Skyjack Page 19

  Note: “Jump was made from 10,000 feet with a 9,000 foot free fall. Speed of 727 was 220 mph. Wind was at 30 mph from the southwest.”

  It’s true. How could Barb know such arcane details as wind speed and wind direction, and be right about them? According to the Bureau files, meteorologists reported the wind speed between Portland and Salem, Oregon, to be between 20 and 30 knots—so, on average, exactly 30 miles per hour on the night of the hijacking. And the wind direction varied between south and southwest. Was this coincidence? Or was Barb really Cooper?

  In researching Barb’s past, Ron and Pat Foreman found other evidence they believe links Barb to the hijacking. They went through Barb’s medical records, and notes from doctors were revealing. In one interview before the surgery, Bobby Dayton told doctors about his hobbies. From the records:

  He has also been a skydiver, but lost interest in that because he found it boring.

  Boring?! How could jumping out of a plane, Ron Foreman wondered, ever get boring?

  The medical records also contained notes from follow-up visits. Eight days before the hijacking, on November 16, 1971, doctors noted that Barb was depressed. She was considering suicide again. Two weeks after the hijacking, on December 8, 1971, her mood had changed.

  [Patient] doing well. Not depressed.… Is on welfare but strangely un-worried despite inability to get work. Welfare expires in three months.

  “Strangely unworried” about money? Why? Because she now had a $200,000 ransom, a ransom she hid in a cistern, a cistern that is somewhere around Woodburn, where we are now driving.

  I see a white farmhouse out the window. Is the front facing south? It is. We follow the road along the trees to check the direction of the field. It looks just like Barb said: longer than it is wide. Now, where are the cisterns?

  We drive farther, circling the orchard, past a trailer park. In the farthest corner, we park, get out, and there it is, over the fence: a cistern. It is just as Barb has described.

  We look down the alleys of trees and check the orchard for big dogs and farmers with guns. This is private property. Should we go?

  Ron Foreman stays with Pat in the car. Cliff and I hop the fence. I hear the distant buzz of a tractor. I look around the orchard. Far off, I see a plaid shirt. Who is that? Better hurry.

  I close my eyes and cross my toes and pray, Oh Lord do I pray, that when we get the cistern open, there will be, just as Barb left it, the remaining portion of D.B. Cooper’s missing ransom. I want it bad. I want it now.

  Screeching, scraping. Cliff and I are breaking sweat to pry the heavy metal cover off the cistern. Finally we get the thing off.

  A hole in the ground is now open, a tunnel to our treasure.

  I get down—chest first. I stick my head into the pit. I look. There is no mistaking what I see. Absolutely nothing.

  Back in the car, we look for another white house that faces south, a pecan orchard longer than it is wide, running east to west. We see a farmer and pull over to ask him about white houses. He gets off his tractor and tells us there are a lot of white houses around here. I ask him what he is growing.

  “Hazelnuts,” he says.

  The trees on his orchard look like all the rest we have seen and that doesn’t jibe. According to the Foremans’ notes, Barb landed in a pecan orchard. Another note they kept disturbs me too. Barb, according to them, claimed to have kept eighty bundles of $2,500 apiece in the cistern. That was wrong. The bills came in a hundred bundles of $2,000 apiece. Did the Foremans hear Barb wrong? Or had Barb made the detail up?

  I wonder about Barb and her wrong color eyes (blue), her short height (five eight), her tale about hiding a change of clothes (and the ransom) in the cistern. If she hid the ransom, how did the Cooper bills get in the sand miles away at Tena Bar?

  Chasing Barb Dayton, I have found another Ken Christiansen. I can’t prove she was Cooper. I can’t prove she wasn’t.

  I call Larry Carr in Seattle. I am planning another visit to look at more files. I wonder if he has any news.

  He does.

  A parachute has been found, he tells me.

  A parachute?

  An old parachute, Carr says. And military.

  Military!

  White canopy, Carr says. And conical shaped.

  Holy shit. Must be Cooper’s NB6, I think. Where was the chute found?

  Amboy, Carr says.

  I don’t need a map. I know where Amboy is. Amboy is just south of Ariel, across Lake Merwin, in Clark County. Amboy is D.B. Cooper country, directly in the drop zone.

