Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper (19 page)

Now wait a minute. Where’s the rest of it? Is the bank trying to steal whatever cash Duane might have had in the box?

No, the bank official says. The magazine is it. He hands it to her.

She reads the title.
Soldier of Fortune
.

It is a magazine for mercenaries and paramilitary types. She looks at the issue date: December 1994. She looks at the cover photo. A man, dressed in snow camouflage, holds an assault rifle wrapped in white gauze.

COLD WEATHER COMMANDOS
, the title reads.

Jo leafs through the magazine. She sees advertisements for brass knuckles, lock picks, lead sap gloves. She reads the first page. She looks at the photo. It’s a parachutist. He is clutching an object between his legs. It’s a bomb. She reads the title of the story.

THE MAN WHO HELD THE SECRETS
, it says.

November 27, 1971
Seattle, Washington

The name of the hijacker is kept confidential. This is by design. With the false alias D.B. Cooper in the press, agents now know that all leads that come in about a “D.B.” can be ignored, and all leads with the name “Dan Cooper” should be given top priority.

Dan Cooper. What does the name mean? Is it an anonymous cover, like Mike Smith or John Doe? Or is it a clue they are overlooking?

Whoever Dan Cooper was, he knew about parachutes. Agents are assigned to identify every parachute jump center and parachute club on the West Coast. They collect registration cards for more than fourteen thousand skydivers throughout Washington, Oregon, and California.

Agents go undercover over the border. At a skydiving competition in Canada, Bureau agents snap covert pictures of skydivers.

Earl Cossey, the rigger who packed the parachutes, is summoned to the Seattle field office for questioning. The feds ask Cossey to describe the chutes in detail.

Both rear pack chutes are emergency chutes, Cossey says. But different types.

How different?

It’s like choosing between a luxury car and an old tank. The luxury model is the Pioneer, Cossey says. The Pioneer was designed for recreational jumpers. The straps around the legs and arms are lined with heavy foam padding that would ease the jolt the hijacker would feel after pulling the ripcord. And using the shroud lines as guides, the hijacker would be able to steer through the night sky.

And the tank?

The NB6, or Navy Back 6, is a military chute, Cossey says. The container is drab Army green. The harness is primitive, and the jolt is so fierce and the padding so weak, the force can break skin.

What color is the canopy of the NB6?

“White,” Cossey says.

What is it made from?

“Nylon. Twenty-eight feet, with a conical canopy.”

Could the hijacker even control a chute as crude as the NB6?

“Somewhat,” Cossey says. It would be difficult to pinpoint a landing. What chute did the hijacker use? Cossey wants to know.

Well, when agents in Reno searched the plane, they found two parachutes. The first was a front chute, the reserve. The ripcord had been pulled. The canopy was loose in the cabin. It had been cut away from the container.

And the other chute?

The Pioneer. It hadn’t been touched. So, agents surmised, the hijacker must have jumped with the NB6.

Cooper must be ex-military, Cossey thinks. Has to be. Why else take the NB6?

And what about the front or reserve chutes? the feds ask.

Useless, Cossey says. The reserve chutes the hijacker was given would not have worked with the NB6. The NB6 does not have steel D rings. Without D rings, there is no way for the hijacker to attach a reserve chute to the NB6.

The issue is moot. Even if the hijacker had D rings, the reserve chute that was missing when the plane was searched (which presumably meant the hijacker took it with him) was a dummy. Linn Emrich, the skydive instructor who provided the reserve chutes, tells agents he mistakenly gave the state troopers a training chute. It was designed not to deploy. The folds of the canopy were sewn shut.

So, the feds ask, is it even possible to survive a jump from the rear of a 727, in stormy conditions, at night, without a working reserve, and a main chute he could hardly steer over a forest as remote as the Cascade foothills?

Quite possible, Cossey says. And the hijacker does not need to be a master skydiver, either. Six or seven jumps with an instructor is enough.

What about jumping at night? Is that more dangerous?

It is. The trouble is vision, Cossey says. When you’re floating down
over a dark forest, it’s harder to gauge the distance to the ground. Not easy on the legs, knees, and ankles.

If the hijacker survived, what are the chances he has an injury?

Extremely high, Cossey says. If Cooper is alive, he would be injured. He could have easily broken a leg or an ankle.

The call goes out from the Bureau field office. Search all local hospitals and interview doctors. Find anyone with a limp.

Inside the Bureau field office, agents are contemplating motives. Was the hijacker a rogue Boeing engineer who was terminated from the company and decided to seek his revenge by hijacking the Northwest plane?

Agents travel to Boeing’s headquarters in Renton, outside of Seattle, and file through company records. How many of Boeing’s workers might have had parachute experience? How many were male, about six feet tall, with dark hair and dark eyes and a dark complexion, and had recently been fired?

A lot. In 1968, there were over 100,000 employees at Boeing. During the recession, the workforce has been slashed to a third. How can the feds fish through tens of thousands of pink slips?

There are clues to follow. The hijacker was specific. He knew about the 727’s aftstairs, and knew a parachutist could safely jump from them and not get incinerated by the jet’s rear engines. So is Dan Cooper an engineer who worked on the Air America 727s that Boeing made for the CIA? Agents identify between twenty and thirty Boeing engineers and test pilots who worked on the CIA project between 1963 and 1964. The interviews yield no suspects.

How familiar was Cooper with the 727?

According to stewardess Tina Mucklow, the hijacker did not know how to operate the aftstairs. He was so unfamiliar with how they worked, he needed her help. If Dan Cooper was a Boeing engineer who worked on the jets, he would know how to use the air-stairs, right?

