Skyjack Page 9

  Himmelsbach opens the door and the face I see is the same as in the old newspaper clippings. High, arching eyebrows. A mustache trimmed just so. Cheeks so closely shaven they look pink. He wears light stiff jeans and a bolo tie. I follow him out to the back porch. This is where Himmelsbach lines up his .22 rifle and snipes varmints sneaking into his garden.

  Himmelsbach—or, H, as Cooper sleuths call him—is the voice of reason in the Cooper case. Since the night of the hijacking, he’s been interviewed by countless news outlets—print, radio, television, local, national, international—and he always shoots down the Robin Hood analogy. How, he snuffs, could the hijacker be a hero when he put thirty-six passengers at risk? And the six brave crew members? And what about the hundreds of airline officials and cops and agents whose Thanksgiving was ruined, and who later spent tens of thousands of hours hunting Cooper down? In one interview, Himmelsbach called the hijacker “nothing but a rotten sleazy bastard.”

  The sun is out. Himmelsbach hears the distant buzz of an engine. He squints up and the sun beams off his blue eyes like flashes of light against the bottom of a swimming pool.

  “AT-6 Texan,” he says of the plane. “A North American AT-6.”

  Despite his age, there is an exactness to Himmelsbach, a German-reared thoroughness and competency that only enhances his credentials as the official granddaddy of the Cooper case. Before we start talking, Himmelsbach has ground rules.

  No problem. Fire away.

  There is one fact that he wants to make sure I understand.

  “I was not and I am not obsessed with the Cooper case,” he says.

  His eyes gaze over me.

  Got it. Not obsessed.

  I ask him what he remembers about the hunt. I want to know about the first morning.

  November 25, 1971

  West Linn, Oregon

  It is dawn. His wife is a bundle under the black and orange silk sheets of their bed, the same bundle as when he came home late from the airport the night before. Ralph Himmelsbach puts on jeans, a shirt, his leather bomber jacket, aviator sunglasses, and drives to the hangar.

  The sky is wet. The air is cold. Snow today. Snow any minute. Better get up before he gets socked in, he thinks.

  His airplane is a single-engine, recreational Taylorcraft. He flies over the Willamette Valley and crosses Vector 23, the flight path of the hijacked plane. He buzzes the treelines of vast areas of remote timber, the streams and lakes and crags that form the border of the Dark Divide.

  Himmelsbach flies a grid. Seven miles one way, seven miles back. Back and back again. Where did the hijacker bail out? He must be in these woods somewhere. But where?

  The agent squints down into the trees. He looks for a plume of smoke from a campfire, a snare of parachute, a pool of blood.

  Back and back and back again. Whoever Dan Cooper is, Himmelsbach is confident he and his fellow Bureau agents will find him. The skyjacker will test the agency. He will prove how good J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI really is.

  Within the Bureau, the Cooper hijacking is given a name: NORJAK. At headquarters in Washington, senior agents are processing the microfilm that contains the serial numbers to every twenty-dollar bill the hijacker was given. The numbers will be printed in a booklet and released to the public. Field offices in Portland, Reno, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and throughout the Pacific Northwest have been asked to investigate and submit daily NORJAK updates to headquarters via teletype.

  In Seattle, agents re-interview witnesses. They need to know what the hijacker looked like, so Bureau artists can create a sketch.

  About how old was he?

  George Labissoniere, the truck driver’s lawyer, says he had a clear view of the hijacker because he went to the bathroom so many times during the flight.

  He was no older than thirty-five, Labissoniere tells the feds.

  He was about fifty, Cord Zrim Spreckel, the printer, tells agents. Spreckel had a good look at the hijacker too. The man looked so suspicious. Why was he wearing sunglasses?

  And what kind of facial features?

  He had a square jaw, Spreckel says.

  He had a saggy chin, Bill Mitchell, the college sophomore, says.

  The details are conflicting. Other than stewardess Tina Mucklow, the only witness who was in close proximity to the hijacker is stewardess Florence Schaffner. Flo tells the feds she saw the hijacker without his sunglasses. She was the only one to see Cooper’s eyes. What color were they?

