Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper (27 page)

Six hundred miles later, it is dark. The marshals stop in Brighton, Colorado, and escort McCoy into the county jail where he will spend the night. The Drunk Tank, it is called. The next morning, the marshals come to take him to federal prison. He is not there. McCoy has escaped.

November 23, 2007
Seattle, Washington

I’m back West again. Down the street, tourists descend on the ice beds of Pike Place Market to watch the mongers throw fish. The neon lights of diners and strip clubs like the Lucky Lady blink in the early darkness of the afternoon. It’s not raining yet. The Vietnamese noodle house is loud and crowded.

Over a bowl of broth and beef and sprouts, Special Agent Larry Carr has news to report. The lab results are in. The physical evidence has come back from Quantico, and Bureau scientists have made a determination about the DNA evidence in the Cooper case.

What is the news?

There isn’t any. The samples aren’t reliable, Carr says.

He’s bummed. His hope had been that the Bureau’s forensic scientists would be able to detect a fleck of genetic material—a hair, say, or dandruff—to use as a sample. Once Carr had the genetic code of the hijacker in place, he could easily rule out (or rule in) suspects.

On the tie, Carr reports, the Bureau’s lab technicians did find a faint trace of saliva. But the sample is too weak to extract a full DNA code. Now Carr cannot use DNA to identify the hijacker. So much for his plan to send a grave-digging crew to Utah.

This can’t be. There must be some genetic matter in the case. What about the Raleigh filter-tip cigarettes agents found in the ashtray near the hijacker’s seat? The filters of the smokes, I imagine, are probably soaked in saliva.

Gone, Carr says.

Gone? Where are they?

Not in the Seattle evidence room. The cigs were in Las Vegas, where agents had deposited them after searching the plane in Reno. They must have gotten lost, Carr says. Or most likely thrown out.

Thrown out? It doesn’t make sense. How could agents toss arguably the most critical piece of evidence in one of their most infamous
unsolved cases? The rest of the evidence—the tie, the deployed parachute, the in-flight magazine—have all been preserved in evidence baggies. So why not the eight Raleigh filter-tip cigarette butts?

We march up the hilly streets, away from the market. No longer in an old bank near the piers, the Bureau field office is on the corner of 3rd and Spring.

Carr removes his wallet, swipes his badge, presses his finger against the pad. Now we’re in. Holy of holies. Here we go.

Over the past few months, a letter-writting campaign—coupled with Carr’s desire to attract media attention to the Cooper case—has resulted in an I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening moment of unprecedented access to the confidential Cooper files. For years the file has been gathering dust in the basement archives of the field office building. Now, Carr has selected the major case files for my perusal.

I follow Carr up the elevator and down the hall to another finger-scan pad and—
voilà!
—we are on the floor. On the far wall is a gallery of mug shots. Agents pass and I solemnly nod—should I really be in here?—and follow Carr to his desk. He collapses in his chair.

I sit across from him and wait. Over the walls I can hear other agents talking about a case. I close my eyes and listen in. The agents are talking about a spy case. I strain my ears to listen harder.

“Here,” Carr says, “This is the meat and potatoes of it.”

He drops the files in front of me. They are as thick as phone books.

I rub my hands together, blow on the fingertips. The cover is yellow and waxy. The pages are brittle. I read the words on the first page as if secrets are buried in the typeface.

THE HIJACK
, it reads.

The dossier reads like a play. There’s Flo Schaffner, telling the feds about the bourbon and Seven-Up the hijacker ordered. And Alice Hancock,
describing the hijacker’s hair as wavy. And Tina Mucklow, relaying the hijacker’s motive verbatim.

“I don’t have a grudge against your airline, miss,” he said. “I just have a grudge.”

I just have a grudge?
I read the line again. Is this Kenny? It doesn’t sound like him. According to Lyle, Kenny’s grudge was not vague or universal. It was specific: Northwest. Is Lyle wrong about the motive? Or was Kenny playing coy with Tina?

I dash off an e-mail to Lyle about the grudge line.

“It sounds very like what he would have said,” Lyle writes back. “Kenny was at a time in his life when he hit a low and was wondering where his life was going. His siblings were having family life and he was still alone. I think he was so lonely that it hurt.”

I plow through the file, reading hundreds of pages over several days. What I find is not evidence supporting Kenny. I find more Lyle Christiansens. The file is littered with suspicious brothers, parents, neighbors, business associates, scorned ex-lovers.

“You’ve meant so much to me this past year,” one man writes in a letter, which his ex-girlfriend apparently submitted to the Bureau for analysis. “I’ll always love you (which you have to hear) but always felt that this is temporary and we would both move on.” There are names to go through, too many names. Maurice Chevelle. Dennis Panther. John Gortel. Bobby J. Brummett. Robert P. Carter. Billy Dean McConnell. James R. Parker. Donald Earl Collins. Ed Adkins. Scott Kaye Kingsworth.

