Skyjack Read online

  Copyright © 2011 by Geoffrey Gray

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gray, Geoffrey.

  Skyjack: the hunt for D.B. Cooper / Geoffrey Gray.

  1. Cooper, D.B. 2. Hijacking of aircraft—United States. 3. Criminal investigation—United States. I. Title.

  HE9803.Z7H5352 2011

  364.15’52092—dc22 2010047655

  eISBN: 978-0-307-45131-6

  Map by David Lindroth

  Jacket design by David Tran

  Jacket photograph (man) by Getty Images

  Endpaper maps: Courtesy of National Oceanic and Atmospheric

  Administration (NOAA)

  v3.1

  For Nana

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Epigraph

  THE JUMP

  Photo Insert

  THE HUNT

  THE CURSE

  NOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  Bombproof and crowded with oxygen … terrace, volcallure at casa Cugat, Abbe Wants Cugie Gets.

  We’re up against an enemy, a conspiracy. They are using any means. We are going to use any means. Is that clear?

  —Richard Nixon

  July 6, 2007

  New York, New York

  SKIPP PORTEOUS WANTS to talk and says can we meet and I say fine. He arrives in a suit that is South Beach white, and between the wide lapels is a T-shirt that is snug and black. He has leather sandals on his feet, no socks. His hair is curly and brown. His goatee is trimmed and gray in spots. He removes his sunglasses, which reveal hooded eyes, and gives the room a looky-loo.

  The bistro is typical midtown Manhattan. A fruit basket of martinis on the menu—mango, peach, Lillet. The clatter of voices at the banquettes and the clank of dishes ricochet over the roar of lunch talk. In the gilded mirrors on the walls are reflections of Windsor knots, hair gel, six-figure cleavage.

  I have dealt with Porteous before. He had a few story ideas; none worked. I can’t remember why now. Porteous was his own story, and maybe I should have written about him.

  He used to be a preacher before he became a private investigator. In the late 1960s, Porteous ran a church in Los Angeles and worked the Sunset Strip with his Bible. He preached to hippies, the homeless, anybody who would listen to his salvation pitch. “Excuse me,” he would say, “if you died tonight, where would you spend eternity?”

  The game for Porteous then was to win souls for the Church, until he lost his own. He saw corruption in the Church and started digging around. What he found was that he was good at digging around, often in disguise. Porteous liked undercover work so much he made a second career out of it. For a small-town sheriff, he bought drugs as a narc. For the FBI, he infiltrated gangs and groups wearing a wire. It was a decent living. The feds paid on time, and in cash.

  His style is not tough-talking or pushy. Porteous has a holistic approach toward PI work. Some retired cops flash badges or guns. Porteous starts each investigative day with a meditation session.

  He also hires mostly women to do PI work.

  “Women have better instincts than men,” he told me when we first met.

  Sherlock Investigations, his agency, had the gimmicky type of title that attracts a lot of attention on the Web. It snared me, and countless others needing help solving problems of an unusual kind. Like the disappearance of Captain Jack, an iguana that was stolen through an open window in Greenwich Village. Or the woman who called because she was convinced the actress Lily Tomlin was stalking her (she wasn’t). Or the man convinced his wife was having an affair with his father (she was). Or the runaway from Israel they found living under a bridge in Arizona. Or the mother from India who wanted to spy on the man her daughter was dating, and all the suspicious spouses and suits who are convinced (and wrongly so) that their phone receivers are tapped and their offices are bugged. Sin and paranoia form the backbone of his business.

  It’s loud in the bistro and I can’t hear the private investigator so good. I lean over my moules, anxious to hear what case has come over Porteous’s transom. Another missing pet? Another teenage runaway? Gypsy scams?

  Nope. It’s a new client, Lyle Christiansen.

