Skyjack Page 18

  Another memory. Members of Duane’s family told her a story. When Bobby Kennedy was campaigning for president, in 1968, Duane took a job working as a bellhop at the Muehlebach Hotel, in Kansas City. On the campaign trail, Bobby Kennedy and his entourage checked in. When Kennedy left the hotel for the day to campaign, Duane snuck into the candidate’s hotel room looking for a memento to steal. In Kennedy’s room he allegedly found a tie and swiped it.

  Was it possible the tie Duane left on the plane was the same tie Kennedy wore? Was that another clue, revenge perhaps for Kennedy’s blundering at the Bay of Pigs? Was it even possible that Bobby Kennedy would wear a clip-on tie?

  That can’t make sense, Jo thinks. And then it does. On the campaign trail in 1968, folks were always pulling at Robert Kennedy’s body, his hands, and probably his tie. Perhaps he wore a clip-on to avoid being choked?

  Or maybe it wasn’t Kennedy who wore the clip-on tie? Perhaps Duane snuck in to the room, got nervous, and grabbed the skinny Towncraft that belonged to one of Kennedy’s security guards?

  That also made sense. When Bobby Kennedy was shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, he grabbed the tie of one guard, and it came off. Kennedy’s guards did wear clip-ons.

  Once again, Jo goes through Duane’s files. One letter she finds is from the Government Employees Benefit Association, a company based in Georgia. The letter claims Duane worked for Government Employees between November 1973 and December 1977. She looks up the company. Government Employees, she finds, is the leading provider of insurance to the CIA. Was Duane really selling insurance to CIA agents? Or was that his cover? And if Duane was a rogue operative working with the CIA, was the Cooper mission a “company job”? Or maybe it was former CIA agents, or mercenaries, the folks who read Soldier of Fortune, who contracted out the mission. If so, why?

  The conspiracy theorists believe Cooper’s hijacking was a black operation, staged during a moment in the news cycle when Americans would be home and watching television (Thanksgiving). It was designed to pressure legislators to pass more stringent safety laws on airplanes and in airports, and to push airlines to pay for metal detectors to deter hijackings. That makes sense to Jo. The Nixon era is chock full of black bag jobs and covert ops. But if the Cooper hijacking was an inside job, who called it? And how was Duane chosen to be the jumper?

  July 26, 1972

  Brighton, Colorado

  The sheriff reads the names for morning arraignments from a list.

  “Benjamin Namepee?”

  Richard Floyd McCoy looks around the drunk tank. A few inmates are still sleeping off their hangovers. No hands go up.

  “Benjamin Namepee?”

  McCoy raises his hand. He walks out of the cell and proceeds to the courthouse. He keels over, cringing in pain. He’s sick, he tells the sheriff. Needs to use the bathroom, fast. He holds out his wrists. The sheriff uncuffs him. He runs.

  Later that afternoon, the marshals find McCoy a few blocks from the courthouse. They place him back in handcuffs and belly chain and finish the drive east to Lewisburg.

  The federal penitentiary at Lewisburg is a massive prison in rural Pennsylvania that was built during the Great Depression. McCoy is housed in the prison’s maximum security wing, Dog Block. His job is in the prison’s dental laboratory. He makes fake teeth for inmates.

  Working with the plaster, McCoy begins to think about another escape. Didn’t John Dillinger use a fake gun to escape from jail? And if Dillinger could whittle a phony gun from a piece of wood, why couldn’t McCoy make his own pistol out of the plaster he works with in the dental lab?

  He needs a sculptor. Through inmates, McCoy makes contact with Melvin Walker, who made the Bureau’s Most Wanted List. The feds call him the Flying Bank Robber.

  Walker has ice-cold eyes, a menacing Fu Manchu mustache, jailhouse tattoos crawling up his arms, and a résumé of epic escapes.

  On a transfer to Marion, then the most secure prison in the nation, Walker made a handcuff key from a refill cartridge of a pen. He hid the key in his sock, handcuffed the marshals to a maple tree, stole their badges, credit cards, guns, car, then disappeared.

  On the lam for months, Walker was eventually caught and transferred back to Marion. The fences were fourteen feet high, topped with swirling rolls of razor wire.

