SKYJACK: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper Read online

  Like the quests to find the Holy Grail and the Lost Dutchman Mine, the hunt for the hijacker is an odyssey that tests the boundaries of obsession, and the farther along the path one gets, stranger and stranger things happen.

  The Cooper Curse is what those who have felt it call it. But is the Curse real? Or something we create, then blame when we fail to find out what happened? Or the by-product of a moment in time defined by chaos and paranoia?

  When Cooper jumped in the fall of 1971, the nation was at war with itself. In government buildings and on college campuses, bombs went off. In cities, looters roamed as riots raged and buildings burned. At demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, protesters were arrested by the tens of thousands. A defeat in Vietnam was imminent. The nation was also mired in recession. Labor strikes crippled the workforce. Unemployment soared. So did the crime rate. Prisons were overcrowded and taken over in riots. Communes were built. Cults formed. Otherwise normal teenagers ran away from home, and had to be “deprogrammed” after they were brainwashed.

  “The music is telling the youth to rise up against the establishment,” Charles Manson said during his trial for murder. “Why blame me? I didn’t write the music.”

  A mob had formed. The underground was rising. Terrorists were homegrown. Communist fears were reborn. Inside J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, a campaign was afoot to compile information on protesters and anarchists. Phones were tapped.

  At the center of the spookfest was President Nixon, whose motorcade was pummeled with rocks and surrounded by protesters.

  “I just want to ask you one favor,” Nixon told top aide H. R. Haldeman. “If I am assassinated, I want you to have them play Dante’s Inferno and have Lawrence Welk produce it.”

  The president feared blackmail from so many different directions, both in and outside his administration, that his aides formed the Plumbers, the White House’s own dirty tricks brigade. The Plumbers’ black-bag jobs eventually led to Watergate and Nixon’s resignation from office, perhaps the lowest point in the nation’s political history.

  Skyjacking was then a national epidemic. Throughout Nixon’s term, there had been roughly a hundred hijackings of American airplanes, and over half the attempts had been successful.

  The airplane had become the next stagecoach, a crime scene for dangerous jet-age robberies, and the skyjacker a momentary cultural hero. Like no other innovation, the invention of the airplane in Kitty Hawk and the evolution of American airpower were testaments to the nation’s technological virility and essential to the American ethos. Air-power had been instrumental in winning the World Wars, in ushering in the jet age, in developing the space program. America had put man on the moon. Boeing had built the 747, the jumbo jet. And yet, in one impulsive action, the lone skyjacker was able to show the fallibility of the costly flying machines. What good was the power of the Air Force in a country like Vietnam where American soldiers were slaughtered under the canopy of the jungle? What good was flying a jet to vacation in Miami when so many flights were getting rerouted to Castro’s Cuba?

  The skyjacker himself was a kind of schizo-transcendentalist. Onboard a jet, taking all passengers and the flight crew as hostages, the skyjacker was able to create his own society. He became his own head of state, directing others—the pilots, the stewardesses, the lawmen, mayors, governors—to act upon his whims. In one flight, the skyjacker went from nobody to somebody. And with reporters from newspapers, radio, and television stations monitoring the drama in the air, the culprits achieved celebrity. Dr. David Hubbard, a psychiatrist interviewing nearly a hundred airplane hijackers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, described taking over an airplane as a holy experience. “The skyjackers,” he once wrote, “seemed intent to stand on their own feet, to be men, to face their God, and to arise from this planet to the other more pleasing place.” To date, hundreds of skyjackers and terrorists have taken over airplanes. Only one remains unknown.

  Shit. Porteous and Lyle Christiansen are on to something. The Cooper case is a big deal. Uncovering the identity of the hijacker is a major story (Pulitzer, hello!), and it’s mine so long as I don’t mess it up. Of course, I’ll have to prove Lyle’s brother was actually the hijacker. How hard could that be?

  Back at my office after lunch, I call Porteous. I want to read the file he’s put together on Lyle’s brother. I want to see it fast, before Porteous decides to call another reporter. As a general rule, PI’s can get giddy over the prospect of publicity. Breaking the Cooper case would make Porteous the most famous PI in America. At least that’s what he must be thinking. That’s what I’m thinking.

