SKYJACK: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper

by Geoffrey Gray

  If you don’t know me by now,

  You will never never never know me.

  Duane sells insurance. They work on the road together. Jo makes the appointments, he closes the customers, she collects the checks. They sleep in motels in different states and spend hours in the car together. He tells her about his past. Of course he doesn’t tell her much. The rest she will piece together later on.

  He was a bad child. He stole. He hurled rocks at the school windows. He pushed a boulder down a hill. He pushed a grand piano down a flight of stairs. He tells her his mother forged his birth certificate so she could get him into the service and out of her house a year early.

  After he was discharged from the Navy for misconduct, Duane enrolled in the Army. Here, he also found trouble. He was in detention at Camp Sibert, Alabama, where the Army was testing chemical weapons like mustard gas. In one note home, written in 1943, Duane begged his mother to send him his watch. “I sure do need it out in the field as I have a lot of time prevision [sic] and I need something to tell what time it is,” he wrote. “I only have one more week of detention and then I can go anywhere on the base.”

  Duane has had three other wives Jo will come to know about. Edna she cannot escape. Duane tattooed her name onto his arm.

  Mary Jane Ross, Duane’s second wife, is his obsession. He spends so much time talking about Mary Jane that Jo once told him to go see her and resolve any feelings he might have before they got married. Jo rarely hears about Margie, Duane’s third wife. Years later, Jo will call her and ask her what she thought of Duane.

  “He was a bastard,” Margie says.

  Jo loves him anyway. Duane makes her laugh. He’s a jokester. His handle for his CB radio is “World’s Greatest Jock Carrier.” Immature, but he makes her smile. That’s the secret to selling insurance, he tells her. No matter what you tell them, make sure you make them smile.

  Duane’s business stays on the books. He wins free cruises. His name is inked on company plaques. She has the certificates of praise from the companies he’s worked for. In 1973, Duane was first runner-up in selling life insurance policies for American Income Life. In October of 1974, another company he worked for, Life Investors, in Charlotte, North Carolina, made him Agent of the Month. He earned a complimentary dinner. At one meeting for Family Life, about 150 salesmen were asked what they thought of the company’s new plan to ban the use of phones and pursue all leads door-to-door. Duane walked up to the stage to address the crowd. He turned around, bent over, and farted.

  When Duane retires, he and Jo move to Pace, a city in the Florida panhandle near Pensacola. They open an antiques store, the Peddler. Duane runs it for a few years and sells antiques at flea markets on the road until his kidneys stop working. His kidneys are so swollen, his abdomen balloons. At night, he vomits. He is so weak he breaks bones turning over in his sleep.

  Jo drives him to West Florida Regional Medical Center. The dialysis is too much for him. Without the treatments, he will die.

  “Is this a body you would want to live in?” Duane tells his doctor. “I can’t even hold my own cigarette.”

  November 24, 1971

  Aboard Northwest Orient Flight 305

  In the back row of the jet, he fishes a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.

  “You smoke?”

  Quit, Tina says. The word is out. Smoking kills. This past summer, Congress banned smoking ads from television and radio.

  She offers to light the cig for him. The matchbook he has is blue. The words Sky Chef are on the cover. He leans in close as she flicks the cardboard stick against the strike pad and watches the sulfur fizzle into flame.

  “Want one?”

  He holds out the pack.

  Why not? Tina takes a butt and sticks it in her mouth. She lights it.

  “Where are you from?” he asks.

  She grew up in Trevose, a small city outside of Philadelphia. She now lives with roommates in an apartment near the Minneapolis–St. Paul airport. The stew zoo.

  “Minneapolis is very nice country,” says the hijacker.

  Tina takes a drag of her smoke. She knows where they are going: Cuba, where all the other hijackers want to go. She jokes with him.

  “You know Northwest Orient has strict policies against traveling to Cuba. Can’t bring home rum or cigars. Customs confiscate them in the airport.”

  The hijacker laughs.

  “No, we’re not going to Cuba. But you’ll like where we’re going.”

