Skyjack Read online

  I ask him why he cares at all.

  He has a grudge, against the government, he says, for subjecting him to hypnosis in the late 1960s. He was placed in a small room, he says. The doctor showed him a sparkly crystal and there was a metronome, and just like in the movies the doctor snapped his fingers and—poof!—Knoss was under the spell.

  The hypnosis poisoned his mind and he wants payback for his nightmares. D.B. Cooper ruined his life, he says. He thought he would go to prison for what he witnessed in the late 1960s.

  In Bloomington we pull into the back parking lot of Aqua Court. “Coop,” or Duane Weber, lived in the 9120 building with his wife, Knoss says. He can’t remember her name. Knoss lived in 9150 with his wife, Cheri. They were the caretakers at Aqua Court. Knoss mowed the lawns, cleaned the filters on the swimming pool. Rent was $105 a month. He points to a snowy patch of grass between 9120 and 9150.

  “That’s where they practiced,” he says. “The parachute—it was white—was unfolded on the grass.”

  There was another figure involved, an employee of Northwest Orient airlines, Knoss says. He told them what to ask for, how the pilots would react. Mr. Northwest was interested in airplane safety. Airplanes were getting hijacked on a regular basis and pilots were getting killed and airline bosses were not doing anything about it, only joining together to break the unions.

  It was true. The high-profile nature of the Cooper case and others did in fact prompt legislators and administrators to install magnetometers in airports. But were McCoy and Weber behind it together? Couldn’t be. What was in it for Weber? With McCoy’s help, Duane Weber was released from prison, Knoss says. Duane wanted to keep his freedom. A professional thief, he also wanted to keep the ransom money. His jump, his reward. Then, according to Knoss, Duane Weber lost the ransom on the first jump—so McCoy decided to try pulling the job himself on United Airlines Flight 855.

  How could I trust Knoss? The whopper he was telling could not be accurate. But what if it was? Or part of it was? How could I afford not to listen?

  Knoss has files back at the house. Do I want to review them?

  Sure.

  The snow is picking up. Heavy flakes. The rental slides on the highway back to Anoka and down the driveway to Knoss’s home.

  I follow Knoss through the front door, and he shuffles up the stairs. The house is a wreck. Boxes are everywhere, closets are stuffed with old toys, more boxes, framing equipment, cases of V8. The dining room is buried under papers, antiques, tchotchkes.

  I use the bathroom. The cabinet over the sink is open, and the shelves are lined with empty pill bottles. I try the spigot to wash my hands. It doesn’t work.

  What happened to Bob Knoss?

  I walk into the living room. It is a graveyard of old clocks and bronze statuettes, a small army of figurine soldiers that stand guard on the shag carpet. The soldiers are designed to protect the clocks, he says.

  “That one’s Don Juan. That’s Don Cesar.”

  He is sitting at his computer, trying to find the documents on his hard drive. He spins around in his chair to explain the business of repairing old clocks. As he talks, the screen saver on the computer screen behind him flashes on.

  I see breasts. Huge breasts. Colossal jugs. The screen changes. Now it’s a thong buried in the crevice of an oiled-up butt. Now it’s a vagina. Now another vagina.

  I look around Knoss’s computer station. I see a copy of Domination Nation, a porn movie that features women taking over the world. Richard McCoy played a role in Domination Nation under a different name, Knoss claims.

  Wait now. How could McCoy play a role in a porn film if he was shot dead by FBI agents back in 1974?

  All a hoax, Knoss claims. McCoy never died in the shootout. His death was faked.

  I want to get out of here. Fast. But I have more questions. I wonder what Knoss thinks about Albert Weinberg’s comic Les Aventures de Dan Cooper. What possible connection could a career con like Duane Weber and a war hero turned porn star like McCoy have with a French cartoon?

  The puzzle of the French comic book is easy to explain, Knoss says. McCoy was an avid comic book collector. Some of his friends were comic book artists. McCoy gave Duane Weber the name Dan Cooper to use as an alias. McCoy must have been a fan of the strip.

  Can any of this be true?

