Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper (28 page)

“Money has been found,” an FBI secretary tells him.

The agent pays little attention. He’s been pranked dozens of times before. He asks the secretary to match the serial numbers of the found money to the list of Cooper bills.

She already did. They match.

The next morning, Himmelsbach waits for the finders of the money to appear. He is annoyed because they are forty-five minutes late.

Dwayne Ingram and his wife, Patricia, drove here all the way from Vancouver, Washington, where they live. They recently moved from rural Oklahoma. Dwayne has a job painting trailers and cars. Patricia stays home and takes care of their eight-year-old son, Brian.

Himmelsbach wants to see the money.

Patricia removes a plastic baggie. She hands it to the agent. Inside he can see three clumps of old bills. They are caked together, dark around the edges like burnt toast.

We were all on a picnic on Tena Bar, Dwayne Ingram says.

Tena Bar is a sand bar along the north shore of the Columbia River. It’s where fishermen run lines for chinook and hippie kids go to swim, play drums, drink beer.

On the beach, Dwayne wanted to build a fire, so he asked his son Brian to clear space in the sand. Brian dropped to his knees, smoothed out a patch and knocked the first bundle over. Then he found two more. The Ingrams wanted to take the money to a bank and cash it out, but a friend noticed the bills were twenties.

“That’s Cooper’s money,” he said.

The Ingrams asked about the reward. How much money will there be?

Himmelsbach needs to check the bills first, to see if they are real. They’ll be easy to eliminate, he thinks, because the real ransom bills were issued in the years 1950, 1963, and 1969.

Himmelsbach picks up a packet of bills. He reads the series number.

“1963,” it reads.

He writes down the serial number.

“55376548.”

He leaves the room to fetch the booklet that contains the serial numbers of the bills the hijacker was given. He goes through all ten thousand serial numbers, hunting for a “55.”

It is a long search. The ransom money was used. The serial numbers aren’t in order. He looks for a 1963 bill combined with a “55.” He finds one. He compares the remaining serial numbers. It’s a match.

Where did little Brian Ingram find that money again?

Tena Bar, the Ingrams tell him. Along the Columbia.

Himmelsbach looks at a map. The location doesn’t make sense. Tena Bar is roughly forty miles south of where the feds thought the hijacker bailed, and around five miles from the Northwest 305 flight path. How in the world did the money end up there? And where’s the rest of it?

November 23, 2007
Seattle, Washington

“The real mystery is the money,” Larry Carr tells me. “The mystery of the money is almost more interesting than the mystery of who Cooper was. If you can figure out the money, that leads you to Cooper. It’s all about the money. The money is our only shot.”

I ask Carr what his plan is now. Like the tie he sent to the Bureau lab in Quantico for a fresh forensic analysis, the money could be reanalyzed with modern techniques. Carr’s problem, though, is that the lab is backed up. Scientists don’t have time or resources to burn on cold cases.

So what’s the strategy?

Carr’s gone undercover, he says, in cyberspace. Under a fake name, he’s joined the Drop Zone, an Internet forum run by amateur D.B. Cooper sleuths. One of the most inquisitive (and caustic) is Snowmman, who refuses to identify who he is or what he does for a living. The most user-friendly is Sluggo_Monster, a nuclear lab consultant from Alabama named Wayne Walker who built
N467us.com
, or “Sluggo’s Northwest 305 Hijacking Research Site.” There is also 377, Orange1, an assortment of parachutists, former parachutists, parachute experts, and scientists. One is Georger, a retired lab whiz and entrepreneur named Jerry Warner. He grew up in the Cooper search area, and remembers talking about the Cooper case every Thanksgiving dinner.

Carr’s plan is to leak information about the case on the forum for the cyber gumshoes to devour. If his bosses at the Bureau aren’t willing to spend resources on the Cooper Case, then maybe the Cooperites in cyberspace will help him. Carr’s handle: Ckret. It won’t be long before his cover is blown.

377: I get the distinct feeling that Ckret is giving us taxpayers a free ride on much of the Cooper investigation.… Am I right Ckret?

Ckret: You don’t trust me? I am from the government and here to help. How could you not trust an FBI agent … By the way, that book you checked out is two days late and at the moment your cell phone is off. Oh, and that web site you have minimized right now, I didn’t know people could do that, very strange
.

The cyber sleuths want to examine the money. Scientist Jerry Warner has a proposal. If the Bureau is too cash strapped for resources to investigate the money, why not farm it out? Warner has all the equipment in his lab. Plus Warner knows other scientists with equipment as advanced as anything the Bureau has in Quantico.

Other agents might scoff at the idea of bequeathing criminal evidence to civilians in order to investigate a criminal case. Not Carr. Best-case scenario is they find something. If the Bureau holds on to it, nothing happens. With Warner, Carr makes plans to have the evidence examined outside the Bureau. But Warner is too old to conduct the forensic examination himself. He’ll need to take on a partner, and he knows the scientist for the job: Tom Kaye.

The next day, I head south to attend the annual D.B. Cooper party at the Ariel Tavern.

