Skyjack Read online

  Seven thousand feet.

  He tries the ripcord again. With both hands. Pull.

  The pilot chute pops. He is moving too fast for it to deploy. He’s on top of the canopy, tied up in the shroud lines. The canopy is now underneath him. He falls away. The chute unfurls.

  His vision is blurry. The headlights along the freeway appear in streaks. He sees a cow pasture.

  Two hundred feet. One hundred feet.

  He braces himself for landing. His knees buckle against the grass. He collapses on top of the duffel bag, resting on his $500,000 fortune. The white canopy of his parachute rustles in the wind over him.

  I did it, he thinks. I really did it.

  No time to celebrate. He gathers the canopy in his arms, grabs the duffel. He starts to run.

  He runs through a wheat field. He runs along a road and when the flash of headlights finds him he jumps in a ditch. He waits, gets up, and runs. He finds a culvert. It’s dry. McCoy stashes his parachute and his duffel bag filled with cash here. He’ll come back for it later.

  He runs. He runs until he sees the lights of the Hi-Spot Drive In. It’s around midnight. Through the windows, McCoy can see the employees are cleaning up. He gives his order to the counter girl.

  Okay, she says. One large Coke, coming up.

  McCoy looks outside. A teenager is getting into his car. McCoy steps outside. He asks for a ride.

  “Five dollars will buy a lot of gas, man,” he says.

  The kid’s name is Peter Zimmerman. He is eighteen. Need a ride, sure. Hop in.

  Driving on the dark roads, McCoy and Zimmerman listen to the news on the radio. A plane has been hijacked over Provo, reports say. The hijacker parachuted out the back with a half a million, the biggest ransom any skyjacker has gotten away with.

  Checkpoints are set up along the road. The sky is lit with red magnesium flares.

  “How come they stay in the air for so long?” Zimmerman asks McCoy about the flares.

  “They have little parachutes on them,” McCoy says.

  When McCoy comes home, his sister-in-law Denise is watching the news.

  “Have you heard?” she says. “Some guy jumped over Provo with half a million dollars!”

  “No, I haven’t. Where’s Karen?”

  “Oh, she’s out visiting somebody.… Van Ieperen called twice. He thinks you did it, Richard! Wants you to call him. Did you do it, Richard? You can tell me.”

  Robert Van Ieperen is a state trooper and McCoy’s parachuting friend.

  Richard knows he can trust Van Ieperen. The trooper would never turn him in.

  Richard goes into the bathroom and runs the hot water in the tub.

  He closes the door and takes off his clothes. He slips in the water and closes his eyes. He did it. He really did it.

  A few days later, Richard wakes up for National Guard duty. It is dawn. He is putting on his military uniform. He hears pounding on the front door. He races into the living room. He sees Stetsons. The feds are waiting for him.

  “Richard Floyd McCoy, you are under arrest for the charge of air piracy. You have the right to remain silent.”

  In response to the rash of skyjackings, legislators in Washington have toughened the penalties for air piracy. The crime is a capital offense. McCoy now faces the death penalty. In Utah, the method of execution is a firing squad.

  The agents cuff him and comb the house. They find a black parachute harness, a black crash helmet, a pistol, and $499,970 in cash in his closet, among other incriminating evidence.

  In handcuffs, Richard pleads with the feds.

  Let me change into a suit, he says. He does not want to embarrass the service, walking into a criminal court in his military uniform.

  Agents push his head down into an unmarked car.

  Neighbors are up, standing on their lawns. Reporters arrive on the scene.

  “He was a real kind person,” says Mr. Cluff, McCoy’s neighbor. “Always friendly and always smiling. He would help push our car out of the snow.”

  “He was the type of fellow you could always say hi to and get a response,” says Mr. Peterman, another neighbor.

  “He does not seem to be the kind of a kid to hijack a plane,” says Mr. Reynolds, who lives near the Cluffs and Petermans.

  McCoy’s wife, Karen, and their children are rushed to a neighbor’s house. Blinds are drawn.

  On the lawn of Richard’s house, reporters linger. The home is empty. The reporters hear McCoy’s telephone ring.

  In Raleigh, Richard’s father, Floyd, is convinced the arrest is a mistake.

