Skyjack Read online

  D. F. Franklin confesses. Franklin is the notorious skyjacker, he tells police. But when they interview him about what he remembers about the hijacking, his details are all wrong. A phenomenon is emerging. In the Cooper case, citizens are turning themselves in!

  Himmelsbach receives letters from psychics and patients in asylums. They knew Cooper personally, they claim. Some spoke directly to God.

  One letter comes from an inventor. After years of research, he tells Himmelsbach, he has created a machine that finds missing people. A sniffer, he calls it.

  Himmelsbach agrees to meet and check out the man’s sniffer.

  The inventor arrives at the field office carrying a black box covered in dials and gadgets.

  The way the sniffer works, the inventor explains, is that it smells an object that once belonged to the person. Then, using the inventor’s patented system, it computes a location.

  The inventor asks Himmelsbach for an object that belongs to the hijacker.

  Himmelsbach hands him a flashlight that belongs to his younger daughter.

  The inventor rubs the flashlight along the black box. Nothing happens.

  Professional treasure hunters emerge. Diving expert John Banks conducts his hunt for Cooper under the waters of Lake Merwin. To avoid publicity, Banks launches his custom-built submarine into the lake at night. Its high-power search beams illuminate the murky waters like a ballpark outfield.

  On his first dive, Banks descends. He sees giant trunks of dead trees through the sub’s observation portal. It is like maneuvering through an ancient forest. Diving deeper, he sees he is headed into the trunk of a massive tree. He braces himself for the crash.

  The trees are so waterlogged, his sub snaps through trunks and branches like pretzels. At the bottom of the lake, he catches his breath. He monitors his equipment. Then he hears the sound.

  Thump.

  What was that?

  Thump, thump.

  He looks out the portal. The branches of dead trees he broke through are now crashing around him. Thump thump thump …

  Banks spends months searching the ancient underwater forest. He finds nothing.

  The case almost dies. The statute of limitations for air piracy is five years. Before the deadline date, agents from the Bureau and prosecutors from the Department of Justice debate whether they should file a “John Doe” indictment and charge the hijacker in absentia. Technically, this would make Dan Cooper a fugitive and extend the statute indefinitely. Internally, agents and prosecutors quarrel over what to do until the day of the anniversary. In Seattle, a prosecutor rushes to a grand jury to present the case. But Seattle doesn’t have a grand jury sitting. Portland does.

  Himmelsbach is the only witness. An indictment is returned in hours. The hunt is on for Dan Cooper, indefinitely. Himmelsbach wonders if the feds made a mistake in their calculations. Did Cooper land somewhere else and survive the jump? Could it be that the man they’re after is a local, living in the area, hidden in plain sight?

  Two weeks away from retirement, Himmelsbach is past the realization he may never catch that rotten sleazy bastard Cooper, may never take his elk. Then he gets a phone call.

  “Money has been found,” an FBI secretary tells him.

  The agent pays little attention. He’s been pranked dozens of times before. He asks the secretary to match the serial numbers of the found money to the list of Cooper bills.

  She already did. They match.

  The next morning, Himmelsbach waits for the finders of the money to appear. He is annoyed because they are forty-five minutes late.

  Dwayne Ingram and his wife, Patricia, drove here all the way from Vancouver, Washington, where they live. They recently moved from rural Oklahoma. Dwayne has a job painting trailers and cars. Patricia stays home and takes care of their eight-year-old son, Brian.

  Himmelsbach wants to see the money.

  Patricia removes a plastic baggie. She hands it to the agent. Inside he can see three clumps of old bills. They are caked together, dark around the edges like burnt toast.

  We were all on a picnic on Tena Bar, Dwayne Ingram says.

  Tena Bar is a sand bar along the north shore of the Columbia River. It’s where fishermen run lines for chinook and hippie kids go to swim, play drums, drink beer.

  On the beach, Dwayne wanted to build a fire, so he asked his son Brian to clear space in the sand. Brian dropped to his knees, smoothed out a patch and knocked the first bundle over. Then he found two more. The Ingrams wanted to take the money to a bank and cash it out, but a friend noticed the bills were twenties.

