Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper (2 page)

Porteous was baffled. Why was Christiansen so desperate to reach Nora Ephron? And what was he talking about when he said he knew a person connected with a famous crime? Which crime? How famous?

In e-mails, Porteous prodded for more information. The old man was cagey. He wanted to tell his story to Nora Ephron, give her the exclusive. But Ephron never wrote him back. Lyle finally gave up. He told Porteous everything.

His hunt started on television. Flipping around the dial, Lyle settled on the program
Unsolved Mysteries
. The topic of the episode was D.B. Cooper: the famous hijacker who in the fall of 1971 parachuted out the back of an airplane with $200,000 in stolen cash—and was never seen again. D.B. Cooper had become a famous American outlaw, the legendary Robin Hood of the sky. The subject of poems and ballads and rock songs, D.B. was up there in the crime annals with Billy the Kid, Bonnie and Clyde, and Bigfoot.

D.B. Cooper, where are you now?
We’re looking for you high and low
.
With your pleasant smile
And your dropout style
,
D.B. Cooper, where did you go?

His identity is a mystery. For four decades, agents, detectives, reporters, treasure hunters, amateur sleuths, and others have quested for clues that might reveal who the hijacker was. But no effort has yielded definitive results. Cooper remains only a face seen in sketches composed by FBI artists. And what a face!

Lyle Christiansen perked up in his chair when he saw it. The face was familiar. The receding hairline, the thin lips. The sloped forehead. The perky ears. The smile—that mischievous smile.

A cold and queasy feeling swept over him as he looked at the face. Could it be? It could. Lyle wrote to Porteous:

Yes, I knew the culprit personally.… He was my brother
.

The PI looks discouraged as I slurp up the garlicky broth at the bottom of my bowl of
moules
. Cooper? Sky pirate? Never heard of the guy.

The name is alluring, though.
D.B. Cooper
. It’s fun to say out loud. It has a royal ring, a rhythm, with those stately initials that look so good in history books. J. P. Morgan. D. H. Lawrence. J. S. Bach.

Back at the office, I look up the case. The headlines continue, forty years later: V
ANISHED
I
NTO
T
HIN
A
IR
. T
HE
P
ERFECT
C
RIME
. T
HE
W
ORLD’S
M
OST
D
ARING
C
RIMINAL
.

Cooper was a genteel thief, according to legend. He wore a suit and tie. He was polite—caring, even—to his hostages. He developed his own cult following. On the anniversary of his crime, in the forests of southwest Washington State, where many believe his parachute came down, worshippers toast his feat and keep the legend going at a party that has been running for forty years.

“He comes off as a kind of curious Robin Hood,” a sociologist said. “Taking from the rich, or at least the big and complex. It doesn’t matter whether he gives to the poor or not.” The symbolism of the skyjack was “one individual overcoming, for the time being anyway, technology, the corporation, the establishment, the system.”

And the posse. Cooper spurred one of the biggest manhunts in law enforcement, as spy planes orbited over search areas and soldiers and generations of FBI agents on the ground waded through snow, mud, and rain in the most remote forest in the nation looking for him. Some lawmen were so impressed with the cleverness and courage of the getaway, they hoped the hijacker was never caught.

“If he took the trouble to plan this thing out so thoroughly, well, good luck to him,” one sheriff said after the jump.

“You can’t help but admire the guy,” another federal agent on the first search teams said.

Cooper’s crime transcended crime. In one jump, the hijacker was able to make the good guys root for the bad guys. So who was he? Why did he do it? And what happened to him?

Over the decades, the number of suspects and persons of interest in the Cooper case has grown to more than one thousand. Buried in the basement of the Bureau’s field office in Seattle, the file runs over forty feet long. Inside are dossiers, letters, photos, interviews from witnesses, airline officials, parachute packers, tipsters, fraudsters, psychics, suspicious neighbors, business partners, conspiracy theorists, parents, jealous lovers. Some suspects disappeared. Some suspects faked their own deaths. One man nearly died in a custom-built submarine, scanning the bottom of a lake for the hijacker’s ransom. One renowned reporter attempted suicide after his suspect was proven to be a fraud; only a steady program of electroshock treatment jolted him back into coherency. Countless impostors emerged. Men went to prison. The hijacking became myth, and over time the myth became truth. It was no longer clear what information was fact, or what was legend.

Like the quests to find the Holy Grail and the Lost Dutchman Mine, the hunt for the hijacker is an odyssey that tests the boundaries of obsession, and the farther along the path one gets, stranger and stranger things happen.

The Cooper Curse is what those who have felt it call it. But is the Curse real? Or something we create, then blame when we fail to find out what happened? Or the by-product of a moment in time defined by chaos and paranoia?

