The government was testing hydrogen bombs on Bikini. Villagers had lost their hair. The radiation caused vomiting, diarrhea. Women could not get pregnant. Layers of ash covered the houses and turned the drinking water yellow. During testing, villagers saw two suns as bombs exploded in the sky. Debris turned the afternoon black. Kenny worked here as a telephone operator.
He was then rehired by Northwest as a flight attendant and for the next three decades as a purser. He kept to himself, a ghost in the cabin of Northwest planes.
Through the union, I found pursers who worked with Kenny. “He was almost invisible,” Harry Honda told me. “If you asked somebody on his plane who was the purser on that flight, they couldn’t tell you, that’s how quiet this guy was.” Lyle Gehring flew with Kenny, too. “You ask people and say ‘Ken Christiansen’ and they’ll say, ‘Who?’?”
When Kenny was diagnosed with cancer, in 1991, his family suspected the source was the radiation he suffered on Bikini Island. When his condition deteriorated, he retired from Northwest. Kenny was so sick he asked his family to spend his last days with him in Bonney Lake. One day, in the hospital, his eyes weak and his lips dry, Kenny motioned to his young brother.
Lyle rushed to Kenny’s bedside.
“There’s something you should know,” Kenny said. “But I can’t tell you!”
“I don’t care what it is,” Lyle said. “You don’t have to tell me about it. We all love you.”
Now, almost two decades later, Lyle has been ruminating about what Kenny said on his deathbed. Was he about to confess to the Cooper hijacking? Did Lyle deny his brother a chance to clear his conscience? What was Kenny trying to tell him? What was his secret?
November 24, 1971
Aboard Northwest Orient Flight 305
The jet banks and climbs. In first class, passenger Floyd Kloepfer, an electronics specialist, pushes his nose against the window and looks down at the Columbia River. Explorers Lewis and Clark paddled through here in canoes, marveling in journals about Native American women wading in the waters, wearing only “a truss or pece [sic] of leather tied around them at the hips and drawn tite [sic] between their legs.”
Across the border into Washington the elevation changes. The sandy river banks of the Columbia turn into a storybook forest with trees as tall as buildings. These forests are where the nation’s logging industry was based, where miners searched for gold, where Bigfoot lives. One remote area is called the Dark Divide. Outside of Alaska, the Dark Divide is the largest stretch of uninhabited land in the country. There are no street signs, no roads. Backpackers and hikers disappear trying to find a way out. The land is so dense and untouched it is said to possess a brain of its own.
Kloepfer now watches the Columbia River shrink into a stream. He looks at the dark clouds and worries about the weather. Tonight he and his wife are driving to her folks’ place across the border in Canada. In the slushy rain, it will be a long drive in his Plymouth Fury.
Some Thanksgiving, he thinks.
The passenger next to him is drunk. The guy’s been drinking whiskey since South Dakota. Kloepfer looks over the seat behind him and finds the sergeant he was talking to earlier. The sergeant is in uniform. He is coming home from Vietnam. He will be spending Thanksgiving with his family, the first time since he shipped out.
The sergeant is not alone. All throughout the fall, soldiers have been lingering in airports and bus stations. Two weeks ago, President Nixon promised that an additional 45,000 American troops stationed in Vietnam would be coming home, too. The promise would be a blessing, except that troops are not the same when they return. Roughly a third of American soldiers in Vietnam are addicted to heroin. The antiwar sentiment is so strong, the soldiers have also become targets for loudmouths and longhairs. What are they fighting for, anyway?
Troops are refusing orders, turning on their commanders. In 1970, there were at least 109 reports of fragging, incidents where soldiers killed officers. Others refused to enter Laos, and scribbled antiwar sentiments onto their combat helmets. “The unwilling, led by the unqualified, doing the unnecessary, for the ungrateful.”
The body counts in Vietnam are staggering—almost 60,000 dead, more than 150,000 wounded. Only months before, details of the Pentagon’s covert bombings in Laos and Cambodia were leaked to the New York Times. In Congress, legislators read the so-called Pentagon Papers into the public record to ensure the Nixon White House could not cover up the scandal. Anyone with access to a newspaper or a television set now has proof: their government is lying to them about Vietnam. How many other lies are there?
