Skyjack Page 24

  I push him. Is he telling me the truth? What kind of forensic matter could Tom have discovered that would be such a case closer?

  He won’t tell me.

  I push harder. He won’t budge. He and the Team are thinking of writing their own book.

  “Either it’s the biggest and best thing to happen to us, or the biggest and worst,” he says. “The stakes are so high, success or failure, the balance is on a knife edge.”

  I call around Cooperland. Tom did find something under his microscope. The forensic matter was in the fibers of the Cooper tie. It is titanium sponge.

  Among the elements, titanium sponge is rare. Its primary use is in very fast airplanes. Titanium is extremely resistant to heat. So, engineers crafted planes such as the SR-71 and prototypes for the Boeing Supersonic Transport from titanium.

  In light of the timing of the hijacking, the discovery of titanium sponge is curious. In the fall of 1971, Boeing canceled its Supersonic Transport program and laid off the program’s workers. Was it conceivable that a Boeing worker handled the titanium sponge while working on the Supersonic Transport, got particles of titanium sponge on his tie, then boarded Northwest 305 in a grudge-fueled moment after getting canned? More enticing is that extremely few companies processed titanium sponge for Boeing. The leading company is Timet, based out of Dallas. Was Dan Cooper a Timet employee?

  Once I learn about Tom’s discovery of titanium sponge, I ask him about it. He refers me to his lawyer.

  “This is business now,” he says. “Once it’s business, the guns come out.”

  I call a few experts on titanium sponge. While Timet handled the bulk of titanium sponge, other companies handled it, too, they say. Titanium was also used on submarines as well as airplanes. A lot of people could have handled titanium sponge prior to the hijacking.

  Titanium sponge was also prevalent in household items, especially white paint, experts say.

  White paint? Tom told me the dandruff he thought he found had turned out to be flecks of white paint off the clip of the clip-on tie. Was this the source of the titanium sponge? Did Tom waste his first investigation on the FBI’s silver-heavy fingerprint solution, and his second investigation on flecks of white paint? Is Tom chasing himself around the case in circles? Am I?

  Later, I get a call from Jerry Warner (aka Georger). He’s upset, needs to talk. In his own lab, Jerry Warner has made a new discovery on the Cooper bills, he says.

  What is it?

  “Silver.”

  Silver again?

  “There are other forms of silver in the fiber threads of the money,” he says. “Completely separate and distinct from the silver nitrate issue. Okay? And these little beauties are sitting there in patterns—oh, it is a sight to behold! It’s absolutely nature at its best!”

  I need a minute to get this straight. Basically, there is natural silver in the Cooper bills, and it was there the entire time, masked by the silver nitrate that was contained in the FBI fingerprint solution that Tom found and ruined his hypothesis.

  Warner is cackling with laughter. “It is absolutely hilarious. We finally proved there was silver! From a lab standpoint, this is really funny.”

  Can he describe what the natural silver looks like under the microscope?

  “Like little doughnuts.… And these little buggers are just being held in there by those cotton fibers like babies in a bassinet.”

  So what does it all mean for the case? Does the natural silver suggest the money has been at Tena Bar the entire time?

  “Not the whole time. I have reasons to believe it maybe came down in different stages,” Warner says.

  But from where?

  “We’re pursuing that,” Warner says. He claims to have interviewed scores of former agents and air traffic officials. Warner’s theory on the flight path is that Northwest 305 came west of the flight path, and close to Tena Bar.

  “Whatever you do, I beg you, do not talk to Jerry Thomas about this information,” Warner says. “If the flight path points west, the Washougal, as you know, is out for good. Once he got wind of where we were going, he was not happy.”

  I ask Warner why he thinks Thomas is trying to defend the Washougal theory so fiercely. Is it because he doesn’t want to look foolish after somebody proves he has been looking for Cooper for the last twenty-two years in the wrong place?

  “It’s Himmelsbach,” Warner says. “He wants to protect Ralph Himmelsbach, who really put out the idea that Cooper died in the woods. If Cooper landed west of the flight path, well, then, heck, of course he could survive the jump.”