When Cooper jumped in the fall of 1971, the nation was at war with itself. In government buildings and on college campuses, bombs went off. In cities, looters roamed as riots raged and buildings burned. At demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, protesters were arrested by the tens of thousands. A defeat in Vietnam was imminent. The nation was also mired in recession. Labor strikes crippled the workforce. Unemployment soared. So did the crime rate. Prisons were overcrowded and taken over in riots. Communes were built. Cults formed. Otherwise normal teenagers ran away from home, and had to be “deprogrammed” after they were brainwashed.

“The music is telling the youth to rise up against the establishment,”
Charles Manson said during his trial for murder. “Why blame me? I didn’t write the music.”

A mob had formed. The underground was rising. Terrorists were homegrown. Communist fears were reborn. Inside J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, a campaign was afoot to compile information on protesters and anarchists. Phones were tapped.

At the center of the spookfest was President Nixon, whose motorcade was pummeled with rocks and surrounded by protesters.

“I just want to ask you one favor,” Nixon told top aide H. R. Haldeman. “If I am assassinated, I want you to have them play Dante’s
Inferno
and have Lawrence Welk produce it.”

The president feared blackmail from so many different directions, both in and outside his administration, that his aides formed the Plumbers, the White House’s own dirty tricks brigade. The Plumbers’ black-bag jobs eventually led to Watergate and Nixon’s resignation from office, perhaps the lowest point in the nation’s political history.

Skyjacking was then a national epidemic. Throughout Nixon’s term, there had been roughly a hundred hijackings of American airplanes, and over half the attempts had been successful.

The airplane had become the next stagecoach, a crime scene for dangerous jet-age robberies, and the skyjacker a momentary cultural hero. Like no other innovation, the invention of the airplane in Kitty Hawk and the evolution of American airpower were testaments to the nation’s technological virility and essential to the American ethos. Air-power had been instrumental in winning the World Wars, in ushering in the jet age, in developing the space program. America had put man on the moon. Boeing had built the 747, the jumbo jet. And yet, in one impulsive action, the lone skyjacker was able to show the
fallibility of the costly flying machines. What good was the power of the Air Force in a country like Vietnam where American soldiers were slaughtered under the canopy of the jungle? What good was flying a jet to vacation in Miami when so many flights were getting rerouted to Castro’s Cuba?

The skyjacker himself was a kind of schizo-transcendentalist. Onboard a jet, taking all passengers and the flight crew as hostages, the skyjacker was able to create his own society. He became his own head of state, directing others—the pilots, the stewardesses, the lawmen, mayors, governors—to act upon his whims. In one flight, the skyjacker went from nobody to somebody. And with reporters from newspapers, radio, and television stations monitoring the drama in the air, the culprits achieved celebrity. Dr. David Hubbard, a psychiatrist interviewing nearly a hundred airplane hijackers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, described taking over an airplane as a holy experience. “The skyjackers,” he once wrote, “seemed intent to stand on their own feet, to be men, to face their God, and to arise from this planet to the other more pleasing place.” To date, hundreds of skyjackers and terrorists have taken over airplanes. Only one remains unknown.

Shit. Porteous and Lyle Christiansen are on to something. The Cooper case is a big deal. Uncovering the identity of the hijacker is a major story (Pulitzer, hello!), and it’s mine so long as I don’t mess it up. Of course, I’ll have to prove Lyle’s brother was actually the hijacker. How hard could that be?

Back at my office after lunch, I call Porteous. I want to read the file he’s put together on Lyle’s brother. I want to see it fast, before Porteous decides to call another reporter. As a general rule, PI’s can get giddy over the prospect of publicity. Breaking the Cooper case would make
Porteous the most famous PI in America. At least that’s what he must be thinking. That’s what I’m thinking.

I race over to Sherlock headquarters. The office doubles as Porteous’s one-bedroom co-op apartment on the Upper West Side. He opens the door and the classical piano music noodling away on the stereo oozes out. The place is like a zen palace for gumshoes.

I sit down at the dining room table. Porteous slides me the file. I pull out a few papers. One is a photo. The image is of a gravesite, for Lyle’s brother. I read the name.

KENNETH P. CHRISTIANSEN
TEC 5 US ARMY
WORLD WAR II
OCT 17 1926—JUL 30 1994

So Lyle’s brother’s name was Kenny. I wonder what he died from.

Cancer, Porteous says. The pancreas. That’s what Lyle told him.

I read Kenny’s military record.

PARACHUTIST’S BADGE, ASIATIC PACIFIC THEATER
.

So it was true. Kenny knew about parachutes. He could have jumped out of that plane just like D.B. Cooper had.

I pull another photo. In this one, Kenny is in uniform. He wears a skinny tie with a clasp. He is standing in the aisle of an airplane.

Kenny worked for Northwest, the airline Cooper hijacked, Porteous says. He wasn’t a flight attendant. He was a purser. A purser is a senior flight attendant who handles the money and immigration issues on international flights.