“I’ll say modestly that our country will be gone very shortly,” H. L. Hunt, the San Francisco oil magnate, said earlier in the week. “The communists are much smarter than freedom-loving people. America doesn’t want to do anything else except make a profit.”
Even the weather in 1971 seems to contribute to a feeling of looming Armageddon. In the South, fifty tornadoes blew through towns and cities in one week, leaving one hundred dead. Los Angeles was rocked with its biggest earthquake in four decades, leaving sixty-five dead.
A mob has been forming. In Detroit, the city zoo had to hire extra security guards because animals were getting attacked. A baby wallaby was stoned to death. A duck was shot with a steel-tipped arrow. Firecrackers were thrown at a pregnant reindeer. A hippopotamus was found with a tennis ball stuffed down his throat.
Cops are getting killed. In Syracuse, the police chief complained that black teenagers were using cars to conduct “guerrilla-type warfare” against his officers via “hit and run.” During the first nine months of the year, ninety-one cops were reported to have been killed on the job.
The war—cultural, political, generational—is raging. Throughout the year, the authorities reported 771 bomb threats in federal buildings. Over the summer, 200,000 protestors descended on the capital. In one day, 12,000 people were arrested. In Miami, anti-pollution activists shuttered a Pepsi bottling plant by pouring cement over a drainage pipe. In Chicago, college students and members of an activist group were arrested for plotting to poison the city’s drinking water. Their plan: inoculate themselves, and create a superior race.
Prisons are overcrowded. Riots break out. In early September, in the upstate New York prison of Attica, inmates armed themselves with shanks, chains, broomsticks, baseball bats, and hammers. They seized the exercise yard. They burned the schoolhouse and chapel. They gagged prison guards at knifepoint, ordered them to strip naked and navigate a club-swinging gauntlet. Gas was released. Shots were fired. Inmates were stripped naked and beaten.
“The Attica tragedy is more stark proof that something is terribly wrong with America,” said Maine senator Edward Muskie, who’s campaigning for president. “We have reached the point where men would rather die than live another day in America.”
To combat violent hippies and homegrown terrorists, a new conservatism has been born. Just this past September, a twelve-year-old boy called the police to turn in his own father for smoking pot.
“There is such a feeling of powerlessness in this country,” said John Gardner, who resigned as the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. “We all have the feeling that we want to complain to the manager, but the manager is invisible. Nobody knows who he is and where to find him.”
The manager is President Nixon, who sounds most powerless of all. Over the summer he made a speech referring to the ornate federal buildings in Washington. He forecasted a gloomy future. “Sometimes when I see those columns I think of seeing Greece and Rome,” he said. “And I think of what happened to Greece and Rome, and you see only what is left of great civilizations of the past—as they have become wealthy, as they lost their will to live, to improve, they became subject to the decadence that destroys the civilization. The United States is reaching that period.”
The words. To her. Pay attention, Flo. Pay attention. The words glare at her as bright as lightbulbs.
I have a bomb. Sit by me.
; He’s kidding, right?
“No, miss. This is for real.”
She gets up and sits in 18D next to him. She drops the note. It flutters to the floor.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No, miss.”
He reaches over to the window seat and puts his fingers on his attaché case. He opens the mouth. She peers inside.
The sticks are red, about eight inches long. She sees a battery. It is bigger than a battery you might put in a flashlight.
He’s teasing Flo now, holding in his fingers the naked copper tip of a wire in front of her. This is for real. She turns.
There’s Tina.
Tina can see Flo’s lips moving but the words are not coming out of her mouth. Flo gasps.
“Tina. Tina.”
Tina picks up the note near Flo’s feet. She reads it. It’s too late to turn back. The wheels are up. Flight 305 is already in the air.
Tina reaches for the interphone hanging outside the lavatory. The interphone is her direct line to the cockpit. She speaks into the receiver.
“We’re being hijacked,” she says. “He’s got a bomb and this is no joke.”
