The Killer Book of Cold Cases (14 page)

Also, Cooper thought that the way the three jet engines were mounted on the rear of the plane would not interfere with the aft steps going down.

Once the plane was airborne, Cooper told the crew that he wanted them to fly the jet to Mexico City, 2,200 miles away. But they demurred, saying that at the altitude and speed they were traveling, the jet would only be able to travel 1,000 miles, to about Reno, Nevada. Cooper accepted their word and told them they would have to refuel there.

They also discussed what route to take, which definitely could not be one going through Reno at 10,000 feet. Several nearby mountain ranges were perilously close to the altitude at which the jet was supposed to be traveling.

They finally settled on a route, and the plane lifted off.

It was not ideal flying weather. As they flew, Captain Scott did the best he could to maintain the speed and altitude while fighting a strong wind. At 8 p.m., it became obvious to the crew that the hijacker was not going to Mexico City. A red light came on in the cabin, indicating that the aft stairs were being lowered. Over the intercom, Captain Scott asked, “Is there anything we can do for you?” The response was curt: “No!” It was the last word the crew heard from Dan Cooper.

At 8:24, Scott noticed the slightest dip in the jet’s nose and then the tail. Cooper had succeeding in lowering the aft stairs, and he had been proven right. Lowering the stairs did not interfere with the way the 727 performed. The crew was not able to find out for sure what had happened, though, because Cooper had ordered everyone to stay in the cockpit.

They flew on to Reno, landing at 10:15 p.m., and the captain and crew waited nervously for five minutes. Captain Scott spoke over the intercom. Receiving no response, he cautiously opened the cockpit door. The passenger cabin was empty. The hijacker was gone, and he had taken with him most everything he carried on board, including his hat, overcoat, and the briefcase bomb. The cash and one set of parachutes were gone as well.

They could only reach one conclusion: Cooper had jumped into the frigid, blustery night—it was seven below at 10,000 feet—at a higher air speed than he had anticipated, about 200 miles per hour, with a backpack and reserve chute on. The theory was that he had lashed the canvas bag full of money to himself. Waiting below were huge Douglas firs and craggy rocks. Cooper would have made an odd sight walking down the stairs, a man in a business suit, raincoat, a homburg, and ordinary shoes but also wearing a parachute on his back and chest.

The FBI swarmed over the plane once it landed. They found the spare chute, eight Raleigh cigarette butts, and surprisingly, a black tie and a tie tack with a mother-of-pearl detail. FBI crime-scene experts also found sixty-six fingerprints that could not be tied to the crew or other passengers, but the prints led nowhere.

The FBI had tried to follow the plane so they could note when Cooper jumped, but they had picked jet fighters to do this job, planes that cruised at up to 1,500 miles an hour and were not useful in doing what this job demanded, which was cruising at much lower speeds.

Because the weather was bad, authorities had to wait until the following day to pursue Cooper. They were unsuccessful. He had disappeared.

On Thanksgiving Day, the FBI started trying to nail Cooper in earnest. During their investigation, they even looked into felons with the same name—Cooper. At one point they tracked down a man named D.B. Cooper. Joe Frazier, a wire service reporter who worked out of Portland, heard it. The name was published and it stuck. From that moment on, the mysterious man who had pulled off this creative, daring caper was known as D.B. Cooper.

Passengers and crew on the plane combined their eyewitness accounts to make a good composite of Cooper. Although the famous crooner probably wouldn’t like it, many thought the sketch of Cooper resembled Bing Crosby because of his jacket and string tie.

The FBI gave the case everything it had, including pursuing 1,200 leads that came in hot and heavy and eventually filled a couple of Dumpsters with paper, which wound up being all the leads were worth. Despite police and FBI efforts, the case had still not been solved by 1976 and officials charged Cooper with piracy in absentia.

One of the most interesting aspects of the D.B. Cooper case was that people didn’t seem to think of him as a villain. He wasn’t quite a Robin Hood stealing from the rich to give to the poor, but a man would have to be incredibly daring to risk his life the way Cooper had.

One psychiatrist commented that part of the reason Cooper was so revered—and that’s a good word—was because he didn’t wind up hurting anyone. Another psychiatrist said that many people would love to have the courage to make one jump that could potentially turn into a lifetime of freedom with enough money to not need a job or be beholden to anyone.

The FBI, however, hardly considered Cooper a hero. One of the agents, Ralph Himmelsbach, tracked Cooper unsuccessfully for eight years and was particularly infuriated by the criminal. He characterized Cooper as a “rodent, a dirty rotten crook, a sleazy rotten criminal who jeopardized the lives of more than forty people.”

Himmelsbach wrote a book about the case called
Norjak: The Investigation of D.B. Cooper
in which he speculated that Cooper was a victim of the “splatter” theory, killed by the jump. But one of the details of the theory that puzzled investigators was: if Cooper had been killed in the jump, what happened to the money, clothing, and other incidentals, including the parachute?

Another theory was that the FBI was searching in the wrong area. There had always been some confusion about which area Cooper actually jumped into. Initially, the drop was assumed to have been about ten miles from Interstate 5 near Ariel, Washington, and the Lake Merwin Dam, which divides Clark and Cowlitz counties, but later it was decided that Cooper dropped into an area close to Woodland, Washington.

