports of sightings continued to pour in. People scoured her books for clues (the police actually dredged a pool that was featured in one of Agatha Christie's books and in which one of her characters had drowned) and followed the story avidly in the newspapers.
The breakthrough finally came when, after ten days, the headwaiter at the Hydropathic Hotel (now the Old Swan Hotel) in Harrogate, York shire, realized that the mysterious novelist he had been reading about for nearly two weeks looked exactly like a stylish female guest who had checked in under the name of Mrs. Neele, claiming to be from South Africa. For ten days “Mrs. Neele” had been singing, dancing, and enjoying the company of the other guests while, like them, also following the Agatha Christie mystery in the newspapers.
The police were called and Archie Christie traveled to Harrogate to identify his wife. In a scene that could have come straight from a Christie novel, Archie placed himself at a table in the corner of the dining room, hidden behind a large newspaper. From there he watched his wife enter the room, pick up the papers containing her picture and the story of the continued search, and sit at another table. The hotel manager later said that as Archie Christie approached his wife, she “looked distant as though she recognized him but could not remember where from.”
So as the police were scouring the hills around Guildford on their hands and knees, Agatha had been alive and well up in Yorkshire rather than lying dead at the bottom of a lake somewhere in Surrey. Needless to say, the police were not impressed; indeed, some newspapers claimed the whole thing had been a publicity stunt. The press pack raced to Harrogate nevertheless, but few believed Archie when he informed them that Agatha was suffering from memory loss. There was a public backlash with demands for the police to be repaid the estimated PS3,000 cost of the search for the missing novelist—indeed, Guildford residents blamed the next increase in their taxes on her. Reviews of her next book, The Big Four, were spiteful as a result, but Agatha Christie was now nationally famous and sales of this new work topped nine thousand copies. The whole affair was a marketing man's dream, with all of Agatha's earlier books being reprinted and enjoying healthy sales.
But the personal outcome for the author was not so positive, as Archie promptly divorced her and married Nancy Neele. In 1930, Agatha met and married the archaeologist Max Mallowan, with whom, having learned her lesson, she immediately shared her resources. None of the parties involved ever spoke of the writer's mysterious disappearance again.
But the debate continued. Could Agatha Christie have had a nervous breakdown? After all, how could she have read about her disappearance in the newspapers and not even recognized a picture or description of herself? For that matter, how could the other guests not have recognized her earlier? Many commentators have suspected a conspiracy—a pact of silence between the writer and her fellow guests.
It was only after the death of Agatha Christie, in January 1976, that the mystery was finally unraveled. It is obvious from the details that the whole affair was in fact far from a publicity stunt. Indeed, Agatha was mortified at seeing so much made of her disappearance. The great mystery of the 1920s, involving the crime writer who was to become one of the most famous and successful in the world, is in reality an easy one to solve.
In 1926, as we have seen, Agatha Christie's world was thrown into turmoil by the sudden death of her mother and the breakdown of her marriage. The mixture of grief, anger, and humiliation she felt following these events led Agatha to the verge of a nervous breakdown, and for the first time in her life she began to behave irrationally. On the morning of Friday, December 3, Agatha and Archie had a major argument about Archie's intention to spend the weekend in Surrey at the house of a friend. He didn't want her to accompany him because, as the writer later discovered, Nancy Neele was going to be present. Such a public breakdown of her marriage was incredibly humiliating, and so— fueled by despair, vengeance, and plain old attention seeking— Agatha, assisted by her sister-in-law Nan, hatched a plot worthy of one of her own novels.
At 10 P.M. on December 3, after Archie had left for the weekend, Agatha drove to Newlands Corner, parked on the edge of the road, and pushed her car down the bank, leaving a suitcase and coat on the backseat and the headlights on, presumably to ensure the car would be discovered. Carrying a second suitcase, she then walked or received a lift to West Clandon station nearby, from where she caught the train to London. After staying the night with Nan, she wrote a letter to Archie's brother Campbell and posted it at 9:45 A.M. on the Saturday, informing him she was traveling to the hotel in Harrogate. She addressed the letter to his office, knowing it would not arrive until at least Monday morning. In the meantime, she was fully expecting the car accident to ruin Archie's weekend, and that of the other guests, who, she presumed, would all be out looking for her rather than having fun without her. When Campbell received the letter on Monday morning, she thought that everything would then die down, and she herself, no doubt, already had her own story worked out about how she could explain the events to her own advantage and to Archie's further misery.
