Skyjack Read online

  He remembers the faces. Tipper, the old fisherman; George, his dog with the smelly breath; and the feeling of the sand against his forearm.

  But as he got older, Brian says, he wondered about these memories. How much of what he knew was really what he knew? Were his memories his own? Or was his mind imbued with the stories of those around him? How much can one remember at eight?

  He wondered about his parents. Did they lie to him? Was his doubt natural? Was he the boy who became famous around the world for actually finding buried treasure? Or was he a fraud?

  He didn’t think so. But how could he be sure?

  Before he sold the Cooper bills, Brian approached his parents. He asked his mom, Patricia, if he really found the money. He did, she told him. His father told him the same.

  Still, Brian was unsure. When his grandmother got sick, Brian went to Florida to visit her in the hospital. His cousin Denise was there at the hospital, too. It was Denise’s mother, Crystal, who had always claimed Denise was the one who found the Cooper money. Brian hadn’t seen Denise in years.

  Brian remembered how close he and Denise had been as kids. They watched movies together on the couch. They built a fort underneath the sheet on his bed.

  Brian felt that part of his recovery from drug addiction and other turmoil in his life was to be honest with himself and those around him. He was willing to accept the fact that he wasn’t the boy who found the money, if that was true.

  In the hospital, Brian pulled Denise aside. He asked her what happened. Was he the one who found the money in the sand? Or was she?

  Denise didn’t want to talk about it.

  “We both know what happened, Brian,” she said.

  But he really doesn’t.

  In Seattle, the evidence is waiting for us in the Bureau field office. Special Agent Carr has spread out more files, photos, the parachute canopy, the clip-on tie.

  Tom places a loupe on his eye. He examines the reserve parachute first. The canopy is watermelon pink. Tom inspects each incision. He counts the number of cut shroud lines.

  That’s strange, he thinks. Five shroud lines are cut. According to the Bureau file, agents first discovered that only three shroud lines had been cut during the hijacking. Who cut the other two? Did Bureau agents snip them as souvenirs?

  The clip-on tie is next for inspection. Tom uses sticky tape and presses it against the polyester fabric to collect pollen samples. Despite its age, the pollen he finds could tell him where the tie has been.

  He studies the fabric under his loupe. He rolls his eyes upward and inspects the clip of the clip-on tie. The hook is painted white. It is stripped in spots.

  Nothing here.

  He scans the fat part of the tie. Under the loupe, Tom’s eye combs the polyester fields of microscopic fibers. How incredible it would be to stumble upon a flake of dandruff! A hair follicle!

  Tom thinks of the dandruff and hair on his own computer keyboard back on his ranch in Arizona. He is always amazed at how much of it finds its way into the keys and how annoying it is to clean it all out. How does so much gunk get in there? As he thinks about this, he moves on from the fat part of the tie to the fake knot of the tie. Then he gets the idea.

  The feds missed it! In the lab at Quantico, Bureau scientists looked for forensic matter on the tie. Where they didn’t look is where a good DNA sample may have been hiding all these years. In the tie.

  A brief argument ensues. Metallurgist Alan Stone isn’t sure they should do this. If they break open the knot of the tie to extract samples, Tom and the Team could be criminally liable, right? Isn’t this tampering with evidence? Stone can’t go to jail. He has a wife. He’d have to hire a lawyer. At the very least, Tom and the Team need to protect themselves: get approvals, sign forms. They can’t rush into this.

  I offer the position, unsolicited, that Tom and the Team move now and fast and quietly. Our window is small. An approval could take weeks.

  I’m getting pushy. We aren’t coming back here, folks. Open up the sucker. Get the damn sample. And let’s get out of here.

  Larry Carr agrees. As official Cooper case agent, he’s been stymied by the Bureau’s watch-your-ass-at-all-times attitude. Besides, Carr already received permission to have the Cooper money delivered to Tom for analysis. Isn’t allowing Tom to open up the tie (and potentially destroying it) the same thing?

  It isn’t. At least not technically. But it’s a good enough rationale for Carr, which is good enough for Tom, which is good enough for Carol. Alan folds. The scientists go to work.

