Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper (31 page)

She sees a photograph of “Macho,” or Bernard Barker, who was involved in Watergate. The Nixon Plumber looks familiar. Did she meet Macho at a private party in New Orleans? She thinks so. Can she be sure the photo is of him? No. And what about the man wearing the blue jacket in Salt Lake City? Duane asked her to take his picture. Why?

Another memory. Members of Duane’s family told her a story. When Bobby Kennedy was campaigning for president, in 1968, Duane took a job working as a bellhop at the Muehlebach Hotel, in Kansas City. On the campaign trail, Bobby Kennedy and his entourage checked in. When Kennedy left the hotel for the day to campaign, Duane snuck into the candidate’s hotel room looking for a memento to steal. In Kennedy’s room he allegedly found a tie and swiped it.

Was it possible the tie Duane left on the plane was the same tie Kennedy wore? Was that another clue, revenge perhaps for Kennedy’s blundering at the Bay of Pigs? Was it even possible that Bobby Kennedy would wear a clip-on tie?

That can’t make sense, Jo thinks. And then it does. On the campaign
trail in 1968, folks were always pulling at Robert Kennedy’s body, his hands, and probably his tie. Perhaps he wore a clip-on to avoid being choked?

Or maybe it wasn’t Kennedy who wore the clip-on tie? Perhaps Duane snuck in to the room, got nervous, and grabbed the skinny Towncraft that belonged to one of Kennedy’s security guards?

That also made sense. When Bobby Kennedy was shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, he grabbed the tie of one guard, and it came off. Kennedy’s guards did wear clip-ons.

Once again, Jo goes through Duane’s files. One letter she finds is from the Government Employees Benefit Association, a company based in Georgia. The letter claims Duane worked for Government Employees between November 1973 and December 1977. She looks up the company. Government Employees, she finds, is the leading provider of insurance to the CIA. Was Duane really selling insurance to CIA agents? Or was that his cover? And if Duane was a rogue operative working with the CIA, was the Cooper mission a “company job”? Or maybe it was former CIA agents, or mercenaries, the folks who read
Soldier of Fortune
, who contracted out the mission. If so, why?

The conspiracy theorists believe Cooper’s hijacking was a black operation, staged during a moment in the news cycle when Americans would be home and watching television (Thanksgiving). It was designed to pressure legislators to pass more stringent safety laws on airplanes and in airports, and to push airlines to pay for metal detectors to deter hijackings. That makes sense to Jo. The Nixon era is chock full of black bag jobs and covert ops. But if the Cooper hijacking was an inside job, who called it? And how was Duane chosen to be the jumper?

July 26, 1972
Brighton, Colorado

The sheriff reads the names for morning arraignments from a list.

“Benjamin Namepee?”

Richard Floyd McCoy looks around the drunk tank. A few inmates are still sleeping off their hangovers. No hands go up.

“Benjamin Namepee?”

McCoy raises his hand. He walks out of the cell and proceeds to the courthouse. He keels over, cringing in pain. He’s sick, he tells the sheriff. Needs to use the bathroom, fast. He holds out his wrists. The sheriff uncuffs him. He runs.

Later that afternoon, the marshals find McCoy a few blocks from the courthouse. They place him back in handcuffs and belly chain and finish the drive east to Lewisburg.

The federal penitentiary at Lewisburg is a massive prison in rural Pennsylvania that was built during the Great Depression. McCoy is housed in the prison’s maximum security wing, Dog Block. His job is in the prison’s dental laboratory. He makes fake teeth for inmates.

Working with the plaster, McCoy begins to think about another escape. Didn’t John Dillinger use a fake gun to escape from jail? And if Dillinger could whittle a phony gun from a piece of wood, why couldn’t McCoy make his own pistol out of the plaster he works with in the dental lab?

He needs a sculptor. Through inmates, McCoy makes contact with Melvin Walker, who made the Bureau’s Most Wanted List. The feds call him the Flying Bank Robber.

Walker has ice-cold eyes, a menacing Fu Manchu mustache, jailhouse tattoos crawling up his arms, and a résumé of epic escapes.

