Skyjack Page 13

She finds another paper, folded up. She unfolds it and reads it: COMMUTATION OF SENTENCE. STATE OF MISSOURI.

  Commutation? She doesn’t know what the word means. The document says John C. Collins was sentenced to prison in Missouri for four years and released after two. CONVICTED OF THE CRIME OF … GRAND STEALING.

  John C. Collins?

  She finds another card in the wallet, a Florida driver’s license. There it is again. The name: John C. Collins. She looks at the photograph on the license. It’s Duane. Why would Duane have a license under the name John C. Collins? The name is curious. Jo’s maiden name was Collins. Is that why he married her?

  She finds a card from the National Rifle Association. Member name: John C. Collins. And one from the Navy. “Honorable discharge,” it says. “John C. Collins.” Whom had she been living with? Who was Duane L. Weber? Who was John C. Collins?

  She goes through the wallet again. She burrows deep into the crevices. She finds two slips of newsprint. One is a classified ad for a rifle—it is for sale. Another bears the following text:

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

  The words don’t make sense. Bombproof and crowded with oxygen? What does that mean? Is it code?

  Several months after Duane’s death, Jo is on a date. She wasn’t interested romantically, so to send the message she starts talking about Duane. She tells her date about the wacky things Duane told her on his deathbed, and how angry he got after he said, “I’m Dan Cooooooper.”

  Dan Cooper sounds a lot like D.B. Cooper, her date says. What if Duane was trying to confess to the hijacking? What if Jo was too preoccupied with his medical condition to pay attention?

  She doesn’t remember much about the hijacking. She stops off at the library the following day. She checks out the book D.B. Cooper: What Really Happened? by Max Gunther. She reads the first few sentences.

  He had given his name to a ticket agent as Dan Cooper, but news reports mistakenly identified him as D.B. Cooper, and that is the name by which he became famous.

  Dan Cooper! Dan Cooooooper! Jo can’t breathe. She goes home. She calls the FBI. She is so hysterical the agent asks her if she has forgotten to take her medication. He won’t listen to her.

  She reads on.

  The audacious crime stunned the world. Nothing like it had ever been done before. Others have tried it since, but nobody else has ever succeeded. The man called D.B. Cooper became a legend. Millions of people in America, Europe, even Russia wondered who this man was, where he had come from, what had driven him to take such a mad risk.

  She reads about the case, everything she can find. She calls the FBI again. She tells them what she heard him say in the hospital. I’m Dan Cooooper.

  It doesn’t matter what Duane said, agents say. They need proof of a crime. Does Jo have proof of a crime?

  She does not. She has memories. She remembers the strange things he told her. She remembers the places he took her. When she pieces it all together, the portrait of the hijacker and Jo’s memories of Duane are almost identical.

  Both were familiar with the Pacific Northwest. He took her there once, in 1978. After they married and moved to Fort Collins, Colorado, they drove west on a trip over the Cascades. Outside of Vancouver, Duane took her on a hike.

  “This is where D.B. Cooper walked out of the woods,” he said.

  “How would you know?” Jo said.

  “Maybe I was there,” Duane said.

  She assumed he was joking.

  Another memory. She thinks it was later that year. Can’t be sure. She and Duane are sleeping. He wakes up. He is frantic. His right arm is raised.

  “I left my prints on the aftstairs,” he said. “I’m going to die.”

  Aftstairs? An odd word. Reading books on D.B. Cooper, she learns the aftstairs are where the hijacker made his infamous leap from the Northwest Orient 727.

  There was also an airline ticket she found in a sock drawer. She thinks it said Northwest Orient on it, and the year 1971. Again: she can’t be sure. She asked Duane about the airline ticket. He shrugged it off. When she went to put his socks back in the drawer, the ticket was missing. Why was it missing?

  Without proof, the Bureau agents dismiss Jo Weber. How can they be sure she is telling them the truth? How can they be sure she isn’t manufacturing her memories?

  Jo is bitter. Jo is scorned. She decides to conduct the investigation herself. She follows the clues Duane left her, tucked into the folds of the ostrich-skin wallet.

  She starts with his sentence for grand larceny.

