Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper (5 page)

I look at more photos. I look into his eyes again. They appear darker now. Did I miss something before? I must have, because behind the sadness, especially in his passport photo, I now see a quirk.

Lyle told me about growing up on the farm outside of Morris. Kenny was second oldest. Lyle was youngest. Their pa was always frustrated with Kenny. He was not good at farmwork, at least not as good as their
older brother Oliver. When they were boys, the Dust Bowl of the Great Depression hit. Grain prices collapsed.

“Our folks were so busy,” Lyle wrote me. “Pa in the field and Ma, cooking, sewing, washing clothes. All of us kids did not get lots of hugs … I think it made us all a little bashful and made us long for the hugs.”

To entertain them, their pa built toys. One invention he called the Perpetual Motion Machine. It ran on marbles. The weight of the marbles pushed the others through and kept the wheels of the machine spinning. Kenny spent hours in the attic marveling at how the machine worked. Kenny’s mind was like a puzzle, always hunting for the missing piece, always looking for the answer.

As boys, they were also taught to be tough. At the county fair, one attraction was the strong-man competition. Last a round with a prizefighter, collect $100. Their pa took that challenge, stepped in the ring, and came home with five $20 bills.

Kenny didn’t like to fight. His passion was theater. He was the lead in school plays. He and their sister Lyla developed their own acrobatic act and performed at the county fair. Kenny also tap-danced.

“He could really snap those shoes around,” Lyle told me.

Kenny received several scholarships for college, but had to postpone his journalism degree. In the spring of 1944, as the Allied troops prepared for the D-Day invasion at Normandy, Kenny enlisted in the Army. For basic training, he was sent to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Here, he joined the Paratroops. It was a prestigious detail, an elite fraternity of aerial invaders. Training was arduous. By the time he strapped on his harness and gear—rear chute, front (or reserve) chute, crash helmet, canteen, cartridge belt, compass, gloves, flares, message book, hand grenades, machete, M-1 Garand rifle, .45 caliber Colt, radio batteries, wire cutters, rations, shaving kit, instant coffee, bouillon cubes, candy—he could barely walk. The load weighed nearly a hundred pounds. His fellow Paratroops had to push him onboard.

Kenny was 11th Airborne Division, the Angels. He trained for
parachute jumps over jungles and jungle warfare. The Angels were fighting in the Philippines. When he arrived overseas, the war was over. On base, Kenny worked as a mail clerk. For extra money, he volunteered for parachute jumps. He wrote about them in letters he sent home.

I went to church this morning. I went last Sunday also, but I had more reason to go, as after ten months of hibernation I once again donned a chute and reserve and entered a C-46
.

I looked up C-46. It was a massive military transport plane. Curtiss Calamity, troops called it. Kenny and twenty-nine other Paratroops jumped out the side door.

I cringed a good deal but I managed once again to pitch myself into the blast. That jump was worth $150. The nicest thing about this whole affair was that I never had time to worry about it.… I had only an hour to get into my harness. The first thing I knew I had jumped and was on my way back to the trucks that were to carry us into camp. Don’t get the idea that I didn’t get that certain stomachless feeling, because I did
.

He spent a week on vacation in Numazo, an ancient Japanese city known for its hot springs.

I lived in a hotel, which sat only about fifty yards from the shore. I spent most of my time up on the roof during the day; nights I usually lounged in a beach chair down by the water’s edge. They had a group of Hawaiian guitar players down there. With the music, the breeze off the ocean, and the waves crashing the shore, I felt like a millionaire enjoying his millions
.

Every time I read the letter, I get stuck on that line.
Like a millionaire enjoying his millions
.

More coincidences lining up. Not only did Kenny know how to parachute, like Cooper did, Kenny did it for money, like Cooper did. Maybe his request of $200,000 was an echo of the $150 he made from the military during his test jump? I wondered how much $200,000 was worth in the fall of 1971. It didn’t sound like much. I punched the numbers into a historic currency calculator. The return: $1,080,054.

Like a millionaire enjoying his millions
.

Throughout his life, Kenny was not a heavy earner. He was a gutsy laborer, willing to work dangerous jobs that paid a few dollars more an hour. He was also restless, aimless, as if trying to escape. But from what?

After the war, Kenny went on the road and sold encyclopedias for the Continental Sales Corp. He also worked the ticket booth at Charley Dobson’s circus in Minnesota. In 1949, he was hired by Northwest Orient and sent to work on Shemya.

Schmoo—that’s what Northwest employees called the island. Living here was like living on the moon. Located on the far tip of the Aleutian Islands, a few hundred miles off the coast of Russia, Schmoo was a pit stop for Allied planes that needed to refuel in the Northern Pacific. The island was small and lonely and flat. The winds were vicious and cold. After the war, Schmoo became a garbage heap for the U.S. military. It was cheaper for Allied forces to dump surplus from the war here than transport it back home. The beach was littered with rusted-out tanks and old bullets.

On the island, Kenny was a grunt. He cleaned airplanes and dumped the toilets. He also drove a bus that carried Northwest stewardesses and pilots to Quonset huts, which were used as sleeping quarters.

Kenny worked on Schmoo for five years. Somehow, he then managed to find even more isolating work. In the summer of 1955, he left for Bikini, a remote island in the South Pacific.

The government was testing hydrogen bombs on Bikini. Villagers had lost their hair. The radiation caused vomiting, diarrhea. Women
could not get pregnant. Layers of ash covered the houses and turned the drinking water yellow. During testing, villagers saw two suns as bombs exploded in the sky. Debris turned the afternoon black. Kenny worked here as a telephone operator.

