Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper (42 page)

“It’s Himmelsbach,” Warner says. “He wants to protect Ralph Himmelsbach, who really put out the idea that Cooper died in the woods. If Cooper landed west of the flight path, well, then, heck, of course he could survive the jump.”

I call Himmelsbach. I ask him about his relationship with Jerry. They are close. “His father wasn’t very nice to him, so I try and be as helpful as I can,” Himmelsbach says. He still believes Cooper perished in the woods and landed in the Washougal River basin. “I haven’t seen a lick of evidence to suggest otherwise,” Himmelsbach says.

I fly to Arkansas. I want to meet and interview Brian’s parents, Dwayne and Patricia. I want to know if they are telling the truth about what happened on Tena Bar. Did Brian find the money or not?

I land at Fort Smith and drive through the Ouchita mountains. An endless brigade of motorcycle riders passes me into Mena, near the Oklahoma border. It has been ravaged by a tornado. Debris lines the streets. Families are homeless.

The Ingram house is on the outskirts of town. Dwayne does not live here anymore. He lives in a trailer in Texas and works as an industrial painter. Water towers are his specialty. Before he paints each one, he climbs to the top of the tower and does a headstand.

He’s also been drinking himself to death. It’s not healthy to have him around the house. On a recent visit, Brian had to tackle him and wrestle a gun out of his hands.

Dwayne has a long white beard that reaches down to his belly button, and hippielike bracelets around his skinny wrists. He rolls a cigarette and we go outside to talk about the case.

Dwayne wants to figure out what the case means. He is not religious like Brian, but what was God trying to tell him when Brian found the money? What was the test? Why would he lose out on the ransom, get arrested, win a chance to have grandparents, lose that, lose the money, win it back in court? What was the deeper message in all that went wrong?

Back in the house, over a tank of goldfish, I see portraits of the Ingram family on the wall, before the money was found. I wonder how they might be different if they hadn’t gone on that picnic on Tena Bar.

“What good is fame without the fortune?” Dwayne says.

“They treated us like criminals,” Patricia says. She sits in a wing-backed chair and Dwayne sits in another across from her. Once again, they repeat the story of how Brian found the three packets of bills at Tena Bar, all the media attention they received after Dwayne’s arrest, and their court victory getting the bills back.

“I always wanted to meet Connie Chung, but not like that,” Dwayne says.

Dwayne is about to cry. He talks about Nan and Tap and how comforting it was to think about having a family again. He wonders if Brian found the buried treasure so that Dwayne could somehow find his real father. If Nan and Tap saw him in the news, then maybe his own father would too. But would Dwayne’s own father even recognize him? He rolls another cigarette.

“The Cooper Curse,” he says.

“Oh, it exists,” Special Agent Larry Carr says of the Curse. He’s no longer the agent on the case. In Cooperland, Carr is considered something of a hero for pushing the case forward. The discovery, on American soil, of the French comic book is largely a result of the media splash he made when he leaked that a parachute (albeit the wrong one) had been found. Carr also released data that exposed another fed bungle: the Missing Minute, which puts the hijacker over a not-as-wooded area. As significant as these discoveries have been, Carr’s bosses at the Bureau couldn’t have been too happy. Bureau culture frowns upon media attention for case agents. Whatever happened, Carr was reassigned to the most tedious detail in the field office: surveillance. Since, he’s relocated to Washington, D.C.

Am I losing my bearings here? I want to talk to the other journalist who came close to unearthing Cooper. His name is Karl Fleming. Before he got involved in the case, Fleming had started his own newspaper, married a cute brunette—she was twenty-two, he was forty-four—and his life seemed to be peaking. He placed a classified ad in local newspapers in the Pacific Northwest, attempting to lure the hijacker
into an interview. The two men who responded were later charged with fraud and sentenced to prison after Fleming promised them immunity and then turned them in in the hopes of not getting arrested himself.

I find Fleming living in Los Angeles. I leave more than a dozen messages for him and his wife, Anne Taylor Fleming, now a writer who also contributes to the
The Newshour with Jim Lehrer
. No response.