  Using two pairs of bar spreaders, Walker pried open his window. He shimmied down the prison wall with a rope made from his bed sheet, clutching a wool blanket. Fired at by guards with high-powered rifles, Walker jumped the prison fence, using the wool blanket to shield himself against the razor wire. He ran for most of the night. The next morning, prison guard dogs discovered him sleeping in a tree.

  Now in Lewisburg, Walker is biding time, writing poetry, waiting for his next escape.

  If I’m destined to be in your prison,

  Then bury me deep underground

  Just the sight of a light, for a man like me

  And I know I am freedom bound.

  In his cell, McCoy flips through magazines, looking for images of guns. He cuts one out. Through other inmates, he sends the image to Walker. McCoy’s next shipment is a block of wax he pilfers from the prison dental lab. Walker sculpts the wax into a replica of a .45 caliber pistol. He sends the replica back to McCoy, who writes to the judge who oversaw his trial in Salt Lake. He begs for a reduced sentence. His letters are not returned. McCoy writes to the judge again.

  It has been nearly six months since I wrote to you. I know you are quite busy and I don’t want to impose on you, but there are important personal considerations which require solutions in the near future. Knowing the final outcome of my case could very well influence some of the decisions that need to be made.

  Like escaping from Lewisburg.

  March 1, 2008

  Catheys Valley, California

  The sun is blinding. I squint through the windshield. I see endless rows of almond trees that line the farms of the Central Valley. We are driving toward Merced. As a young man, Bobby Dayton drove the same route. I imagine him pulling over in his beat-up truck, asking for work. With his fair hair and blue eyes, Bobby would have burned in the sun. Or maybe he tanned dark. Bobby was a quarter Indian.

  That fits. On the plane, witnesses described the hijacker as dark, swarthy.

  “He says he was Kickapoo, and when my grandfather went to check it he says Winnebago, so I don’t know really what tribe we are,” Rena Ruddell says.

  Rena is Bobby’s daughter and closest living relative. Her brother, Dennis, died years ago. Shortly after he returned from Vietnam, police found him in a friend’s bathtub. The bathtub was filled with milk, and a needle was stuck in his arm. A heroin overdose, the coroner said.

  Now in her fifties, Rena has picked me up from the airport in Modesto, where she teaches elementary school. We are en route to Catheys Valley to see the old Dayton ranch and visit with Barb’s relatives.

  Rena is a believer. At first, when Ron and Pat Foreman contacted her and told her they thought her father was D.B. Cooper, Rena doubted it. But that’s changed. The more Rena thought about it—Barb’s love for airplanes, her hatred for the airlines, her lust for The Score, her suicidal tendencies—the more it all made sense.

  “You had to know him,” Rena says. “He just didn’t care if he lived or died.”

  Listening to Rena talk about her father, I think of Dr. Hubbard, as if the psychiatrist had left me clues to uncovering Cooper’s identity.

  Failure after failure gradually aroused an intense hostility that was slowly transferred from himself to society in an attempt to defend himself against a rising desire to commit suicide.

  … After years of inadequate and misguided effort, these men had steadily depleted their sense of self-worth, until in a last desperate moment they plunged into this symbolic action in which they saw themselves more or less permanently as men who had done one fine thing.

  Yep. This was Bobby. Or, Barb.

  The hills of the Mother Lode are marked with the mouths
of old mining claims and the tombstones of bank robbers. In clearings, oak trees stand alone and the spindly branches cast shadows that look like witches’ fingers. The road is now dirt and we follow a creek. In the creek a man has his jeans rolled up and is showing a boy how to use a sluice box, working the water that runs over the rocks and through the dirt for flakes of gold.

  The Dayton ranch exists only in memory. The house and barn are gone. All that’s left are a few stones of a chimney Elmer built. Rena and I walk the grounds. She wonders if her father buried the ransom money here. Across the stream, I can see an old mine that must have been active in the 1860s. Did Barbara hide the ransom in there?

