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  Throughout the trial, Rhodes has been observing McCoy’s behavior in the courtroom. Rhodes notices McCoy is making funny faces at his daughter, Chante, and toddler, Rich, in the front row of the courtroom, making them laugh. One morning, before the judge and jurors and lawyers arrive, a pair of marshals escort McCoy into court and Chante sidles up to him. McCoy holds out his palm. Inside is a yellow spinning top. How did McCoy manage to get the toy in jail, Rhodes wonders, and smuggle it in for his daughter?

  During closing arguments, the judge makes an announcement.

  “Something that pleases this court and I’m sure has been weighing heavily on you people’s minds,” he says, “is whether or not you’d eventually have to give this fellow the death penalty. Well, the court’s gonna help you solve that little problem right now. You can, as of now, dismiss that dilemma from your minds.”

  This morning in Washington, the Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional. McCoy’s life has been spared.

  In handcuffs, McCoy is escorted out of the courtroom. He walks past Rhodes, who will interview him in jail the next day. McCoy then passes a female journalist. McCoy can’t miss her. Blond, tall, leggy. She wears red ladybug lipstick and matching red heels.

  “Wish me luck, ma’am,” McCoy says to the goddess.

  She nods, stomps out her cigarette, and turns to Rhodes.

  “Was it Hemingway?” she says. “Damn it! Or Steinbeck? Or who in the hell was it? Well, whoever it was that had the good sense to come up with it must have been thinking of our boy McCoy when he came up with the line: You show me a hero and I’ll show you a tragedy.”

  The jury finds McCoy guilty in under two hours.

  After the courtroom closes, the feds camp out in the law library. The agent who investigated McCoy’s case, Jim Thiessen, lights a Winston and paces in his penny loafers. Russell Calame, who recently ran the Bureau field office in Salt Lake City, removes an initialed handkerchief and mops his brow. The agents discuss the case they failed to make. All along, they have been convinced McCoy is D.B. Cooper.

  They’ve been able to match up physical evidence. During his investigation, Thiessen showed the photos of Cooper’s black clip-on tie left in the rear of the Northwest 305 plane to Denise Burns, McCoy’s sister-in-law, and Mildred Burns, his mother-in-law; both identified the tie and tie clasp as belonging to McCoy. Thiessen also showed the photos to Robert Van Ieperen, McCoy’s state trooper friend. From Thiessen’s report:

  ROBERT VAN IEPEREN advised that MCCOY likes to wear conservative solid-colored clip-on ties similar to the tie recovered after the hijacking of a Northwest plane on November 24th, 1971. VAN IEPEREN stated he had been out socially with MCCOY and recalled that at a movie one night MCCOY wore a clip-on tie and removed the tie when he sat down to watch the movie.

  Thiessen paces, thinking about how to come up with enough evidence to charge McCoy with NORJAK.

  Probation officer Bernie Rhodes walks in the room. Thiessen and Calame get an idea: Maybe Rhodes can get McCoy to confess to the Cooper hijacking.

  Rhodes is familiar with the Cooper case. He wonders what proof the agents have.

  “That area isn’t as rough or forestlike as some people think,” Calame says about the Cooper drop zone in southwest Washington. “He should have been just fine. He walks or hooks a ride into Portland, next day catches a plane, or bus or whatever, back to Vegas.”

  Las Vegas?

  As part of McCoy’s background investigation, Thiessen assembled McCoy’s financial, telephone, school, National Guard, and auto records. On the morning of the hijacking, Thiessen found, McCoy used his Bank of America credit card to fill up the tank on his Volkswagen bug. The location, Thiessen found, wasn’t Provo, Utah. It was Cedar City, which is several hours south and east of Provo, directly on the way to Las Vegas.

  McCoy was in Las Vegas. That’s fact. On Thanksgiving, a day after the Cooper hijacking, McCoy’s home in Provo received a collect call from the lobby of the Tropicana Hotel. The time of the call was 10:41 p.m. Who else would have called McCoy’s home from the lobby of the Tropicana other than McCoy?

  McCoy was near the Tropicana, and on Thanksgiving, Thiessen found. The same day the collect call was made to McCoy’s home, McCoy purchased 5.6 gallons of gasoline only two miles away from the Tropicana, at the Power Thrust Service Station. The Power Thrust, Thiessen found, is located alongside the airport.

