Cooper suspect Duane Weber, photographed by his wife Jo Weber in 1979, after they married. COURTESY OF JO WEBER
After digging into her husband’s past, Jo Weber discovered that Duane was a career criminal who spent much of his life in prison, often under the alias John C. Collins.
A military parachutist tests the air-stairs of the hijacked Northwest Orient Boeing 727 during a test flight to see where Cooper landed on January 6, 1972.
Designed for the CIA, the SR-71 was the most advanced spyplane of its era. Its cameras and sensors failed to locate the hijacker. THE NORM TAYLOR COLLECTION/THE MUSEUM OF FLIGHT
McCoy later escaped from federal prison with a gun made from dental plaster.
Former Green Beret Richard Floyd McCoy Jr. was a suspect in the Cooper case after he hijacked another 727 five months after Cooper’s jump, for $500,000. SALT LAKE TRIBUNE
Special Agent Ralph Himmelsbach quizzes Dwayne and Patricia Ingram after they claimed their son Brian found the Cooper bills on Tena Bar, the most significant development in the unsolved case. MAX GUTIERREZ © BETTMANN/CORBIS
Brian Ingram, age fourteen, after winning back a portion of the Cooper bills in a six-year legal war with the FBI. MICHAEL LLOYD, THE OREGONIAN
FBI agent Larry Carr went undercover in a cyber forum under the code name Ckret; he was later reassigned. ANDY ROGERS, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
Scientist Tom Kaye tests the buoyancy of money in the Columbia River at Tena Bar, where the Cooper bills were found. RANDY L. RASMUSSEN/THE OREGONIAN
Vietnam veteran and retired drill sergeant Jerald Thomas has been hunting for Cooper for more than twenty years; recent theories suggest he might be looking in the wrong place. MARK HARRISON/SEATTLE TIMES
The mystery of the hijacker’s alias, Dan Cooper, may finally have been solved—as the name of an old French comic book hero who was a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot.
I must ask you, who in the hell do some of you people think you are, and what in the hell do you think you are doing. I have succeeded in pulling off one of the most successful, talked about crimes of today.… No one was endangered, the caper was only committed to show the unbelieving world that a PERFECT crime was possible.
NO HARM DONE
the perfect crime
grant me amnesty
money will be returned
no harm done
answer by way of public announcement
within 48 hours
i’ve won, admit you’ve lost
—d.b. cooper
i am alive and doing well in home town PO. The system that beats the system. db cooper
ATTENTION!
Thanks for hospitality. Was in a rut.
D.B. Cooper
you will never find me
give up
db cooper
i am right here portland and the $200,000 is for revolution
dear manager,
much of the credit for my success is yours, thanks.
I am departing very soon for foreign soil, flying naturally, thanks again.
D.B. Cooper
August 24, 2007
Approaching Portland International Airport, Oregon
I am on the plane and I am thinking of the Pulitzer prize. What is the prize? Is there a trophy? A plaque? Anything I’ll be able to keep? A check to cash? And how will I apply? Or will they just know about my exposé unmasking the real D.B. Cooper as bashful Northwest purser Ken Christiansen? And how should the story start? With Kenny as a boy, growing up in the Great Depression and running up to his attic to gaze at his father’s Perpetual Motion Machine?
Now I am wondering about a metal detector. Before I left, Lyle was insistent: Bring a metal detector to Bonney Lake. If Lyle knew his brother Kenny, he told me, Kenny would bury the loot in his backyard like the family dog buries gnawed-up bones.
How can I take Lyle seriously? If Kenny was Cooper, why would he have kept the evidence on his property? Then again, if Kenny actually planned out the hijacking—if he was gutsy enough to jump out of a plane over the remote forests of southwest Washington with $200,000 in twenty-dollar bills tied to his chest with a pair of parachute shrouds—then he was capable of anything. To prove the case, I would have to consider the most unlikely scenarios, stretch the limits of my own logic.