  “He’s not that kind of boy,” Floyd says.

  August 26, 2007

  Seattle, Washington

  I am in the lobby of the Edgewater. I am talking to the concierge.

  “You know where I might find a metal detector?”

  I feel stupid saying it.

  The look on the concierge’s face is as blank as a sheet of paper.

  “It’s Sunday,” he says, about my metal detector request. “The hardware stores are all closed.”

  Problem solved. What could I find with a metal detector anyway?

  I unfurl the map in my rental car and search for Bonney Lake. It takes a while. Finally, I find the tiny dot.

  I drive out of the city, past the port and endless stacks of red and green and blue shipping containers. The empty cars of freight trains rumble as seagulls caw and peck along the tracks.

  Could Lyle be wrong about his older brother? The Kenny he described growing up on the farm in Minnesota seemed too kind a soul to hijack. Kenny kept his own flower bed of red zinnias and was good to his younger brother.

  “Us kids were playing tag out by the garden,” Lyle wrote me. “Kenny was almost impossible to catch because he was a tricky runner. I chased after him and he would almost let me catch him. Finally I gave up in anger and started crying. Kenny was surprised by this and came over to me and said, ‘Why don’t you try again, maybe you can catch me this time?’ Sure enough, I went after him and I caught him that time.”

  18406 Old Sumner Buckley Highway. I must have passed the house four times. Then I realize: Kenny’s old house isn’t a house anymore. It’s a shop.

  PRICED RIGHT PRINT & SIGN, is the name out front.

  I pull into the driveway. The shop is closed. I’m nervous. I don’t know why.

  I step out of the rental and onto the gravel. I am haunted by a strange, and weighty feeling. Am I being watched? My eyes dart around: along the road, into the windows of the houses across the street, into the trees up the hill out back.

  I can’t see anybody. Who is watching? Kenny?

  I sneak up to a window. The lights in the Priced Right are off. I can’t see anything inside. I imagine Kenny in here, wearing his overalls and blue conductor’s cap. I imagine him singing after dinner the way Lyle told me he did, or stashing the ransom in the walls and under the floorboards.

  There was also an old army locker that Kenny kept. When Lyle looked inside it after Kenny’s death, he found a slip for Harrah’s casino in Las Vegas. “Maybe it was a good place to launder money,” Lyle wrote, or perhaps Kenny hid the ransom in the locker. “He kept it secure by a big padlock,” Lyle said. “It would have been handy to take a few bills out now and then.”

  I press my nose onto the glass and peer into the dark chasm. Was this the kitchen? I remember a poster Lyle told me about, a poster Kenny hung in the kitchen. The poster read:

  THERE ARE THREE KINDS OF PEOPLE.

  Those who MAKE things happen.

  Those who WATCH things happen.

  And those who WONDER what happened.

  I wonder myself: Which one was Kenny?

  I get back in the car and drive up the hill to find old neighbors. One man is pulling out groceries from the trunk of his car.

  I roll down my window. I ask him if he knew a Ken Christiansen.

  He did.

  Really?

  “You know he had them boys living with him,” the
man says, lifting a bag onto his knee.

  Boys? What kind of boys?

  Runaways, he says.

  Did he happen to know any of their names?

  “The one that stayed with him the longest was Kenny.”

  Another Kenny?

  “Kenny McWilliams,” he says, and heads into his house.

  Back in the Edgewater that night, I scour every online phonebook and directory. I call every Ken Kenny Kenneth McWilliams MacWilliams in the state of Washington. After midnight, I find him. Kenneth B. MacWilliams is living in Walla Walla, over the Cascades.

  “He was an amusing character,” MacWilliams tells me about Kenny. “He didn’t speak much about the past.”

  MacWilliams met Kenny as a teenager, after he ran away from home. I ask him about Lyle’s theory: that Kenny was the infamous hijacker D.B. Cooper.

  “He could have been him,” MacWilliams says. “D.B. Cooper could have been anybody if you really think about it … But I can’t really see that happening.”

  Why not?

  “You know, he didn’t have any particular lifestyle. Everything was a little different. Different directions.”

  How would MacWilliams describe it?