  I go to the libraries in Bloomington and Minneapolis. I scan old phone books for the names McCoy and Weber and Dan Cooper. I search for other aliases. I search the microfiche at the Minnesota Historical Society for stories in the local Bloomington Sun that Knoss claimed were printed in the summer of 1968 or 1969 about Duane’s wife getting arrested for stealing checks. I can’t find anything in the old newsprint. Have I missed it? Are my eyes so tired that I glazed over the magic words that would place Duane Weber and Richard McCoy in the same town before the hijacking, and prove that Knoss is telling the truth about his hypnosis after he dodged the draft?

  I look again in the Minnesota microfiche. Nothing. I have the rolls sent to New York. I go to the public library. I look one more time. I can’t find anything.

  Is Knoss lying? If so, why? Have the painkillers created these whoppers? Or are his facts off?

  Late one night, I find myself scanning the film credits of Domination Nation. What am I doing? It is simply not possible for McCoy to be in the porno movie. He was shot dead by FBI agents seventeen years before Domination Nation was produced. But here I am, looking anyway. And right there, in the credits of the post-apocalyptic porn—in which “women rule and men live like wild animals,” according to one write-up—I find the name: Tommy Gunn.

  Wasn’t that Duane Weber’s friend? Didn’t Jo Weber claim to meet Gunn once in Mobile, Alabama? Didn’t he tell her that Duane knew people in high places? Is Gunn McCoy? Is McCoy still alive?

  “Believing in Bob Knoss is like believing in the tooth fairy,” Jo Weber tells me. “I only found one truth in ten years of talking to that man. He must have known Duane.” But how?

  I fly into Pensacola, Florida. It’s taken over two years of phone calls—most of them late at night, all of them long—to secure an interview with Jo Weber. In Cooperland, Jo is widely considered a madwoman. She has talked to every Cooper hunter, witness, agent. Her posts to the Drop Zone are endless, miles of text and rants in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS or new bolded clues that make no SENSE! as her streams of thought go on. I don’t know who I am going to find: the widow of Dan Cooper, or another Bob Knoss.

  She lives outside of Pensacola. It’s an hour’s drive across the panhandle. As I pass churches and doughnut shops and parking lot barbecue pits, I think of Jo’s rule. She made it clear before I left: no pictures. Jo does not want people to know what she looks like. She rarely leaves her house. Has her obsession with the case turned her haggard? Or is she so paranoid that she doesn’t want any of Duane’s spooky associates to know what she looks like?

  I pull into the driveway.

  She is in the garage, smoking a Doral. She wears lipstick and blush. Her white hair is swept up into a bun. Her shirt is a pattern of pink and purple plaid, the sleeves rolled up as if she’s been gardening. She is not haggard. She is an attractive woman. She seems strangely … normal. Maybe Jo Weber isn’t such a loo-loo after all?

  “Oh, it’s ruined my life,” she says about the case as we go inside. She cracks open a Diet Dr. Pepper and takes me on the tour.

  Her home is immaculate. The carpets are groomed and dirt free. The sheets of the beds are made and taut. Kitchen counters spotless.

  She shows me her bedroom. Also spotless. On the bureau is a picture of her third husband. She married him after Duane. He died several years ago.

  “Hi, Jim,” she says and waves to the photo.

  Her files are in order. The binders are stored in suitcases she keeps in the trunk of her car. Jo doesn’t leave her home without taking Duane’s files with her. How could she? What if there was a fire? What if she was robbed? These files are all she has to show for her fifteen-year odyssey e
xposing her ex-husband’s secret past.

  We set up in the kitchen. She removes her evidence from a box. She shows me the Soldier of Fortune magazine she found in his safety deposit box. I touch it. It’s real. She shows me the ostrich skin wallet that was recovered in Duane’s van, along with the fake licenses, Navy ID. It’s all real. I read the gobbledygook of newsprint hidden away in the billfold: “Bombproof and crowded with oxygen … terrace, volcallure at casa Cugat, Abbe Wants Cugie Gets.”

  All of it is here, just like she said. I want to hear her taped phone conversations with Mary Jane Ross, who was married to Duane at the time of the hijacking. I want to hear Mary Jane’s alleged confession that she lived with James Earl Ray’s wife while Duane was in prison.