  “Brown,” she says.

  And about how old was he?

  “Mid-forties,” she says.

  Tina Mucklow agrees. But Cooper is shorter than what Flo thinks. Tina pegs the hijacker to be between five foot ten and six feet tall.

  Flo says six feet tall, no shorter. And his hair was black, just like his suit and his shoes, Flo says.

  His hair was dark brown, and so was his suit, which may have had a black stripe, Tina says.

  And what about his shoes? What kind?

  Also brown, Tina says. Ankle-length leather shoes, pebble grain, no laces.

  To compose the sketch, Tina and Flo and Alice Hancock and other witnesses are shown the Facial Identification Catalog, the Bureau’s bible of ears (average? protruding? close set?) and noses (hooked? snub? downward tip?) and chins (cleft? dimple?). Flo likes face type KK5-1, except for the ears and hair. Alice likes KA3-9 (eyebrows, OC1-10; mouth, KE9-11; cheek and cheekbones, KJ1-1).

  And what about the hair?

  “Straight, parted on the left side,” Flo says.

  “Straight, narrow sideburns,” Tina says.

  Alice saw the hijacker’s hair differently.

  “Wavy, short, and trimmed in the back,” Alice says.

  “Marcelled,” Robert Gregory, the paint company owner, tells the agents who interview him. The marcel wave is an old French hairstyle created by hot irons.

  As co-owner of a paint company, Gregory pays attention to details, especially colors. Gregory says the hijacker’s suit was not brown or black. The color was russet, a reddish brown. And the suit, he tells the feds, had wide lapels. Which was strange. Wide lapels are out of style.

  Gregory also noticed the hijacker’s hair. It was jet black, and had a greasy patent leather shoe polish shine to it. The hair was so dark it could have been dyed. The man’s skin was also “swarthy.” Perhaps he was Mexican-American, or had American Indian blood.

  And about how tall?

  Not that tall, Gregory tells the feds. About five foot nine.

  In Reno, in daylight, agents can see inside the cabin. Northwest 305 is wrecked. Food from the meals the hijacker requested for the crew are splattered over the seats and on the walls. Searching for fingerprints, agents dust 18E, the seat the hijacker sat in, the handle of the lavatory he hid in, the cabin phone he used to call the pilots when he couldn’t get the aftstairs down, the in-flight magazine in front of the seat.

  The agents find fingerprints. Too many. Which are the stews’ and passengers’? Which are Cooper’s?

  In the armrest, agents locate the hijacker’s cigarette butts. They look at the label. The brand is Raleigh, a coupon smoke. In total, there are eight butts in the ashtray. The agents search for hairs to analyze. On a seat, they find one limb hair. On the cloth that covers the headrest, they find a head hair. It is brown, Caucasian in origin.

  Near the hijacker’s seat, agents find another piece of evidence. It is a tie. A skinny tie. The color is black. The knot is fake. It’s a clip-on. In the center of the tie is a tack. It is gold in color and features a circular pearl-like stone.

  Agents turn over the tie and read the label. “TOWNCRAFT, #3, PENNEY’S,” it says.

  In Portland, Himmelsbach comes home for Thanksgiving dinner thinking about Cooper. Time is running out. With every minute that elapses, the feds lose ground. The weather had been so terrible—rain, fog, snow—that agents and local law enforcement could not search the flight path on foot. The next morning, the search would begin in earnest. That night, Himmelsbach
watches the evening news. The hijacking is a lead story. At CBS, Walter Cronkite reads the intro.

  When he boarded a plane in Portland Oregon last night he was just another passenger who gave his name as D.[B.] Cooper. But today, after hijacking a Northwest airlines jet, ransoming the passengers in Seattle, then making a getaway by parachute somewhere between there and Reno, Nevada, the description by one wire service: Master Criminal.

  September 3, 1969

  University Hospital, University Of Washington, Seattle

  In the auditorium, doctors, surgeons, and all of the fourth-year medical students wait to hear the speech Bobby Dayton has prepared before going into surgery. Bobby has become a fixture at the teaching hospital, sitting in waiting rooms in a dress and heels, chain-smoking. His doctors told him the name he chose for himself as a woman should be similar to his own. Bobby thought about Roberta. He prefers Barbara.