  A car barrels down the dirt road, pulls over. I see a white cowboy hat. It’s Sharon Power, Rena’s aunt. She was married to Bill Dayton, Bobby’s brother. Sharon is also the sister of Dixie, Bobby’s first wife. Sharon spent years on the ranch with the Dayton family. She learned to ride horses here. She walks around the property in her stiff dungarees and cowboy boots, pointing to where she and Bill and Bobby stabled Toots, Sugar, and Buck, their horses. She points to a patch of grass that was once a kitchen where Bobby’s mother, Bernice, made her hominy grits and tamale pie.

  Sharon does not doubt that Bobby Dayton turned into Dan Cooper.

  “He just had that kind of mind,” she tells me.

  Sharon is a poet. She wrote a few verses to explain her theories.

  A lonely man sat in the night

  The spirit within, was just not right.

  The bomb he held was violently loaded.

  A move of his finger and it would be exploded.

  Stilts in his shoes raised him from short to tall.

  He had always hated being somewhat small.

  The unfamiliar tie was bothersome.

  Becoming edgy it troubled him some.

  He shot out in the turbulent air

  In a free fall, if he died he didn’t care.

  In small pieces he burned the chute

  And note by note he burned all the loot.

  This was his hidden treasure

  No one would find it, not ever.

  He changed into women’s clothes

  Put on makeup and powdered his nose.

  It would be a long walk to the road to catch a bus

  SHE would find amusement in all of the fuss.

  Sharon’s daughter, Billie Dayton, lives nearby. Billie was close with Bobby too. Bobby was her uncle. When the hijacking occurred, Billie remembered her father hearing the news and saying, “That’s Bobby.”

  Billie Dayton is a believer too. Her uncle Bobby was always trying to prove he could do something others could not. He was also suicidal over his sex change operation and depressed over his failure to obtain a commercial pilot’s license. Bobby was a man with a grudge.

  After the operation, Billie’s father didn’t speak or visit with Barb until she got sick. She’d moved out of Seattle and into a trailer in the desert near Carson City, Nevada. She was broke, gambling all her money and social security checks away in slot machines.

  When Bill and Billie arrived to visit, Barb was in the hospital.

  Bill and Billie suspected she might have some of the Cooper bills. They searched her trailer for them, but nothing turned up.

  Then a curious thing happened. In the hospital, Barb began to make strange gestures. Bill and Billie thought she finally wanted to confess to the hijacking. But Barb’s condition had deteriorated. She could no longer talk. Then she was gone.

  “I have no doubt in my mind Bobby was D.B. Cooper,” Billie says. “I know it.”

  August 2000

  Pace, Florida

  Jo Weber does not leave her house. She has too much work decoding the clues Duane left her. Her friends stop calling. Her daughters are embarrassed by her obsession with the Cooper case. But how can Jo let it go? She has to find a piece of evidence to prove Duane is Cooper. She has to prove it because she needs to show everyone who doubts her that she isn’t making up this story—that she isn’t a loo-loo.

  She calls the FBI again. They don’t call back. What have they found? What are they hiding from her?

  After the story about Duane is published in U.S. News & World Report, Jo gets calls from all over the country. One of them is from Bob Knoss.

  Knoss knew Duane, he claims. He met Duane through Richard Floyd McCoy Jr. They were training for the hijacking together.

  What? Can’t be true. How could two Cooper suspects (Weber, McCoy) be involved in the Cooper hijacking?

  Bob Knoss is a picture-framer who once lived in Bloomington, Minnesota. He had forgotten about Duane until the U.S. News & World Report story was published in July of 2000. Knoss had recently broken his back. He was marooned on his sofa, taking painkillers. Watching television, Knoss saw Duane’s face. That’s the dude, he thought to himself.

  The memory Knoss claimed to have meshed together into a wacky comedy, a story about a gung-ho aspiring covert agent (McCoy), who in order to impress his rogue bosses recruited a charming crook from prison (Duane Weber). Together they conspired to hijack a Northwest plane, to accomplish the dual purposes of getting rich together and capturing the attention of legislators in Washington to increase airport security.