  “Is there a light here somewhere?” Tom says.

  “Turn that projector on,” Alan says.

  “Don’t talk as much if you can.”

  “Don’t open it up too much.”

  “WE GOT GUNK.”

  “Wait, wait, Tom,” Carol says. “There, I got a light. Seriously. Where do you want it?”

  “WE GOT GUNK.”

  “Whoa.”

  “There’s some hair.”

  “Hold on. I don’t have the focal … oh yeah, I see.”

  “Oh yeah, there’s some hair in there.”

  “I don’t think we got the hair we saw.”

  “Pull it apart.”

  “You see the hair?”

  “Nope.”

  “Ah yeah.”

  “And some dandruff flakes.”

  “Hold it, shine it in there.”

  “I SEE GUNK! The tie is loaded!”

  “So that ties it all together.”

  “Look at this cheap tie.”

  “I can photograph into that.”

  “That’s good. One more.”

  “I got a gazillion megapixels.”

  “Hold it right there.”

  “Oh yeah. We be the bad D.B. Cooper investigators. Yeah, baby, yeah. Show me the money.”

  “It’s in the Columbia.”

  “How do they look?”

  “There’s obviously stuff in there. Mmmmmm.”

  “You got the hair?”

  “There’s a hair in there.”

  “At least one. Now we got some horsepower. Yeah, baby, yeah. We be the bad D.B. Cooper investigators.…”

  Later that night we sit on the bed in Tom’s motel room. We toast each other as if an imaginary bottle of champagne has been uncorked to honor the Team’s improbable coup. In a few hours, Tom was able to do what the FBI couldn’t: find evidence that could reveal the genetic makeup of the hijacker. If the gunk Tom collected is good enough (and Tom believes it is), the DNA can be grown and identified and run through millions of gene libraries. A match could be imminent.

  “I don’t want to get carried away, guys,” Tom says, “but we might actually solve this thing.”

  September 15, 2009

  New York, New York

  Jimmy’s Corner is a dive bar in midtown that is as narrow as a subway car, and the walls are crowded with boxing photographs. The back area is a stockroom of sorts. Skipp Porteous and I sit here to discuss the case. More than two years have passed since Porteous told me about the envelope he delivered to Nora Ephron for Lyle Christiansen. Now, more than ever, the Manhattan PI is convinced Kenny Christiansen is D.B. Cooper.

  “I’d say with ninety-five percent certainty it’s him,” Porteous says.

  I have doubts.

  Himmelsbach was right. Kenny was too short. In the Bureau’s Cooper file, I found an interview with Tina Mucklow in which agents had asked the stewardess her height. “Five eight,” she replied. And the hijacker, she added, was taller than she was.

  Ken Christiansen also did not have enough hair. While the sketch showed a balding man, the hijacker was described by at least two witnesses (paint man Robert Gregory and first-class stew Alice Hancock) as having wavy hair. “Marcelled,” Gregory had said. In 1971, Ken Christiansen had thin straight hair.

  Kenny looked like the Bing Crosby sketch, but so did a lot of people. Besides, it isn’t clear if Dan Cooper resembled the Bing Crosby sketch. Or the next composite.
Or the next one. There were multiple sketches, all different.

  Kenny’s motive was also weak. Despite being a loner, Kenny, according to Lyle, seemed to carry a balanced if not sunny outlook on life, a naive Midwestern optimism. I can’t see him in the back of the plane, holding the wire with a clip on the end and telling Tina, “They’re not going to take me alive.”

  Porteous disagrees. And he has proof. It’s a photograph that Lyle found after Kenny’s death.

  I look at the photo. Kenny is wearing a black raincoat. In his left hand, he holds a briefcase. In his right hand, he holds a white canvas sack.

  Now, Porteous asks, why would Kenny wear the same outfit as the hijacker, and carry what looked like a replica of the briefcase bomb and a cloth bank bag? Analyzing the photo closely, Porteous also noticed a Christmas wreath on the door. He asked Lyle when the photo was taken.

  “1971,” Lyle told him.

  If the Christmas wreath was up, that means the image must have been taken just after the hijacking. So who took the picture?

