Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper (24 page)

One thousand feet. Two thousand feet.

McCoy feels weak. No, it is his stomach. He is sick. He will vomit.

Simmer down, Richard, he tells himself. Simmer down.

He blacks out.

Three thousand feet. Four thousand feet.

The duffel is floating to his left. He comes to and sees it. He stems toward it.

In the sky he can see the giant lights of the search planes. He needs to pull the ripcord before he is too weak. He strains to grip the release handle. He pulls.

The canopy does not release. The handle is jammed.

Five thousand feet.

Richard thinks about his own funeral. He figures they will probably have it on a Tuesday.

Seven thousand feet.

He tries the ripcord again. With both hands. Pull.

The pilot chute pops. He is moving too fast for it to deploy. He’s on top of the canopy, tied up in the shroud lines. The canopy is now underneath him. He falls away. The chute unfurls.

His vision is blurry. The headlights along the freeway appear in streaks. He sees a cow pasture.

Two hundred feet. One hundred feet.

He braces himself for landing. His knees buckle against the grass. He collapses on top of the duffel bag, resting on his $500,000 fortune. The white canopy of his parachute rustles in the wind over him.

I did it, he thinks. I really did it.

No time to celebrate. He gathers the canopy in his arms, grabs the duffel. He starts to run.

He runs through a wheat field. He runs along a road and when the flash of headlights finds him he jumps in a ditch. He waits, gets up, and runs. He finds a culvert. It’s dry. McCoy stashes his parachute and his duffel bag filled with cash here. He’ll come back for it later.

He runs. He runs until he sees the lights of the Hi-Spot Drive In.
It’s around midnight. Through the windows, McCoy can see the employees are cleaning up. He gives his order to the counter girl.

Okay, she says. One large Coke, coming up.

McCoy looks outside. A teenager is getting into his car. McCoy steps outside. He asks for a ride.

“Five dollars will buy a lot of gas, man,” he says.

The kid’s name is Peter Zimmerman. He is eighteen. Need a ride, sure. Hop in.

Driving on the dark roads, McCoy and Zimmerman listen to the news on the radio. A plane has been hijacked over Provo, reports say. The hijacker parachuted out the back with a half a million, the biggest ransom any skyjacker has gotten away with.

Checkpoints are set up along the road. The sky is lit with red magnesium flares.

“How come they stay in the air for so long?” Zimmerman asks McCoy about the flares.

“They have little parachutes on them,” McCoy says.

When McCoy comes home, his sister-in-law Denise is watching the news.

“Have you heard?” she says. “Some guy jumped over Provo with half a million dollars!”

“No, I haven’t. Where’s Karen?”

“Oh, she’s out visiting somebody.… Van Ieperen called twice. He thinks you did it, Richard! Wants you to call him. Did you do it, Richard? You can tell me.”

Robert Van Ieperen is a state trooper and McCoy’s parachuting friend.

Richard knows he can trust Van Ieperen. The trooper would never turn him in.

Richard goes into the bathroom and runs the hot water in the tub.

He closes the door and takes off his clothes. He slips in the water and closes his eyes. He did it. He
really
did it.

A few days later, Richard wakes up for National Guard duty. It is dawn. He is putting on his military uniform. He hears pounding on the front door. He races into the living room. He sees Stetsons. The feds are waiting for him.

“Richard Floyd McCoy, you are under arrest for the charge of air piracy. You have the right to remain silent.”

In response to the rash of skyjackings, legislators in Washington have toughened the penalties for air piracy. The crime is a capital offense. McCoy now faces the death penalty. In Utah, the method of execution is a firing squad.

The agents cuff him and comb the house. They find a black parachute harness, a black crash helmet, a pistol, and $499,970 in cash in his closet, among other incriminating evidence.

In handcuffs, Richard pleads with the feds.

Let me change into a suit, he says. He does not want to embarrass the service, walking into a criminal court in his military uniform.

Agents push his head down into an unmarked car.

Neighbors are up, standing on their lawns. Reporters arrive on the scene.

“He was a real kind person,” says Mr. Cluff, McCoy’s neighbor. “Always friendly and always smiling. He would help push our car out of the snow.”