  His remarks are typed. He reads them.

  After forty-three years, I continue to live with an obsession that has ruined not only my life, but the life of others I have loved. I cannot understand myself, nor can I reason why I must be tormented until I die. I did not ask to come upon this earth, and I have never thanked God for the breath of life. My health is excellent and my appearance is normal enough—a normal male who should find a place in the world, marry, and live out a reasonably happy life. If only it were that simple.

  Every night when Bobby was a boy, his family ate dinner together in silence. His father, Elmer, wanted to listen to the news on the radio, and the rest of the family wasn’t allowed to talk. Elmer was a cement contractor in Long Beach, California. He was tough and proud and always walked a few paces ahead of his wife, Bernice. “Squaw follow chief,” he liked to say.

  Bobby was jealous of his younger brother, Bill, who was taller and better-looking. Bobby made his own stilts from wood and stuffed them into his shoes. He practiced walking with the stilts until no one even noticed he was wearing them. Bobby and Bill were close. When they were teenagers, they fled to Mexico to mine gold. Short of money, they camped in a cave for shelter. Bill started complaining about the aliens. They were watching him, he said. They had taken him into space on a spaceship and returned him here.

  His brother was cursed. The curse ran in their family. It was placed on their grandfather by an Indian woman. She decreed that all the men in the Dayton family would suffer from pains in their minds. Bill was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

  Meanwhile, the Dayton family had moved. Bobby’s father, Elmer, purchased land on an old ranch in the Mother Lode, where miners pulled out fortunes from the gold-flecked streams of the Sierra Nevada mountains in northern California. The ranch was over seven hundred acres, not large by farming standards but huge for a cement contractor from Long Beach. At first, Elmer knew little about how to run a ranch. There wasn’t enough grass for his livestock to eat; many animals got sick and died of starvation.

  On furlough from the Merchant Marines, Bobby met Dixie on a blind date. She had big eyes and a flirty, fun way about her. She liked to write poems, just like him.

  After the first date, Dixie’s parents found out.

  “We’re just friends,” she told them. Nothing sexual happened.

  They didn’t believe her. Bobby was older, twenty-two. She was only fifteen. Get married, they urged her.

  Bobby was stationed in Alaska when his parents began writing to him, encouraging him to marry Dixie.

  “It doesn’t make any real difference to me,” Bobby wrote back. “Either way things turn out is OK with me.”

  He was distracted. He was trying to get his pilot license, but he failed the written part of the exam. There was a lot of math on the test. He knew how to fly. Why did he need to know math?

  He also flunked the physical exam. Doctors noticed a problem in one of his eyes. His vision was off.

  All Bobby ever wanted was to fly for a living. That dream was over. The next best thing was gold. He later moved back to the Mother Lode, purchased his own claim nearby, and married Dixie.

  They had a son, Dennis. Bobby built a cabin for them on the mining claim. At night, Bobby would wake them with his screams.

  The Blanket Monster was after him again, he’d tell Dixie. The Blanket Monster was a phantom that chased him in his dreams. It was big and fast. Bobby ran from it. He’d stop, turn, look back. The Blanket Monster was gone. Then, there it was. To appear invisible, the Blanket Monster merely turned itself sideways. Then it came in front of him … the blanket wide like a sail … about to swallow him.

  One afternoon, Dixie came home and found Bobby wearing one of her dresses. He tried to calm her down. He told her about his sickness. After a while, she came to understand, and they faked the marriage to protect his secret. When Dixie got pregnant again, Bobby knew he wasn’t Rena’s father, but he treated the baby girl as his own.

  The claim he purchased did not yield the gold he hoped. So Bobby traveled. Once, he went to prospect gold in the Yukon. A small plane dropped him into the bush, along with a guide he called the Crazy Indian. After a while, the Crazy Indian got sick. Bobby left to find help.