  The agents speculate. On the morning of November 24, the day Northwest 305 is hijacked, McCoy drives to Cedar City and then on to Las Vegas. Here, he boards a flight to Portland, where he then boards Northwest 305 as Dan Cooper. A genius setup.

  After bailing out, McCoy gets back to Portland the next morning, flies back to Las Vegas, picks up his Volkswagen bug waiting for him in the airport parking lot, tops off his car with gas at the Power Thrust, calls Karen collect from the Tropicana, and drives home to Provo.

  Rhodes is suspicious. He’s read up on the Cooper case.

  “How do you get around brown and blue eyes?” he says.

  Cooper had brown eyes. McCoy’s are blue.

  “First of all, we’re not sure they were brown,” Calame says. “The stewardess could have been mistaken.”

  And the Raleigh filter-tip cigarettes?

  The feds have researched the smokes. Raleigh is produced by Brown & Williamson and is the least popular of all the company’s brands, representing only 1.5 percent of all brands sold. So Cooper must have a connection to them.

  “If McCoy, a Mormon, smoked as part of his disguise,” Calame says, “he would have needed to buy a pack of cigarettes in the Portland airport. What brand would he choose? Well, it’s naturally going to be Raleigh, his hometown, his home brand, isn’t it?”

  The signatures of the hijackings were also similar. Both McCoy and Cooper sat in the last row of the plane, in front of the lavatory. Both used notes and one stewardess to relay information.

  Rhodes has a question. If McCoy was Cooper and got away with $200,000, then why four months later would he risk the death sentence and hijack United 855 for $500,000?

  “He lost it,” Thiessen says. During the first jump. “He lost the damn money!”

  “Got away from him,” Calame says.

  The jail in Salt Lake smells of stale coffee and cigarette butts. In an interview room, Richard McCoy waits for the questions. Probation officer Rhodes lights a Marlboro. He holds out his pack.

  “Do you smoke? Do you smoke cigarettes?”

  “Nope,” McCoy says. “I don’t use tobacco, but it doesn’t bother me when you do.”

  “Do you gamble? Shoot dice? This sort of thing.”

  “No. I don’t gamble. Don’t have the money to shoot dice. Don’t know how.”

  “Do you drink alcohol?”

  “Nope. I’ve had liquor a few times in my life, but when you’re ready to jot these things down for Judge Ritter, give him the truth: Richard Floyd McCoy Jr. doesn’t drink, smoke, or gamble.”

  Rhodes reaches into his bag and removes the Bureau’s sketch of D.B. Cooper. He places it on the table in front of McCoy.

  “If you can,” Rhodes says, “and I know this was a while back, but try to remember where you were last Thanksgiving, November twenty-fifth, and the day before, Wednesday, November twenty-fourth, 1971.”

  “Thanksgiving is still a holiday, isn’t it, so naturally I would have been around the house. I didn’t have school and I didn’t have Guard. I was home. Why?”

  “Cook or clean, or help Karen with anything she might remember?”

  “Yes. I cooked, yes, and helped Karen with Thanksgiving dinner.”

  Rhodes doesn’t waste time. He wants a confession.

  “What I’d like you to tell me is how you can be in Provo cooking Thanksgiving dinner and make a collect call from the Tropicana Hotel-Casino in Las Vegas at 10:41 p.m. that same night?”

  “And how do you know it was me who made the call? Could have been anybody.”

  “For the sake of argument,
let’s assume for a minute that you’re right. You didn’t make that call. Someone else made it, okay? Well, I’ve got an even better one for you. Explain, if you can, how someone driving your green Volkswagen bug, North Carolina license plate number SA 1334, purchased 5.6 gallons of gas just after eleven p.m. Thanksgiving night at the Power Thrust Service Station in Las Vegas, using your credit card—Bank Americard #4763160217773—which is yours, isn’t it?—signed your name, Richard Floyd McCoy Jr., to that credit charge slip. How about it?”

  McCoy is picking his teeth with a paper clip.

  “How about it?” McCoy says. “You seem to have all the answers. You tell me.”

  “Why were you in Vegas during the Cooper thing?”

