Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper (16 page)

His ranch is set back from the main road. I drive down the gravel moat and across fields that sit in the shadows of Mount Hood.

Himmelsbach opens the door and the face I see is the same as in the old newspaper clippings. High, arching eyebrows. A mustache trimmed just so. Cheeks so closely shaven they look pink. He wears light stiff jeans and a bolo tie. I follow him out to the back porch. This is where Himmelsbach lines up his .22 rifle and snipes varmints sneaking into his garden.

Himmelsbach—or, H, as Cooper sleuths call him—is the voice of reason in the Cooper case. Since the night of the hijacking, he’s been interviewed by countless news outlets—print, radio, television, local, national, international—and he always shoots down the Robin Hood analogy. How, he snuffs, could the hijacker be a hero when he put thirty-six passengers at risk? And the six brave crew members? And what about the hundreds of airline officials and cops and agents whose Thanksgiving was ruined, and who later spent tens of thousands of hours hunting Cooper down? In one interview, Himmelsbach called the hijacker “nothing but a rotten sleazy bastard.”

The sun is out. Himmelsbach hears the distant buzz of an engine. He squints up and the sun beams off his blue eyes like flashes of light against the bottom of a swimming pool.

“AT-6 Texan,” he says of the plane. “A North American AT-6.”

Despite his age, there is an exactness to Himmelsbach, a German-reared thoroughness and competency that only enhances his credentials as the official granddaddy of the Cooper case. Before we start talking, Himmelsbach has ground rules.

No problem. Fire away.

There is one fact that he wants to make sure I understand.

“I
was
not and I
am
not obsessed with the Cooper case,” he says.

His eyes gaze over me.

Got it. Not obsessed.

I ask him what he remembers about the hunt. I want to know about the first morning.

November 25, 1971
West Linn, Oregon

It is dawn. His wife is a bundle under the black and orange silk sheets of their bed, the same bundle as when he came home late from the airport the night before. Ralph Himmelsbach puts on jeans, a shirt, his leather bomber jacket, aviator sunglasses, and drives to the hangar.

The sky is wet. The air is cold. Snow today. Snow any minute. Better get up before he gets socked in, he thinks.

His airplane is a single-engine, recreational Taylorcraft. He flies over the Willamette Valley and crosses Vector 23, the flight path of the hijacked plane. He buzzes the treelines of vast areas of remote timber, the streams and lakes and crags that form the border of the Dark Divide.

Himmelsbach flies a grid. Seven miles one way, seven miles back. Back and back again. Where did the hijacker bail out? He must be in these woods somewhere. But where?

The agent squints down into the trees. He looks for a plume of smoke from a campfire, a snare of parachute, a pool of blood.

Back and back and back again. Whoever Dan Cooper is, Himmelsbach is confident he and his fellow Bureau agents will find him. The skyjacker will test the agency. He will prove how good J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI really is.

Within the Bureau, the Cooper hijacking is given a name: NORJAK. At headquarters in Washington, senior agents are processing the microfilm that contains the serial numbers to every twenty-dollar bill the hijacker was given. The numbers will be printed in a booklet and released to the public. Field offices in Portland, Reno, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and throughout the Pacific Northwest have been asked to investigate and submit daily NORJAK updates to headquarters via teletype.

In Seattle, agents re-interview witnesses. They need to know what the hijacker looked like, so Bureau artists can create a sketch.

About how old was he?

George Labissoniere, the truck driver’s lawyer, says he had a clear view of the hijacker because he went to the bathroom so many times during the flight.

He was no older than thirty-five, Labissoniere tells the feds.

He was about fifty, Cord Zrim Spreckel, the printer, tells agents. Spreckel had a good look at the hijacker too. The man looked so suspicious. Why was he wearing sunglasses?

And what kind of facial features?

He had a square jaw, Spreckel says.

He had a saggy chin, Bill Mitchell, the college sophomore, says.

The details are conflicting. Other than stewardess Tina Mucklow, the only witness who was in close proximity to the hijacker is stewardess Florence Schaffner. Flo tells the feds she saw the hijacker without his sunglasses. She was the only one to see Cooper’s eyes. What color were they?

“Brown,” she says.

And about how old was he?

“Mid-forties,” she says.

Tina Mucklow agrees. But Cooper is shorter than what Flo thinks. Tina pegs the hijacker to be between five foot ten and six feet tall.

