Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper (15 page)

Designed for the CIA, the SR-71 was the most advanced spyplane of its era. Its cameras and sensors failed to locate the hijacker. THE NORM TAYLOR COLLECTION/THE MUSEUM OF FLIGHT

McCoy later escaped from federal prison with a gun made from dental plaster.

Former Green Beret Richard Floyd McCoy Jr. was a suspect in the Cooper case after he hijacked another 727 five months after Cooper’s jump, for $500,000. SALT LAKE TRIBUNE

Special Agent Ralph Himmelsbach quizzes Dwayne and Patricia Ingram after they claimed their son Brian found the Cooper bills on Tena Bar, the most significant development in the unsolved case. MAX GUTIERREZ © BETTMANN/CORBIS

Brian Ingram, age fourteen, after winning back a portion of the Cooper bills in a six-year legal war with the FBI. MICHAEL LLOYD, THE OREGONIAN

FBI agent Larry Carr went undercover in a cyber forum under the code name Ckret; he was later reassigned. ANDY ROGERS, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER

Scientist Tom Kaye tests the buoyancy of money in the Columbia River at Tena Bar, where the Cooper bills were found. RANDY L. RASMUSSEN/THE OREGONIAN

Vietnam veteran and retired drill sergeant Jerald Thomas has been hunting for Cooper for more than twenty years; recent theories suggest he might be looking in the wrong place. MARK HARRISON/SEATTLE TIMES

The mystery of the hijacker’s alias, Dan Cooper, may finally have been solved—as the name of an old French comic book hero who was a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot.

I must ask you, who in the hell do some of you people think you are, and what in the hell do you think you are doing. I have succeeded in pulling off one of the most successful, talked about crimes of today.… No one was endangered, the caper was only committed to show the unbelieving world that a PERFECT crime was possible.

NO HARM DONE

        the perfect crime

grant me amnesty

        money will be returned

  no harm done

answer by way of public announcement

        within 48 hours

     i’ve won, admit you’ve lost

                —d.b. cooper

i am alive and doing well in home town PO. The system that beats the system. db cooper

ATTENTION!

Thanks for hospitality. Was in a rut.

D.B. Cooper

you will never find me

give up

db cooper

    i am right here portland and the $200,000 is for revolution

dear manager,

much of the credit for my success is yours, thanks.

I am departing very soon for foreign soil, flying naturally, thanks again.

D.B. Cooper

August 24, 2007
Approaching Portland International Airport, Oregon

I am on the plane and I am thinking of the Pulitzer prize. What is the prize? Is there a trophy? A plaque? Anything I’ll be able to keep? A check to cash? And how will I apply? Or will they just know about my exposé unmasking the real D.B. Cooper as bashful Northwest purser Ken Christiansen? And how should the story start? With Kenny as a boy, growing up in the Great Depression and running up to his attic to gaze at his father’s Perpetual Motion Machine?

Now I am wondering about a metal detector. Before I left, Lyle was insistent: Bring a metal detector to Bonney Lake. If Lyle knew his brother Kenny, he told me, Kenny would bury the loot in his backyard like the family dog buries gnawed-up bones.

How can I take Lyle seriously? If Kenny was Cooper, why would he have kept the evidence on his property? Then again, if Kenny actually planned out the hijacking—if he was gutsy enough to jump out of a plane over the remote forests of southwest Washington with $200,000 in twenty-dollar bills tied to his chest with a pair of parachute shrouds—then he was capable of anything. To prove the case, I would have to consider the most unlikely scenarios, stretch the limits of my own logic.

My first interview is forty miles south of Portland, with the man considered to be the world’s foremost expert on the D.B. Cooper case, Ralph Himmelsbach. The retired special agent is now in his eighties, and there is talk about how he became “obsessed” with the case after the first call (“164 in progress”) came over the radio. He’s chased Cooper for decades and still failed to identify him. They say Cooper ruined his first marriage.

I have come for his blessing. I have photos of Ken Christiansen in my bag and copies of his military records from the Paratroops. I have my arguments all mapped out. If I can convince an expert like
Himmelsbach that Ken Christiansen is a worthy suspect, I’ll be on my way toward making my case.