Unfortunately, when Campbell opened the letter that Monday, he hardly looked at it and then managed to lose it, leaving Agatha's whereabouts unknown and the so-called mystery in the hands of the frenzied press. Agatha, clearly alarmed that her mind games had rapidly become so public and out of her control, decided to lie low to consider her next move. Perhaps she would have continued to hide—clearly she hadn't expected anybody to recognize her; or perhaps she would have fled abroad to escape the growing scandal.
It is intriguing to think what Agatha's next real-life storyline would have been if the headwaiter at the Harrogate Hydropathic Hotel had not finally recognized the author. But let us be grateful that he did, because some very fine stories subsequently began to flow out of this now famous author. I am off now to leave my car at Beachy Head to see how many of you come looking for me. If, after a week or so, nobody has tracked me down, try the Old Swan at Harrogate. I don't want to be left there too long.
What happened to
the famous hijacker who jumped off
a plane carrying a small fortune?
The offense on the face of it was a simple one, but the mystery surrounding its aftermath has passed into legend. On November 24, 1971, a man going by the name of D. (“Dan”) B. Cooper hijacked a Boeing 727 on a domestic flight and demanded $200,000 from its owners, Northwest Orient. Confident they would catch the hijacker, the company agreed to pay the cash in exchange for their passengers.
But the hijacker had other plans. After the aircraft had taken off again, minus its passengers and with D. B. Cooper $200,000 richer, he strapped himself to a parachute and jumped out into the cold night. He was never seen or heard of again, so if he survived the jump, it had been the perfect crime. If not, of course, he had been the perfect idiot. Either way, D. B. Cooper became an instant celebrity among the tie-dyed, hash-smoking hippies of the early 1970s, when hijacking had rather more of a romantic/revolutionary feel about it than it does today when terrorists are suspected at every turn. Despite one of the biggest manhunts in American history, including amateur investigations, books, TV documentaries, and films, nothing more is known about D. B. Cooper today than was known on the day of his daring airborne stunt.
So let's look at the events in a bit more detail. At 4 P.M. on that particular day in 1971—the fourth Wednesday in November, Thanksgiving Eve—a soberly dressed businessman approached the counter of Northwest Orient Airlines at Portland International Airport and bought a one-way ticket to Seattle for twenty dollars. The businessman, who gave his name as D. B. Cooper, was allocated seat 18C on Flight 305, which left on time at 4:35 P.M., climbing into the cold, rainy night with thirty-seven passengers and five flight crew on board.
Shortly after takeoff, the passenger sitting in seat 18C beckoned to an attractive young stewardess, Florence Schaffner, and passed her a note. This was such a common occurrence between businessmen and the flight crew that Schaffner, believing Cooper had given her his phone number, simply smiled and placed it, unread, in her pocket. The next time she passed seat 18C, Cooper whispered, “Miss, you had better read that note. I have a bomb.” She duly read the note and rushed to the cockpit to show Captain William Scott. The captain then instructed Schaffner to walk to the back of the plane and, so as not to alarm the other passengers, quietly sit next to Cooper and try and gather more information. As she sat down, the hijacker opened his briefcase and wordlessly revealed a device consisting of two cylinders surrounded by wires. It certainly looked like a bomb to the young stewardess.
Captain Scott then radioed air traffic control with Cooper's demand of $200,000 in used bills, together with four parachutes, two for him and the others for two of the crew he intended to take with him as hostages. The FBI was alerted, and they ordered Northwest Orient's president, Donald Nyrop, to comply fully with Cooper's demands. After all, they reasoned, where was he going to go? No one could jump from a jet airliner and survive. There was also the safety of the other passengers to consider, together with the negative publicity such a hijacking would generate if the company refused to comply; Nyrop felt $200,000 was a small sum to pay under the circumstances. Cooper then instructed the pilot to stay in the air until the money and parachutes were ready, and soon heard Captain Scott announce to his passengers that a small mechanical problem would require the jet to circle before landing. The rest of the passengers remained unaware of the hijacking and Flight 305 finally landed at 5:45 P.M. at its intended destination.
Once Cooper was satisfied that the money, all in used twenty-dollar bills, and the parachutes had been delivered, he allowed the passengers to leave. At 7:45 P.M., with only the pilot, co pilot, one flight attendant, and himself remaining on board, Cooper told Captain Scott to fly toward Mexico. He instructed him to fly at a low altitude of ten thousand feet (instead of the usual thirty thousand feet), and with the landing gear down and the wing flaps set at 15 degrees, thus indicating a detailed knowledge of flying. Unknown to him, however, the plane was being closely tracked by two United States Air Force F-106 jet fighters, using a state-of-the-art radar detection system.