  His intel is sparse. From what the private detective has pieced together, Lyle Christiansen appears to be a kooky old man, an eccentric, and prodigious. He is eighty years old, and lives in Morris, Minnesota, a prairie town closer to Fargo, North Dakota, than it is to Minneapolis. Lyle grew up in Morris and worked for the post office there. In retirement, he has become an inventor. He is in the process of patenting a hodgepodge of household contraptions: the Yucky Cleaning Wand (it slips into the neck of a bottle to clean the tough-to-reach places), an egg breaker that cracks eggs perfectly every time, and a shirt that disguises the appearance of suspenders (he finds them distasteful—in his version, you wear them on the inside of the shirt).

  Christiansen’s wife, Donna, has a creative mind, too. Over the years she has assembled a collection of expressions, adages, sayings, idioms, clichés, and senseless American verbiage. The title of her book is As Cute as a Bug’s Ear. It has 2,270 entries, ranging from “As Bald as a Billiard Ball” to “You’ve Got it Made.”

  Great. But so what? What’s the story here? Why would a retired post office worker and aspiring inventor from Bumblefuck, Minnesota, need the services of a Manhattan sleuth-for-hire like Porteous?

  Porteous was puzzled too. The first e-mail he received from Christiansen was cryptic. It read:

  Dear Good People at Sherlock Investigations,

  I would very much like to contact Nora Ephron, Movie Director of the movie, “Sleepless in Seattle”. I think she would be interested in what I have to say.

  The Sherlock employee who handled the note was Sherry Hart. Before she became an investigator, Hart tried to make it as a singer-songwriter and actress. Her training in the dramatic arts now helps with her undercover work. She’s handled hundreds of cases for Porteous, and as she read over Christiansen’s e-mail she thought, Here we go. Another whackjob. She wrote back:

  We would not be able to give you a famous person’s address. If you want to write a letter to Ms. Ephron, we would deliver it to her ourselves. The fee would be $495. Proceed?

  Proceed. Christiansen’s check and letter arrived shortly thereafter. Porteous handled the letter with caution, as if it contained a nuclear code. He held the envelope to the light to examine it. He rotated the edges. He peered through the fibers of the paper and checked the pockets for powders.

  The note was clean.

  He read it. Lyle’s letter to Ephron was a pitch for a movie. Lyle wanted to base the film on the life and times of a person he knew. The language was vague. The person he knew was quiet and shy. Bashful was Lyle’s word. Mr. Bashful also happened to be a culprit to a major unsolved crime, Lyle said.

  He also suggested a title for the film: The Bashful Man in Seattle. A tip of the hat to Nora Ephron’s blockbuster, Sleepless in Seattle.

  Reading the bizarre note, Porteous did not attempt to understand it. He wasn’t getting paid to understand it. He hailed a cab to Ephron’s building on Park Avenue and approached the doorman.

  “Nora Ephron live here?” he said.

  “Yes,” the doorman said.

  Porteous placed Lyle’s envelope in the doorman’s white-gloved hands. He then hailed a cab h
ome. Easy money.

  As the weeks passed, Lyle Christiansen was patient. Did Ephron know he was a retired civil servant living on little income, and paid so much money to send her a note? Ephron’s films were so warm and tender. How could she be so cold and rude as to not respond with a note of her own?

  In her home on Park Avenue, Ephron did receive Christiansen’s letter. She saw his note on her kitchen counter and maybe later in the office. Or did it land in the wastebasket with her junk mail? She couldn’t be sure. It disappeared.

  In Morris, Christiansen was flustered. He decided to write Ephron again. Did she not receive his first letter? Would Porteous deliver it for him? Whatever the fee was, he’d pay it.

  Porteous was baffled. Why was Christiansen so desperate to reach Nora Ephron? And what was he talking about when he said he knew a person connected with a famous crime? Which crime? How famous?

  In e-mails, Porteous prodded for more information. The old man was cagey. He wanted to tell his story to Nora Ephron, give her the exclusive. But Ephron never wrote him back. Lyle finally gave up. He told Porteous everything.