  McCoy holds his hand in the air as if swearing on the Bible.

  “How many times do I have to tell you? I helped Karen cook turkey dinner.”

  The next morning, Rhodes arrives at the jail for a follow-up interview. McCoy is crying. “I can’t even comprehend forty-five years,” he says. “Even if I got out in, say, thirty years.… Chante would be thirty-five years old; Rich, thirty-two. I don’t think I’ll put them through that. Or me either.” He is contemplating suicide.

  Again, Rhodes removes the Bureau’s sketch of Cooper. He lights a cigarette and goes through the routine questions: financial statements, statement of offense. Six, seven hours pass. Rhodes packs up his things.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” McCoy says.

  He is holding up the Bureau’s sketch of Cooper.

  “I don’t know,” Rhodes says. “Am I?”

  “That’s up to you. You wanted to talk bad enough yesterday about—you know, the other thing?”

  “What other thing?”

  “This thing. This guy here.”

  McCoy is flapping the Cooper sketch in the air like a Polaroid.

  “Do you or don’t you want to talk about this thing?”

  “What other thing? Be more specific.”

  “This other thing.”

  “Are you absolutely sure you know what you’ve got there?”

  “Yes. I know what it is, but I’m beginning to wonder if you do.”

  “You tell me then, what is it?”

  “Let’s just forget it,” McCoy says. He flicks the sketch across the room. “I think you’re having a harder time, for some reason, than I am.”

  At dawn the next morning, McCoy is wrapped in six feet of belly chain that is threaded through his belt loops, handcuffs, and leg irons. He is escorted by federal marshals into an unmarked car. In the backseat, he watches the sun as it rises over the Wasatch range and the soft light flashes against the smokestacks of the Kennecott Copper Corporation, into Parley’s Canyon, past the Mormon temple.

  Six hundred miles later, it is dark. The marshals stop in Brighton, Colorado, and escort McCoy into the county jail where he will spend the night. The Drunk Tank, it is called. The next morning, the marshals come to take him to federal prison. He is not there. McCoy has escaped.

  November 23, 2007

  Seattle, Washington

  I’m back West again. Down the street, tourists descend on the ice beds of Pike Place Market to watch the mongers throw fish. The neon lights of diners and strip clubs like the Lucky Lady blink in the early darkness of the afternoon. It’s not raining yet. The Vietnamese noodle house is loud and crowded.

  Over a bowl of broth and beef and sprouts, Special Agent Larry Carr has news to report. The lab results are in. The physical evidence has come back from Quantico, and Bureau scientists have made a determination about the DNA evidence in the Cooper case.

  What is the news?

  There isn’t any. The samples aren’t reliable, Carr says.

  He’s bummed. His hope had been that the Bureau’s forensic scientists would be able to detect a fleck of genetic material—a hair, say, or dandruff—to use as a sample. Once Carr had the genetic code of the hijacker in place, he could easily rule out (or rule in) suspects.

  On the tie, Carr reports, the Bureau’s lab technicians did find a faint trace of saliva. But the sample is too weak to extract a full DNA code. Now Carr cannot use DNA to identify the hijacker. So much for his plan to send a grave-digging crew to Utah.

  This can’t be. There must be some genetic matter in the case. What about the Raleigh filter-tip cigarettes agents found in the ashtray near the hijacker’s seat? The filters of the smokes, I imagine, are probably soaked in saliva.

  Gone, Carr says.

  Gone? Where are they?

  Not in the Seattle evidence room. The cigs were in Las Vegas, where agents had deposited them after searching the plane in Reno. They must have gotten lost, Carr says. Or most likely thrown out.

  Thrown out? It doesn’t make sense. How could agents toss arguably the most critical piece of evidence in one of their most infamous unsolved cases? The rest of the evidence—the tie, the deployed parachute, the in-flight magazine—have all been preserved in evidence baggies. So why not the eight Raleigh filter-tip cigarette butts?

  We march up the hilly streets, away from the market. No longer in an old bank near the piers, the Bureau field office is on the corner of 3rd and Spring.

  Carr removes his wallet, swipes his badge, presses his finger against the pad. Now we’re in. Holy of holies. Here we go.

