Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper (25 page)

“He was an amusing character,” MacWilliams tells me about Kenny. “He didn’t speak much about the past.”

MacWilliams met Kenny as a teenager, after he ran away from home. I ask him about Lyle’s theory: that Kenny was the infamous hijacker D.B. Cooper.

“He could have been him,” MacWilliams says. “D.B. Cooper could have been anybody if you really think about it … But I can’t really see that happening.”

Why not?

“You know, he didn’t have any particular lifestyle. Everything was a little different. Different directions.”

How would MacWilliams describe it?

“Odd,” he says. “It was uncomfortable for me because I am not like that. I told my folks he was gay, but not everybody lived in that house at night.”

So Kenny was gay? Was that why he was so secretive? Always escaping around the world? And was that what his deathbed confession
(“There is something you should know”)
was really about?

And where does that leave my investigation into Kenny as D.B.? Are Kenny’s sexual preferences—and perhaps his fear of coming out of the closet—relevant to the hijacking case?

It’s absolutely critical, I decide. According to Dr. Hubbard, the skyjacking expert, the vast majority of hijackers had effeminate mannerisms and homosexual urges. “For these men, to command a woman or even attempt it approaches the outer limits of imagination,” Dr. Hubbard wrote.

I wonder what the eyewitnesses on the Northwest 305 flight think of Kenny. I have photos to show them. Some forty years later, will they recognize him?

I find Alice Hancock, the first-class stew, living outside of Minneapolis. She answers the phone with a sweet voice, a cheerful personality. In retirement, she is studying Chinese. She remembers clear moments from the hijacking, how she attempted to lure young Tina away from the hijacker with playing cards, how copilot Bill Rataczak was freaking out in the cockpit and told her for some reason to remove her shoes.

Alice was a decent witness. She hadn’t spent the same amount of time with the hijacker as Flo or Tina, but she had a look at him. I send her a photo of Kenny.

“The resemblance is definitely there,” she says.

But?

Kenny is too bald.

“This fella had a head of hair,” Alice says of Cooper.

Tina Mucklow is her own mystery. After the hijacking, she disappeared. In 2001, when agents working the Cooper case wanted to meet with
her, they found her living under the name Tina Larson at the Carmel of Maria Regina, a convent outside of Eugene, Oregon. Tina had become a nun.

Tina had been a good witness. After the hijacking, she met with federal agents at least twice and delivered extensive interviews about the hijacker, his mood, his mannerisms.

“He was never cruel or nasty,” Tina said.

For the last forty years she has been almost completely mum about the case. Her silence has spurred a number of conspiracy theories in Cooperland. Does she know something that she’s hiding about the hijacker? Did he approach her and threaten her, telling her not to come forward? Did he do something terrible to her that prompted her to become a nun?

I find Tina living in Springfield, a town outside of Eugene. I call. I leave messages. I write. I imagine the aging stewardess sitting on her sofa in her living room listening to her answering machine, wondering if she should pick up after holding back whatever secrets she’s been keeping all these years. I pray for her to pick up.

Please, Tina, please. I send her telepathic messages, mental beams aimed to direct her hands to her telephone receiver. Pick up, Tina.

Tina does not pick up. And then, after a year or so, she does.

Her voice is soft and cautious.

I find myself lowering my voice to mirror hers, desperate to connect with her. I tell her about my investigation. Would she be willing to look at a few photographs of my Kenny?

“No,” she says. She doesn’t want to talk about the case.

I ask her why.

Passenger safety. She doesn’t want to “promote something that was not intended to be a good thing, and endanger anyone in the airline business.” In essence, her worry is that a would-be hijacker could read my story about D.B. Cooper, get inspired, and hijack another plane, just like so many copycats did in the early 1970s.

But that was forty years ago! I plead with Tina for an interview. She agrees to a follow-up call.

Never going to talk to her again, I think. But she picks up.

“I’ve made a decision,” she says.

I’m sending warm vibes through my fingers into the plastic receiver of my phone. I am ready to shop for plane tickets. I can be at her doorstep in Oregon in twenty-four hours—less, when you factor in the time change.

“I won’t be part of the journey,” she says.

It’s not fair. Why?

“I don’t think I have to explain the reason why I’ve chosen what I’ve chosen,” she says.

I try to persuade her. She’s part of history here. Her experience counts.

“I will honor the decision I’ve made,” she says. “It’s about my personal choice.… It’s final for me.”

I find stewardess Flo Schaffner in South Carolina. She is living here under a different name and prefers to keep it anonymous after what has happened to her. I fly into Columbia and walk out of the airport, and there she is, waving from behind the wheel of her car.