  I race over to Sherlock headquarters. The office doubles as Porteous’s one-bedroom co-op apartment on the Upper West Side. He opens the door and the classical piano music noodling away on the stereo oozes out. The place is like a zen palace for gumshoes.

  I sit down at the dining room table. Porteous slides me the file. I pull out a few papers. One is a photo. The image is of a gravesite, for Lyle’s brother. I read the name.

  KENNETH P. CHRISTIANSEN

  TEC 5 US ARMY

  WORLD WAR II

  OCT 17 1926—JUL 30 1994

  So Lyle’s brother’s name was Kenny. I wonder what he died from.

  Cancer, Porteous says. The pancreas. That’s what Lyle told him.

  I read Kenny’s military record.

  PARACHUTIST’S BADGE, ASIATIC PACIFIC THEATER.

  So it was true. Kenny knew about parachutes. He could have jumped out of that plane just like D.B. Cooper had.

  I pull another photo. In this one, Kenny is in uniform. He wears a skinny tie with a clasp. He is standing in the aisle of an airplane.

  Kenny worked for Northwest, the airline Cooper hijacked, Porteous says. He wasn’t a flight attendant. He was a purser. A purser is a senior flight attendant who handles the money and immigration issues on international flights.

  In the photo, I can see Kenny is grinning. Or is it a smirk? It looks as if Kenny knows something—a secret he is keeping. Kenny, what is it? Why the smirk? What is your secret?

  Porteous hands me a sketch of the hijacker.

  I place the image next to Kenny’s face. Time to compare.

  Whoa. Porteous is right. The resemblance is spooky.

  “Oh, I think it’s him,” Sherry Hart says. Porteous’s ace is typing away at a computer terminal next to the kitchen.

  If Hart’s femme instincts are so good, what is she sensing?

  “Oh, coincidences lining up,” she says.

  I’m not convinced. But I’m getting there.

  I flip back to Kenny’s military records. In the far corner of one form I see his thumbprint, taken May 25, 1944, when he enlisted. I place my own thumb on it. I close my eyes. I imagine what Kenny’s hands must have felt like. I imagine my own thumbprint on his—to summon a feeling, an out-of-body clue that would tell me if Lyle’s brother was indeed D. B. Cooper.

  I feel something. Really. I swear. Kenny?

  Or do I feel anything? Am I trying too hard and making it all up?

  I look at another paper in Porteous’s file. 18406 OLD SUMNER BUCKLEY HIGHWAY, BONNEY LAKE, WASHINGTON. That’s Kenny’s address.

  Where’s Bonney Lake?

  “About forty miles from Seattle,” Porteous says. He’s seen the town on Google maps. He’s also noticed that Bonney Lake is strategically located. It’s only twenty miles away from SEA-TAC, the airport where the Cooper hijacking took place. The authorities suspected Cooper was familiar with airlines and the area.

  Coincidences, as Hart said, are lining up.

  Do I have a choice? I have to fly West. I have to go to Kenny’s old house, feel around for more spirits, knock on the doors of his neighbors, find old friends, colleagues from Northwest. I write to Lyle for more information about his brother. I want to know him as Lyle did. I want to understand the way his mind worked. I drop all assignments. I do more research on the case. I read several books, newspaper clips. Soon I am leaving for the airport and now I
am on the plane and I can’t get the ballad out of my head. I can hear guitar strings. I hum along to the chords.

  With your pleasant smile

  And your dropout style,

  D.B. Cooper, where did you go?

  I know exactly where: 18406 Old Sumner Buckley Highway.

  November 24, 1971

  Portland International Airport, Oregon

  She is a specimen of red. Red lipstick. Red nail polish. Red uniform. It is not a candy apple red or a fire truck red, but the coral red you find on a necklace. Red is a central component of the “new look” campaign Northwest Orient Airlines launched the previous year. The makeover means new menus, mottos, ticket jackets, logos, and lots of red. Blue is out. Blue is conservatism and depression. And red? Red is passion, strength, arrogance.