May 27, 1969
University Hospital, University of Washington, Seattle
“Nothing I do is phony,” Bobby Dayton would say.
It was true. When he wanted to go on a hike to clear his mind, he left with his dog, Irish, and came back three weeks later. He prospected for gold in the Yukon and nearly died from starvation. In the Merchant Marines, traveling the world in the hulls of the big ships, he went hunting in the Philippines and lived among the Māori warriors, who were famous for their guerrilla battle tactics. Back on the boat, he was nearly shot for being a deserter. Bobby spent plenty of time in the brig.
He could be nasty, a savage. He’d punch you in the face if you looked at him wrong. He’d spit on your shoes to get a reaction, then slug you. Bobby talked about robbing banks because there was never any good work around, and he once rode with the Hells Angels as they terrorized the State of California. He never killed anybody, but he could have and almost did several times. Once in Mexico. Once in Seattle, where he lives. A taxicab driver cut him off. In the dispute, Bobby got out of his Dodge, removed a chain from the trunk, and beat the cabbie to within inches of his life.
“Evidently, I’m a transsexual problem,” Bobby tells his doctor before the surgery. “My wife tells me I’m two people. She tells me when I’m Bob I seem bitter, but when I’m Barbara I’m a much nicer person.”
He is in the hospital for a psychological evaluation, which is necessary before sex change operations. He is wearing a long-sleeved blouse (to cover his tattoos) and high heels. There is lipstick on his cigarette.
The doctor studies his appearance and mannerisms. His teeth are in poor shape. His hands are rough. His speech is quiet and soft, and his gestures and hand movements are mildly effeminate.
The doctor asks what Bobby does for a living.
Until recently, Bobby was working on the Lockheed shipping yards, as an electrician. He was foreman to twenty men. It was uncomfortable for him to be in charge; men shouldn’t take orders from women, he thought, and so he quit.
“I feel better away from people,” Bobby says. “I feel they can see through me for what I am. I don’t feel like the other men. I feel if I was a woman I could let myself go.”
The doctor has a test for him, a game really. Free association, no wrong answers. The way it works is the doctor starts a sentence and Bobby finishes it.
The doctor starts.
“If I had ten thousand dollars …”
“I would buy myself an operation,” Bobby says.
“If I were invisible …”
“I wouldn’t do anything.”
“If I were an animal I’d be …”
“Bird. I like birds and flying.”
One early memory. Bobby is five. He wants to be Tinkerbell, from Peter Pan. She is trailed by magic dust. She can always fly away.
Even as a boy, looking in the mirror at his legs, which he thought were too shapely, Bobby thought he could see the woman inside him. He snuck into his mother’s dresser and placed his hands among her bras and panties to feel the fabric. Alone in a room he tried them on. Later, he slept in them.
His dreams were of men on top of him, pushing themselves into him. Sometimes Bobby put the family dog on top of his groin. He told the dog to sit and imagined the weight of the dog was the weight of another man.
Another early memory. He can see the airfield in Long Beach. The planes have propellers, fins, and wings—just like birds. He can see them coming in for landings and can hear the scream of their engines. He watches them scurry around the taxiway. How can these aluminum contraptions manage to fly?
Bobby looks through the airport fence. An older man is cleaning his plane. Bobby shouts to the man through the fence.
“How about a ride?”
The man shakes his head.
The next day Bobby comes back. The next day too.
Finally the old man hands Bobby a rag and Bobby wipes down his plane. In exchange, Bobby gets his ride and discovers a purpose in life: to fly.
“I don’t like being under someone else’s control,” Bobby says years later. “In my plane, I feel like I’m totally inside the sky, totally free.”
During his psychiatric evaluation, the doctor asks Bobby to describe his employment history.
“I’m a job jumper,” Bobby says.
He dropped out of high school and picked lemons with migrant workers for a quarter a day. He drove to Oregon to pick tomatoes and then found higher pay in the logging camps of the Pacific Northwest. When he was old enough he enrolled in the Air Force. He wanted to learn how to fly for free. But the exams required a background in mathematics. Doctors also noticed a problem with his eye. He didn’t qualify for flight school.