My first interview is forty miles south of Portland, with the man considered to be the world’s foremost expert on the D.B. Cooper case, Ralph Himmelsbach. The retired special agent is now in his eighties, and there is talk about how he became “obsessed” with the case after the first call (“164 in progress”) came over the radio. He’s chased Cooper for decades and still failed to identify him. They say Cooper ruined his first marriage.
I have come for his blessing. I have photos of Ken Christiansen in my bag and copies of his military records from the Paratroops. I have my arguments all mapped out. If I can convince an expert like Himmelsbach that Ken Christiansen is a worthy suspect, I’ll be on my way toward making my case.
His ranch is set back from the main road. I drive down the gravel moat and across fields that sit in the shadows of Mount Hood.
Himmelsbach opens the door and the face I see is the same as in the old newspaper clippings. High, arching eyebrows. A mustache trimmed just so. Cheeks so closely shaven they look pink. He wears light stiff jeans and a bolo tie. I follow him out to the back porch. This is where Himmelsbach lines up his .22 rifle and snipes varmints sneaking into his garden.
Himmelsbach—or, H, as Cooper sleuths call him—is the voice of reason in the Cooper case. Since the night of the hijacking, he’s been interviewed by countless news outlets—print, radio, television, local, national, international—and he always shoots down the Robin Hood analogy. How, he snuffs, could the hijacker be a hero when he put thirty-six passengers at risk? And the six brave crew members? And what about the hundreds of airline officials and cops and agents whose Thanksgiving was ruined, and who later spent tens of thousands of hours hunting Cooper down? In one interview, Himmelsbach called the hijacker “nothing but a rotten sleazy bastard.”
The sun is out. Himmelsbach hears the distant buzz of an engine. He squints up and the sun beams off his blue eyes like flashes of light against the bottom of a swimming pool.
“AT-6 Texan,” he says of the plane. “A North American AT-6.”
Despite his age, there is an exactness to Himmelsbach, a German-reared thoroughness and competency that only enhances his credentials as the official granddaddy of the Cooper case. Before we start talking, Himmelsbach has ground rules.
No problem. Fire away.
There is one fact that he wants to make sure I understand.
“I was not and I am not obsessed with the Cooper case,” he says.
His eyes gaze over me.
Got it. Not obsessed.
I ask him what he remembers about the hunt. I want to know about the first morning.
November 25, 1971
West Linn, Oregon
It is dawn. His wife is a bundle under the black and orange silk sheets of their bed, the same bundle as when he came home late from the airport the night before. Ralph Himmelsbach puts on jeans, a shirt, his leather bomber jacket, aviator sunglasses, and drives to the hangar.
The sky is wet. The air is cold. Snow today. Snow any minute. Better get up before he gets socked in, he thinks.
His airplane is a single-engine, recreational Taylorcraft. He flies over the Willamette Valley and crosses Vector 23, the flight path of the hijacked plane. He buzzes the treelines of vast areas of remote timber, the streams and lakes and crags that form the border of the Dark Divide.
Himmelsbach flies a grid. Seven miles one way, seven miles back. Back and back again. Where did the hijacker bail out? He must be in these woods somewhere. But where?
The agent squints down into the trees. He looks for a plume of smoke from a campfire, a snare of parachute, a pool of blood.
Back and back and back again. Whoever Dan Cooper is, Himmelsbach is confident he a
nd his fellow Bureau agents will find him. The skyjacker will test the agency. He will prove how good J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI really is.
Within the Bureau, the Cooper hijacking is given a name: NORJAK. At headquarters in Washington, senior agents are processing the microfilm that contains the serial numbers to every twenty-dollar bill the hijacker was given. The numbers will be printed in a booklet and released to the public. Field offices in Portland, Reno, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and throughout the Pacific Northwest have been asked to investigate and submit daily NORJAK updates to headquarters via teletype.
In Seattle, agents re-interview witnesses. They need to know what the hijacker looked like, so Bureau artists can create a sketch.
About how old was he?
George Labissoniere, the truck driver’s lawyer, says he had a clear view of the hijacker because he went to the bathroom so many times during the flight.