  Flo Schaffner hates Northwest’s new-look uniforms, designed by Christian Dior. She has to wear the Carnaby Street cap with a duck bill and ear flaps. The dress and jacket ensemble are too mod. All the straight lines make her look fat. She feels like Elmer Fudd.

  Now she stands on the top of the aftstairs, and cold wind off the tarmac blows through the silk of her stockings and into the maw of the cabin. She looks out and sees the last passengers for the 305 flight. Huddled in their coats, they had been waiting at Gate 52, Concourse L. Now they are on the tarmac in Portland, lining up to board under the giant red fin of the Northwest Orient jet. Above them are clouds that are dark and heavy with rain. Heavy storms are predicted for the next few days.

  The first passenger in line walks up the stairs.

  Flo meets him. Two years working for Northwest, her lines are automatic.

  “Hi. Welcome aboard. Can I check your ticket?”

  She reads the name on the boarding pass. Finegold, Larry.

  He has frizzy hair, chunky eyeglasses. He does not look like a federal prosecutor. He spent the day in Vancouver, Washington, on the border of Oregon, to watch his colleagues prosecute the mayor of San Francisco on corruption charges. Finegold needs to get home. He and his wife, Sharon, have an event at their synagogue later in the night.

  Finegold is nervous about the flight. Only two months before, the same type of plane, a Boeing 727, disappeared. Preparing for a descent into Juneau, the navigational system on the Alaska Airlines jet malfunctioned. The pilots and passengers were never heard from again.

  “It apparently crashed into a sheer wall of mountain,” an airline official said.

  The Alaska Airlines crash was the worst airline accident to date in the country’s history: 111 fatalities. Officials still haven’t figured out what mechanical failures caused the crash of such a big plane. Flight computers can’t be trusted. Or pilots. Or passengers.

  The fear of flying is pervasive. To ease nerves, passengers on morning flights drink breakfast martinis with their cornflakes. Others use hypnotists or take tranquilizers before boarding. A group of psychologists recently started the Fly Without Fear Club, whose members are so petrified of airplanes they can’t look at them on the ground. The underlying causes of the fear, psychologists say, are feelings of claustrophobia, a lack of control, a fear of achievement. “There you are, up there, strapped in, trussed up, unable to affect your own destiny in any way,” one passenger told the New York Times. “If the plane goes down, so do you. What a perfect place for God to get you.”

  To quell the nerves of passengers, airlines invest in advertising campaigns. “Hey there! You with the sweaty palms,” read the copy for a Pacific Air Lines ad. “Deep down inside, every time that big plane lifts off the runway, you wonder if this is it, right? You want to know something, fella? So does the pilot, deep down inside.” At Northwest Orient, one early idea was to stage a photo with a group of Crow Indians. In front of a Northwest plane, the Indians wore headdresses and moccasins and posed for the camera stone-faced and bare-chested. “If the Indians aren’t afraid of the white man’s bird, nobody else should be,” a Northwest pilot said.

  The ads weren’t enough to put passengers at ease. Stewardesses are the new panacea; they’ve become sex objects, redirecting passengers’ fears. At Southwest, the stews wear white leather boots with porn-star laces and tangerine hot pants.

  For Braniff, Italian printmaker Emilio Pucci designed the Air Strip, uniforms that come off during the flight. “Introducing the Air Strip,” the Braniff ads read.

  When she boards our airplane, she

  Zip

  sheds these outer garments to greet you in a raspberry suit and color-coordinated shoes. This ensemble is too expensive to risk soiling during dinner, so at the appropriate moment, she

  Zip

  Snap

  Zip

  changes into a lovely serving dress which we call a Puccino (named for its creator, Emilio Pucci, who believes that even an airline hostess should look like a girl).

  Braniff stews were then nicknamed “Pucci Galores” after the Bond girl in Goldfinger. At United, the ads are generous: “Every passenger gets warmth, friendliness and extra care. And someone may get a wife.” At American, ads boast that the airline’s stews are marriage material. “A girl who can smile for five hours is hard to find,” the brochure says, “not to mention a wife who can remember what 124 people want for dinner.” At National, the pleasing spirit has been taken to the next level. Last month, the airline spent nearly $10 million on this Madison Avenue campaign: “I’m Cheryl. Fly me.”