  Over the past few months, a letter-writting campaign—coupled with Carr’s desire to attract media attention to the Cooper case—has resulted in an I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening moment of unprecedented access to the confidential Cooper files. For years the file has been gathering dust in the basement archives of the field office building. Now, Carr has selected the major case files for my perusal.

  I follow Carr up the elevator and down the hall to another finger-scan pad and—voilà!—we are on the floor. On the far wall is a gallery of mug shots. Agents pass and I solemnly nod—should I really be in here?—and follow Carr to his desk. He collapses in his chair.

  I sit across from him and wait. Over the walls I can hear other agents talking about a case. I close my eyes and listen in. The agents are talking about a spy case. I strain my ears to listen harder.

  “Here,” Carr says, “This is the meat and potatoes of it.”

  He drops the files in front of me. They are as thick as phone books.

  I rub my hands together, blow on the fingertips. The cover is yellow and waxy. The pages are brittle. I read the words on the first page as if secrets are buried in the typeface.

  THE HIJACK, it reads.

  The dossier reads like a play. There’s Flo Schaffner, telling the feds about the bourbon and Seven-Up the hijacker ordered. And Alice Hancock, describing the hijacker’s hair as wavy. And Tina Mucklow, relaying the hijacker’s motive verbatim.

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

  I just have a grudge? I read the line again. Is this Kenny? It doesn’t sound like him. According to Lyle, Kenny’s grudge was not vague or universal. It was specific: Northwest. Is Lyle wrong about the motive? Or was Kenny playing coy with Tina?

  I dash off an e-mail to Lyle about the grudge line.

  “It sounds very like what he would have said,” Lyle writes back. “Kenny was at a time in his life when he hit a low and was wondering where his life was going. His siblings were having family life and he was still alone. I think he was so lonely that it hurt.”

  I plow through the file, reading hundreds of pages over several days. What I find is not evidence supporting Kenny. I find more Lyle Christiansens. The file is littered with suspicious brothers, parents, neighbors, business associates, scorned ex-lovers.

  “You’ve meant so much to me this past year,” one man writes in a letter, which his ex-girlfriend apparently submitted to the Bureau for analysis. “I’ll always love you (which you have to hear) but always felt that this is temporary and we would both move on.” There are names to go through, too many names. Maurice Chevelle. Dennis Panther. John Gortel. Bobby J. Brummett. R
obert P. Carter. Billy Dean McConnell. James R. Parker. Donald Earl Collins. Ed Adkins. Scott Kaye Kingsworth.

  February 12, 1980

  Portland, Oregon

  Cameron David Bishop. Richard J. Jaquish. Gordon Dale Erwin. John Emil List. Earl Gene Larson. Doyle Wayne Harvell. Frank Taus. Russell Lee Cooper. Fred Angelo Catalano. William Francis Johnston Jr. Dan O’Halloran. Joseph Gilpatrick …

  At the Bureau field office in Portland, agent Ralph Himmelsbach is bombarded with leads. Himmelsbach can’t understand how one man could parachute out of an airplane and vanish. It’s as if D.B. Cooper never existed. Maybe he didn’t exist. Maybe that was the clue. Perhaps Cooper faked his own death?

  One tip of this sort comes in about a boater who went out on Lake Shasta and never came back. After a search, he was pronounced dead. Two years later, the same man is spotted pumping gas at a service station in Southern California. Going through records, agents find the man had serviced his car in Portland, and before the hijacking.

  Agents locate the man in Los Angeles, go to the address. It’s a porno bookstore. The man looks nothing like the Bureau sketch.

  More names, more leads. Peter A. Parlo. Everett R. Coovert. Paul Alan Van Riessen. Garnett Hollish. Lawrence Allison Hobart. Robert Hampton Keely. William Johnson Mason. Joseph Royce Stagg. Anthony Lambert Cole. John Henry Marlin. John Galvan Douglas. Robert K. Bertsch. Ronald Ross Newman. Max Arnold Freeman …

  There are others, arrested and questioned. Like the drunk man in Madras, Oregon, who was found sleeping on the street with $9,000 in cash in his pockets. Or the man who ordered coffee in a Fresno diner at 4:30 a.m. and tipped with a $50 bill. Or the steelworker who always wanted to be a paratrooper and never came back to work. Or the retired special agent living in a Washington boarding house.