On a transfer to Marion, then the most secure prison in the nation,
Walker made a handcuff key from a refill cartridge of a pen. He hid the key in his sock, handcuffed the marshals to a maple tree, stole their badges, credit cards, guns, car, then disappeared.

On the lam for months, Walker was eventually caught and transferred back to Marion. The fences were fourteen feet high, topped with swirling rolls of razor wire.

Using two pairs of bar spreaders, Walker pried open his window. He shimmied down the prison wall with a rope made from his bed sheet, clutching a wool blanket. Fired at by guards with high-powered rifles, Walker jumped the prison fence, using the wool blanket to shield himself against the razor wire. He ran for most of the night. The next morning, prison guard dogs discovered him sleeping in a tree.

Now in Lewisburg, Walker is biding time, writing poetry, waiting for his next escape.

If I’m destined to be in your prison
,
Then bury me deep underground
Just the sight of a light, for a man like me
And I know I am freedom bound
.

In his cell, McCoy flips through magazines, looking for images of guns. He cuts one out. Through other inmates, he sends the image to Walker. McCoy’s next shipment is a block of wax he pilfers from the prison dental lab. Walker sculpts the wax into a replica of a .45 caliber pistol. He sends the replica back to McCoy, who writes to the judge who oversaw his trial in Salt Lake. He begs for a reduced sentence. His letters are not returned. McCoy writes to the judge again.

It has been nearly six months since I wrote to you. I know you are quite busy and I don’t want to impose on you, but there are important personal considerations which require solutions in the near future. Knowing the final outcome of my case could very well influence some of the decisions that need to be made
.

Like escaping from Lewisburg.

March 1, 2008
Catheys Valley, California

The sun is blinding. I squint through the windshield. I see endless rows of almond trees that line the farms of the Central Valley. We are driving toward Merced. As a young man, Bobby Dayton drove the same route. I imagine him pulling over in his beat-up truck, asking for work. With his fair hair and blue eyes, Bobby would have burned in the sun. Or maybe he tanned dark. Bobby was a quarter Indian.

That fits. On the plane, witnesses described the hijacker as dark, swarthy.

“He says he was Kickapoo, and when my grandfather went to check it he says Winnebago, so I don’t know really what tribe we are,” Rena Ruddell says.

Rena is Bobby’s daughter and closest living relative. Her brother, Dennis, died years ago. Shortly after he returned from Vietnam, police found him in a friend’s bathtub. The bathtub was filled with milk, and a needle was stuck in his arm. A heroin overdose, the coroner said.

Now in her fifties, Rena has picked me up from the airport in Modesto, where she teaches elementary school. We are en route to Catheys Valley to see the old Dayton ranch and visit with Barb’s relatives.

Rena is a believer. At first, when Ron and Pat Foreman contacted her and told her they thought her father was D.B. Cooper, Rena doubted it. But that’s changed. The more Rena thought about it—Barb’s love for airplanes, her hatred for the airlines, her lust for The Score, her suicidal tendencies—the more it all made sense.

“You had to know him,” Rena says. “He just didn’t care if he lived or died.”

Listening to Rena talk about her father, I think of Dr. Hubbard, as if the psychiatrist had left me clues to uncovering Cooper’s identity.

Failure after failure gradually aroused an intense hostility that was slowly transferred from himself to society in an attempt to defend himself against a rising desire to commit suicide
.

 … After years of inadequate and misguided effort, these men had steadily depleted their sense of self-worth, until in a last desperate moment they plunged into this symbolic action in which they saw themselves more or less permanently as men who had done one fine thing
.

Yep. This was Bobby. Or, Barb.

The hills of the Mother Lode are marked with the mouths of old mining claims and the tombstones of bank robbers. In clearings, oak trees stand alone and the spindly branches cast shadows that look like witches’ fingers. The road is now dirt and we follow a creek. In the creek a man has his jeans rolled up and is showing a boy how to use a sluice box, working the water that runs over the rocks and through the dirt for flakes of gold.

The Dayton ranch exists only in memory. The house and barn are gone. All that’s left are a few stones of a chimney Elmer built. Rena and I walk the grounds. She wonders if her father buried the ransom money here. Across the stream, I can see an old mine that must have been active in the 1860s. Did Barbara hide the ransom in there?