Flo says six feet tall, no shorter. And his hair was black, just like his suit and his shoes, Flo says.

His hair was dark brown, and so was his suit, which may have had a black stripe, Tina says.

And what about his shoes? What kind?

Also brown, Tina says. Ankle-length leather shoes, pebble grain, no laces.

To compose the sketch, Tina and Flo and Alice Hancock and other witnesses are shown the Facial Identification Catalog, the Bureau’s bible of ears (average? protruding? close set?) and noses (hooked? snub?
downward tip?) and chins (cleft? dimple?). Flo likes face type KK5-1, except for the ears and hair. Alice likes KA3-9 (eyebrows, OC1-10; mouth, KE9-11; cheek and cheekbones, KJ1-1).

And what about the hair?

“Straight, parted on the left side,” Flo says.

“Straight, narrow sideburns,” Tina says.

Alice saw the hijacker’s hair differently.

“Wavy, short, and trimmed in the back,” Alice says.

“Marcelled,” Robert Gregory, the paint company owner, tells the agents who interview him. The marcel wave is an old French hairstyle created by hot irons.

As co-owner of a paint company, Gregory pays attention to details, especially colors. Gregory says the hijacker’s suit was not brown or black. The color was russet, a reddish brown. And the suit, he tells the feds, had wide lapels. Which was strange. Wide lapels are out of style.

Gregory also noticed the hijacker’s hair. It was jet black, and had a greasy patent leather shoe polish shine to it. The hair was so dark it could have been dyed. The man’s skin was also “swarthy.” Perhaps he was Mexican-American, or had American Indian blood.

And about how tall?

Not that tall, Gregory tells the feds. About five foot nine.

In Reno, in daylight, agents can see inside the cabin. Northwest 305 is wrecked. Food from the meals the hijacker requested for the crew are splattered over the seats and on the walls. Searching for fingerprints, agents dust 18E, the seat the hijacker sat in, the handle of the lavatory he hid in, the cabin phone he used to call the pilots when he couldn’t get the aftstairs down, the in-flight magazine in front of the seat.

The agents find fingerprints. Too many. Which are the stews’ and passengers’? Which are Cooper’s?

In the armrest, agents locate the hijacker’s cigarette butts. They
look at the label. The brand is Raleigh, a coupon smoke. In total, there are eight butts in the ashtray. The agents search for hairs to analyze. On a seat, they find one limb hair. On the cloth that covers the headrest, they find a head hair. It is brown, Caucasian in origin.

Near the hijacker’s seat, agents find another piece of evidence. It is a tie. A skinny tie. The color is black. The knot is fake. It’s a clip-on. In the center of the tie is a tack. It is gold in color and features a circular pearl-like stone.

Agents turn over the tie and read the label. “T
OWNCRAFT, #3
, P
ENNEY’S,
” it says.

In Portland, Himmelsbach comes home for Thanksgiving dinner thinking about Cooper. Time is running out. With every minute that elapses, the feds lose ground. The weather had been so terrible—rain, fog, snow—that agents and local law enforcement could not search the flight path on foot. The next morning, the search would begin in earnest. That night, Himmelsbach watches the evening news. The hijacking is a lead story. At CBS, Walter Cronkite reads the intro.

When he boarded a plane in Portland Oregon last night he was just another passenger who gave his name as D.[B.] Cooper. But today, after hijacking a Northwest airlines jet, ransoming the passengers in Seattle, then making a getaway by parachute somewhere between there and Reno, Nevada, the description by one wire service: Master Criminal
.

September 3, 1969
University Hospital, University Of Washington, Seattle

In the auditorium, doctors, surgeons, and all of the fourth-year medical students wait to hear the speech Bobby Dayton has prepared before going into surgery. Bobby has become a fixture at the teaching hospital, sitting in waiting rooms in a dress and heels, chain-smoking. His doctors told him the name he chose for himself as a woman should be similar to his own. Bobby thought about Roberta. He prefers Barbara.

His remarks are typed. He reads them.

After forty-three years, I continue to live with an obsession that has ruined not only my life, but the life of others I have loved. I cannot understand myself, nor can I reason why I must be tormented until I die. I did not ask to come upon this earth, and I have never thanked God for the breath of life. My health is excellent and my appearance is normal enough—a normal male who should find a place in the world, marry, and live out a reasonably happy life. If only it were that simple
.