  “Odd,” he says. “It was uncomfortable for me because I am not like that. I told my folks he was gay, but not everybody lived in that house at night.”

  So Kenny was gay? Was that why he was so secretive? Always escaping around the world? And was that what his deathbed confession (“There is something you should know”) was really about?

  And where does that leave my investigation into Kenny as D.B.? Are Kenny’s sexual preferences—and perhaps his fear of coming out of the closet—relevant to the hijacking case?

  It’s absolutely critical, I decide. According to Dr. Hubbard, the skyjacking expert, the vast majority of hijackers had effeminate mannerisms and homosexual urges. “For these men, to command a woman or even attempt it approaches the outer limits of imagination,” Dr. Hubbard wrote.

  I wonder what the eyewitnesses on the Northwest 305 flight think of Kenny. I have photos to show them. Some forty years later, will they recognize him?

  I find Alice Hancock, the first-class stew, living outside of Minneapolis. She answers the phone with a sweet voice, a cheerful personality. In retirement, she is studying Chinese. She remembers clear moments from the hijacking, how she attempted to lure young Tina away from the hijacker with playing cards, how copilot Bill Rataczak was freaking out in the cockpit and told her for some reason to remove her shoes.

  Alice was a decent witness. She hadn’t spent the same amount of time with the hijacker as Flo or Tina, but she had a look at him. I send her a photo of Kenny.

  “The resemblance is definitely there,” she says.

  But?

  Kenny is too bald.

  “This fella had a head of hair,” Alice says of Cooper.

  Tina Mucklow is her own mystery. After the hijacking, she disappeared. In 2001, when agents working the Cooper case wanted to meet with her, they found her living under the name Tina Larson at the Carmel of Maria Regina, a convent outside of Eugene, Oregon. Tina had become a nun.

  Tina had been a good witness. After the hijacking, she met with federal agents at least twice and delivered extensive interviews about the hijacker, his mood, his mannerisms.

  “He was never cruel or nasty,” Tina said.

  For the last forty years she has been almost completely mum about the case. Her silence has spurred a number of conspiracy theories in Cooperland. Does she know something that she’s hiding about the hijacker? Did he approach her and threaten her, telling her not to come forward? Did he do something terrible to her that prompted her to become a nun?

  I find Tina living in Springfield, a town outside of Eugene. I call. I leave messages. I write. I imagine the aging stewardess sitting on her sofa in her living room listening to her answering machine, wondering if she should pick up after holding back whatever secrets she’s been keeping all these years. I pray for her to pick up.

  Please, Tina, please. I send her telepathic messages, mental beams aimed to direct her hands to her telephone receiver. Pick up, Tina.

  Tina does not pick up. And then, after a year or so, she does.

  Her voice is soft and cautious.

  I find myself lowering my voice to mirror hers, desperate to connect with her. I tell her about my investigation. Would she be willing to look at a few photographs of my Kenny?

  “No,” she says. She doesn’t want to talk about the case.

  I ask her why.

  Passenger safety. She doesn’t want to “promote something that was not intended to be a good thing, and endanger anyone in the airline business.” In essence, her worry is that a would-be hijacker could read my story about D.B. Cooper, get inspired, and hijack another plane, just like so many copycats did in the early 1970s.

  But that was forty years ago! I plead with Tina for an interview. She agrees to a follow-up call.

  Never going to talk to her again, I think. But she picks up.

  “I’ve made a decision,” she says.

  I’m sending warm vibes through my fingers into the plastic receiver of my phone. I am ready to shop for plane tickets. I can be at her doorstep in Oregon in twenty-four hours—less, when you factor in the time change.

  “I won’t be part of the journey,” she says.

  It’s not fair. Why?

  “I don’t think I have to explain the reason why I’ve chosen what I’ve chosen,” she says.

  I try to persuade her. She’s part of history here. Her experience counts.

  “I will honor the decision I’ve made,” she says. “It’s about my personal choice.… It’s final for me.”

  I find stewardess Flo Schaffner in South Carolina. She is living here under a different name and prefers to keep it anonymous after what has happened to her. I fly into Columbia and walk out of the airport, and there she is, waving from behind the wheel of her car.