  Kenny did. It was taken on a self-timer, Lyle told Porteous.

  So why would Kenny take this extremely weird picture of himself that seems to connect him to the hijacking? Or was it all just another coincidence?

  The answer, Porteous says, is in a tree. Or was in a tree. Porteous spoke with Dan Rattenbury, owner of the Priced Right print shop. Before he purchased the property from the former owners, Rattenbury told Porteous a young boy had once found $2,000 in $20 bills buried inside the crack of a tree in Kenny’s backyard.

  So Lyle was right! Kenny did bury the money in the backyard! Fuck. I knew I should have rented that metal detector.

  I ask Porteous for more information. Were the bills in packets? Or loose? Were there any rubber bands? Did Porteous find the boy who found them?

  “I can’t tell you,” he says.

  Can’t tell me? Why not?

  “I’m writing my own book,” he says.

  “In the older models, I feel like a bird because I can feel every little gust on the wing,” Barb Dayton says. She is talking about flying to a reporter from the University of Washington newspaper. Ron and Pat Foreman found the clip, which confirms Barb’s claustrophobia, her general hatred of the airlines, and her fear of commercial planes.

  “I don’t like being under someone else’s control,” she says. “In my plane I feel like I’m totally inside the sky, totally free.”

  I liked Barb as a suspect. She had the grudge that Kenny didn’t. As an electrician, she knew how to rig a bomb. She knew dynamite from working in the logging camps. She was suicidal. A civilian pilot, she knew the air routes across the Pacific Northwest. She knew how to parachute. She even found it “boring.”

  She was also a chain-smoker who didn’t have money, who would have smoked coupon cigs like Raleighs. I could see her in Dan Cooper’s out-of-date clothes: the russet suit with the wide lapels, the skinny clip-on tie. It all could have come from the Goodwill bin where she shopped for clothes after her sex-change operation. As a woman, she also had access to makeup. She could powder her face bronze. Or she could be herself: part Native American. Most of all, Barb was cocky. I could see her reading about hijacker Paul Cini ten days before Thanksgiving Eve and saying to herself—just as she told her doctors about her father—“I can do anything he can do.” And do it better.

  Skyjackers, I learned, were not creators. They were imitators. After interviewing dozens of skyjackers, Hubbard found that the crimes were last-minute rush jobs, conceived to cure a feeling of emotional despair.

  “All of the forces in life converge in one moment in which there is an impulsive act,” Hubbard wrote.

  Yes, Barb Dayton was D.B. Cooper. She had it all!

  Except the hair (blond), the height (five eight), and the right color eyes (blue). And what was her connection to the French-Canadian comic book character Dan Cooper? And if Barb got away with the hijacking, why did Brian Ingram find the Cooper bills at Tena Bar? Did Barb plant them there? Was it Barb who tossed them off the bridge upriver from Tena Bar and not Duane Weber?

  Richard Floyd McCoy Jr. is a phantom. It’s as if any evidence of him has been scrubbed from history. Sure, there are legal files from his case. I spend weeks poring over them. I reread the official statements for his military medals that were submitted as evidence in his trial.

  With the position of the compound marked by a flare and the firefight marked by tracer rounds, McCoy began a series of firing passes, launching rockets directly into the Vietcong positions until all his ammunition was expended.

  Did this really happen? Was the enemy “completely routed,” or was this fiction? Are medal honors always this detailed? Or are McCoy’s military records fake?

  The facts in McCoy’s case file are curious. Why did he travel to Las Vegas during the Cooper hijacking? Who did make the collect call to his home from the Tropicana hotel?

  Karen McCoy must know a lot. Was McCoy Cooper? Did McCoy have a hand in the Cooper case? Did she and McCoy ever live in Bloomington, Minnesota, and happen to know a picture-framer named Bob Knoss?

  After a few months of digging, I find her attorney in Salt Lake City. He won’t tell me where Karen lives, how to reach her. She doesn’t want to talk about the Cooper case, or about her dead husband, he says. I write letters. No response. Karen, what are you hiding?

  I find Floyd, McCoy’s father, in the obituary section of the Charlotte News & Observer. The obituary is brief and lists all of McCoy’s family members except McCoy. Why did the family choose to leave out Floyd’s first and only son?

