Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper (33 page)

I get down—chest first. I stick my head into the pit. I look. There is no mistaking what I see. Absolutely nothing.

Back in the car, we look for another white house that faces south, a pecan orchard longer than it is wide, running east to west. We see a
farmer and pull over to ask him about white houses. He gets off his tractor and tells us there are a lot of white houses around here. I ask him what he is growing.

“Hazelnuts,” he says.

The trees on his orchard look like all the rest we have seen and that doesn’t jibe. According to the Foremans’ notes, Barb landed in a pecan orchard. Another note they kept disturbs me too. Barb, according to them, claimed to have kept eighty bundles of $2,500 apiece in the cistern. That was wrong. The bills came in a hundred bundles of $2,000 apiece. Did the Foremans hear Barb wrong? Or had Barb made the detail up?

I wonder about Barb and her wrong color eyes (blue), her short height (five eight), her tale about hiding a change of clothes (and the ransom) in the cistern. If she hid the ransom, how did the Cooper bills get in the sand miles away at Tena Bar?

Chasing Barb Dayton, I have found another Ken Christiansen. I can’t prove she was Cooper. I can’t prove she wasn’t.

I call Larry Carr in Seattle. I am planning another visit to look at more files. I wonder if he has any news.

He does.

A parachute has been found, he tells me.

A parachute?

An old parachute, Carr says. And military.

Military!

White canopy, Carr says. And conical shaped.

Holy shit. Must be Cooper’s NB6, I think. Where was the chute found?

Amboy, Carr says.

I don’t need a map. I know where Amboy is. Amboy is just south of Ariel, across Lake Merwin, in Clark County. Amboy is D.B. Cooper country, directly in the drop zone.

The story is innocent enough. In Amboy, a man had been using a back hoe in his backyard. His children were playing in the dirt. In the dirt they found the white fabric of the parachute. Suspecting it was Cooper’s, they called the FBI.

Carr mentions the discovery to a local television reporter, who runs with the story. The wires jump on the news, and so do the national papers, including the
New York Times
.

The discovery of the white conical parachute in Amboy (which turned out to be a bust) sends shockwaves through Cooperland. In Alabama, cyber sleuth Sluggo_Monster (aka nuclear lab consultant Wayne Walker) reconfigures the preferences on his Internet search browsers to collect the avalanche of news stories following the Amboy parachute find. One story he snags is published in
AvioNews
, an Italian periodical that covers the aeronautics industry.

The story is written in Italian. It’s difficult to follow. But scrolling through a garbled translation of the text, Walker makes his own discovery: The author of the
AvioNews
piece has picked up on the mystery of the hijacker’s name.

“Dan Cooper,” the Italian story states, “was the name of a toon created by Albert Weinberg, from Belgium, during the 50s.”

Dan Cooper a toon? A cartoon?

“He was a Canadian airman, involved in many adventures regarding spying’s cases and science fictions.”

Walker runs more searches on the Web. He digs up images of old comics. Dan Cooper, Walker finds, is not just an “airman.” He is a combat pilot. Cooper flies fighter jets and test planes for the Royal Canadian Air Force. Walker can’t understand the words he reads. The comic is written in French. It has never been translated into English. But the images are clear.

Dan Cooper is a Canadian version of GI Joe. He has a square chin, rippling biceps, clear blue eyes, a crew cut. He skyrockets out of the
earth’s orbit to battle men in spacesuits with metal hooks for arms, aliens, and enemy frogmen. He runs (
Pang!
) and dives (
Plouf!
) and is chased (
Halte!
) and takes off again in his jet (
Tchiiiiiiiiouw!
). Dan Cooper is an aerial acrobat, and his save-the-day missions all seem to end the same way: floating down in a conical parachute, just like the hijacker Dan Cooper did with the NB6 on November 24, 1971.

The comic is not a coincidence, Walker thinks. I agree. There is a connection between the French-Canadian comic book hero Dan Cooper and the hijacker who used his name. There has to be. But what is it?

His creator, I hope, will know.