  When he arrived, the prison where Duane was incarcerated in Jefferson City, Missouri, was considered the most violent, dysfunctional prison in the nation. Built in 1836, the gray stone buildings were described as a “medieval twilight zone,” and later “the bloodiest forty-seven acres in America.” It was also home, Jo learns, to a small-time crook who rented out magazines in the courtyard.

  James Earl Ray was a jailhouse legend at Jefferson City. Before he pled guilty to assassinating Martin Luther King (and later recanted), Ray had reportedly escaped from the prison by hiding in a bread box.

  Jo wonders, did Duane (or John C. Collins) know James Earl Ray? How can she find out?

  Duane’s wife at the time was Mary Jane Ross. Jo finds a number for her in California. Jo is nervous about calling. Eventually, she dials. She has to know: Does Duane have a connection to James Earl Ray? If so, what is it?

  Lana picks up. Lana is Duane’s stepdaughter. Lana misses Duane. She is sorry to hear he passed.

  “We’re all family in a way,” Lana tells Jo.

  Lana has fond memories of Duane. He was an inspiration to her.

  “He lived a hard and fast life … as a cat burglar. I always thought, Great, my stepfather is a sophisticated criminal. Wow, some of the jewels he brought home. Wow … He always worked alone.”

  Cat burglar? Worked alone?

  Jo knew he stole. Once, after selling antiques at a flea market, Duane’s friend Jim Stallings went with Duane to a pharmacy. Stallings looked down the aisle and saw Duane pocket a bottle of aspirin.

  Jo was not surprised. Before he passed away, Duane would come home from the Piggly Wiggly and she would find packets of Kool-Aid in the pockets of Duane’s coat. Duane didn’t even drink Kool-Aid. She went to the Piggly Wiggly and spoke with the manager. She wanted to pay for what Duane stole.

  “We’ve known about it for some time,” the manager told her. “If he takes anything expensive, we’ll give you a call.”

  Were these signs? Had Jo been in denial about Duane all along?

  “He was a real sophisticated person …” Lana says, “nothing about him that wasn’t first class … He was pulling diamonds out of barrettes, big diamonds … I learned a lot of lessons from him. He told me never tell a cop nothing.”

  Jo asks about Mary Jane. Is she around?

  “Best time to call her is in the morning,” Lana says, “before she’s had a few beers.”

  Mary Jane doesn’t sound too drunk when Jo calls. “Why don’t you come out here and enjoy our earthquakes?” Mary Jane says.

  “I wish I could afford to,” Jo says.

  “You little asshole,” Mary Jane says. “Have you ever been in a seven-point-two?”

  Mary Jane rambles. Maybe she is drunk. She is hurting.

  “I look in the obituary every day to see if my name is there,” Mary Jane says.

  Jo asks her about D.B. Cooper. Did Mary Jane know anything about the hijacking?

  “Never heard of it, Jo.”

  Really? Or is Mary Jane covering up for Duane? Was Mary Jane involved in the caper somehow?

  Jo asks her about James Earl Ray.

  “I met the guy,” Mary Jane says.

  What?

  “I met him. His wife stayed with me for a while.”

  James Earl Ray’s wife and Mary Jane were roommates?

  “She was Jewish,” Mary Jane says. “I’m not Jewis
h and I don’t go for this Hanukkah.”

  Jo asks Mary Jane about James Earl Ray’s escape in a bread box.

  “That was a put-on, honey. He didn’t escape. That was all a big hoax. They got him to Canada because he was supposed to act like he was the guy who killed Martin Luther King. I know it for a fact.”

  How does she know it? Jo is trembling. Duane must have known James Earl Ray. Their wives were roommates! Was that the connection? Was there more? Jo is now recording her phone calls to prove she is not making up what others tell her. She is also keeping an audio diary to document her journey into Duane’s past. When the call with Mary Jane is over, she speaks into her tape recorder.

  “Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god!” she says.

  She writes letters. She calls federal agents, witnesses, private detectives. She spends hundreds of dollars on phone calls, then thousands. She talks for hours, won’t get off with people. She asks reporters and editors for help. All shrug her off. Except one.