  I call Himmelsbach. I ask him about his relationship with Jerry. They are close. “His father wasn’t very nice to him, so I try and be as helpful as I can,” Himmelsbach says. He still believes Cooper perished in the woods and landed in the Washougal River basin. “I haven’t seen a lick of evidence to suggest otherwise,” Himmelsbach says.

  I fly to Arkansas. I want to meet and interview Brian’s parents, Dwayne and Patricia. I want to know if they are telling the truth about what happened on Tena Bar. Did Brian find the money or not?

  I land at Fort Smith and drive through the Ouchita mountains. An endless brigade of motorcycle riders passes me into Mena, near the Oklahoma border. It has been ravaged by a tornado. Debris lines the streets. Families are homeless.

  The Ingram house is on the outskirts of town. Dwayne does not live here anymore. He lives in a trailer in Texas and works as an industrial painter. Water towers are his specialty. Before he paints each one, he climbs to the top of the tower and does a headstand.

  He’s also been drinking himself to death. It’s not healthy to have him around the house. On a recent visit, Brian had to tackle him and wrestle a gun out of his hands.

  Dwayne has a long white beard that reaches down to his belly button, and hippielike bracelets around his skinny wrists. He rolls a cigarette and we go outside to talk about the case.

  Dwayne wants to figure out what the case means. He is not religious like Brian, but what was God trying to tell him when Brian found the money? What was the test? Why would he lose out on the ransom, get arrested, win a chance to have grandparents, lose that, lose the money, win it back in court? What was the deeper message in all that went wrong?

  Back in the house, over a tank of goldfish, I see portraits of the Ingram family on the wall, before the money was found. I wonder how they might be different if they hadn’t gone on that picnic on Tena Bar.

  “What good is fame without the fortune?” Dwayne says.

  “They treated us like criminals,” Patricia says. She sits in a wing-backed chair and Dwayne sits in another across from her. Once again, they repeat the story of how Brian found the three packets of bills at Tena Bar, all the media attention they received after Dwayne’s arrest, and their court victory getting the bills back.

  “I always wanted to meet Connie Chung, but not like that,” Dwayne says.

  Dwayne is about to cry. He talks about Nan and Tap and how comforting it was to think about having a family again. He wonders if Brian found the buried treasure so that Dwayne could somehow find his real father. If Nan and Tap saw him in the news, then maybe his own father would too. But would Dwayne’s own father even recognize him? He rolls another cigarette.

  “The Cooper Curse,” he says.

  “Oh, it exists,” Special Agent Larry Carr says of the Curse. He’s no longer the agent on the case. In Cooperland, Carr is considered something of a hero for pushing the case forward. The discovery, on American soil, of the French comic book is largely a result of the media splash he made when he leaked that a parachute (albeit the wrong one) had been found. Carr also released data that exposed another fed bungle: the Missing Minute, which puts the hijacker over a not-as-wooded area. As significant as these discoveries have been, Carr’s bosses at the Bureau couldn’t have been too happy. Bureau culture frowns upon media attention for case agents. Whatever happened, Carr was reassigned to the most tedious detail in the field office: surve
illance. Since, he’s relocated to Washington, D.C.

  Am I losing my bearings here? I want to talk to the other journalist who came close to unearthing Cooper. His name is Karl Fleming. Before he got involved in the case, Fleming had started his own newspaper, married a cute brunette—she was twenty-two, he was forty-four—and his life seemed to be peaking. He placed a classified ad in local newspapers in the Pacific Northwest, attempting to lure the hijacker into an interview. The two men who responded were later charged with fraud and sentenced to prison after Fleming promised them immunity and then turned them in in the hopes of not getting arrested himself.

  I find Fleming living in Los Angeles. I leave more than a dozen messages for him and his wife, Anne Taylor Fleming, now a writer who also contributes to the The Newshour with Jim Lehrer. No response.