I find comic book artist Albert Weinberg in Corseaux, a town on Lake Geneva, in Switzerland. I imagine his château as vast and ornate, with doors that lead from his studio to a veranda that looks out onto water that ripples with the wake of a passing speedboat.

Weinberg was not trained as an artist. Growing up in Belgium, he dropped out of law school and was hired as an illustrator for Hergé, creator of Tintin, the legendary French comic that follows the adventures of a boy reporter. After
Tintin
became its own magazine in the ’50s, Hergé asked Weinberg to come up with his own character and strip.

Weinberg needed a backdrop, a universe for his character to explore. He chose the sky. He wanted the air filled with jets, parachutes, drones, spaceships. Weinberg had family in French Canada, and he imagined his hero as a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot.

Weinberg is old now, almost ninety. I want to see him. I want to sit on the veranda and watch the speed boat go by, ask about the character he created, and the hijacker he must have inspired.

I call him in Switzerland. The voice on the end of the line is smooth and deep and kind, a grandfather speaking in a slow and pleasing French. Battling the language barrier, I ask for a visit. Best to meet
in person. That way, I can sit across from the old comic book artist in his rocking chair, a shawl over his shoulders, and he can lay out the secret to this case for me.

Impossible to meet in person, he says.

Why?

He will be on holiday, he says.

So perhaps when he returns?

Impossible, he says. Holiday will be several months.

I settle for a phone call with a translator.

“It’s a bit of a mystery for me as well,” Weinberg says about the case when I call again. In the early 1970s, when the identity of the hijacker was first reported as “Dan Cooper,” Weinberg says he received phone calls from his contacts in the Royal Canadian Air Force notifying him.

“I don’t remember exactly the date,” Weinberg says, “but it rather amused me because I said to myself, Look here, it’s probably a former pilot or a reader. And francophone, Canadian francophone. But we were never able to uncover more of this story.”

I ask Weinberg about the name. Was there any symbolism? Where did he come up with Dan Cooper?

“The phone book. I picked two hundred names in Quebec and went to my family and I said, ‘Which ones do you like?’ … Eventually the name Dan Cooper was chosen.”

And what about Dan Cooper? How would he define his character?

“I think the main quality of my character is that he is very, very sensitive,” Weinberg says. “Even though he was a military pilot, he always held a high regard for human life. It would have been difficult for me to make Dan Cooper proudly shooting on another plane.”

August 10, 1974
Lewisburg, Pennsylvania

Richard Floyd McCoy’s letters to the judge are introspective. He writes about Vietnam. He explains why he was shipped home with a shrapnel wound and the Purple Heart.

Maybe you’re wondering whether I was capable of harming anyone.… During my first tour of duty in Vietnam, I was wounded. The only reason, Your Honor, is that I was unable to kill a man up close
.

McCoy’s letters are not answered. His motion to reduce his forty-year prison sentence is denied. McCoy and Walker discuss terms. Prison escapes are negotiations.

“If you shoot it out, I’ll shoot it out with you,” Walker says. “But only if I can see we can make it. If I can’t, my hands go over my head.”

“Not me,” McCoy says. “I’d rather die a thousand deaths before I spend one more day in Lewisburg.”

They wait until deep summer, until the cornstalks outside the prison fence have grown high enough for them to run through. From the wire report:

Lewisburg, PA—Four armed convicts, including a Mormon Sunday school teacher involved in a bizarre 1972 hijacking, crashed a commandeered garbage truck through a gate at a federal penitentiary Saturday and disappeared into the central Pennsylvania mountains
.

They drive east and south and over the Mason-Dixon Line, down to North Carolina. McCoy has family there. Along the way, the convicts shave each other’s heads. In North Carolina, they make news again.

New Bern, N.C.—Authorities say four men who robbed a Pollocksville, N.C., bank were convicts who escaped from the federal prison at Lewisburg, Pa., last Saturday
.

There is more.

The bandits then switched to another car with Ohio tags. It was subsequently spotted by police helicopter on an unpaved logging road in the Great Dover Swamp. Officers aboard the helicopter exchanged fire with the fugitives as they abandoned the vehicle, police said
.