  As a reporter for U.S. News & World Report, Doug Pasternak listens to Jo Weber for three years before he publishes a piece on Duane Weber in 2000. During the course of his reporting, Pasternak discovers that Jo was married to a career criminal. Duane’s first prison was McNeil, a federal penitentiary in Washington. His scam had been seducing women during the war and swindling GI checks from them. After the war, Duane did time at the Ohio State Penitentiary, in Columbus, Ohio. In 1953, he was paroled from San Quentin. In 1954, he spent one day in Soledad, south of Santa Cruz. Then he was in Folsom, near Sacramento, until 1959. In 1960, he was arrested in El Paso for burglary, convicted, and sent to Canon City, the federal prison in Colorado.

  Later, she stumbles on a newspaper story, printed in the St. Petersburg Times, July 29, 1957. The paper calls Duane Lorin Weber a “smooth-talking ex-con.” Then 33, Duane had been arrested for flirting with women at a nightclub on Treasure Island, Florida, and stealing their wallets. When the police searched his hotel room, they found, among other things, identification from several people, among them a badge from an investigator at the District Attorney’s office in Jackson County, Missouri. Police learned Duane had already spent six years in prison in California and five in Ohio.

  “It may take several weeks before we can run down this man’s history, even then we may only know half of it,” a deputy sheriff told the newspaper.

  Questioning him after his arrest, one police officer asked Duane his occupation.

  “Crook, I guess,” he said.

  Jo cries learning these things. Who did she marry? She sobs into her tape recorder.

  “Duane, I get chills thinking about what you did,” she says.

  August 27, 2007

  Edgewater Hotel, Seattle, Washington

  I wake up under the plaid sheets of the hotel bed. It is dawn, the sky is gray, the window of my room at the Edgewater is open. I hear pelicans and the horns of the passing boats on Puget Sound. Through the window, I see the giant cranes of the port. I smell salt water.

  I duck back under the covers. Could I have been wrong about Kenny? How could I so easily dismiss an expert like Himmelsbach? True, he wasn’t the lead agent on the case—that was Charlie Farrell, then Ron Nichols, out of Seattle—but Himmelsbach had access to the same case documents they did, and he worked the case the longest. What do I know about a criminal investigation? I’m taking my cues from an 80-something retired postal worker from middle-of-nowhere Minnesota, whose advice to me was to rent a metal detector.

  I am ready to cry. I am burning my magazine’s money and my own out here in Seattle. Nothing in Kenny’s past suggests a propensity toward criminal activity. Still, what are the chances? How many other ex-Paratroopers would have lived near the Drop Zone, knew enough but not all about the aftstairs on a Boeing 727, worked in airplane maintenance, and looked exactly like the Bureau’s sketch?

  Kenny’s grin flashes in my mind. I can’t give up on him now. I haven’t even been out to Bonney Lake yet. I think of a story his brother Lyle told me about a game he and Kenny played as boys. The Parachute Game, they called it. It required a blindfold and a table board. Their pa blindfolded Lyle and told him to stand on the board. He did.

  Then their pa and their older brother, Oliver, would lift the board in the air, telling the young boys it was an airplane and they were taking off. The table board airplane was flying higher; in the sky now, far higher. Now it was time to parachute.

  “Jump,” their pa would say.

  Lyle never did. He was too scared.

  Kenny’s turn was next. The table board airplane went into flight again, high in the sky.

  “Jump,” their pa said.

  Kenny always jumped.

  I walk downstairs into the hotel restaurant for breakfast. Special Agent Larry Carr is waiting. We sit at a table by the floor-to-ceiling windows that reveal the frigid chop of Puget Sound. There is heavy fog along the water, hiding the peaks of the Olympics and the tugboats and commuter ferries as they move in to dock.

  Carr is the FBI agent assigned to the Cooper case. He’s been on it only a few months, but he’s already obsessed with the nagging mystery of it all and piecing together whatever snippets of actual data or facts are buried in the Bureau’s Cooper file. For the last forty years it’s been a morgue of dead-end leads, futile reports, and bureaucratic bilge. A new clue has to be in there somewhere.

  Carr is tall and built and in shape. In high school, he was an All-American track star. His event was the pole vault. His detail in the Bureau is now with the Seattle field office’s Bank Robbery Task Force. It’s a decent assignment. After he retires, Carr could join a private security firm and parlay his expertise on how to protect banks from robberies into a second career.

