Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper (17 page)

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.

This data is at once precise and vague. What does
oscillations
mean? According to the flight’s engineer, Harold Anderson, the oscillations in the cabin refer to a “pressure bump” he noticed on the Northwest jet’s air cabin pressure dial. But what caused this pressure bump? Was it a change in the jet’s aerodynamics? A stormlike gust of wind? Or the hijacker bailing out?

In Minnesota, Northwest’s engineers imagine a likely scenario. Hovering at 10,000 feet in the night sky, Cooper walks down the
aftstairs. His own weight (plus twenty pounds of stolen cash) pushes the stairs down. But the combined weight of the hijacker and the ransom (roughly two hundred pounds) is not enough to force the aftstairs into a locked position—the slipstream of air running underneath the jet is pushing the aftstairs up. That leaves the hijacker teetering on the edge of the aftstairs, hovering on a perch over the dark forest below.

He leaps. He slips and falls. However it happens, the Northwest engineers believe that after the hijacker departs the aircraft, the weight from the aftstairs is released; then, like a springboard, the slipstream pushes the aftstairs up toward the cabin of the jet. By closing the size of the open hole in the jet during flight, the cabin pressure changes. The meter inside the gauge oscillates. Hence, the pressure bump.

But: when did the pressure bump happen? Was it at 8:12 p.m., the time recorded on the Northwest Teletype transcript? Or was 8:12 p.m. the time when the pilots reported it? How much time had elapsed between the bump and the report? What if the transcription was off? If so, what was the range of error? One minute? Five? Ten?