He was no older than thirty-five, Labissoniere tells the feds.
He was about fifty, Cord Zrim Spreckel, the printer, tells agents. Spreckel had a good look at the hijacker too. The man looked so suspicious. Why was he wearing sunglasses?
And what kind of facial features?
He had a square jaw, Spreckel says.
He had a saggy chin, Bill Mitchell, the college sophomore, says.
The details are conflicting. Other than stewardess Tina Mucklow, the only witness who was in close proximity to the hijacker is stewardess Florence Schaffner. Flo tells the feds she saw the hijacker without his sunglasses. She was the only one to see Cooper’s eyes. What color were they?
“Brown,” she says.
And about how old was he?
“Mid-forties,” she says.
Tina Mucklow agrees. But Cooper is shorter than what Flo thinks. Tina pegs the hijacker to be between five foot ten and six feet tall.
Flo says six feet tall, no shorter. And his hair was black, just like his suit and his shoes, Flo says.
His hair was dark brown, and so was his suit, which may have had a black stripe, Tina says.
And what about his shoes? What kind?
Also brown, Tina says. Ankle-length leather shoes, pebble grain, no laces.
To compose the sketch, Tina and Flo and Alice Hancock and other witnesses are shown the Facial Identification Catalog, the Bureau’s bible of ears (average? protruding? close set?) and noses (hooked? snub? downward tip?) and chins (cleft? dimple?). Flo likes face type KK5-1, except for the ears and hair. Alice likes KA3-9 (eyebrows, OC1-10; mouth, KE9-11; cheek and cheekbones, KJ1-1).
And what about the hair?
“Straight, parted on the left side,” Flo says.
“Straight, narrow sideburns,” Tina says.
Alice saw the hijacker’s hair differently.
“Wavy, short, and trimmed in the back,” Alice says.
“Marcelled,” Robert Gregory, the paint company owner, tells the agents who interview him. The marcel wave is an old French hairstyle created by hot irons.
As co-owner of a paint company, Gregory pays attention to details, especially colors. Gregory says the hijacker’s suit was not brown or black. The color was russet, a reddish brown. And the suit, he tells the feds, had wide lapels. Which was strange. Wide lapels are out of style.
Gregory also noticed the hijacker’s hair. It was jet black, and had a greasy patent leather shoe polish shine to it. The hair was so dark it could have been dyed. The man’s skin was also “swarthy.” Perhaps he was Mexican-American, or had American Indian blood.
And about how tall?
Not that tall, Gregory tells the feds. About five foot nine.
In Reno, in daylight, agents can see inside the cabin. Northwest 305 is wrecked. Food from the meals the hijacker requested for the crew are splattered over the seats and on the walls. Searching for fingerprints, agents dust 18E, the seat the hijacker sat in, the handle of the lavatory he hid in, the cabin phone he used to call the pilots when he couldn’t get the aftstairs down, the in-flight magazine in front of the seat.
The agents find fingerprints. Too many. Which are the stews’ and passengers’? Which are Cooper’s?
In the armrest, agents locate the hijacker’s cigarette butts. They look at the label. The brand is Raleigh, a coupon smoke. In total, there are eight butts in the ashtray. The agents search for hairs to analyze. On a seat, they find one limb hair. On the cloth that covers the headrest, they find a head hair. It is brown, Caucasian in origin.
Near the hijacker’s seat, agents find another piece of evidence. It is a tie. A skinny tie. The color is black. The knot is fake. It’s a clip-on. In the center of the tie is a tack. It is gold in color and features a circular pearl-like stone.
Agents turn over the tie and read the label. “TOWNCRAFT, #3, PENNEY’S,” it says.
In Portland, Himmelsbach comes home for Thanksgiving dinner thinking about Cooper. Time is running out. With every minute that elapses, the feds lose ground. The weather had been so terrible—rain, fog, snow—that agents and local law enforcement could not search the flight path on foot. The next morning, the search would begin in earnest. That night, Himmelsbach watches the evening news. The hijacking is a lead story. At CBS, Walter Cronkite reads the intro.