  The story is innocent enough. In Amboy, a man had been using a back hoe in his backyard. His children were playing in the dirt. In the dirt they found the white fabric of the parachute. Suspecting it was Cooper’s, they called the FBI.

  Carr mentions the discovery to a local television reporter, who runs with the story. The wires jump on the news, and so do the national papers, including the New York Times.

  The discovery of the white conical parachute in Amboy (which turned out to be a bust) sends shockwaves through Cooperland. In Alabama, cyber sleuth Sluggo_Monster (aka nuclear lab consultant Wayne Walker) reconfigures the preferences on his Internet search browsers to collect the avalanche of news stories following the Amboy parachute find. One story he snags is published in AvioNews, an Italian periodical that covers the aeronautics industry.

  The story is written in Italian. It’s difficult to follow. But scrolling through a garbled translation of the text, Walker makes his own discovery: The author of the AvioNews piece has picked up on the mystery of the hijacker’s name.

  “Dan Cooper,” the Italian story states, “was the name of a toon created by Albert Weinberg, from Belgium, during the 50s.”

  Dan Cooper a toon? A cartoon?

  “He was a Canadian airman, involved in many adventures regarding spying’s cases and science fictions.”

  Walker runs more searches on the Web. He digs up images of old comics. Dan Cooper, Walker finds, is not just an “airman.” He is a combat pilot. Cooper flies fighter jets and test planes for the Royal Canadian Air Force. Walker can’t understand the words he reads. The comic is written in French. It has never been translated into English. But the images are clear.

  Dan Cooper is a Canadian version of GI Joe. He has a square chin, rippling biceps, clear blue eyes, a crew cut. He skyrockets out of the earth’s orbit to battle men in spacesuits with metal hooks for arms, aliens, and enemy frogmen. He runs (Pang!) and dives (Plouf!) and is chased (Halte!) and takes off again in his jet (Tchiiiiiiiiouw!). Dan Cooper is an aerial acrobat, and his save-the-day missions all seem to end the same way: floating down in a conical parachute, just like the hijacker Dan Cooper did with the NB6 on November 24, 1971.

  The comic is not a coincidence, Walker thinks. I agree. There is a connection between the French-Canadian comic book hero Dan Cooper and the hijacker who used his name. There has to be. But what is it?

  His creator, I hope, will know.

  I find comic book artist Albert Weinberg in Corseaux, a town on Lake Geneva, in Switzerland. I imagine his château as vast and ornate, with doors that lead from his studio to a veranda that looks out onto water that ripples with the wake of a passing speedboat.

  Weinberg was not trained as an artist. Growing up in Belgium, he dropped out of law school and was hired as an illustrator for Hergé, creator of Tintin, the legendary French comic that follows the adventures of a boy reporter. After Tintin became its own magazine in the ’50s, Hergé asked Weinberg to come up with his own character and strip.

  Weinberg needed a backdrop, a universe for his character to explore. He chose the sky. He wanted the air filled with jets, parachutes, drones, spaceships. Weinberg had family in French Canada, and he imagined his hero as a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot.

  Weinberg is old now, almost ninety. I want to see him. I want to sit on the veranda and watch the speed boat go by, ask about the character he created, and the hijacker he must have inspired.

 
; I call him in Switzerland. The voice on the end of the line is smooth and deep and kind, a grandfather speaking in a slow and pleasing French. Battling the language barrier, I ask for a visit. Best to meet in person. That way, I can sit across from the old comic book artist in his rocking chair, a shawl over his shoulders, and he can lay out the secret to this case for me.

  Impossible to meet in person, he says.

  Why?

  He will be on holiday, he says.

  So perhaps when he returns?

  Impossible, he says. Holiday will be several months.

  I settle for a phone call with a translator.

  “It’s a bit of a mystery for me as well,” Weinberg says about the case when I call again. In the early 1970s, when the identity of the hijacker was first reported as “Dan Cooper,” Weinberg says he received phone calls from his contacts in the Royal Canadian Air Force notifying him.