  Alone in the bush, he was without food and shelter. The natural world devoured him. The mosquitoes attacked in swarms. He stripped out of his clothes and jumped in a river to keep them from eating his skin. When the pilots of the rescue helicopter spotted him, Bobby was naked and running toward them. His first postcard home read:

  Had to be rescued. Out of food for eight days.… Need rest here for awhile. Any money would be appreciated.

  A few days later, he wrote again.

  I was the last one rescued. They dropped me some food by air and picked me up the next morning. I had gone about 8 miles back to see if there was any of the moose left we had killed about ten days before but the bear had eaten it … I had passed out several times that day trying to reach the moose and had wandered aimlessly four miles out of the way … All fine now.

  When Bobby came home from his trips, the world he left behind had changed. Once he learned Dixie had an affair with his brother, Bill. Another time, Bobby discovered she had taken up with another man from the Mother Lode and was divorcing him.

  He moved to Seattle. He found work in the shipping yards and lived in a boarding house. It was liberating for him to be alone, to cross-dress in peace. Then he met Cindy. She was a waitress. Eventually, she and Bobby married. They were a poor family. On the shipping yards the workers were striking and paychecks were scarce. They went bankrupt. The electricity and gas in the house were shut off. They used a gas lantern and camping stove to prepare meals. Finally, Bobby decided to go back into the Merchant Marines for extra pay. It was the summer of 1967, and he shipped out to Vietnam.

  When he got off the boat, the poverty was overwhelming. Bobby got jumped by a gang of kids, who stole six dollars from him. He woke up lying on the street in his own blood, watching the Vietnamese walk by. Why had nobody offered to help him up? What was wrong with this country?

  When he came home, Cindy was missing. She had taken off with another man. She had cashed all of the checks that Bobby had sent her. She had also taken his car. Bobby filed a report with the police, claiming she stole it. The police refused to file a charge. Isn’t she your wife, sir?

  Finally, he found her. They agreed to stay together as friends. At night, Bobby would wear a dress and cook dinner for Cindy and her boyfriend. Then they would all sit around the table and play cards.

  He moved to Baltimore, to be near Johns Hopkins University, where doctors were performing sex change operations. Bobby had no money. He didn’t eat for days. Doctors rejected his application for the surgery. How could Bobby adapt into society as a woman? His features were too manly. His teeth were bad. His body was covered in tattoos. He couldn’t be a pilot. He hadn’t found gold. He’d lost his family. He was broke. What was there to live for?

  Months later, at the training hospital on the University of Washington campus, Bobby finishes his written remarks
before his operation.

  Society dictates that I live and work as a male, but laws cannot bend deep feelings and longings that tear me away from the maleness they stab me with. If I seem rough and coarse, blame it on society. They forced me to live in a man’s world. A world I’ve despised from the beginning. I no longer care what people think when they meet me, for I choose to stay the way I am now. When I venture out into the world again, it shall be as a female.

  November 26, 1971

  Woodland, Washington

  The morning light is a curtain of gray. The air is damp. The forecast is for more rain and sleet and snow. Seventeen squad cars are parked outside the police station. The sheriffs and their deputies have come from Clark, Cowlitz, Lewis, and Wahkiakum counties. A posse is in place. A media circus is forming, too, as reporters from across the country descend on southwest Washington to document the manhunt for the missing hijacker.

  Inside the Woodland police station, the searchers wear Stetsons and boots to navigate the muddy floor of the forest. On the walls are maps of the search area. The air search will be conducted by six fixed-wing planes, flying in a pattern. Helicopters will hover over the treetops. By radio, the planes and choppers will communicate with search teams on the ground. Boats will patrol Lake Merwin, a dammed-up reservoir.

  It is still unclear where the hijacker landed. In Minnesota, Northwest officials have their conversation with the Northwest pilots on the company radio transcribed. Within the transcript, they find this line: WE NOW HAVE AN AFT-STAIR LITE ON. The light from the aftstairs in the rear of the jet means the stairs had been lowered during the flight. According to a Teletype copy of the transcript, that report was delivered from the Northwest cockpit before 7:42 p.m. The transcription also bears this line: GETTING SOME OSCILLATIONS IN THE CABIN. MUST BE DOING SOMETHING WITH THE AIR-STAIRS. That report, 8:12 p.m.