  “That’s Cooper’s money,” he said.

  The Ingrams asked about the reward. How much money will there be?

  Himmelsbach needs to check the bills first, to see if they are real. They’ll be easy to eliminate, he thinks, because the real ransom bills were issued in the years 1950, 1963, and 1969.

  Himmelsbach picks up a packet of bills. He reads the series number.

  “1963,” it reads.

  He writes down the serial number.

  “55376548.”

  He leaves the room to fetch the booklet that contains the serial numbers of the bills the hijacker was given. He goes through all ten thousand serial numbers, hunting for a “55.”

  It is a long search. The ransom money was used. The serial numbers aren’t in order. He looks for a 1963 bill combined with a “55.” He finds one. He compares the remaining serial numbers. It’s a match.

  Where did little Brian Ingram find that money again?

  Tena Bar, the Ingrams tell him. Along the Columbia.

  Himmelsbach looks at a map. The location doesn’t make sense. Tena Bar is roughly forty miles south of where the feds thought the hijacker bailed, and around five miles from the Northwest 305 flight path. How in the world did the money end up there? And where’s the rest of it?

  November 23, 2007

  Seattle, Washington

  “The real mystery is the money,” Larry Carr tells me. “The mystery of the money is almost more interesting than the mystery of who Cooper was. If you can figure out the money, that leads you to Cooper. It’s all about the money. The money is our only shot.”

  I ask Carr what his plan is now. Like the tie he sent to the Bureau lab in Quantico for a fresh forensic analysis, the money could be reanalyzed with modern techniques. Carr’s problem, though, is that the lab is backed up. Scientists don’t have time or resources to burn on cold cases.

  So what’s the strategy?

  Carr’s gone undercover, he says, in cyberspace. Under a fake name, he’s joined the Drop Zone, an Internet forum run by amateur D.B. Cooper sleuths. One of the most inquisitive (and caustic) is Snowmman, who refuses to identify who he is or what he does for a living. The most user-friendly is Sluggo_Monster, a nuclear lab consultant from Alabama named Wayne Walker who built N467us.com, or “Sluggo’s Northwest 305 Hijacking Research Site.” There is also 377, Orange1, an assortment of parachutists, former parachutists, parachute experts, and scientists. One is Georger, a retired lab whiz and entrepreneur named Jerry Warner. He grew up in the Cooper search area, and remembers talking about the Cooper case every Thanksgiving dinner.

  Carr’s plan is to leak information about the case on the forum for the cyber gumshoes to devour. If his bosses at the Bureau aren’t willing to spend resources on the Cooper Case, then maybe the Cooperites in cyberspace will help him. Carr’s handle: Ckret. It won’t be long before his cover is blown.

  377: I get the distinct feeling that Ckret is giving us taxpayers a free ride on much of the Cooper investigation.… Am I right Ckret?

  Ckret: You don’t trust me? I am from the government and here to help. How could you not trust an FBI agent … By the way, that book you checked out is two days late and at the moment your cell phone is off. Oh, and that web site you have minimized right now, I didn’t know people could do that, very strange.

  The cyber sleuths want to examine the money. Scientist Jerry Warner has a proposal. I
f the Bureau is too cash strapped for resources to investigate the money, why not farm it out? Warner has all the equipment in his lab. Plus Warner knows other scientists with equipment as advanced as anything the Bureau has in Quantico.

  Other agents might scoff at the idea of bequeathing criminal evidence to civilians in order to investigate a criminal case. Not Carr. Best-case scenario is they find something. If the Bureau holds on to it, nothing happens. With Warner, Carr makes plans to have the evidence examined outside the Bureau. But Warner is too old to conduct the forensic examination himself. He’ll need to take on a partner, and he knows the scientist for the job: Tom Kaye.

  The next day, I head south to attend the annual D.B. Cooper party at the Ariel Tavern.

  The Tavern is the only store in Ariel. It sits along the roadside, its shingled blue siding and clap-tin roof battling gravity. Out front, plants grow from a urinal. The entrance is covered in signs: THIS BUSINESS SUPPORTED BY TIMBER DOLLARS and UNATTENDED CHILDREN WILL BE SOLD AS SLAVES.