“He was the type of fellow you could always say hi to and get a response,” says Mr. Peterman, another neighbor.

“He does not seem to be the kind of a kid to hijack a plane,” says Mr. Reynolds, who lives near the Cluffs and Petermans.

McCoy’s wife, Karen, and their children are rushed to a neighbor’s house. Blinds are drawn.

On the lawn of Richard’s house, reporters linger. The home is empty. The reporters hear McCoy’s telephone ring.

In Raleigh, Richard’s father, Floyd, is convinced the arrest is a mistake.

“He’s not that kind of boy,” Floyd says.

August 26, 2007
Seattle, Washington

I am in the lobby of the Edgewater. I am talking to the concierge.

“You know where I might find a metal detector?”

I feel stupid saying it.

The look on the concierge’s face is as blank as a sheet of paper.

“It’s Sunday,” he says, about my metal detector request. “The hardware stores are all closed.”

Problem solved. What could I find with a metal detector anyway?

I unfurl the map in my rental car and search for Bonney Lake. It takes a while. Finally, I find the tiny dot.

I drive out of the city, past the port and endless stacks of red and green and blue shipping containers. The empty cars of freight trains rumble as seagulls caw and peck along the tracks.

Could Lyle be wrong about his older brother? The Kenny he described growing up on the farm in Minnesota seemed too kind a soul to hijack. Kenny kept his own flower bed of red zinnias and was good to his younger brother.

“Us kids were playing tag out by the garden,” Lyle wrote me. “Kenny was almost impossible to catch because he was a tricky runner. I chased after him and he would almost let me catch him. Finally I gave up in anger and started crying. Kenny was surprised by this and came over to me and said, ‘Why don’t you try again, maybe you can catch me this time?’ Sure enough, I went after him and I caught him that time.”

18406 Old Sumner Buckley Highway. I must have passed the house four times. Then I realize: Kenny’s old house isn’t a house anymore. It’s a shop.

PRICED RIGHT PRINT & SIGN
, is the name out front.

I pull into the driveway. The shop is closed. I’m nervous. I don’t know why.

I step out of the rental and onto the gravel. I am haunted by a strange, and weighty feeling. Am I being watched? My eyes dart around: along the road, into the windows of the houses across the street, into the trees up the hill out back.

I can’t see anybody. Who is watching? Kenny?

I sneak up to a window. The lights in the Priced Right are off. I can’t see anything inside. I imagine Kenny in here, wearing his overalls and blue conductor’s cap. I imagine him singing after dinner the way Lyle told me he did, or stashing the ransom in the walls and under the floorboards.

There was also an old army locker that Kenny kept. When Lyle looked inside it after Kenny’s death, he found a slip for Harrah’s casino in Las Vegas. “Maybe it was a good place to launder money,” Lyle wrote, or perhaps Kenny hid the ransom in the locker. “He kept it secure by a big padlock,” Lyle said. “It would have been handy to take a few bills out now and then.”

I press my nose onto the glass and peer into the dark chasm. Was this the kitchen? I remember a poster Lyle told me about, a poster Kenny hung in the kitchen. The poster read:

THERE ARE THREE KINDS OF PEOPLE
.
Those who
MAKE
things happen
.
Those who
WATCH
things happen
.
And those who
WONDER
what happened
.

I wonder myself: Which one was Kenny?

I get back in the car and drive up the hill to find old neighbors. One man is pulling out groceries from the trunk of his car.

I roll down my window. I ask him if he knew a Ken Christiansen.

He did.

Really?

“You know he had them boys living with him,” the man says, lifting a bag onto his knee.

Boys? What kind of boys?

Runaways, he says.

Did he happen to know any of their names?

“The one that stayed with him the longest was Kenny.”

Another Kenny?

“Kenny McWilliams,” he says, and heads into his house.

Back in the Edgewater that night, I scour every online phonebook and directory. I call every Ken Kenny Kenneth McWilliams MacWilliams in the state of Washington. After midnight, I find him. Kenneth B. MacWilliams is living in Walla Walla, over the Cascades.