He was then rehired by Northwest as a flight attendant and for the next three decades as a purser. He kept to himself, a ghost in the cabin of Northwest planes.

Through the union, I found pursers who worked with Kenny. “He was almost invisible,” Harry Honda told me. “If you asked somebody on his plane who was the purser on that flight, they couldn’t tell you, that’s how quiet this guy was.” Lyle Gehring flew with Kenny, too. “You ask people and say ‘Ken Christiansen’ and they’ll say, ‘Who?’?”

When Kenny was diagnosed with cancer, in 1991, his family suspected the source was the radiation he suffered on Bikini Island. When his condition deteriorated, he retired from Northwest. Kenny was so sick he asked his family to spend his last days with him in Bonney Lake. One day, in the hospital, his eyes weak and his lips dry, Kenny motioned to his young brother.

Lyle rushed to Kenny’s bedside.

“There’s something you should know,” Kenny said. “But I can’t tell you!”

“I don’t care what it is,” Lyle said. “You don’t have to tell me about it. We all love you.”

Now, almost two decades later, Lyle has been ruminating about what Kenny said on his deathbed. Was he about to confess to the Cooper hijacking? Did Lyle deny his brother a chance to clear his conscience? What was Kenny trying to tell him? What was his secret?

November 24, 1971
Aboard Northwest Orient Flight 305

The jet banks and climbs. In first class, passenger Floyd Kloepfer, an electronics specialist, pushes his nose against the window and looks down at the Columbia River. Explorers Lewis and Clark paddled through here in canoes, marveling in journals about Native American women wading in the waters, wearing only “a truss or pece [sic] of leather tied around them at the hips and drawn tite [sic] between their legs.”

Across the border into Washington the elevation changes. The sandy river banks of the Columbia turn into a storybook forest with trees as tall as buildings. These forests are where the nation’s logging industry was based, where miners searched for gold, where Bigfoot lives. One remote area is called the Dark Divide. Outside of Alaska, the Dark Divide is the largest stretch of uninhabited land in the country. There are no street signs, no roads. Backpackers and hikers disappear trying to find a way out. The land is so dense and untouched it is said to possess a brain of its own.

Kloepfer now watches the Columbia River shrink into a stream. He looks at the dark clouds and worries about the weather. Tonight he and his wife are driving to her folks’ place across the border in Canada. In the slushy rain, it will be a long drive in his Plymouth Fury.

Some Thanksgiving, he thinks.

The passenger next to him is drunk. The guy’s been drinking whiskey since South Dakota. Kloepfer looks over the seat behind him and finds the sergeant he was talking to earlier. The sergeant is in uniform. He is coming home from Vietnam. He will be spending Thanksgiving with his family, the first time since he shipped out.

The sergeant is not alone. All throughout the fall, soldiers have been lingering in airports and bus stations. Two weeks ago, President Nixon promised that an additional 45,000 American troops stationed in Vietnam would be coming home, too. The promise would be a blessing, except that troops are not the same when they return. Roughly a third of American soldiers in Vietnam are addicted to heroin. The antiwar
sentiment is so strong, the soldiers have also become targets for loudmouths and longhairs. What are they fighting for, anyway?

Troops are refusing orders, turning on their commanders. In 1970, there were at least 109 reports of fragging, incidents where soldiers killed officers. Others refused to enter Laos, and scribbled antiwar sentiments onto their combat helmets. “The unwilling, led by the unqualified, doing the unnecessary, for the ungrateful.”

The body counts in Vietnam are staggering—almost 60,000 dead, more than 150,000 wounded. Only months before, details of the Pentagon’s covert bombings in Laos and Cambodia were leaked to the
New York Times
. In Congress, legislators read the so-called Pentagon Papers into the public record to ensure the Nixon White House could not cover up the scandal. Anyone with access to a newspaper or a television set now has proof: their government is lying to them about Vietnam. How many other lies are there?

“I’ll say modestly that our country will be gone very shortly,” H. L. Hunt, the San Francisco oil magnate, said earlier in the week. “The communists are much smarter than freedom-loving people. America doesn’t want to do anything else except make a profit.”

Even the weather in 1971 seems to contribute to a feeling of looming Armageddon. In the South, fifty tornadoes blew through towns and cities in one week, leaving one hundred dead. Los Angeles was rocked with its biggest earthquake in four decades, leaving sixty-five dead.

A mob has been forming. In Detroit, the city zoo had to hire extra security guards because animals were getting attacked. A baby wallaby was stoned to death. A duck was shot with a steel-tipped arrow. Firecrackers were thrown at a pregnant reindeer. A hippopotamus was found with a tennis ball stuffed down his throat.

Cops are getting killed. In Syracuse, the police chief complained that black teenagers were using cars to conduct “guerrilla-type warfare” against his officers via “hit and run.” During the first nine months of the year, ninety-one cops were reported to have been killed on the job.

The war—cultural, political, generational—is raging. Throughout
the year, the authorities reported 771 bomb threats in federal buildings. Over the summer, 200,000 protestors descended on the capital. In one day, 12,000 people were arrested. In Miami, anti-pollution activists shuttered a Pepsi bottling plant by pouring cement over a drainage pipe. In Chicago, college students and members of an activist group were arrested for plotting to poison the city’s drinking water. Their plan: inoculate themselves, and create a superior race.