Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper (26 page)

During closing arguments, the judge makes an announcement.

“Something that pleases this court and I’m sure has been weighing heavily on you people’s minds,” he says, “is whether or not you’d eventually have to give this fellow the death penalty. Well, the court’s gonna help you solve that little problem right now. You can, as of now, dismiss that dilemma from your minds.”

This morning in Washington, the Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional. McCoy’s life has been spared.

In handcuffs, McCoy is escorted out of the courtroom. He walks past Rhodes, who will interview him in jail the next day. McCoy then passes a female journalist. McCoy can’t miss her. Blond, tall, leggy. She wears red ladybug lipstick and matching red heels.

“Wish me luck, ma’am,” McCoy says to the goddess.

She nods, stomps out her cigarette, and turns to Rhodes.

“Was it Hemingway?” she says. “Damn it! Or Steinbeck? Or who in the hell was it? Well, whoever it was that had the good sense to come up with it must have been thinking of our boy McCoy when he came up with the line: You show me a hero and I’ll show you a tragedy.”

The jury finds McCoy guilty in under two hours.

After the courtroom closes, the feds camp out in the law library. The agent who investigated McCoy’s case, Jim Thiessen, lights a Winston and paces in his penny loafers. Russell Calame, who recently ran the Bureau field office in Salt Lake City, removes an initialed handkerchief and mops his brow. The agents discuss the case they failed to make. All along, they have been convinced McCoy is D.B. Cooper.

They’ve been able to match up physical evidence. During his investigation, Thiessen showed the photos of Cooper’s black clip-on tie left in the rear of the Northwest 305 plane to Denise Burns, McCoy’s sister-in-law, and Mildred Burns, his mother-in-law; both identified the tie and tie clasp as belonging to McCoy. Thiessen also showed the photos to Robert Van Ieperen, McCoy’s state trooper friend. From Thiessen’s report:

ROBERT VAN IEPEREN
advised that
MCCOY
likes to wear conservative solid-colored clip-on ties similar to the tie recovered after the hijacking of a Northwest plane on November 24th, 1971.
VAN IEPEREN
stated he had been out socially with
MCCOY
and recalled that at a movie one night
MCCOY
wore a clip-on tie and removed the tie when he sat down to watch the movie
.

Thiessen paces, thinking about how to come up with enough evidence to charge McCoy with NORJAK.

Probation officer Bernie Rhodes walks in the room. Thiessen and Calame get an idea: Maybe Rhodes can get McCoy to confess to the Cooper hijacking.

Rhodes is familiar with the Cooper case. He wonders what proof the agents have.

“That area isn’t as rough or forestlike as some people think,” Calame says about the Cooper drop zone in southwest Washington. “He should have been just fine. He walks or hooks a ride into Portland, next day catches a plane, or bus or whatever, back to Vegas.”

Las Vegas?

As part of McCoy’s background investigation, Thiessen assembled McCoy’s financial, telephone, school, National Guard, and auto records. On the morning of the hijacking, Thiessen found, McCoy used his Bank of America credit card to fill up the tank on his Volkswagen bug. The location, Thiessen found, wasn’t Provo, Utah. It was Cedar City, which is several hours south and east of Provo, directly on the way to Las Vegas.

McCoy
was
in Las Vegas. That’s fact. On Thanksgiving, a day after the Cooper hijacking, McCoy’s home in Provo received a collect call from the lobby of the Tropicana Hotel. The time of the call was 10:41 p.m. Who else would have called McCoy’s home from the lobby of the Tropicana other than McCoy?

McCoy was near the Tropicana, and on Thanksgiving, Thiessen found. The same day the collect call was made to McCoy’s home, McCoy purchased 5.6 gallons of gasoline only two miles away from the Tropicana, at the Power Thrust Service Station. The Power Thrust, Thiessen found, is located alongside the airport.

The agents speculate. On the morning of November 24, the day Northwest 305 is hijacked, McCoy drives to Cedar City and then on to Las Vegas. Here, he boards a flight to Portland, where he then boards Northwest 305 as Dan Cooper. A genius setup.

After bailing out, McCoy gets back to Portland the next morning, flies back to Las Vegas, picks up his Volkswagen bug waiting for him in the airport parking lot, tops off his car with gas at the Power Thrust, calls Karen collect from the Tropicana, and drives home to Provo.

Rhodes is suspicious. He’s read up on the Cooper case.

“How do you get around brown and blue eyes?” he says.

Cooper had brown eyes. McCoy’s are blue.

“First of all, we’re not sure they were brown,” Calame says. “The stewardess could have been mistaken.”

And the Raleigh filter-tip cigarettes?

The feds have researched the smokes. Raleigh is produced by Brown & Williamson and is the least popular of all the company’s brands, representing only 1.5 percent of all brands sold. So Cooper must have a connection to them.