  Why not even a courtesy call to say no thanks? Is Fleming ducking me? Is Anne Taylor? Why?

  Fleming has written a memoir, I learn, published in 2005. I get it. I open the first page and read his dedication.

  To All the Reporters Who Did the Right Thing

  I find the chapter on the Cooper case. “A Fall from Grace,” it’s called. I want to find out what happened to Fleming after the Cooper story collapsed on him. I find this passage.

  I slid into a dark depression, spending hours prone on the sofa in my little office, unable to function, often in tears, begging for night so that I could sleep. I often thought of suicide and considered how to go about it. I didn’t like heights and a gun would be too messy. A pill overdose would do it.

  His wife and her father forced him into a car. They drove him to a mental health facility. Orderlies strapped him to a gurney.

  As I lay there with a partially free hand I tried to stuff the corner of a sheet down my throat to kill myself.

  Institutionalized, Fleming was given heavy doses of antidepressants. He spent a significant amount of time in therapy. None of it worked. He began electroshock treatments.

  I didn’t have a choice and I was too far down to be scared. Finally, slowly, I began to get better, began to see the sun shine again.

  On a lark, I call Fleming again.

  He picks up. Of course, he’d be happy to meet and talk about Cooper.

  “You know, to this day, I still believe I had the right man,” he says.

  I fly to Los Angeles. I call to confirm the date and time. I call again. I leave several messages. I finally reach him several days later. He can’t talk about D.B. Cooper. His wife’s orders.

  “Sorry to have led you down the primrose path,” he says.

  I check out another lead. Another confession. Bryant “Jack” Coffelt was a confidence man who spent much of his life in prison. A charmer, he was known to stuff wads of hundred-dollar bills in the roof of his Cadillac. He later worked in Washington as the chauffeur to the last descendant of Abraham Lincoln. The Lincoln heir had a reputation “as a dirty old man,” according to one account, and with Coffelt at the family estate they organized “modern-day Roman orgies.” Years later, Coffelt confessed to the Cooper crime, and witnesses claimed that after the skyjacking he mysteriously walked with a limp.

  Socially, Coffelt was said to be close to a number of Washington elite, including J. Edgar Hoover, and was suspected by many to be working as an informant. Coffelt would conceal evidence in the most unsuspecting places. He once stuffed a note from his lawyer with the message “Burn This Letter!” inside a cookbook.

  I had seen Coffelt’s name in the Bureau file. According to the FBI, Coffelt had a lock-tight alibi. I spent a few weeks checking him out. I couldn’t find much that jibed. At the time of the hijacking, the feds found, Coffelt was in a mental institution in the state of Illinois. Coffelt was a dead end.

  I get more leads. A son tells me his father, a former air-traffic controller, once confessed to him in the family basement. Former Northwest employees tell me a lone-wolf employee who matched the hijacker’s description disappeared after the crime, prompting widespread suspicions. Another private detective and lawyer tells me about Wolfgang Gossett, a former Air Force man and gambler turned priest who, among other things, helped the FBI investigate cults.

  Another lead. I must have overlooked it. Buried in a book is another Cooper confessor who, after a stint in the Paratroops, enrolled at Rutgers and joined the varsity track team. He was, according to a witness, “a steady third-place finisher.”

  I drive to Rutgers. I camp out in the basement of the massive library on campus, flipping through old yearbooks. I scan the faces of the track runners, jumpers, pole vaulters, looking for my steady third-place finisher. I have to squint to see the details of the boyish faces in the team photos. I crack open another yearbook, and another. Focus now. If the clue to the Cooper mystery is here, I can’t afford to miss it.

  I return to the library the next day, and the next. I select suspicious names and faces from the Rutgers varsity track team from years ’45, ’46, ’47, ’48, and ’49. I pull the individual student files, searching for a clue, a morsel of data that would correspond to something I had read in the FBI file, a link.

  I request more folders. I go through all. The link should be here. It isn’t.