On February 10, 1980, the year he was to retire, Himmelsbach and his colleagues at the FBI had an important find brought to them—$5,800 in deteriorating twenty-dollar bills. A check of the serial numbers revealed that the bills had been part of the ransom given to Cooper.

The money was discovered forty miles upstream from the Woodland area. A geologist theorized that the money had ended up in the river (and Cooper, too) and then after a journey downstream, which included getting ensnarled in river debris for years, the bag of money deteriorated so much that it finally got free of whatever was holding it and floated down to the location where the bills were found.

The discovery of the money galvanized the investigation. The FBI now had a new area to search for any other evidence related to Cooper.

On May 18, fourteen weeks after the cash was discovered, Mount St. Helens erupted, not only starting fires in the area where new Cooper clues were but blanketing the potential search area with ash that obscured everything.

Some FBI agents were convinced that a section of the Columbia River would give up Cooper’s remains, and an extensive search was mounted using scuba divers, sonar, and grappling hooks. Nothing was ever found, though one of the FBI agents who headed the search wrote a book about it.

The only thing that finding the money seems to show for sure was that Cooper had landed in the Woodland area. Most people took the discovery of the money as evidence of his demise, but others theorized that he survived the drop, only to discard the money after becoming concerned about the serial number of the bills being recorded. Others say that Cooper made his way to Vancouver or Portland and got away with the money, having dropped some of it on the way down. Whatever happened to Cooper, the remaining ransom money was never found.

It was not as if the FBI wasn’t trying. They distributed 100,000 copies of a pamphlet to banks that listed all of the ransom bills’ serial numbers. And Richard Tosaw, an ex-FBI agent who was convinced that Cooper was at the bottom of the Columbia River, offered a reward of $100,000 to anyone who would turn in a bill to him. No one showed up.

Whenever a crime becomes a media darling, investigators can be sure that people will come out of the woodwork to confess. This is one of the reasons why investigators do not reveal all the facts they have or try to mislead people who confess to see if they can correct them.

Sometimes people who confess can build a fairly convincing case. For example, in 1995 Duane Weber from Florida claimed to be Cooper. After he died, his wife revealed that he had been an ex-con and was familiar with the Seattle-Tacoma area, having served one of his prison sentences near Sea-Tac. His wife also revealed that Weber had lived a secret life as John C. Collins and that they had once gone to a heavily wooded, remote area in Clark County, Washington.

She also said that Weber sometimes talked in his sleep and she heard him use the words “aft stairs” and “fingerprints” a number of times. However, Weber was eliminated as a suspect because his DNA did not match that on the tie Cooper left on the hijacked plane.

Without question, the “confession” theory that got the most attention appeared in a book by Max Gunther,
D.B. Cooper: What Really Happened
, which was based on six telephone conversations between Gunther and a woman named Clara.

She told Gunther that two days after the robbery, November 26, 1971, she found Cooper hurt in her garden in Longview, Washington. She took him into her house and cared for him, ministering to a broken foot.

When she got to know him, he told her that he was an affluent man from Connecticut who had abandoned his family and headed west. Once he was settled, he had gotten into skydiving and dreamed up his plan. The woman also explained that Cooper spent many days studying air routes and planes and how they would react in certain situations—like with someone leaping out the back of a jetliner in flight.

They became sweet on each other and eventually settled on Long Island, where he went to work under a variety of identities. And the money? The woman said they went to Atlantic City and laundered it, avoiding banks.

The woman said that Cooper had died in 1982 of natural causes.

The FBI had several problems with the story and said it was false. The main reason was that none of the ransom bills ever showed up after supposedly being laundered in Atlantic City.

The FBI doesn’t take defeat easily, and D.B. Cooper was certainly a defeat. A few years ago, the FBI appealed to the public again to help in tracking down Cooper. The following is from the statement they made.

Larry Carr, the FBI agent mentioned in the statement, laid out the facts of the case, as well as what the FBI knew from the evidence they had found, to help anyone connect information they had to the D.B. Cooper case.

“We originally thought Cooper was an experienced jumper, perhaps even a paratrooper,” Carr said. “We concluded after a few years that this was simply not true. No experienced parachutist would have jumped in the pitch-black night, in the rain, with a 200-mile-an-hour wind in his face, wearing loafers and a trench coat. It was simply too risky. He also missed that his reserve chute was only for training and had been sewn shut—something a skilled skydiver would have checked.”

The hijacker had no help on the ground, either. To have used an accomplice, Cooper would have needed to coordinate closely with the flight crew so he could jump at just the right moment and hit the right drop zone. But Cooper simply said, “Fly to Mexico,” and he had no idea where he was when he jumped. There was also no visibility of the ground due to cloud cover at 5,000 feet.

The FBI had a solid physical description of Cooper. “The two flight attendants who spent the most time with him on the plane were interviewed separately the same night in separate cities and gave nearly identical descriptions,” Carr said. “They both said he was about 5'10" to 6 feet tall, 170 to 180 pounds, in his mid-40s, with brown eyes. People on the ground who came into contact with him also gave very similar descriptions.”

A number of other people have come forward since claiming to be Cooper, but none of them has ever been proven to be the real D.B. Cooper.