  Conventional wisdom is that the party’s origins are pure, an event based on admiration for the hijacker’s guts, and the celebration has taken on the feel of a séance. Each year, there is hope that if the partygoers dance hard enough and drink enough beer, the guest of honor—D.B.—will walk through the front door.

  “They always say the criminal comes back to his old haunts, and I think he’ll come back,” Germaine Tricola, the founder of Cooper Days, would say. In time, the Cooper party became part of the Cooper legend, and they’ve both worked to keep each other alive for the past four decades. President Jimmy Carter called in once.

  Some years, before the bands played, hundreds of partygoers were offered search tours, parachute jumps, seaplane rides, a D.B. Cooper look-alike contest. Lunch and dinner were the same: buffalo stew served with slices of buttered white bread.

  News clippings are spread along the walls. In the old photographs, loggers with mutton-chop sideburns sit around the store’s woodstove. One man presses two beers against his head to simulate antennas. A band is jamming, playing the Cooper ballads.

  He said I beg your pardon ma’am a big bad bomb it’s true,

  But I won’t set if off if you don’t put me in the mood.

  Just take me to Seattle and we’ll put down for to land,

  And I’ll sell you back your airplane for a cool two hundred grand.

  I am not drunk. I should be. I should be cursing Ken Christiansen and his brother, Lyle, for sending the wacky letter to Nora Ephron. Is this the final scene of Lyle’s The Bashful Man in Seattle? The gullible reporter who flies around the country hunting for the ghost of a purser.

  I look around the room. The light in the tavern is soft and murky, like the glow of an old Coleman lantern. A parachute canopy hangs over picnic tables and twinkle lights are laced through old license plates and taxidermy. Near the cash register is Cooper gear: T-shirts, matchbooks, mugs. Inside a hot dog roaster, a lone frankfurter spins away. The band is on break. I’m on my second bowl of logger stew and chasing it down with a cold can of beer when I see them. They are standing at the tavern door.

  The older man is shorter. His hands are buried in his pockets.

  His friend is younger, taller, stout. He is holding a three-ring binder.

  I introduce myself.

  The shorter man is Ron Foreman. He’s an airline mechanic.

  The taller man is Cliff Kluge. He is a Delta pilot.

  “The reason we’re here, is my friend Ron has a story to tell,” Kluge says.

  Ron can’t get the words out of his mouth.

  “Yeah, you see, it’s just one of those things that when I tell people, the first thing they do is just, well, freak out, and their mind closes up and they say, no way, you’re crazy.”

  “You have to have an open mind,” Kluge says.

  “Nobody takes us seriously, not even the FBI! We went to them, we got a lawyer. They didn’t even call us back!”

  We sit down. Kluge opens the three-ring binder. He points.

  The photo is of a man standing in front of the propeller of an old Piper Super Cub airplane. The man has light sandy hair. He is thin and lean.

  Kluge thumbs through the pages. He points again.

  This photo is of a woman. She is middle-aged. Light hair. Dark horn-rim glasses. She is standing in front of an old Cessna 140. Her pose is similar to the man in the previous picture. Behind her are tall trees. I squint. I can see she is holding a cigarette in her right hand.

  “Okay?” Kluge says.

  Okay what?

  “That’s D.B. Cooper!” Ron says.

  I don’t get it. Which one?

  “They both are,” Kluge says.

  I look at the binder. I read the first page.

  “Timeline of our friendship with Barbara Dayton,” it says.

  Jo,

  You’re seeing Jesus Christ in the toast.

  I’m just selling it on Ebay.

  Who’s more fucked up? The person seeing the image in the toast, or the one selling it on Ebay?

  —snowmman, posting on the Drop Zone, November 4, 2008

  December 2008

  Sierra Vista, Arizona

  The envelope is sent by courier. Seattle to Phoenix, Phoenix to Tucson. The envelope is then driven across the desert to the border town where scientist Tom Kaye keeps his ranch and laboratory. When the package is close, his phone rings. It’s them. The feds.

  “Hey, Tom,” the agent says. “We got your bills here. You wanna come get ’em?”