When he boarded a plane in Portland Oregon last night he was just another passenger who gave his name as D.[B.] Cooper. But today, after hijacking a Northwest airlines jet, ransoming the passengers in Seattle, then making a getaway by parachute somewhere between there and Reno, Nevada, the description by one wire service: Master Criminal.
September 3, 1969
University Hospital, University Of Washington, Seattle
In the auditorium, doctors, surgeons, and all of the fourth-year medical students wait to hear the speech Bobby Dayton has prepared before going into surgery. Bobby has become a fixture at the teaching hospital, sitting in waiting rooms in a dress and heels, chain-smoking. His doctors told him the name he chose for himself as a woman should be similar to his own. Bobby thought about Roberta. He prefers Barbara.
His remarks are typed. He reads them.
After forty-three years, I continue to live with an obsession that has ruined not only my life, but the life of others I have loved. I cannot understand myself, nor can I reason why I must be tormented until I die. I did not ask to come upon this earth, and I have never thanked God for the breath of life. My health is excellent and my appearance is normal enough—a normal male who should find a place in the world, marry, and live out a reasonably happy life. If only it were that simple.
Every night when Bobby was a boy, his family ate dinner together in silence. His father, Elmer, wanted to listen to the news on the radio, and the rest of the family wasn’t allowed to talk. Elmer was a cement contractor in Long Beach, California. He was tough and proud and always walked a few paces ahead of his wife, Bernice. “Squaw follow chief,” he liked to say.
Bobby was jealous of his younger brother, Bill, who was taller and better-looking. Bobby made his own stilts from wood and stuffed them into his shoes. He practiced walking with the stilts until no one even noticed he was wearing them. Bobby and Bill were close. When they were teenagers, they fled to Mexico to mine gold. Short of money, they camped in a cave for shelter. Bill started complaining about the aliens. They were watching him, he said. They had taken him into space on a spaceship and returned him here.
His brother was cursed. The curse ran in their family. It was placed on their grandfather by an Indian woman. She decreed that all the men in the Dayton family would suffer from pains in their minds. Bill was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
Meanwhile, the Dayton family had moved. Bobby’s father, Elmer, purchased land on an old ranch in the Mother Lode, where miners pulled out fortunes from the gold-flecked streams of the Sierra Nevada mountains in northern California. The ranch was over seven hundred acres, not large by farming standards but huge for a cement contractor from Long Beach. At first, Elmer knew little about how to run a ranch. There wasn’t enough grass for his l
ivestock to eat; many animals got sick and died of starvation.
On furlough from the Merchant Marines, Bobby met Dixie on a blind date. She had big eyes and a flirty, fun way about her. She liked to write poems, just like him.
After the first date, Dixie’s parents found out.
“We’re just friends,” she told them. Nothing sexual happened.
They didn’t believe her. Bobby was older, twenty-two. She was only fifteen. Get married, they urged her.
Bobby was stationed in Alaska when his parents began writing to him, encouraging him to marry Dixie.
“It doesn’t make any real difference to me,” Bobby wrote back. “Either way things turn out is OK with me.”
He was distracted. He was trying to get his pilot license, but he failed the written part of the exam. There was a lot of math on the test. He knew how to fly. Why did he need to know math?
He also flunked the physical exam. Doctors noticed a problem in one of his eyes. His vision was off.
All Bobby ever wanted was to fly for a living. That dream was over. The next best thing was gold. He later moved back to the Mother Lode, purchased his own claim nearby, and married Dixie.
They had a son, Dennis. Bobby built a cabin for them on the mining claim. At night, Bobby would wake them with his screams.
The Blanket Monster was after him again, he’d tell Dixie. The Blanket Monster was a phantom that chased him in his dreams. It was big and fast. Bobby ran from it. He’d stop, turn, look back. The Blanket Monster was gone. Then, there it was. To appear invisible, the Blanket Monster merely turned itself sideways. Then it came in front of him … the blanket wide like a sail … about to swallow him.
SKYJACK: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper Page 9