  The air is hot and sticky. I push through it and get in the car. Flo looks different than she did on the front page of the Minnesota Star the day after the hijacking. Her hair is short and frosted. She wears a tank top, and her biceps are ripped. A workout fanatic, she teaches classes at her local gym. That’s where she met Art Rish, her boyfriend. He’s a cop. He is sitting in the front seat.

  We drive to Lizard’s Thicket, a restaurant near the airport.

  It is Sunday morning and the booths at Lizard’s are filled with a post-church rush of dusted-off suits, dresses, hats, girls playing tag in Mary Janes. The menu is Southern and deep fried.

  Flo is also paranoid. Too many strange things have happened to her: agents knocking on her door, a pair of convicts approaching her on her wedding day. She feared for her life. She was the only witness to see the hijacker’s eyes. She could testify against him in court, put him away for the rest of his life. The first thing he would do, she worried, would be find her and, gulp, eliminate the witness. She’d look under her car for bombs. Turn over the keys real slow.

  I remove a few photos of Kenny. I place them on the table.

  She reaches for the image of Kenny in his Northwest Orient uniform. She stares deep into the grain of black and white as if trying to reacquaint herself with that night. Her hands are trembling. She reaches for another photo. She lays the image flat on the sticky countertop. Her eyes zoom in on Kenny’s face. She rubs it with her fingers as if she is touching up a charcoal drawing.

  Well, is it him?

  “The ears, the ears are right,” she says. “Yes, thin lips. And the top lip, kind of like this, yes.… A wide forehead, yes.”

  Then the hair.

  “Receding, yes, the two areas—yes, yes—sort of like this.”

  Flo is pushing down on the photo hard now, rubbing the image as if she is a medium and is now trying to summon the spirit of Kenny.

  “There was more hair, though.”

  The eyes?

  “About like that.”

&n
bsp; The eyebrows?

  “About like that.”

  I want to give Flo space. I look up and around the room. Tables are getting cleared. The smell is heavy on lard, collards, Sunday-morning ham. Older men are hunched over their food, sipping sugary soda from straws. The hijacker would be about their age by now, mid to late eighties. I wonder if I could recognize Cooper now if I saw him in the back of a plane forty years ago. I doubt it.

  “I think you might be on to something here,” Flo says.

  “Really?”

  “But I … I can’t say … ‘Yea.’ ”

  That’s not what I want to hear.

  What about the other suspects she’s seen? How does Kenny compare?

  Of all the suspects, Kenny is the closest match, Flo says. But she doesn’t feel comfortable saying definitely, absolutely, without question, this is the guy. It doesn’t mean no. It also doesn’t mean yes.

  I ask her about Tina’s silence. Why does Flo think Tina won’t talk about the case?

  “She’s hiding something,” Flo says. But what? Flo doesn’t know.

  I don’t either. Tina, what are you hiding?

  I ask Flo about the hijacker’s manner, his vibe. Was he alpha macho tough guy or soft and bashful? Did she think he could have been, as Ken Christiansen was, gay?

  No, Flo doesn’t think so. But how could she know for sure?

  Plus, the case was bizarre. So many strange things happened after. She took a month off from work to clear the night from her mind; then a man started following her like a shadow. He boarded Northwest planes she was flying on. Why was he stalking her?

  “I know the hijacker, from prison,” the man said. “He wants to talk to you.”

  Flo pushed the man away, told him to leave her alone.

  He resisted.

  “I want to tell you, this guy is not just a hijacker,” the man said. “He was in the Bay of Pigs. This guy works for the CIA.”

  June 29, 1972

  Salt Lake City, Utah

  Richard Floyd McCoy Jr. has no good closing arguments. In fact, he has no legitimate defense. Agents found $499,970 of the ransom in his closet. They matched handwriting samples. The question before jurors is not whether McCoy is guilty of air piracy. The question is whether he should be sentenced to death, or serve out forty-five years in federal prison. The official who may have the most control over how much prison time McCoy serves is Bernie Rhodes, chief probation officer. If jurors opt to spare McCoy’s life, Rhodes will interview McCoy and prepare a sentencing report for the judge.