Uncle John’s True Crime (20 page)

Rather than bury his Evita again, Perón kept her around the house; he and his third wife, Isabel, propped her up in the dining room and ate in her presence every evening, even when they entertained guests. The arrangement lasted until 1973, when Perón returned to power in Argentina and left his beloved mummy in Spain. Later, Evita was brought across the Atlantic and buried in Argentina.

What’s a
melcryptovestimentaphiliac
? Someone who compulsively steals ladies’ underwear
.

Free advice from Uncle John: When you’re caught red-handed, it’s often better just to fess up and take your lumps. Here are a few people who would have done well to follow his advice
.

S
COOBY-DOOFUS

In August 1996, in Tampa, Florida, police arrested Robert Meier and charged him with credit fraud after he married his comatose girlfriend only hours before she died. Why? So he could rack up more than $20,000 in charges on her credit cards. Meier’s excuse: It was his girlfriend’s dog’s fault. According to a police spokesperson, “He said the dog told him she would want him to have a better life, so it would be OK to use her credit cards.”

WHO’S KIDDING WHO?

In February 1997, Cathleen Byers, former manager of the Oregon Urban Rural Credit Union, was arrested for embezzlement. Was she guilty? Byers admitted stealing $630,000 over six years but claimed that she wasn’t
really
guilty because she suffers from multiple personality disorder. One of her other personalities—Ava, Joy, Elizabeth, Tillie, Claudia, C. J., Katy, Roman, Cookie, Mariah, Frogger, Chrissy, or Colleen—must have done it without her knowledge. An expert testified that whichever alter-personality took the money didn’t know right from wrong and that Byers wasn’t even aware of what her alter-self was up to. The judge didn’t buy it, arguing that Byers “should have been clued in by the new house and the luxury cars.”

DRIVEN TO DRINK

After only one month on the job, Calgary, Alberta, school bus driver Marvin Franks was arrested for driving his bus while under the influence of alcohol. Police pulled Franks’s bus over and administered a breath test after a terrified student called 911 using her cell phone. The bus driver was found to have a blood-alcohol level three times the legal limit. In an interview with the
Calgary Sun
, Franks admitted to having two beers before starting his route, on top of being hungover from drinking the
night before. But he blamed his drinking on job stress, which he blamed on the kids he drives to school. “If you had these kids on your bus, you’d drink too,” he explained.

In 23 years on the air, the TV show
America’s Most Wanted
helped capture 1,153 fugitives
.

LOUNGE LIZARD

In March 2002, 47-year-old Susan Wallace, a former British Airways flight attendant, was convicted of animal cruelty after she threw Igwig, her three-foot-long iguana, at a doorman and then later at a policeman following an altercation in a pub. Wallace maintains that she is innocent because Igwig acted of his own volition. “He probably jumped in defense of me. He’s done that before,” she said. (Igwig is now banned from the pub.)

STRAIGHT SHOOTER

David Duyst of Grand Rapids, Michigan, was convicted of murdering his wife and was then sentenced to life without parole. Yet to this day, Duyst insists that he’s not guilty, despite a mountain of forensic evidence against him. So how’d she die? According to Duyst, she committed suicide by shooting herself...
twice
, in the
back
of her head.

SIDE ORDER OF COMPASSION, PLEASE

Professional boxer Waxxem Fikes, 35, served five days in an Akron, Ohio, jail after assaulting a waiter at Swenson’s restaurant in 2001. According to testimony, Fikes was “aggressively complaining” that the onions on his double cheeseburger were unsatisfactory. “I told him that I expect the onions to be crisp, tender and succulent, and bursting with flavor,” Fikes testified. “They were not. My hands are lethal weapons or whatever, I know that. But he had no compassion for what I was talking about.”

BODY OF EVIDENCE

In March 2001, a woman in Munich, Germany, saw a neighbor carrying a dead body into his apartment. She called the police. When the suspect answered the door in a “surprised and disturbed state,” officers thought for sure that they had a murderer on their hands. Not quite. As the embarrassed man explained, the “dead body” was actually a life-sized silicon doll that he’d just purchased from an adult bookstore.

Pittsburgh cops once investigated a crime scene for 8 hours before realizing it was a movie set
.