“If McCoy, a Mormon, smoked as part of his disguise,” Calame says, “he would have needed to buy a pack of cigarettes in the Portland airport. What brand would he choose? Well, it’s naturally going to be Raleigh, his hometown, his home brand, isn’t it?”

The signatures of the hijackings were also similar. Both McCoy and Cooper sat in the last row of the plane, in front of the lavatory. Both used notes and one stewardess to relay information.

Rhodes has a question. If McCoy was Cooper and got away with $200,000, then why four months later would he risk the death sentence and hijack United 855 for $500,000?

“He lost it,” Thiessen says. During the first jump. “He lost the damn money!”

“Got away from him,” Calame says.

The jail in Salt Lake smells of stale coffee and cigarette butts. In an interview room, Richard McCoy waits for the questions. Probation officer Rhodes lights a Marlboro. He holds out his pack.

“Do you smoke? Do you smoke cigarettes?”

“Nope,” McCoy says. “I don’t use tobacco, but it doesn’t bother me when you do.”

“Do you gamble? Shoot dice? This sort of thing.”

“No. I don’t gamble. Don’t have the money to shoot dice. Don’t know how.”

“Do you drink alcohol?”

“Nope. I’ve had liquor a few times in my life, but when you’re ready to jot these things down for Judge Ritter, give him the truth: Richard Floyd McCoy Jr. doesn’t drink, smoke, or gamble.”

Rhodes reaches into his bag and removes the Bureau’s sketch of D.B. Cooper. He places it on the table in front of McCoy.

“If you can,” Rhodes says, “and I know this was a while back, but try to remember where you were last Thanksgiving, November twenty-fifth, and the day before, Wednesday, November twenty-fourth, 1971.”

“Thanksgiving is still a holiday, isn’t it, so naturally I would have been around the house. I didn’t have school and I didn’t have Guard. I was home. Why?”

“Cook or clean, or help Karen with anything she might remember?”

“Yes. I cooked, yes, and helped Karen with Thanksgiving dinner.”

Rhodes doesn’t waste time. He wants a confession.

“What I’d like you to tell me is how you can be in Provo cooking Thanksgiving dinner and make a collect call from the Tropicana Hotel-Casino in Las Vegas at 10:41 p.m. that same night?”

“And how do you know it was me who made the call? Could have been anybody.”

“For the sake of argument, let’s assume for a minute that you’re right. You didn’t make that call. Someone else made it, okay? Well, I’ve got an even better one for you. Explain, if you can, how someone driving your green Volkswagen bug, North Carolina license plate number SA 1334, purchased 5.6 gallons of gas just after eleven p.m. Thanksgiving night at the Power Thrust Service Station in Las Vegas, using your credit card—Bank Americard #4763160217773—which is yours, isn’t it?—signed your name, Richard Floyd McCoy Jr., to that credit charge slip. How about it?”

McCoy is picking his teeth with a paper clip.

“How about it?” McCoy says. “You seem to have all the answers. You tell me.”

“Why were you in Vegas during the Cooper thing?”

McCoy holds his hand in the air as if swearing on the Bible.

“How many times do I have to tell you? I helped Karen cook turkey dinner.”

The next morning, Rhodes arrives at the jail for a follow-up interview. McCoy is crying. “I can’t even comprehend forty-five years,” he says. “Even if I got out in, say, thirty years.… Chante would be thirty-five years old; Rich, thirty-two. I don’t think I’ll put them through that. Or me either.” He is contemplating suicide.

Again, Rhodes removes the Bureau’s sketch of Cooper. He lights a cigarette and goes through the routine questions: financial statements, statement of offense. Six, seven hours pass. Rhodes packs up his things.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” McCoy says.

He is holding up the Bureau’s sketch of Cooper.

“I don’t know,” Rhodes says. “Am I?”

“That’s up to you. You wanted to talk bad enough yesterday about—you know, the
other thing
?”

“What
other thing
?”

“This thing. This guy here.”

McCoy is flapping the Cooper sketch in the air like a Polaroid.

“Do you or don’t you want to talk about this thing?”

“What other thing? Be more specific.”

“
This
other thing.”

“Are you absolutely sure you know what you’ve got there?”

“Yes. I know what it is, but I’m beginning to wonder if you do.”

“You tell me then, what is it?”

“Let’s just forget it,” McCoy says. He flicks the sketch across the room. “I think you’re having a harder time, for some reason, than I am.”

At dawn the next morning, McCoy is wrapped in six feet of belly chain that is threaded through his belt loops, handcuffs, and leg irons. He is escorted by federal marshals into an unmarked car. In the backseat, he watches the sun as it rises over the Wasatch range and the soft light flashes against the smokestacks of the Kennecott Copper Corporation, into Parley’s Canyon, past the Mormon temple.