  I find Russell, McCoy’s brother, living in North Carolina. I leave messages. No reply.

  I need to talk to Karen. Or Chante. Or Richard Jr., his son. They must know something.

  I can’t find them. I hire a private investigator. He gets the numbers. I call each one. I leave messages. I leave more messages.

  I fly to Minnesota in a snowstorm. The story Bob Knoss told Jo Weber about a conspiracy and McCoy handling Duane Weber had sounded absurd. But what about the Cooper case so far hasn’t been absurd?

  Besides, Knoss has references. After the U.S. News story on Duane Weber was printed in 2000, he contacted Don Nichols, a prominent lawyer in Minneapolis. Knoss worried he might be criminally liable. He claims he witnessed McCoy engineer the hijacking.

  Nichols was at first puzzled by Knoss’s story. The hijacking was in 1971. Why didn’t Knoss come forward sooner?

  Knoss couldn’t remember. His memory was blocked.

  Blocked? Nichols asked how that could be.

  He’d been hypnotized, Knoss said. By the military. At least he thinks it was the military. He can’t be sure.

  Knoss’s recall started after his accident on the beach. A wave crashed over him, broke his back. Knoss could barely walk. It was the heavy painkillers, he thinks, that unlocked the memories of the hijacking that he had been ordered to forget.

  Lawyer Nichols was suspicious. Was Knoss making this all up? Then again, how could anyone spin a yarn so fanciful?

  They met in the lawyer’s office. Knoss told his story again.

  “He presents well,” Nichols tells me.

  Knoss’s second reference is R. A. Randall, a former public defender who became a judge on the second-highest court in Minnesota.

  I meet Randall at a Perkins outside Minneapolis for breakfast. He is wearing a camouflage hunting cap and sweatshirt. His fingers are covered in turquoise rings, mementos from Indian reservations.

  I ask the retired judge whether he thinks Bob Knoss is telling the truth about witnessing the planning of the hijacking.

  “If there were two men in Minnesota that I would expect not to fabricate or lie, they would be Homer and Bob Knoss,” Randall says.

  Randall grew up with the Knoss family. Bob’s father, Homer, repaired old clocks. Homer taught his son the trade. They both had mechanical minds, like engineers, not storytellers.

  “If Bob Knoss says, ‘I tried to dodge the draft
,’ I’d bet lunch he tried to dodge the draft,” Randall says. “If Bob Knoss says, ‘I got hypnotized,’ I’d bet dinner he was hypnotized. The question is, what happens to the mind when you get hypnotized?”

  The sun is coming in bright off the snow in the parking lot and through the window.

  “I believe he perceived it. The question is, what did he perceive? The question is, are we dealing with a case of the seven blind sisters, where, you know, one grabs the head and one grabs the neck and one grabs the dick and they think they have got their hands on a snake but really they are holding on to an elephant built like a wall of mud?”

  Randall takes a slug of coffee.

  “The question is, is Bob Knoss after the last digit of pi?”

  Bob Knoss lives in Anoka, an exurb forty miles north of Minneapolis. After a few turns, I see a narrow, wooded driveway covered in snow. My rental careens on the ice and just misses the trees as I make my way down the slippery driveway.

  I see a sign out front. PICTURE FRAMING, it says.

  Knoss squeezes out the front door. He is big like a linebacker and wide like a billboard. Across his chest is a football jersey. “Hawaii 00,” it reads. His eyeglasses are off center and smudged. A bushy goatee hangs from his chin in the style of old pharaohs.

  Knoss can’t remember exactly where he was hypnotized. We drive around, pull into a few strip plazas. He thinks it was in here, a makeshift office amid pizza parlors and surgical supply stores.

  We finally give up. Knoss can’t remember. That was part of his hypnosis. He was told to forget everything.

  Our next stop is Aqua Court Apartments, in Bloomington.

  On the way he grooms over the story once again, careful to separate what he witnessed (“Now that’s fact”) and what he has extrapolated (“Now that’s me trying to piece things together”). He insists everything he tells me is true and that he’d take a lie detector test to prove it.