The air is hot and sticky. I push through it and get in the car. Flo looks different than she did on the front page of the
Minnesota Star
the day after the hijacking. Her hair is short and frosted. She wears a tank top, and her biceps are ripped. A workout fanatic, she teaches classes at her local gym. That’s where she met Art Rish, her boyfriend. He’s a cop. He is sitting in the front seat.

We drive to Lizard’s Thicket, a restaurant near the airport.

It is Sunday morning and the booths at Lizard’s are filled with a post-church rush of dusted-off suits, dresses, hats, girls playing tag in Mary Janes. The menu is Southern and deep fried.

Flo is also paranoid. Too many strange things have happened to her: agents knocking on her door, a pair of convicts approaching her on
her wedding day. She feared for her life. She was the only witness to see the hijacker’s eyes. She could testify against him in court, put him away for the rest of his life. The first thing he would do, she worried, would be find her and, gulp, eliminate the witness. She’d look under her car for bombs. Turn over the keys real slow.

I remove a few photos of Kenny. I place them on the table.

She reaches for the image of Kenny in his Northwest Orient uniform. She stares deep into the grain of black and white as if trying to reacquaint herself with that night. Her hands are trembling. She reaches for another photo. She lays the image flat on the sticky countertop. Her eyes zoom in on Kenny’s face. She rubs it with her fingers as if she is touching up a charcoal drawing.

Well, is it him?

“The ears, the ears are right,” she says. “Yes, thin lips. And the top lip, kind of like this, yes.… A wide forehead, yes.”

Then the hair.

“Receding, yes, the two areas—yes, yes—sort of like this.”

Flo is pushing down on the photo hard now, rubbing the image as if she is a medium and is now trying to summon the spirit of Kenny.

“There was more hair, though.”

The eyes?

“About like that.”

The eyebrows?

“About like that.”

I want to give Flo space. I look up and around the room. Tables are getting cleared. The smell is heavy on lard, collards, Sunday-morning ham. Older men are hunched over their food, sipping sugary soda from straws. The hijacker would be about their age by now, mid to late eighties. I wonder if I could recognize Cooper now if I saw him in the back of a plane forty years ago. I doubt it.

“I think you might be on to something here,” Flo says.

“Really?”

“But I … I can’t say … ‘Yea.’ ”

That’s not what I want to hear.

What about the other suspects she’s seen? How does Kenny compare?

Of all the suspects, Kenny is the closest match, Flo says. But she doesn’t feel comfortable saying definitely, absolutely, without question, this is the guy. It doesn’t mean no. It also doesn’t mean yes.

I ask her about Tina’s silence. Why does Flo think Tina won’t talk about the case?

“She’s hiding something,” Flo says. But what? Flo doesn’t know.

I don’t either. Tina, what are you hiding?

I ask Flo about the hijacker’s manner, his vibe. Was he alpha macho tough guy or soft and bashful? Did she think he could have been, as Ken Christiansen was, gay?

No, Flo doesn’t think so. But how could she know for sure?

Plus, the case was bizarre. So many strange things happened after. She took a month off from work to clear the night from her mind; then a man started following her like a shadow. He boarded Northwest planes she was flying on. Why was he stalking her?

“I know the hijacker, from prison,” the man said. “He wants to talk to you.”

Flo pushed the man away, told him to leave her alone.

He resisted.

“I want to tell you, this guy is not just a hijacker,” the man said. “He was in the Bay of Pigs. This guy works for the CIA.”

June 29, 1972
Salt Lake City, Utah

Richard Floyd McCoy Jr. has no good closing arguments. In fact, he has no legitimate defense. Agents found $499,970 of the ransom in his closet. They matched handwriting samples. The question before jurors is not whether McCoy is guilty of air piracy. The question is whether he should be sentenced to death, or serve out forty-five years in federal prison. The official who may have the most control over how much prison time McCoy serves is Bernie Rhodes, chief probation officer. If jurors opt to spare McCoy’s life, Rhodes will interview McCoy and prepare a sentencing report for the judge.

Throughout the trial, Rhodes has been observing McCoy’s behavior in the courtroom. Rhodes notices McCoy is making funny faces at his daughter, Chante, and toddler, Rich, in the front row of the courtroom, making them laugh. One morning, before the judge and jurors and lawyers arrive, a pair of marshals escort McCoy into court and Chante sidles up to him. McCoy holds out his palm. Inside is a yellow spinning top. How did McCoy manage to get the toy in jail, Rhodes wonders, and smuggle it in for his daughter?