  In the seat across from them, Bill Mitchell, the college sophomore, waits for his chance. What is the young stew doing talking to such an older guy? Mitchell notices that as the man talks to the stew, he spills his drink. What is that stewardess thinking wasting her time on him? When will she get up so he can make his move?

  The jet banks into a turn around Seattle, circling the city twenty miles to the south. The hijacker wants to know the time. His deadline is 5:00 p.m. He peers out the window.

  “We’re over Tacoma now.”

  In Portland. Special Agent Ralph Himmelsbach sprints into the terminal. In the doorway, a lady is lugging hat boxes. Himmelsbach nearly knocks her over. He heads for the management office of Northwest Orient. His boss, Julius Mattson, special agent in charge of the Bureau’s field office in Portland, is listening to a panel of radios cued in to the cockpit of the hijacked plane.

  “There you are, Ralph,” Mattson says. “Where you been? We got a hot one going here.”

  “Got here quick as I could. Damn traffic on Sandy was fierce. Dispatch said the guy has a bomb. What else do we know?”

  “Not a lot more,” says Mattson. “He wants money and a parachute. So far that’s about all that we’ve been able to put together.”

  “How much cash?”

  “Two hundred thousand,” says Frank Faist, a Northwest official.

  “Whew. That’s a hell of a hit, Frank. Are you going to make it?”

  “I imagine so. He’s holding all the high cards.”

  “Any idents on the guy with the bomb?”

  “We’ve asked the crew to pass on anything they can, but so far no info.”

  “Have your people found out anything more?”

  “We got the ticket lifts and the flight manifest. We know there are twenty-nine men aboard that aircraft. He could be nine or ninety for all I know now.”

  Over the radio, there is a crackle of sound. It is the Northwest pilots on the frequency. Himmelsbach and Mattson strain their ears.

  “Our future destination not yet advised … Name of man unknown … About six feet one inch, black hair, age about fifty, weight a hundred and seventy-five pounds. Boarded at Portland.”

  Portland! He was here, Himmelsbach thinks. But who was he? How did he get here? Taxi? Car? Did he stay overnight? Walk from a hotel? Take the bus?

  Agents fan out across the terminal, searching for witnesses. The day before Thanksgiving is one of the busiest travel days of the year. Agents approach airport officials, security personnel, passengers, taxi drivers, bus drivers, parking lot attendees, rental car agents, gift shop employees, coffee shop employees, bartenders in the cocktail lounge, waiters and waitresses in the restaurants, and salesmen working in the insurance stands.

  See anybody suspicious? About six foot one? Black hair?

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, there was a gentleman that looked awfully suspicious,” Hal Williams says.

  Williams is a gate clerk for Northwest. He noticed the gentlemen. He was odd, not like the others. He boarded Flight 305.

  What was so odd about him?

  He was dressed in black, all black, Williams tells the feds.

  Anything else?

  The man was a lone wolf, Williams says. Before the flight, other passengers on the 305 gathered by the terminal window. With the storm coming, they joked about how they would all have to run across the tarmac. Everybody would get drenched in the rain. The man in black was not part of the group. His attitude was different.

  How differ
ent? How would he describe the attitude?

  “Blah,” Williams says.

  The agents have the passenger list for Flight 305. Recognize any names?

  Williams looks at the list.

  “No,” he says.

  The feds hunt for more eyewitnesses. To get on the plane, the hijacker must have purchased a ticket. Who sold it to him?

  Dennis Lysne was working the ticket desk that afternoon, agents learn.

  Where is Lysne?

  He’s left for the day, Northwest officials tell the feds.

  In Portland, agents race to Lysne’s home. They find his wife. Where is Lysne?

  The supermarket, she tells them. Doing some Thanksgiving shopping.

  In the supermarket parking lot, Lysne loads up his car with groceries. He gets in the driver’s seat. His engine won’t start. He walks to a pay phone and calls his wife.

  “Better hurry home,” she tells him. “The FBI wants to talk to you.”

  At his house, Lysne is briefed. Flight 305 was hijacked. The man says he has a bomb. Does Lysne remember selling a ticket to anybody suspicious?