  His hunt started on television. Flipping around the dial, Lyle settled on the program Unsolved Mysteries. The topic of the episode was D.B. Cooper: the famous hijacker who in the fall of 1971 parachuted out the back of an airplane with $200,000 in stolen cash—and was never seen again. D.B. Cooper had become a famous American outlaw, the legendary Robin Hood of the sky. The subject of poems and ballads and rock songs, D.B. was up there in the crime annals with Billy the Kid, Bonnie and Clyde, and Bigfoot.

  D.B. Cooper, where are you now?

  We’re looking for you high and low.

  With your pleasant smile

  And your dropout style,

  D.B. Cooper, where did you go?

  His identity is a mystery. For four decades, agents, detectives, reporters, treasure hunters, amateur sleuths, and others have quested for clues that might reveal who the hijacker was. But no effort has yielded definitive results. Cooper remains only a face seen in sketches composed by FBI artists. And what a face!

  Lyle Christiansen perked up in his chair when he saw it. The face was familiar. The receding hairline, the thin lips. The sloped forehead. The perky ears. The smile—that mischievous smile.

  A cold and queasy feeling swept over him as he looked at the face. Could it be? It could. Lyle wrote to Porteous:

  Yes, I knew the culprit personally.… He was my brother.

  The PI looks discouraged as I slurp up the garlicky broth at the bottom of my bowl of moules. Cooper? Sky pirate? Never heard of the guy.

  The name is alluring, though. D.B. Cooper. It’s fun to say out loud. It has a royal ring, a rhythm, with those stately initials that look so good in history books. J. P. Morgan. D. H. Lawrence. J. S. Bach.

  Back at the office, I look up the case. The headlines continue, forty years later: VANISHED INTO THIN AIR. THE PERFECT CRIME. THE WORLD’S MOST DARING CRIMINAL.

  Cooper was a genteel thief, according to legend. He wore a suit and tie. He was polite—caring, even—to his hostages. He developed his own cult following. On the anniversary of his crime, in the forests of southwest Washington State, where many believe his parachute came down, worshippers toast his feat and keep the legend going at a party that has been running for forty years.

  “He comes off as a kind of curious Robin Hood,” a sociologist said. “Taking from the rich, or at least the big and complex. It doesn’t matter whether he gives to the poor or not.” The symbolism of the skyjack was “one individual overcoming, for the time being anyway, technology, the corporation, the establishment, the system.”

  And the posse. Cooper spurred one of the biggest manhunts in law enforcement, as spy planes orbited over search areas and soldiers and generations of FBI agents on the ground waded through snow, mud, and rain in the most remote forest in the nation looking for him. Some lawmen were so impressed with the cleverness and courage of the getaway, they hoped the hijacker was never caught.

  “If he took the trouble to plan this thing out so thoroughly, well, good luck to him,” one sheriff said after the jump.

  “You can’t help but admire the guy,” another federal agent on the first search teams said.

  Cooper’s crime transcended crime. In one jump, the hijacker was able to make the good guys root for the bad guys. So who was he? Why did he do it? And what happened to him?

  Over the decades, the number of suspects and persons of interest in the Cooper case has grown to more than one thousand. Buried in the basement of the Bureau’s field office in Seattle, the file runs over forty feet long. Inside are dossiers, letters, photos, interviews from witnesses, airline officials, parachute packers, tipsters, fraudsters, psychics, suspicious neighbors, business partners, conspiracy theorists, parents, jealous lovers. Some suspects disappeared. Some suspects faked their own deaths. One man nearly died in a custom-built submarine, scanning the bottom of a lake for the hijacker’s ransom. One renowned reporter attempted suicide after his suspect was proven to be a fraud; only a steady program of electroshock treatment jolted him back into coherency. Countless impostors emerged. Men went to prison. The hijacking became myth, and over time the myth became truth. It was no longer clear what information was fact, or what was legend.

  Like the quests to find the Holy Grail and the Lost Dutchman Mine, the hunt for the hijacker is an odyssey that tests the boundaries of obsession, and the farther along the path one gets, stranger and stranger things happen.