  “I don’t remember exactly the date,” Weinberg says, “but it rather amused me because I said to myself, Look here, it’s probably a former pilot or a reader. And francophone, Canadian francophone. But we were never able to uncover more of this story.”

  I ask Weinberg about the name. Was there any symbolism? Where did he come up with Dan Cooper?

  “The phone book. I picked two hundred names in Quebec and went to my family and I said, ‘Which ones do you like?’ … Eventually the name Dan Cooper was chosen.”

  And what about Dan Cooper? How would he define his character?

  “I think the main quality of my character is that he is very, very sensitive,” Weinberg says. “Even though he was a military pilot, he always held a high regard for human life. It would have been difficult for me to make Dan Cooper proudly shooting on another plane.”

  August 10, 1974

  Lewisburg, Pennsylvania

  Richard Floyd McCoy’s letters to the judge are introspective. He writes about Vietnam. He explains why he was shipped home with a shrapnel wound and the Purple Heart.

  Maybe you’re wondering whether I was capable of harming anyone.… During my first tour of duty in Vietnam, I was wounded. The only reason, Your Honor, is that I was unable to kill a man up close.

  McCoy’s letters are not answered. His motion to reduce his forty-year prison sentence is denied. McCoy and Walker discuss terms. Prison escapes are negotiations.

  “If you shoot it out, I’ll shoot it out with you,” Walker says. “But only if I can see we can make it. If I can’t, my hands go over my head.”

  “Not me,” McCoy says. “I’d rather die a thousand deaths before I spend one more day in Lewisburg.”

  They wait until deep summer, until the cornstalks outside the prison fence have grown high enough for them to run through. From the wire report:

  Lewisburg, PA—Four armed convicts, including a Mormon Sunday school teacher involved in a bizarre 1972 hijacking, crashed a commandeered garbage truck through a gate at a federal penitentiary Saturday and disappeared into the central Pennsylvania mountains.

  They drive east and south and over the Mason-Dixon Line, down to North Carolina. McCoy has family there. Along the way, the convicts shave each other’s heads. In North Carolina, they make news again.

  New Bern, N.C.—Authorities say four men who robbed a Pollocksville, N.C., bank were convicts who escaped from the federal prison at Lewisburg, Pa., last Saturday.

  There is more.

  The bandits then switched to another car with Ohio tags. It was subsequently spotted by police helicopter on an unpaved logging road in the Great Dover Swamp. Officers aboard the helicopter exchanged fire with the fugitives as they abandoned the vehicle, police said.

  McCoy and Walker press on to Gatlinburg, Tennessee. They hole up at a Howard Johnson’s motel. One afternoon, they watch Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as they count their score from another robbery. Thirty thousand … fifty thousand … seventy-six thousand. At night, they go out for dinner and steal license plates from cars and look for people who look like them, so they can steal their identification. But what is the point?

  The Howard Johnson’s is its own prison. What have they done it all for? They decide to live big, splurge. Fuck it. McCoy buys his daughter an Arabian horse for her birthday and rents a horse farm in Tuskegee, Alabama. He and Walker rent an apartment in Virginia Beach, furnish it lavishly, and stockpile it with a small cache of weapons.

  McCoy plans another airplane hijacking, to make an even bigger score. He and Walker start running to get in shape.

  One fall night, making the drive from Tuskegee back to Virginia Beach, McCoy gets a strange feeling. He is talking about God, the Mormon church, the stillness of the ocean.

  “Tell me again,” McCoy says, “what’s the name of those evergreens along the front of the house?”

  “Arborvitae,” Walker says. Means “tree of life.”

  “Arborvitae. Arborvitae,” McCoy says, forcing himself to remember the name.

  McCoy pulls onto Great Neck Road. He does not want to enter the house. What if somebody has given them up?

  “It’s your turn,” Walker says.

  McCoy pulls over the car. He places a pistol in his waistband. He jogs toward the house, strolls up the front walk. He turns the key.

  The orange glow of streetlights floods the window in the front room.

  He hears the crackle of a radio in the other room. It is blaring voices.

  He reaches for his gun. He hears a scream.

  “FBI! … Close the door. Be quiet.”

  Gun sparks fly in the dark. It sounds like cannonballs have gone off.

  “I’m killed,” McCoy says.