  “Yes,” Lysne says. There was one suspicious passenger.

  Does Lysne happen to remember the passenger’s name?

  He does.

  “Cooper. Dan Cooper.”

  Cooper was the last passenger to buy a ticket for Flight 305.

  What did Cooper look like?

  He was wearing dark clothes. Had darkish skin. Olive in color.

  Anything else?

  Lysne remembers snippets of their conversation. The man asked, Can I get on your flight to Seattle? He asked, That’s a 727, isn’t it?

  Does Lysne remember anything else?

  The fare was $20. Cooper paid with cash.

  Did Cooper display any nervous behavior or fidgeting?

  He did not.

  Did Lysne notice what Cooper was keeping his money in?

  He did not.

  Could he recognize Cooper again if he saw him?

  Lysne isn’t sure.

  It is raining. It is unclear how powerful the storm will be. On the ground in Seattle, homicide detective Owen McKenna gets a call from Seattle’s chief of detectives. McKenna is briefed on the hijacking. The chief wants McKenna to fetch the $200,000 ransom for the hijacker and bring it to SEA-TAC airport.

  In his unmarked car, McKenna races to the Seattle First National Bank downtown. Two employees from the bank’s security department are waiting for him. They have a leather satchel. Inside is a canvas bag that contains $200,000, all in twenty-dollar bills.

  The money is not coated with powders or rigged with exploding packs of dye. But the bills are marked. To prepare for a robbery, Seattle First National has set aside a cache of bills, and each serial number of each bill has been recorded on microfiche. They count out a hundred stacks of twenty-dollar bills, each stack worth $2,000. The load must weigh twenty pounds, maybe more.

  McKenna drives the bank officials and the satchel to SEA-TAC. He thinks about the man with the bomb on the hijacked plane circling above them.

  As a detective, McKenna has little respect for the airlines. One cold case haunts him. He found her body on a houseboat near the University of Washington. She had been beaten, strangled, raped. She was a stewardess, and he suspects the killer was a passenger she met. The airlines are selling sex in their stewardesses, but what are they doing to protect them? So many of the stews tell the same story: small-town girls, left home to see the world before they got married. What about the creeps? The killers? And now parachuting hijackers?

  On the police radio, there are more voices on the frequency. The feds want to know where the parachutes are.

  With sirens flashing, state troopers descend on Issaquah Skyport, a parachute jump center twenty miles east of SEA-TAC airport. Inside, proprietor Linn Emrich hands the troopers two front or reserve chutes. These front chutes will clip onto the harness of the rear or main parachutes. A trooper puts them in the trunk of his car and speeds off to SEA-TAC.

  The rear parachutes are already at the airport. Norman Hayden, a local pilot, sent them in a taxicab. Hayden recently purchased the chutes from Earl Cossey, a local parachute rigger.

  Inside the airport, the bank officials from Seattle First National lug the ransom into the Northwest flight operations office. The bank officials cut open a seal of the leather satchel and hand FBI boss J. Earl Milnes the canvas bag inside. Its dimensions are roughly a foot by a foot, and eight or nine inches tall. Milnes looks at the money. He does not count it. He hands the bag to Al Lee, Northwest’s director of flying. Lee lugs the sack of cash into the trunk of McKenna’s unmarked car, along with the rear parachutes, eight meals for the crew, and instructions on how to use a parachute.

  Thousands of feet above them, in the cockpit of the Northwest jet, Scotty worries about the passengers. Won’t they get edgy when the plane doesn’t land? Won’t they start asking questions? Should he tell them the flight has been hijacked?

  “You know, Scotty, I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Rataczak says. “I know we picked up some good old Montana mountain boys and they’re pretty good sized, and they’re sitting up in first class and they’re on their second and third martinis. We don’t need them to look at each other and say, ‘Hey, let’s go back and get a hijacker.’ ”

  The pilots have an idea. Why not ask him what he wants to do?

  They call back to Tina. She asks the hijacker if he wants the passengers alerted.

  “No,” he says.