  Tom wonders where the agents are.

  “We’re across the street from La Casita restaurant in the mall.”

  La Casita? In the mall?

  Tom is disappointed. The feds are holding crucial evidence to the infamous case of D.B. Cooper and they want him to pick it up like it’s a drive-through taco? And how do they know he is for real?

  “Don’t you want to come by and see the lab first?”

  The moment is surreal. How could Tom have gotten so lucky? The scientist’s career has been a rollercoaster of ups and downs. His unanticipated success as a paintball entrepreneur has fizzled out. At one point, Tom had seventeen employees and grossed $5 million a year as the president of AirGun Designs—until customers complained that his guns were jamming on them. Then his competitors started making semi-automatic weapons, and Tom decided to retire early.

  He chooses not to work for anyone else. He doesn’t have a Ph.D. or college degree, and his résumé (pizza delivery man, high school security guard) doesn’t exactly make him easily employable. But among the world’s brainiest astronomers, paleontologists, geologists, and physicists, Kaye is known as a problem-solving genius, a geeky renegade who can outthink the thinkers.

  “I’m basically just a body that carries my head around,” he tells people.

  He’s achieved some remarkable feats. In 2005, Kaye and a few collaborators used a spectrograph, which breaks down light into rainbows, and discovered a distant planet named Tau Boötis. After a few tries, he managed to get the findings published. Tom also co-authored several scientific papers with titles such as “Mass Extinction Enigmas in Context with Gamma Ray Bursts” in journals like Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers. He studied rings on old trees, the finger bones of a T. Rex. With his microscopes, he peers into matter so small and so old that nobody has even seen it before, a peep show into a secret universe.

  “Living on the edge,” he calls it.

  Tom’s scientific interests are so varied he’s developed an eclectic collection of friends, many of whom he meets on dinosaur digs or on nerdy Internet forums. That’s where he met Jerry Warner, a.k.a. Georger, and learned of Warner’s obsession with the Cooper case. Tom was in high school when the hijacker jumped and he remembers the story in the news. Now that Jerry Warner has cut a deal with the FBI to have them look at the Cooper bills, Tom is anxious to get to work in his lab. His job is to handle the money that Brian Ingram found, analyze it, and figure out how it lande
d on Tena Bar.

  Tom doesn’t expect to solve the case with science. Without a decent DNA sample to test, how can he? He can debunk a few myths, and write a paper about it for a science periodical. Maybe even a mainstream one like Science.

  The car barrels down the dirt road, spitting up red dust. It passes the yucca plants and mesquite trees and cactus that dot Tom’s ranch. It passes a steel dome that is part of an astronomy lab Tom has been building for the past eight years, and one of his telescopes, which Tom made from a septic tank, oil drum, bike chain, lazy Susan, and fan belt. This makeshift contraption (all operated by computer) sits across from the Geek Barn, a graveyard of old parts from Tom’s inventions and failed businesses. Over the years, they’ve included: a doggy-proof latch for dog cages; a machine that makes a gizmo to mix paint; an air compressor that sprays paint on objects like gumballs; several recreational objects built from fiberglass, like hang gliders, water skis, canoes.

  The industrial robot age, in the early eighties, should have been his moment. To learn about advanced computer systems, Tom crashed a robot convention like an undercover agent. Pretending to be a buyer, he asked salespeople how the robots worked and recorded their answers with a hidden tape recorder. He transcribed the conversations and built his own industrial robot in his mother’s basement. But before his company went public, his investors put all their money in handheld breathalyzers.

  In a way, cracking open the Cooper case, if only a smidge, would be a kind of redemption for Tom. To understand the case he would need to understand the facts and the players, and he’d been up late on his computer, reading the endless posts on the Drop Zone. The Cooper community was similar to the dinosaur diggers he works with: lots of infighting and questing for glory. One Cooper hunter, he learned, had made a name for himself in the woods in southwest Washington, searching for the hijacker’s bones and his missing cash. This hunter, a former military survival expert named Jerry Thomas, was so convinced that Cooper’s parachute came down in the woods he was searching, he’d been looking there for the last twenty-two years.