Why not even a courtesy call to say no thanks? Is Fleming ducking me? Is Anne Taylor? Why?

Fleming has written a memoir, I learn, published in 2005. I get it. I open the first page and read his dedication.

To All the Reporters Who Did the Right Thing

I find the chapter on the Cooper case. “A Fall from Grace,” it’s called. I want to find out what happened to Fleming after the Cooper story collapsed on him. I find this passage.

I slid into a dark depression, spending hours prone on the sofa in my little office, unable to function, often in tears, begging for night so that I could sleep. I often thought of suicide and considered how to go about it. I didn’t like heights and a gun would be too messy. A pill overdose would do it
.

His wife and her father forced him into a car. They drove him to a mental health facility. Orderlies strapped him to a gurney.

As I lay there with a partially free hand I tried to stuff the corner of a sheet down my throat to kill myself
.

Institutionalized, Fleming was given heavy doses of antidepressants. He spent a significant amount of time in therapy. None of it worked. He began electroshock treatments.

I didn’t have a choice and I was too far down to be scared. Finally, slowly, I began to get better, began to see the sun shine again
.

On a lark, I call Fleming again.

He picks up. Of course, he’d be happy to meet and talk about Cooper.

“You know, to this day, I still believe I had the right man,” he says.

I fly to Los Angeles. I call to confirm the date and time. I call again. I leave several messages. I finally reach him several days later. He can’t talk about D.B. Cooper. His wife’s orders.

“Sorry to have led you down the primrose path,” he says.

I check out another lead. Another confession. Bryant “Jack” Coffelt was a confidence man who spent much of his life in prison. A charmer, he was known to stuff wads of hundred-dollar bills in the roof of his Cadillac. He later worked in Washington as the chauffeur to the last descendant of Abraham Lincoln. The Lincoln heir had a reputation “as a dirty old man,” according to one account, and with Coffelt at the family estate they organized “modern-day Roman orgies.” Years later, Coffelt confessed to the Cooper crime, and witnesses claimed that after the skyjacking he mysteriously walked with a limp.

Socially, Coffelt was said to be close to a number of Washington elite, including J. Edgar Hoover, and was suspected by many to be working as an informant. Coffelt would conceal evidence in the most unsuspecting places. He once stuffed a note from his lawyer with the message “Burn This Letter!” inside a cookbook.

I had seen Coffelt’s name in the Bureau file. According to the FBI, Coffelt had a lock-tight alibi. I spent a few weeks checking him out. I couldn’t find much that jibed. At the time of the hijacking, the feds found, Coffelt was in a mental institution in the state of Illinois. Coffelt was a dead end.

I get more leads. A son tells me his father, a former air-traffic controller, once confessed to him in the family basement. Former Northwest employees tell me a lone-wolf employee who matched the hijacker’s description disappeared after the crime, prompting widespread suspicions. Another private detective and lawyer tells me about Wolfgang Gossett, a former Air Force man and gambler turned priest who, among other things, helped the FBI investigate cults.

Another lead. I must have overlooked it. Buried in a book is another Cooper confessor who, after a stint in the Paratroops, enrolled at Rutgers and joined the varsity track team. He was, according to a witness, “a steady third-place finisher.”

I drive to Rutgers. I camp out in the basement of the massive library on campus, flipping through old yearbooks. I scan the faces of the track runners, jumpers, pole vaulters, looking for my steady third-place finisher. I have to squint to see the details of the boyish faces in the team photos. I crack open another yearbook, and another. Focus now. If the clue to the Cooper mystery is here, I can’t afford to miss it.

I return to the library the next day, and the next. I select suspicious names and faces from the Rutgers varsity track team from years ’45, ’46, ’47, ’48, and ’49. I pull the individual student files, searching for a clue, a morsel of data that would correspond to something I had read in the FBI file, a link.

I request more folders. I go through all. The link should be here. It isn’t.