  She relays the message back. Now the crew needs a ruse to explain the delay. Rataczak switches on the in-flight intercom system.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he says, “there’s been a slight mechanical problem. We’ve been asked to circle Seattle, to burn off excess fuel.”

  A clap of thunder. The storm has hit. In the jet windows there are flashes of lightning against the dark sky. In the bulkhead row, prosecutor Larry Finegold can see them. He tries to make sense of what the pilot had just said. It doesn’t make sense. How could any mechanical problem on a jet be slight?

  He thinks, This is the one, oh boy, here we go, get ready to crash. He thinks about his wife. Sharon was in law school at Berkeley when they met. She had such long hair. He was a preppy in jeans and penny loafers. Once they started talking, he didn’t want the conversation to end. He couldn’t stand to be apart from her. After they met, he went with friends on a three-day fishing trip. After the first night, he made his friends dock. He hitchhiked to her dorm room and proposed. Now she’s pregnant with their first child. A boy, they’ve learned. His son.

  The jet is shaking. More lightning. The cabin drops in spasms. His stomach is rolling like a waterbed.

  Across the aisle, passenger Barbara Simmons wakes up from a nap. She looks out the window and sees the lights of the Space Needle. The futuristic structure was the tallest west of the Mississippi when it was built for the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle. It is located several miles north of SEA-TAC.

  “Oh my gosh,” Simmons says to her husband. “Either we’re on the wrong plane or we’re being hijacked.”

  One passenger gets out of his seat and marches toward the back. Tina gets up and intercepts him at row 14.

  “I’m bored,” he says. “You have any sports magazines to read back there?”

  She escorts him to the rear. She looks for a sports magazine. She can’t find any.

  “How about the New Yorker?” she says.

  In a nearby seat, passenger Labissoniere, the trucking lawyer, gets up to use the lavatory.

  When he comes out, another passenger is blocking the aisle. He’s a cowboy type, wearing a Stetson. He’s furious, demanding that Tina tell him more about this “mechanical difficulty.” Why do they have to burn fuel? When will they be on the ground? Does Tina know anything?

  Labissoniere notices the man in sunglasses sitting next to Tina. He seems amused by the cowboy’s antics. Then he gets annoyed when the man won’t stop. He tells Stetson Ma
n to go back to his seat. The hijacker and Tina are alone again.

  “If that’s a sky marshal, I don’t want any more of that,” he says.

  “There aren’t any sky marshals on the 305 flight,” she says.

  He remembers something: his note. Flo has it. He wants it back.

  Tina picks up the phone and tells the captain. She eases back into her seat. She asks the hijacker if he wants anything to eat or drink.

  “No.”

  She asks him about the passengers. When can they get off?

  He goes over his instructions again. She needs to pay attention.

  First, the fuel truck; he wants it out at SEA-TAC and ready to pump gas when the plane lands.

  Second, the money; he wants the car carrying the ransom parked so he can see it from the windows at all times.

  Third, her; he wants Tina to get out of the plane and fetch the bag of money.

  She worries. The bag may be too heavy for her to carry.

  “You’ll manage,” he says.

  Once the money is on board, the passengers will be released. Then Tina will get the parachutes and meals. He also has Benzedrine pills in his pocket. He doesn’t want the crew to get sleepy.

  The jet banks another wide loop.

  Tina tries to chat him up.

  “So, where you from?” she says.

  He won’t tell her. He’s not that stupid.

  She wants to know his motive. Why hijack this plane?

  “Do you have a grudge against Northwest?” she says.

  He looks at the stewardess, the sunglasses shielding his eyes.

  “I don’t have a grudge against your airline, Miss,” he says. “I just have a grudge.”

  December 7, 1942

  Cove City, North Carolina

  Ever since he was born, the old folks in the tobacco town said there was something about Richard Floyd McCoy Jr. that was not right. He could not speak properly. The cord under his tongue was too taut, so doctors snipped it and left him with a lisp. As a boy he got picked on and was always in fights. One reason for the birth defects, townsfolk surmised, was that the boy’s parents were first cousins.