  I’d read up on Ray. I couldn’t find evidence of him marrying until he was back in prison, for shooting Martin Luther King. Jo goes into her safe, produces the cassettes and a recorder. She presses play. The conversation is the same as she has said.

  Within the binders, Jo has printed out volumes of old e-mails, messages in which she has desperately tried to enlist the help of others on her hunt. In some messages, she refers to topics he might have said or somebody might have told her, like “Operation Mongoose,” the covert CIA attempt to assassinate Castro. But too many years have passed. She can’t remember who told her about Operation Mongoose. She has talked to too many people, sent too many e-mails. It’s all part of a trap she’s built for herself. She can’t prove Duane was Cooper. She can’t prove he wasn’t.

  Duane Weber has been vetted. The Bureau has checked out his background, some physical evidence such as hairs from a razor Jo sent in. They have ruled him out. Using the partial DNA strain found on the tie, Carr says he was also able to rule Duane out.

  Jo is unfazed. If the DNA sample on the tie is incomplete, how could the Bureau trust it? Besides, how do the feds know the traces of saliva on the tie are Duane’s? What if he borrowed the tie before the hijacking? What if he stole it? What if an agent drooled on it?

  She can’t scrub the lyrics from her mind: “If you don’t know me by now,/You will never never never know me …”

  Was this another clue Duane had left her?

  “Perhaps [Duane] sang that song to me for a reason,” Jo says. “Damn him for ever telling me anything. Damn him! Why couldn’t he have just kept his damn secret?”

  Jo Weber has enemies.

  Orange1: “Plenty of people were listening to Jo’s story … until it became clear that what there wasn’t so much a ‘story’ as a hodge podge of unverified statements, suppositions, grasping at straws and wild theories.”

  georger: “Jo, the mistake you make is thinking YOU are important. The rest of the world is laughing or trying to avoid you, trying to work around you, or without you. You are living a lie here. The emotional part of your brain is running the rational part of your brain.”

  nigel99: “When the threads started your story was really interesting … over the last few months a very different picture has emerged and I strongly believe that you have been hoodwinked … I feel very sorry for you as I think you are probably an innocent old lady …”

  Sluggo_Monster: “Yes Jo … Whatever you say Jo. It’s obvious that you ‘Just Don’t Get It.’ Oh yeah … for everybody else: Did you know the FBI lied to Jo? I hadn’t heard that!”

  snowmman: “Oh and one more thing. Jo: you’re a nut case.”

  Jo’s biggest enemy in Cooperland is Cooper hunter Jerry Thomas.

  Jerry Thomas: “Jo your still here shocking. I don’t Know why But it is cool that you are. Your funny in a ignorante way But still ypour post and fiction, Is refreshing. Have fun Kiddo. I’m sure everyone on this forum enjoys your fiction stories … One more thing leave this forum. Jerry”

  Jerry’s cyber assaults bring Jo to tears. “That man is evil,” she tells me one night, crying. “He’s like the interrogators they use in Iraq.”

  Why can’t she ignore him?

  “You can call me anything you want, but you can’t call me a liar,” she says.

  Jerry is unapologetic. The Drop Zone, which he recently discovered, is a place for a serious exchange of information. It should be presented accordingly. Jo has taken over the case with her hysterics, he and many others feel. She’s simply getting in the way.

  So is Tom Kaye, Jerry thinks. After our field trip, they had a few conversations about Tom’s findings and the paper Tom was planning to write. Jerry expressed interest in being a bylined contributor on his paper. Tom told Jerry he was not “part of the Team,” meaning his team of science buddies: Alan and Carol.

  Jerry was offended.

  “What does he mean I wasn’t part of the Team? Not part of the Team! He invited me!”

  Three months after the trip, Jerry returned to the Washougal area to see how far the river had moved the packet of bills Tom had thrown in. Jerry walked down the path under the small bridge like we had done and followed the current as it moved. He scanned the water, looking for the money bundle with: REWARD IF FOUND!

  Jerry found it. Didn’t take long. It had traveled only about a hundred yards downstream. It was trapped in a pool of water, under a boulder. Tom was right. The Washougal was too weak to move the money to the Columbia. It would have taken a biblical flood to get the bills there.