And what about the motive? Was it only money? According to Mucklow, Dan Cooper was bitter. “I don’t have a grudge against your airline,” he told her. “I just have a grudge.”

Fall Semester, 1971
Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah

The headaches. The tumor. Is it real? Richard Floyd McCoy Jr. is in pain. What is wrong with him?

He tries to focus on his schoolwork. The research paper on skyjackers interests him. To prevent skyjackings, he needs to understand how they think, what their minds are like. One psychological study, released earlier in the year, suggests that skyjackers are not really motivated by the politics of Cuba or the Irish Liberation Army or the Middle East, despite what they say. The study burrows deeper into the unconscious, identifies what triggers the criminal impulse and the impact of flight on the ego.

It starts, of course, with the father. Dr. David G. Hubbard, a psychiatrist who interviewed dozens of skyjackers in prison to complete his book,
The Skyjacker
, proposed the following theory:

It is my overall thesis that these men introjected the fearful image of a father at an early age, a father who would “do them in if they dared to rise and try to act like men,” and that image of the impossible father had an intimate connection with the son’s gravito-inertial experiences and his definitions of the impossible, revealing a determinant of crime specifically involving flight
.

Gravity is key, Hubbard thought. From the moment of birth until death, gravity governs us all. It cannot be escaped. After birth, when the mind is in the process of rapid development and the strains of personality and ego are formed, babies are at the mercy of gravity. They cannot stand. They need the help of others to transport them. They are pinned by gravity. Slowly, they learn to use their own two feet to rise up, to break the stranglehold the force of gravity has upon them.

Gravity becomes its own impossible father, Hubbard says. “It is violent, inevitable, instantaneous, and unmerciful. It is indifferent and final, and by its physical nature stands in stark contrast to that of the
mother who … is condemned to live in a world where a physical reality (the father) is holding her and her children down in eternal subjection.”

McCoy’s childhood was like that. His father beat him. His mother could do nothing to stop it, until she left him for another man. She was also religious and sweet. There was definitely what Dr. Hubbard called a “hostile border” between the father and the mother. And: “The child must clearly stand on one side or the other.”

McCoy and Karen and Karen’s younger sister, Denise, live in a small red brick house on a quiet street in Provo. The trees that arch over the street are horse chestnut and sycamore. Their neighbors are like them—devout Mormons connected to Provo’s educational and economic center, BYU. For extra money, McCoy has been teaching Sunday school. He is familiar with the Mormon Articles of Faith.

12.) We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law
.

13.) We believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and in doing good to all men …

Along the siding of McCoy’s house are bushes that are so overgrown they almost touch the windowsills. The garage is small. His Volkswagen bug squeezes in.

In the house, there is tension between Richard and Karen and Denise. How will McCoy support his children, Chante and Rich, if he has no chance at a career in law enforcement?

For a release, McCoy goes parachuting at the Alta Jump Center with Robert Van Ieperen, a state trooper and a friend from the National Guard. McCoy talks about the topic on his mind. How easy would it
be to jump out of a commercial airliner, if you did it the right way? How much cash could you get away with? Where would you land? It would have to be a remote drop zone, away from authorities.

At home, McCoy thinks and talks about skyjackings. Denise, his sister-in-law, later recalled a question McCoy asked her. If McCoy jumped out of an airplane in a remote location, would she be willing to pick him up?

November 29, 1971
Seattle, Washington

The sketches are finished. The Bureau has postcards printed for agents to analyze and for cops to pass out and slide under house doors. The image is printed in newspapers. It runs on television news spots. The face is everywhere.

The face is an honest face, or a once-honest face. The lips are thin, as if from the Midwest. The hair is good-boy hair: flat and parted neatly on the top of his forehead. The expression is empty and pallid and yet there is something determined about his look. Or maybe there isn’t. The face is now a blank canvas for the mind to fill. Dan Cooper is now who you want him to be.

The guy looks a lot like Bing Crosby, many say.

There is a second sketch. It is an arresting image. The frames of the hijacker’s sunglasses are not ornate or horn-rimmed. They are wrap-around frames with bubble lenses, sunglasses you might wear riding around the German countryside in a motorcycle sidecar.

In Las Vegas, agents analyze evidence found on the hijacked plane. What does the black clip-on tie mean? Towncraft? Penney’s? J.C. Penney’s? A Bureau agent takes the tie to the department store. He shows it to the manager and the assistant manager. This tie look familiar?

It does. Penney’s carries the Towncraft label.

The agent flips over the tie. Can the Penney’s employees tell perhaps what Penney’s store the Towncraft tie came from?

Impossible, the manager says. All J.C. Penney stores carry the Towncraft label. Also notice the width, he says. The tie is skinny, a slender ribbon of black cloth.

The assistant manager goes over to the tie counter. He retrieves a Towncraft. The tie he is holding is at least two and half times the width of the Towncraft found on the hijacked plane.

Why was one Towncraft skinny and the other wide?

Styles have changed, the assistant manager tells the agent. Men are wearing wide ties now.

How long ago was Penney’s carrying the skinny Towncraft?

At least a year, the assistant manager says. A year and a half probably.

What about the gold-colored pearl tie tack?

Penney’s doesn’t sell that item, the manager says.

Have any idea who does?

No idea.

What about the
#3
on the label? What does the
#3
mean?

A price indicator, the manager says. The #3 Towncraft sold for $1.50.

The Towncrafts aren’t dress-type ties, the assistant manager says. They’re usually worn by working people, purchased in bulk.