He vowed revenge. He would not give the military the satisfaction of good service. He would be a terrible, incorrigible soldier. He joined the Merchant Marines.
On Merchant ships, Bobby wrote home from ports that were hard to pronounce, names he tattooed onto his arms and chest. Eniwetok, Alang Alang, Kara Gara, Barugo, Batangas, Cagayan, Agoo, Tabao. He was in the South Pacific. He was in South America. He swam in shark-infested waters. He hunted with natives.
He was a violent case. He drank fifths of bourbon in gulps to impress other sailors (then wandered off to vomit). He followed other sailors into brothels and forced himself to have sex with women. Anything to protect his secret. In the dead of night, under the moon and adrift in the ocean, Bobby would crawl out from his bunk and sneak toward the front of the ship, where he would slip on his dress and his heels.
“You can’t live if you don’t do it,” Bobby tells his doctors about his cross-dressing. “It’s like medicine.”
After the Merchant Marines, Bobby changed jobs every month or so. He’s had more than 150 over the years, he tells the doctor. He can fix cars, washing machines, vacuum cleaners. He was a mechanic at Ford, Bethlehem Steel, Continental Can. He worked at Yosemite National Park.
He knows how to plaster and cement too—just like his father, Elmer.
“I can do anything he can do,” Bobby says about Elmer.
In the hospital, Cindy Dayton is interviewed about Bobby. Cindy is Bobby’s second wife. If she felt Bobby was a woman, the doctor asks, why did she marry him?
“I’m not sure why I married him,” Cindy says. “I wanted a husband and he seemed like a good provider. I like him as a person. He doesn’t lie or swear.”
Recently, Bobby tried to commit suicide, she says. For months they lived in Baltimore because Bobby was on the list for a sex change operation at Johns Hopkins. He was rejected. The doctors in Baltimore felt it would be too much of a challenge for Bobby to adapt in society as a woman. How could he pass with his bad teeth, his chain smoking, and his tattoos covering his body?
“I say he is a woman,” Cindy says. “He thinks like a woman.… H
e’s beautiful as a woman. He doesn’t overdress or over-makeup. As a man, he’s sloppy, and it’s a little embarrassing.”
November 24, 1971
Aboard Northwest Orient Flight 305
The jet is climbing. Ten thousand feet, fifteen thousand feet. In the cockpit, Scotty and copilot Bill Rataczak aren’t sure how to respond. A bomb? Is it real? Does it matter?
In total, there are thirty-six passengers in the cabin, six crew members. As captain, Scotty is in charge. What to do?
Scotty radios Northwest Orient flight operations in Minnesota.
A man in the back says he has a bomb, Scotty says. He doesn’t know who the man is or what he wants. Not yet.
“Take this down.”
Flo Schaffner reaches into her purse and retrieves her pen. She can no longer see the man’s eyes. He’s put on sunglasses. The frames are dark. The lenses are brown.
“I want two hundred grand by five p.m., in cash,” he says.
She writes down the words on the envelope he gave her.
“Put it in a knapsack,” he says.
The pen scratches paper and the words she writes appear in a messy swirl of cursive. Anything else?
“I want two back parachutes and two front parachutes.… When we land, I want a fuel truck ready to refuel.”
Anything else?
He wants meals for the flight crew, in case anyone gets hungry.
“No funny stuff, or I’ll do the job.”
She writes down those words, too.
“No fuss. After this we’ll take a little trip.”
“No fuss,” she writes and her mind reels and her chest heaves. No, Flo, no, don’t do this. Do NOT panic. The images of the airplane in the sky are easy to conjure. KABOOM! Smoldering debris bobbing in the water. Charred bodies. She is a corpse. Her pa is getting calls in Fordyce … from the newspapermen … from the morgue. This isn’t happening, Flo, this isn’t happening. Focus on the details. No, no. Details are worse. Parachutes? What did he want parachutes for? Is he taking a hostage? Is that hostage her? A fuel truck? Where are they going? What is this “little trip”?
SKYJACK: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper Page 4