  The Cooper Curse is what those who have felt it call it. But is the Curse real? Or something we create, then blame when we fail to find out what happened? Or the by-product of a moment in time defined by chaos and paranoia?

  When Cooper jumped in the fall of 1971, the nation was at war with itself. In government buildings and on college campuses, bombs went off. In cities, looters roamed as riots raged and buildings burned. At demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, protesters were arrested by the tens of thousands. A defeat in Vietnam was imminent. The nation was also mired in recession. Labor strikes crippled the workforce. Unemployment soared. So did the crime rate. Prisons were overcrowded and taken over in riots. Communes were built. Cults formed. Otherwise normal teenagers ran away from home, and had to be “deprogrammed” after they were brainwashed.

  “The music is telling the youth to rise up against the establishment,” Charles Manson said during his trial for murder. “Why blame me? I didn’t write the music.”

  A mob had formed. The underground was rising. Terrorists were homegrown. Communist fears were reborn. Inside J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, a campaign was afoot to compile information on protesters and anarchists. Phones were tapped.

  At the center of the spookfest was President Nixon, whose motorcade was pummeled with rocks and surrounded by protesters.

  “I just want to ask you one favor,” Nixon told top aide H. R. Haldeman. “If I am assassinated, I want you to have them play Dante’s Inferno and have Lawrence Welk produce it.”

  The president feared blackmail from so many different directions, both in and outside his administration, that his aides formed the Plumbers, the White House’s own dirty tricks brigade. The Plumbers’ black-bag jobs eventually led to Watergate and Nixon’s resignation from office, perhaps the lowest point in the nation’s political history.

  Skyjacking was then a national epidemic. Throughout Nixon’s term, there had been roughly a hundred hijackings of American airplanes, and over half the attempts had been successful.

  The airplane had become the next stagecoach, a crime scene for dangerous jet-age robberies, and the skyjacker a momentary cultural hero. Like no other innovation, the invention of the airplane in Kitty Hawk and the evolution of American airpower were testaments to the nation’s technological virility and essential to the American ethos. Air-power had been instrumental in winning the World Wars, in ushering in the jet age, in developing the space program. America had put man on the moon. Boeing had built the 747, the jumbo j
et. And yet, in one impulsive action, the lone skyjacker was able to show the fallibility of the costly flying machines. What good was the power of the Air Force in a country like Vietnam where American soldiers were slaughtered under the canopy of the jungle? What good was flying a jet to vacation in Miami when so many flights were getting rerouted to Castro’s Cuba?

  The skyjacker himself was a kind of schizo-transcendentalist. Onboard a jet, taking all passengers and the flight crew as hostages, the skyjacker was able to create his own society. He became his own head of state, directing others—the pilots, the stewardesses, the lawmen, mayors, governors—to act upon his whims. In one flight, the skyjacker went from nobody to somebody. And with reporters from newspapers, radio, and television stations monitoring the drama in the air, the culprits achieved celebrity. Dr. David Hubbard, a psychiatrist interviewing nearly a hundred airplane hijackers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, described taking over an airplane as a holy experience. “The skyjackers,” he once wrote, “seemed intent to stand on their own feet, to be men, to face their God, and to arise from this planet to the other more pleasing place.” To date, hundreds of skyjackers and terrorists have taken over airplanes. Only one remains unknown.

  Shit. Porteous and Lyle Christiansen are on to something. The Cooper case is a big deal. Uncovering the identity of the hijacker is a major story (Pulitzer, hello!), and it’s mine so long as I don’t mess it up. Of course, I’ll have to prove Lyle’s brother was actually the hijacker. How hard could that be?

  Back at my office after lunch, I call Porteous. I want to read the file he’s put together on Lyle’s brother. I want to see it fast, before Porteous decides to call another reporter. As a general rule, PI’s can get giddy over the prospect of publicity. Breaking the Cooper case would make Porteous the most famous PI in America. At least that’s what he must be thinking. That’s what I’m thinking.