Modern-day Robin Hood? Or high-flying robber? He hijacked an airplane, stole a small fortune, then parachuted out of sight...and straight into legend
.

D
AREDEVIL

The day before Thanksgiving in November 1971, a nondescript man wearing a plain dark suit, white shirt, narrow black tie, and sunglasses stepped up to the Northwest Orient Airlines ticket counter in Portland, Oregon. He paid $20 in cash for a one-way ticket to Seattle on Flight 305.

Once the 727 was airborne, the man summoned the flight attendant, Tina Mucklow, introduced himself as “Dan Cooper,” and handed her a note. It said he had a bomb in his briefcase and would blow up the plane if they didn’t grant his demands. He wanted two parachutes and $200,000 in $20 bills. When the plane landed in Seattle, Cooper kept the pilot and crew hostage but let the passengers off in exchange for the chutes and the loot. Then he ordered the pilot to take off and set a course for Mexico with these instructions: Keep the landing gear down, and the flight speed under 170 mph. Somewhere over the Lewis River, 25 miles northeast of Portland, Cooper strapped on a parachute, tied the money to his waist, and jumped out the rear stairway of the plane. He was never seen again.

THE BIGFOOT OF CRIME

In the ensuing investigation, the FBI questioned a man named Daniel B. Cooper. Although that person was never a serious suspect, the FBI reported to the press that they’d interrogated a “D. B. Cooper.” And those initials became forever linked with the skyjacker.

The FBI manhunt that followed was unprecedented in scope and intensity. It was a showcase investigation, meant to display the competency of the world’s greatest law enforcement agency. Every inch of ground in the vicinity of the purported landing site was searched from the air and land, with teams of trackers and dogs, for 18 days. So it was a humbling moment when, after weeks of tracking down leads, the FBI admitted that they had come up with...nothing. No credible suspect. No trace of the loot or the parachute. No further leads to follow. A complete dead end.
One frustrated FBI agent referred to Cooper as the “Bigfoot of crime” because there was no proof of his existence anywhere.

If Cooper survived, he’d pulled off the crime of the century.

First high-profile kidnapping in Canada: beer baron John Sackville Labatt in 1934
.

A STAR IS BORN

Something about the hijacking caught the public’s imagination, as the media reports raved about the audacity of the crime and the calm, competent way in which Cooper carried it out. According to the flight attendants, Cooper behaved like a gentleman throughout the ordeal, even requesting that meals be delivered to the crew while they were stuck on the ground in Seattle, waiting for the ransom money to be delivered.

He became a folk hero, a latter-day Jesse James. Songs were written about him, and a movie was made, starring Treat Williams as Cooper and Robert Duvall as the FBI agent on his trail. Half a dozen books, mostly by former FBI agents, provided theories about what happened to him. He was living the high life on a beach in Mexico. Or he’d slipped back into his former life somewhere in the States, undetected and unnoticed.

On February 13, 1980, a family picnicking on the Columbia River, 30 miles west of Cooper’s landing area, found three bundles of disintegrating $20 bills ($5,800 total). The serial numbers were traced to the ransom. The rest of the cash has never been found.

...SO WHO DUNNIT?

• Possible Suspect #1
. On April 7, 1972, four months after Cooper’s successful hijacking, another hijacker stole a plane in Denver, using the same M.O. as D. B. Cooper. The Denver flight was also a 727 with a rear stairway, from which the hijacker made his getaway by parachute. A tip led police to Richard McCoy Jr., a man with an unusual profile: married with two children, a former Sunday school teacher, a law enforcement major at Brigham Young University, a former Green Beret helicopter pilot with service in Vietnam, and an avid skydiver. When FBI agents arrested McCoy two days after the Denver hijacking, they found a jumpsuit and a duffel bag containing half a million dollars. McCoy was convicted and sentenced to 45 years.

In August 1974, McCoy escaped from prison (he tricked the guards into letting him out of his cell with a handgun made from toothpaste and then crashed a garbage truck through the prison gate). The FBI tracked him down and three months later killed him in a shootout in Virginia.

Officially, the murders of Lizzie Borden’s parents remain unsolved. (Lizzie was acquitted.)