  There is no path. There is no story. What have I done? What have I found? Proof that the Cooper Curse has gotten me too?

  I reread the story I wrote about Ken Christiansen in New York that was published three years ago. Maybe there is a clue in here I missed? A follow-up I’ve forgotten? I scroll down to the section where the readers can write in to discuss the piece. There is one comment.

  The whole deal was a Spec Ops “black” bag job. My proof is that I was actually in prison in Walla Walla until the week in question, then let out on a “furlough” … Go figure.

  The post is a crank, right? But how can I leave it alone? I go to the magazine’s tech department, where they trace the e-mail address of the poster. I send him a note. He replies:

  The facts are that DB was a “bag” job, because I participated in it.… I had a barn, a vehicle, a “catch” team and a local driver, if and when we picked up the jumper.

  He was a professional mercenary, involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion, the capture of Che Guevara in Bolivia, other high-profile covert assignments.

  “Same folks all the way into Watergate,” the poster writes about his colleagues. “Well, actually all the way into the White House.”

  He wants anonymity. I agree. From now on I’ll call him Jake. Some topics Jake and I discuss are so sensitive he demands we have “one-pad” conversations. I don’t know what the term means.

  “One pad” is individual message cryptography, used only once between sender and receiver. It is a very simple system, but almost unbreakable. I understand that some dark groups have some code crackers, but it takes a while.

  At Jake’s instruction, I set up an e-mail account in the Philippines. His rules: I type a draft e-mail, he responds in the draft. The draft is deleted. The message is never sent.

  I learn about Jake. He was introduced to the mercenary world in a logging camp in Alaska, where he had run away as a troubled boy. His contact was an ex-Marine who he claims had his fingernails ripped off during an interrogation by North Koreans.

  Jake’s specialty was transportation. “I can get a team safely from one place to another and back better than anyone on the planet. I was useless as tits on an Orchard boar on projects that did not require those particular kinds of capabilities.”

  In the fall of 1971, Jake was serving time in Walla Walla state prison for forgery, though the backstory is complicated. A few months before November 24, he claims, he was approached in prison.

  “The folks that contacted me were ‘suits.’ Names didn’t matter, but who they referenced for creds was a guy that I did some work for in Valle Verde in Bolivia in ’67. That guy’s resource team was out of Virginia … organized, managed and controlled by the same folks that contracted out operations to Air America in Camp Pong, Cambodia, and the GT up around Khan Falls.�
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  Jake was offered a deal, he says: In exchange for his help in the hijacking, Jake would get parole.

  He agreed. He left Walla Walla prison the day before the hijacking—November 23, 1971, he says—and was given his orders in the field.

  Mine was to acquire a target (a male, no description provided), contacting me through a specific one pad code (that I can’t and won’t provide), transport target to a specific location, stop and evaluate target’s condition, providing medical and other assistance as necessary, then transport target to a transfer point in East Portland.

  On the night of the hijacking, Jake was with his catch team, waiting for the one pad from the jumper.

  My grid [or pickup area] was from Cedar Creek off the Cowlitz River, east to Yale Bridge Road, south on the Amboy Road to Yacolt and east to the old Amboy road that went to La Center. My actual extract point was the old Bucomb Hallow camp boat ramp at Lake Merwin.

  I check the location. It is in the heart of the flight path.

  Jake and his catch team waited all night for the hijacker to respond, he says. The one-pad message never came. After his Thanksgiving furlough, Jake returned to Walla Walla, and his parole came through.

  DB Cooper was a media event, staged to coincide with the expansion and funding of the secret war in South America. Financial, and Organizational legislation was moving through the Congress, and a big splashy case of Air Piracy on the national media would help the legislative process get laws passed that dealt with Transportation Security, among many other things.

  If Jake was really a military-trained mercenary, I wonder if he can illuminate the mysterious items Jo Weber found after Duane Weber’s death.

  I send him a photo of the San Marino Sanitarium that Jo found in Duane’s ostrich-skin wallet. Does Jake know what it means?