  He stumbles. He falls back through the front door, onto the porch, into the Arborvitae bushes.

  “Somebody run!” an agent says. “Get some bath towels! Before this man bleeds to death.”

  “Fuck him,” another agent says. “That son of a bitch just tried to kill me.”

  The agents hover over McCoy’s body. It is too late for a D.B. Cooper confession. The coroner is called.

  February 28, 2009

  Battleground, Washington

  I pull into the parking lot of the Best Western in southern Washington. It’s my fifth trip to the state—no, my sixth. I can’t remember. I can’t remember what I am looking for. The ghost of a closeted airline purser who lived with young boys and looked exactly like an FBI sketch that may not have looked like the hijacker at all? Or a gold-obsessed trans-gender librarian-pilot who had a grudge against the airlines? Or am I after a fanatic of Dan Cooper the comic book hero? Or should I stop looking and wait for scientist Tom Kaye to break open the case with his microscopic scientific thinking?

  I am here to document Kaye’s fieldwork. I am not alone. Tom has assembled a team that has traveled across the country to help him analyze the money. The technical brain will be Alan Stone, a metallurgist from Chicago whom Tom knows from the dinosaur world. Another dinosaur buddy is Carol Abraczinskas. She is a scientific illustrator from the University of Chicago. She’s here to help in the field and draw pictures for Tom’s planned scientific paper. Also with us is the little boy who found the money, Brian Ingram, who is not so little anymore. Tom flew Brian in from Mena, Arkansas, and offered to pay for his trip. Brian knew the area; after all, he found the money there. He is also press bait. The story of the boy-turned-man who returns to the spot that changed his life, Tom hopes, will entice reporters to cover his fieldwork.

  The last member of the team is a last-minute addition: Jerry Thomas. For help navigating the woods in the Washougal area, Jerry is a natural choice. He’s been looking in the area for Cooper’s body and ransom for the past twenty-two years.

  Tom is ready to get started. Tall and lanky, he wears simple blue jeans, a blue sweatshirt, and black sneakers that are worn out from walking across Montana hunting for T. rex teeth. He is hungry because he gets hungry when he is anxious. Tom buries his head in the rear of a rental minivan. It’s stuffed with science equipment: test tubes, notebooks, sample jars, and
a fishing rod to which he’s affixed a bundle of cash to test its buoyancy. The equipment and tests, he hopes, will confirm his “explosive” hypothesis—which he revealed to me, under the provision that I not reveal it until now. So, here it is.

  Think of the plaque on your teeth. It forms, over time, from bacteria that grow and collect. Well, the silver on the Cooper bills that he saw under his microscope formed in a similar way, Tom hypothesizes.

  His first step was to call Alan Stone (“my metal guy”), who looks exactly how you would imagine a metallurgist to look: spectacles, mustache, fanny pack. He runs Aston Labs, a metals research firm in Chicago. When Tom discovered silver on the bills in his lab in Arizona, he sent the images to Stone for his opinion.

  Yes, definitely silver, Stone confirmed. But how did it get there?

  Together, the scientists gazed at Tena Bar on Google Earth. The sand on the beach where Brian Ingram found the Cooper bills, they saw, was not white and powdery. It was black.

  After studying the properties of silver, Tom and Alan learned that microscopic traces of silver can seep out of sand. And when silver comes into contact with a porous and natural element—like the linen that money is made from—a chemical event takes place. “Bacterial ooze,” as Tom puts it, would seep out of the sand and form on the bills and protect them from the elements. This ooze, like a plaque, would explain all that black stuff he first saw.

  But the Silver-in-the-Sand theory, if true, is limited. Other questions remain. How long had the money been at Tena Bar to develop the microscopic plaque? And perhaps more important, how did the money get there in the first place?

  Tom thinks the feds goofed. Tom is not the first Cooper hunter to suspect that the real drop zone was not where the feds were looking.

  After reviewing data about the flight path, amateur sleuth Wayne Walker (Sluggo_Monster) found the error on a timeline that charted Northwest 305’s position. A licensed pilot, Walker found minutes 8:01, 8:02, 8:03, and 8:05 all accounted for. So where was minute 8:04?