  National’s stews also appear in their airline’s television commercials. They stare lustily into the camera as they deliver their punch line: “I’m going to fly you like you’ve never been flown before.”

  To boycott National, protesters have formed picket lines in Washington, D.C., and New York. Women’s libbers are filing papers in court and demanding judges ban the Fly Me ad campaign. On the streets they march behind barricades.

  “Go Fly Yourself, National,” their pickets read.

  At Northwest, petitions are going around for the stews to sign. The flight attendants want to unionize. Flo hasn’t signed them. She’s happy to have her job, after what she’s been through.

  “Hi. Welcome aboard. Can I check your ticket?”

  Kurata, George. A steel importer from Japan.

  Next in line. Zrim Spreckel, Cord. He runs a printing company in Seattle.

  Flo checks more boarding passes. Her head itches. It’s her wig. The bob is brunette and shaped like a space helmet.

  Next passenger. Pollart, Les. Big feller. Could have been a tackle. He owns a trucking company. Next: Labissoniere, George. Pollart’s lawyer.

  “Hi. Welcome aboard.…”

  The wig. Flo needs it. She never has time to do her hair before flights. She keeps it long and black, like Cher. Cher is number one on the charts. Flo knows the lyrics to her songs.

  I was born in the wagon of a travelin’ show …

  Flo knows a bit about fame herself. She won several beauty prizes as a child. She was voted Miss Pink Tomato, Miss Swimming Pool, Miss Fordyce. Freshman year she made Redbug varsity cheerleading. She barked out the letters so loud—Gimme an R! Gimme an E!—she could barely speak the next day. It was cadet-style cheering: lots of straight arms and snaps of the black and red pom-poms.

  Fordyce is the name of the town where she grew up. It is a speck on the Arkansas map, located on the way to New Orleans. It was too small for her. After high school, she wanted to go to the most exotic place she could think of. Tahiti. She wanted to stick her feet in the black-sand beaches and learn the hula dance.

  She applied for work at eleven airlines. Her pa drove her to Little Rock and to Nashville for interviews and told her not to worry, Flo, this was the one, he could feel it. She got the same letter back eleven times: “Dear Miss Schaffner, We are sorry to inform you that …”

  Flipping through Glamour magazine, Flo saw an ad for a flight training school in St. Paul. She enrolled. It felt like the military. There was a giant pool and she had to dive in the water and save dummy passengers. She was given instructions on beauty. How to apply f
oundation, how to sit, how to talk. Guidelines for stews had been printed in manuals.

  Be a good, sincere listener. Ask leading questions and show interest in conversation. This allows the passenger the feeling of importance.

  Avoid talking about yourself and encourage passengers to talk about themselves. This procedure will make their trip pleasant.

  Avoid argumentation. The aim of Stewardess work is to please passengers. Argument creates opposition and disgust and will not please, therefore defeating the aim of Stewardess work.

  The airlines were not the Great Escape she imagined. It was a cruel and lonely journey without a destination. To pass time, she ate. Doughnuts disappeared by the glazed dozen. Empty buckets of chicken and pizza boxes stacked up by the garbage. Flo tried to disguise the weight by wearing her serving apron, but her bulging hips bumped passengers in the aisles. On the way to Fargo, she was caught.

  Spotters. Flo was called into the Northwest management office and told to step on their scale. This time she shocked herself: 185 pounds! Northwest placed her on unpaid probation. She went to a doctor who prescribed diet pills. The pills made the pangs of hunger disappear. She starved herself and got her job back.

  Next passenger. Mitchell, Bill. University of Oregon sophomore. He wears a paisley shirt, shows his ticket, and sits in 18B. It is the last row of the jet, port side, middle seat. Mitchell is looking forward to Thanksgiving weekend. His old friends will be back home in Seattle, and they will all party by the lake like they did in high school. He looks over the rows of seats in the cabin. The flight is half-full. He notices her immediately.