The Tavern is the only store in Ariel. It sits along the roadside, its shingled blue siding and clap-tin roof battling gravity. Out front, plants grow from a urinal. The entrance is covered in signs:
THIS BUSINESS SUPPORTED BY TIMBER DOLLARS
and
UNATTENDED CHILDREN WILL BE SOLD AS SLAVES
.

Conventional wisdom is that the party’s origins are pure, an event based on admiration for the hijacker’s guts, and the celebration has taken on the feel of a séance. Each year, there is hope that if the partygoers dance hard enough and drink enough beer, the guest of honor—D.B.—will walk through the front door.

“They always say the criminal comes back to his old haunts, and I think he’ll come back,” Germaine Tricola, the founder of Cooper Days, would say. In time, the Cooper party became part of the Cooper legend, and they’ve both worked to keep each other alive for the past four decades. President Jimmy Carter called in once.

Some years, before the bands played, hundreds of partygoers were offered search tours, parachute jumps, seaplane rides, a D.B. Cooper look-alike contest. Lunch and dinner were the same: buffalo stew served with slices of buttered white bread.

News clippings are spread along the walls. In the old photographs, loggers with mutton-chop sideburns sit around the store’s woodstove. One man presses two beers against his head to simulate antennas. A band is jamming, playing the Cooper ballads.

He said I beg your pardon ma’am a big bad bomb it’s true
,
But I won’t set if off if you don’t put me in the mood
.
Just take me to Seattle and we’ll put down for to land
,
And I’ll sell you back your airplane for a cool two hundred grand
.

I am not drunk. I should be. I should be cursing Ken Christiansen and his brother, Lyle, for sending the wacky letter to Nora Ephron. Is this the final scene of Lyle’s
The Bashful Man in Seattle
? The gullible reporter who flies around the country hunting for the ghost of a purser.

I look around the room. The light in the tavern is soft and murky, like the glow of an old Coleman lantern. A parachute canopy hangs over picnic tables and twinkle lights are laced through old license plates and taxidermy. Near the cash register is Cooper gear: T-shirts, matchbooks, mugs. Inside a hot dog roaster, a lone frankfurter spins away. The band is on break. I’m on my second bowl of logger stew and chasing it down with a cold can of beer when I see them. They are standing at the tavern door.

The older man is shorter. His hands are buried in his pockets.

His friend is younger, taller, stout. He is holding a three-ring binder.

I introduce myself.

The shorter man is Ron Foreman. He’s an airline mechanic.

The taller man is Cliff Kluge. He is a Delta pilot.

“The reason we’re here, is my friend Ron has a story to tell,” Kluge says.

Ron can’t get the words out of his mouth.

“Yeah, you see, it’s just one of those things that when I tell people, the first thing they do is just, well, freak out, and their mind closes up and they say, no way, you’re crazy.”

“You have to have an open mind,” Kluge says.

“Nobody takes us seriously, not even the FBI! We went to them, we got a lawyer. They didn’t even call us back!”

We sit down. Kluge opens the three-ring binder. He points.

The photo is of a man standing in front of the propeller of an old Piper Super Cub airplane. The man has light sandy hair. He is thin and lean.

Kluge thumbs through the pages. He points again.

This photo is of a woman. She is middle-aged. Light hair. Dark horn-rim glasses. She is standing in front of an old Cessna 140. Her pose is similar to the man in the previous picture. Behind her are tall trees. I squint. I can see she is holding a cigarette in her right hand.

“Okay?” Kluge says.

Okay what?

“That’s D.B. Cooper!” Ron says.

I don’t get it. Which one?

“They both are,” Kluge says.

I look at the binder. I read the first page.

“Timeline of our friendship with Barbara Dayton,” it says.

Jo,

You’re seeing Jesus Christ in the toast.
I’m just selling it on Ebay.
Who’s more fucked up? The person seeing the image in the toast, or the one selling it on Ebay?

—snowmman, posting on the Drop Zone, November 4, 2008

December 2008
Sierra Vista, Arizona

T
he envelope is sent by courier. Seattle to Phoenix, Phoenix to Tucson. The envelope is then driven across the desert to the border town where scientist Tom Kaye keeps his ranch and laboratory. When the package is close, his phone rings. It’s them. The feds.

“Hey, Tom,” the agent says. “We got your bills here. You wanna come get ’em?”

Tom wonders where the agents are.

“We’re across the street from La Casita restaurant in the mall.”

La Casita? In the mall?

Tom is disappointed. The feds are holding crucial evidence to the infamous case of D.B. Cooper and they want him to pick it up like it’s a drive-through taco? And how do they know he is for real?

“Don’t you want to come by and see the lab first?”

The moment is surreal. How could Tom have gotten so lucky? The scientist’s career has been a rollercoaster of ups and downs. His unanticipated success as a paintball entrepreneur has fizzled out. At one point, Tom had seventeen employees and grossed $5 million a year as the president of AirGun Designs—until customers complained that his guns were jamming on them. Then his competitors started making semi-automatic weapons, and Tom decided to retire early.