As the flight crossed southwest Washington, Cooper ordered the pilot to slow his speed to 150 knots and the rest of the crew to remain at the front of the plane with the curtains closed. At 8:11 P.M. the rear door warning light came on, and this was the last anyone saw of the mysterious D. B. Cooper. Even the air force pilots shadowing Flight 305 in their jet fighters failed to see him jump.
After landing safely at Reno airport, the agreed-upon destination, the crew waited in the cockpit for ten minutes for further instructions. None came, and air traffic control also confirmed they had not received any instructions from Cooper. Cautiously Captain Scott called the hijacker over the intercom and, on receiving no response, nervously opened the cockpit door. Cooper had vanished, having taken everything with him, including his briefcase bomb, the canvas bag full of twenty-dollar bills, and his hat and coat. All that remained were the three unused parachutes. Cooper had done the un think able. He had jumped out of a commercial passenger jet and into the cold, wet night, thousands of feet above the ground. He had completely disappeared, never to be seen again. Nobody could prove he had survived and therefore got away with his crime, but, as even the FBI admitted, nobody could prove he was dead either.
The FBI calculated that the likely landing area for the skydiving hijacker was southwest of the town of Ariel, close to Lake Merwin, thirty miles north of Portland, Oregon. The eighteen-day manhunt that followed failed to reveal a single trace of the hijacker, but then all the FBI had was a description of a fit, six-foot, olive-skinned man of Mediterranean appearance, cleanshaven and wearing a dark suit, which narrowed the search right down to about a billion people, worldwide. They had some work to do.
It was soon apparent to the authorities that they were dealing with a meticulously planned crime, well thought out in every detail. First of all, Cooper had had no intention of taking any hostages with him: his request for four parachutes was simply to ensure that no dummy parachutes were delivered. Cooper had also worked out the weight of the ten thousand twenty-dollar bills as twenty-one pounds. If he'd asked for smaller denominations, they would have weighed considerably more and created a risk when landing, while larger denominations would be harder to pass on, thereby creating a risk of being caught. Hence twenty-dollar bills were perfect for Cooper's purposes.
He also knew that the Boeing 727-100 has three engines, one high on the fuselage immediately in front of the vertical tail fin and two others on either side of the fuselage just above the horizontal tail fins. This meant that neither the engine exhausts nor the intakes would get in the way when he lowered the rear steps and threw himself out into the night, which led to speculation he had targeted Flight 305 specifically for its engine layout.
Cooper also insisted that the pilot not pres surize the cabin, knowing he would be able to breathe naturally at 10,000 feet (but no higher) but reducing the risk of air rush as the door was opened. And as he was fully aware of the 727’s minimum flight speed with a full load of fuel, as well as the wing-flap settings required, and appeared to know that the 1,600 mph F-106 fighters would no longer be able to escort the jet once the aircraft speed had reduced to around 150 knots, this gave Cooper the window of time he needed to jump unseen, suggesting to many he was either a serving or retired airman.
The only mistake he made was to leave behind eight Raleigh cigarette stubs and his tie and tiepin, but even this evidence has led the police nowhere. There were also sixty-six fingerprints on the plane that could not be matched to the flight crew or any of the other passengers. Considering the number of people traveling on a commercial airliner in the course of a few weeks, this was regarded as unreliable evidence, although an exhaustive check with FBI records revealed no match anyway and D. B. Cooper's real identity remained unknown. That he could recognize McChord Air Force Base as the Boeing 727 circled Seattle-Tacoma airport also provided a clue, as did his lack of a regional accent observed by the ticket a
gent who allocated his seat. This all led FBI investigators to conclude Cooper was local and with a background in either military or civil aviation, possibly from McChord Air Force Base itself.
Appalling weather the day after the hijacking interrupted the search through the vast wooded area Cooper had probably landed in. But the full-scale land and air search that took place over the ensuing weeks revealed no trace of Cooper, the distinctive red and yellow parachute, or, most important, the cash. The police search team did discover the body of a missing teenager, but Cooper himself had vanished, which seems to disprove the theory that he had been killed during the jump or on landing. The FBI even checked the national database for any criminal by the name of Dan Cooper, or D. B. Cooper, in order to find out if, on the off chance, this otherwise meticulous and thorough hijacker had been stupid enough to buy a ticket in his own name. He wasn't, although a genuine Dan Cooper in Portland did undergo an uncomfortable few hours of questioning before being released without charge.