  I want to tell him about Kenny. I want Carr’s opinion on him as a suspect. But now I’m paranoid. Carr wants to solve the case as much as I do. So why should I spoon-feed him all the details about Kenny that Skipp Porteous and Lyle have given me? Carr could scoop me. I could tell him about Kenny, hand over the military files and photo, and see it all on the evening news.

  Instead, I ask Carr for access to the Bureau’s files. Perhaps I can dig up a clue that has never before been made public and match it to Kenny.

  Carr takes a stab at his huevos rancheros.

  “Gonna need approval for that,” he says.

  Technically, the case is still open. Nobody has been caught. Carr wouldn’t mind publicity on it, though. In fact, that’s one of Carr’s goals in the case. He’s hopeful that a blizzard of write-ups on the hijacking could shake loose a few new leads.

  He can’t do much. The Bureau is devoting its resources to actual cases, not legends.

  He asks me about my suspect.

  I’m cagey. I defer, obfuscate, punt.

  Carr isn’t too concerned.

  Why not?

  Because he’s isolated a top contender, he says.

  Really?

  The suspect is so good, Carr says, he’s asked headquarters for permission to dig up the suspect’s grave to collect DNA evidence.

  There’s DNA evidence?

  One of the first things Carr did was send the physical evidence in the case to the Bureau’s lab in Quantico, Virginia. The last time scientists analyzed the material collected on the hijacked plane, DNA analysis was not available.

  I prod. This suspect of Carr’s, might the fellow have a name?

  Carr won’t say. Confidential.

  Well, what about the grave? Where is the grave located?

  “Utah,” he says.

  Now it is time to cry. Utah? Kenny never spent any time in Utah. It’s official: I have no story.

  Then I remember. Utah? I’ve been reading up on the case. A prime suspect was from Utah.

  April 7, 1972

  Aboard United Airlines Flight 855, Over Provo, Utah

  He is flying under the name James Johnson. His ticket is one-way, to Los Angeles. He sits in the last row of the plane, in front of the lavatory, just like Dan Cooper. He ha
s heavy tan makeup on his face, which makes him look swarthy. Spanish, a witness later says. The toupee on his head is dark and wet with sweat. He wears mirrored sunglasses and a blue and red sport jacket. Underneath the seat is a plaid suitcase. In his waistband is a pistol. Close by is a pineapple grenade and notes he typed out on his typewriter.

  WE HAVE A GRENADE, THE PIN HAS BEEN PULLED. WE HAVE PISTOLS, THEY ARE LOADED. WE HAVE C-4 PLASTIC EXPLOSIVES.

  Despite a few unruly passengers Richard Floyd McCoy gets what he asks for: $500,000 in cash and four parachutes. Through his typewritten notes, the pilots reroute and now hover over McCoy’s drop zone: Provo, Utah, his hometown.

  The jet is empty. The passengers deplaned in San Francisco. In the rear of the cabin, McCoy lowers the aftstairs. The night is dark and clear.

  He stuffs the ransom in a duffel bag. He clips the duffel bag to the D ring on the parachute’s harness. He inches toward the aftstairs of the Boeing 727, grips the bag of cash with his knees, and falls feet first.

  The rush of air feels like he’s falling off a bank building. The cold air flattens the skin on his face.

  He stems, arching his back so the air flattens against his chest. This slows him down. The duffel bag slips loose from his knees. It whips around, pulling him, twisting him, as he falls.

  One thousand feet. Two thousand feet.

  McCoy feels weak. No, it is his stomach. He is sick. He will vomit.

  Simmer down, Richard, he tells himself. Simmer down.

  He blacks out.

  Three thousand feet. Four thousand feet.

  The duffel is floating to his left. He comes to and sees it. He stems toward it.

  In the sky he can see the giant lights of the search planes. He needs to pull the ripcord before he is too weak. He strains to grip the release handle. He pulls.

  The canopy does not release. The handle is jammed.

  Five thousand feet.

  Richard thinks about his own funeral. He figures they will probably have it on a Tuesday.