In 1991 former FBI agent Russell Calame claimed in his book
D. B. Cooper: The Real McCoy
that McCoy and Cooper were the same person. He quoted Nicholas O’Hara, the FBI agent who tracked down McCoy, as saying, “When I shot Richard McCoy, I shot D. B. Cooper.” But there’s no conclusive evidence. In fact, McCoy’s widow sued for libel and won.

Possible Suspect #2
. In August 2000, Jo Weber, a Florida widow, told
U.S. News and World Report
that shortly before her husband Duane died in 1995, he told her, “I’m Dan Cooper.” Remembering that he’d talked in his sleep about jumping out of a plane, she checked into his background and discovered he’d spent time in an Oregon prison. Then she found a Northwest Airlines ticket stub from the Seattle-Tacoma airport among his papers. She found a book about D. B. Cooper in the local library—it had notations in the margins matching her husband’s handwriting.

She relayed her suspicions to FBI agent Ralph Himmelsbach, chief investigator on the D. B. Cooper case. To this day he insists Weber is one of the likeliest suspects he’s come across. More recently, facial recognition software was used to find the closest match to the composite picture of Cooper. Of the 3,000 photographs used (including Richard McCoy’s), Duane Weber’s was identified as the “best match.”

Possible Suspect #3
. Elsie Rodgers of Cozad, Nebraska, often told her family about the time she was hiking near the Columbia River in Washington in the 1970s and found a human head. They never really believed her until, while going through her things after her death in 2000, they found a hatbox in her attic...with a human skull in it. Was it Cooper?

Possible Suspect #4
. In 2011 an Oklahoma woman named Marla Cooper told the FBI that when she was eight years old in November 1971, her uncle, L. D. Cooper, said he was planning “something big.” He returned two days later with severe wounds. As Marla’s father was tending to him, L.D. said, “We did it. We hijacked an airplane.” They told little Marla her uncle was in a car accident. She never saw L.D. again after that, and put it out of her mind for nearly 40 years. Then in 2009, Marla’s elderly mother talked about her “long-lost brother who’d hijacked that plane.” Marla gave the FBI a guitar strap belonging to her uncle, as well as a Polaroid of him. Like Weber’s, it looks eerily like the suspect in the composite drawing. The Feds couldn’t get any prints off the strap, however, and L. D. Cooper has been dead since 1999. The case remains open.

In 2006 a Florida school’s mock
CSI
field trip accidentally discovered a real dead body
.

A long-held secret of carnies and hucksters. With a little practice, it really works
.

W
HAT YOU NEED

A large coin. The bigger and heavier, the better. When you get really good at it, you can use a quarter, but until then, a fifty-cent piece or silver dollar is best. The trick is nearly impossible with a nickel, dime, or penny.

HOW TO DO IT:

1
. Place the coin in the middle of your palm with the side you want to win face down. For example, if you want “heads” to win the toss, put the heads side of the coin face down in your palm.

2
. Hold your arm straight out and clench all the muscles in your arm so it’s as stiff as possible.

3
. While holding that arm out tight, toss the coin into the air.

4
. Here’s the tricky part: As you keep your arm clenched and toss the coin up, jerk your hand slightly back. In other words, very subtly pull your hand ever so closer to your body. The move may be somewhat noticeable, but don’t worry. Nobody will be watching your hand—all eyes will be on the coin in the air.

5
. Catch the coin in your palm. Result: The coin will turn over in the air exactly one whole time. It will land exactly the same as it was before the toss—with the predetermined winning side face down in your hand.

6
. Slap the coin onto your forearm to reverse the coin and reveal the winning side—which is what was face down in your palm when you started and what you rigged it to be.

It takes some practice to learn when and how hard to jerk back your hand to spin the coin only once. The heavier the coin, the easier it is—a small coin weighs so little that it tends to spin too many times. With a heavier coin, you’ve got more control. Now get out there and cheat...er, uh...amaze your friends.

What do Fiji, Chile, and Egypt have in common? You can be jailed there for not voting
.

We couldn’t find Uncle John’s old Fart Bazooka, but we managed to find some other famous weapons
.

T
HE SARAJEVO PISTOL