  Knoss knew about it because he was involved, he says. His story is complicated. Knoss was a draft dodger who got caught. Instead of going to prison, he volunteered to help McCoy on the Cooper hijacking. Knoss was McCoy’s witness, he tells Jo. In case McCoy got arrested, Knoss was to testify that McCoy was operating on behalf of interests friendly to the government.

  And how did McCoy and Duane get involved?

  McCoy got Duane out of prison, Knoss says. Only Knoss never knew Duane as Duane, Knoss tells Jo. He knew Duane by his nickname, Coop. And his alias, Dan Cooper.

  Jo does not believe Bob Knoss’s story. How can she? But she does check it out.

  One late night on the phone, she asks Mary Jane if she and Duane ever lived in Bloomington.

  “No,” Mary Jane tells her. “We never lived in Bloomington, just stayed there for a few weeks.”

  So it was true. Or possibly true. Duane had been in Bloomington, Minnesota. Bob Knoss could have known Duane. If that part of Knoss’s story is true, what about the rest?

  She reads every book and article written on the case. She calls all the major witnesses. She flies to Washington to see if she can retrace her steps, to see if she can remember where Duane took her, that road near the town of Orchards where Duane said, “That’s where D.B. Cooper walked out of the woods.”

  A few memories come back to her. Especially down near the Columbia. She passes the Red Lion Inn. She’s been to the hotel before. Duane pulled the car over. She went to use the ladies’ room. When she came back to the car, Duane was gone. She circled the lobby. She checked the car again. Where did Duane go? Finally, she found him down near the river’s edge.

  “What you looking at, Duane?” she asked.

  “The bag,” he said.

  Jo strained her eyes and scanned the river. She saw a paper bag. She didn’t know what was in it. Duane was using it for trash, she thought.

  She scolded him for tossing trash into the river.

  “You don’t do that!” she said. “You don’t litter like that!”

  Now, after learning about the case, and about the Cooper bills Brian Ingram found on Tena Bar down the river, Jo wonders about that bag. Maybe it wasn’t filled with trash like she thought. Maybe Duane was throwing away the Cooper bills. The year was 1978. Or 1979. She can’t remember. She tells this story often. Few believe her. What if Jo is making up the entire story?

  March 4, 2008

  Woodburn, Oregon

  I pull into the parking lot of an Arby’s south of Portland. I am here to meet Ron and Pat Foreman and Ron’s pilot friend Cliff Kluge. Our mission: find the rest of Cooper’s missing ransom.

  We have a guide of sorts. In the late 1970s, when Barb Dayton confessed to being the skyjacker, the Foremans took notes. Our plan
is to follow the notes, as if they are clues Barb left for us to use, like a treasure map.

  “A white house,” the first note reads. “The front faces the south. There is an old tractor kitty-corner to the house. The pecan orchard is longer than it is wide and runs east and west. The money is hid in one of the irrigation cisterns.”

  There is more. “Cistern at end, so not used.”

  We drive down the freeway, retracing the flight path, until we get to turn into Woodburn.

  “Woodburn,” according to the Foremans’ notes, “is exactly 38 miles south of Columbia River.”

  The notes describe how Barb pulled the job. On the night of the hijacking, she rode a bus from Woodburn to Portland. Foreman note: “Bus not as conspicuous.” Her motive: “Bitterness against FAA & airlines. Too many rules against the average pilot. Everything for the airlines.” The bomb: “Two five-pound charges with detonator in zippered brown briefcase. Battery switch in pocket. Detonator was a staple remover with wires soldered to it.”

  The staple remover, I think, is a revealing detail. After the hijacking, Tina Mucklow reported seeing a “a little clip at the end” of the wire of the hijacker’s briefcase bomb. Was the “clip” Tina saw really Barb’s staple remover?

  I see grassy fields of the Willamette farms and labyrinths of trees in the orchards.

  In the passenger seat, Ron Foreman looks at the sky to get his bearings. As pilots, he and Barb flew over the flight path of the hijacked plane and the farms around which we are now meandering. Ron also knows where Barb says she jumped. According to his notes, her visual cue from the sky was “Aurora State Airport.” On the map, Aurora State Airport is a few miles south of Portland. In the night sky, Barb would have been able to see the lights of Vancouver, then Portland, then Aurora.