  Jerry is unfazed. Once the seasons change, he’ll be back and get his feet moving through the woods. If he can find the time.

  His daughter, Charlene, is now living with him. After our trip, she split up with her husband and lost custody of her children. She slept on park benches and on the street for a few weeks. She was spending any money she had on drugs. She decided to walk the I-5 bridge that spans the Columbia River and commit suicide.

  On the bridge, she called Jerry.

  “Either help me or come to my funeral,” she said.

  She later moved into a trailer on his land.

  “It’s hard,” she tells me. “I’m not a bad person. He won’t let me do anything. Like the other night I want to go dancing. He tells me, ‘A mother your age should not be outside dancing.’ But it’s like, there are people fifty and sixty years old at that bar.”

  Charlene overdosed a few months later. She had hitchhiked into town to go to a bar. When Jerry arrived at the hospital, the doctor told him that Charlene had died at least twice before she was resuscitated. After checking out of the hospital, Charlene moved into town to look for a job. I ask her why she thinks her father has spent so long looking for Cooper.

  “At first it was the money, he wasn’t doing too good then,” she says. “Now I think it’s the publicity. He’s a bragga-muffin.”

  “The Curse, the goddamn Curse,” Tom Kaye says when we meet six months after the trip at his ranch. He’s in his basement lab. He is shaking his head.

  “I’ve become one of them,” he says. “What separates me from Jo Weber?”

  His forensic investigation has backfired. The implosion started when he returned from Seattle and had a conversation with another metallurgist about the high amount of silver in the Cooper bills.

  The metallurgist was not surprised. In the 1980s, the FBI used silver nitrates to locate fingerprints on criminal evidence. Tom raced to Wal-Mart to get a nitrate test. He came home and tested the bills.

  “They were loaded,” he says.

  It was a gut-wrenching blunder. How did he manage to make such an epic mistake? He spent six months and thousands of dollars to discover the Bureau’s own fingerprint dusting solution.

  “It was like finding a treasure map to the Lost Dutchman’s Mine, and digging and digging and there’s nothing there but dirt,” he says. “I don’t want to be part of that story. I want a success story.”

  The pollen tests were revealing. Once Tom analyzed the sticky tape he’d used on the tie, he did not find traces of pine. The lack of pine pollen suggests the tie did not come from the Pacific Northwest. Relying on the expertise of a pollen expert in Belgium, Tom was able to ascertain the species of flower the pol
len had come from: impatiens.

  “The problem is, there’s about a thousand different varieties of impatiens,” Tom says. “It happens to be one of the most common flowers.”

  In his lab, he pops a slide in a microscope to show me a grain of pollen. The slide is of a flower from outside his old house in Chicago. He brings the sample into focus. He discovers another problem. The pollen from his house flower looks similar to the pollen he saw on the Cooper bills. Was the expert in Belgium wrong? Could he be sure the pollen on the tie was actually impatiens? Even if he could, what would that prove? The pollen is another bust.

  And what about the gunk he found in the tie?

  “Just gunk,” he says.

  What about the hair he found in the tie knot?

  “Wool.”

  Wool?

  “It came from a sheep.”

  And the dandruff?

  “Plastic, or white paint from the clip of the clip-on tie.”

  Analyzing the evidence, he was able to make one conclusion. Cooper did survive the jump, he thinks. Under the microscope, Tom noticed the money had been bound for so long, the ink of serial numbers on the bills had bled into each other. When he looked at them further, he found that they lined up precisely behind each other in the stack.

  Tom did not expect this. When he used his fishing rod to cast a packet of bills into the Columbia River, what happened was clear: The bills fanned out in the water, like the fins of an exotic fish. So if the Cooper bills had floated loosely in the water, when they dried and stuck together, the serial numbers would not be in perfect alignment. They would be slightly off.

  Which means what exactly?

  “The money did not float down the river,” Tom says.

  So how did it get to Tena Bar?

  “Nonnatural means,” he says.

  Which means?

  “People … If there’s one story the money tells us, it’s that.”

  He does have more information. A new lead, he says. He found it by accident, under his microscope. I can see he is getting excited just talking about it. The lead, he says, “could end the case once and for all.”