February 12, 1980
Portland, Oregon

Cameron David Bishop. Richard J. Jaquish. Gordon Dale Erwin. John Emil List. Earl Gene Larson. Doyle Wayne Harvell. Frank Taus. Russell Lee Cooper. Fred Angelo Catalano. William Francis Johnston Jr. Dan O’Halloran. Joseph Gilpatrick …

At the Bureau field office in Portland, agent Ralph Himmelsbach is bombarded with leads. Himmelsbach can’t understand how one man could parachute out of an airplane and vanish. It’s as if D.B. Cooper never existed. Maybe he didn’t exist. Maybe that was the clue. Perhaps Cooper faked his own death?

One tip of this sort comes in about a boater who went out on Lake Shasta and never came back. After a search, he was pronounced dead. Two years later, the same man is spotted pumping gas at a service station in Southern California. Going through records, agents find the man had serviced his car in Portland, and before the hijacking.

Agents locate the man in Los Angeles, go to the address. It’s a porno bookstore. The man looks nothing like the Bureau sketch.

More names, more leads. Peter A. Parlo. Everett R. Coovert. Paul Alan Van Riessen. Garnett Hollish. Lawrence Allison Hobart. Robert Hampton Keely. William Johnson Mason. Joseph Royce Stagg. Anthony Lambert Cole. John Henry Marlin. John Galvan Douglas. Robert K. Bertsch. Ronald Ross Newman. Max Arnold Freeman …

There are others, arrested and questioned. Like the drunk man in Madras, Oregon, who was found sleeping on the street with $9,000 in cash in his pockets. Or the man who ordered coffee in a Fresno diner at 4:30 a.m. and tipped with a $50 bill. Or the steelworker who always wanted to be a paratrooper and never came back to work. Or the retired special agent living in a Washington boarding house.

D. F. Franklin confesses. Franklin is the notorious skyjacker, he tells police. But when they interview him about what he remembers about the hijacking, his details are all wrong. A phenomenon is emerging. In the Cooper case, citizens are turning themselves in!

Himmelsbach receives letters from psychics and patients in asylums. They knew Cooper personally, they claim. Some spoke directly to God.

One letter comes from an inventor. After years of research, he tells Himmelsbach, he has created a machine that finds missing people. A sniffer, he calls it.

Himmelsbach agrees to meet and check out the man’s sniffer.

The inventor arrives at the field office carrying a black box covered in dials and gadgets.

The way the sniffer works, the inventor explains, is that it smells an object that once belonged to the person. Then, using the inventor’s patented system, it computes a location.

The inventor asks Himmelsbach for an object that belongs to the hijacker.

Himmelsbach hands him a flashlight that belongs to his younger daughter.

The inventor rubs the flashlight along the black box. Nothing happens.

Professional treasure hunters emerge. Diving expert John Banks conducts his hunt for Cooper under the waters of Lake Merwin. To avoid publicity, Banks launches his custom-built submarine into the lake at night. Its high-power search beams illuminate the murky waters like a ballpark outfield.

On his first dive, Banks descends. He sees giant trunks of dead trees through the sub’s observation portal. It is like maneuvering through an ancient forest. Diving deeper, he sees he is headed into the trunk of a massive tree. He braces himself for the crash.

The trees are so waterlogged, his sub snaps through trunks and branches like pretzels. At the bottom of the lake, he catches his breath. He monitors his equipment. Then he hears the sound.

Thump.

What was that?

Thump, thump.

He looks out the portal. The branches of dead trees he broke through are now crashing around him.
Thump thump thump …

Banks spends months searching the ancient underwater forest. He finds nothing.

The case almost dies. The statute of limitations for air piracy is five years. Before the deadline date, agents from the Bureau and prosecutors from the Department of Justice debate whether they should file a “John Doe” indictment and charge the hijacker in absentia. Technically, this would make Dan Cooper a fugitive and extend the statute indefinitely. Internally, agents and prosecutors quarrel over what to do until the day of the anniversary. In Seattle, a prosecutor rushes to a grand jury to present the case. But Seattle doesn’t have a grand jury sitting. Portland does.

Himmelsbach is the only witness. An indictment is returned in hours. The hunt is on for Dan Cooper, indefinitely. Himmelsbach wonders if the feds made a mistake in their calculations. Did Cooper land somewhere else and survive the jump? Could it be that the man they’re after is a local, living in the area, hidden in plain sight?

Two weeks away from retirement, Himmelsbach is past the realization he may never catch that rotten sleazy bastard Cooper, may never take his elk. Then he gets a phone call.