Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper (6 page)

Prisons are overcrowded. Riots break out. In early September, in the upstate New York prison of Attica, inmates armed themselves with shanks, chains, broomsticks, baseball bats, and hammers. They seized the exercise yard. They burned the schoolhouse and chapel. They gagged prison guards at knifepoint, ordered them to strip naked and navigate a club-swinging gauntlet. Gas was released. Shots were fired. Inmates were stripped naked and beaten.

“The Attica tragedy is more stark proof that something is terribly wrong with America,” said Maine senator Edward Muskie, who’s campaigning for president. “We have reached the point where men would rather die than live another day in America.”

To combat violent hippies and homegrown terrorists, a new conservatism has been born. Just this past September, a twelve-year-old boy called the police to turn in his own father for smoking pot.

“There is such a feeling of powerlessness in this country,” said John Gardner, who resigned as the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. “We all have the feeling that we want to complain to the manager, but the manager is invisible. Nobody knows who he is and where to find him.”

The manager is President Nixon, who sounds most powerless of all. Over the summer he made a speech referring to the ornate federal buildings in Washington. He forecasted a gloomy future. “Sometimes when I see those columns I think of seeing Greece and Rome,” he said. “And I think of what happened to Greece and Rome, and you see only what is left of great civilizations of the past—as they have become wealthy, as they lost their will to live, to improve, they became subject
to the decadence that destroys the civilization. The United States is reaching that period.”

The words. To her. Pay attention, Flo. Pay attention. The words glare at her as bright as lightbulbs.

I have a bomb. Sit by me
.

He’s kidding, right?

“No, miss. This is for real.”

She gets up and sits in 18D next to him. She drops the note. It flutters to the floor.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No, miss.”

He reaches over to the window seat and puts his fingers on his attaché case. He opens the mouth. She peers inside.

The sticks are red, about eight inches long. She sees a battery. It is bigger than a battery you might put in a flashlight.

He’s teasing Flo now, holding in his fingers the naked copper tip of a wire in front of her. This
is
for real. She turns.

There’s Tina.

Tina can see Flo’s lips moving but the words are not coming out of her mouth. Flo gasps.

“Tina.
Tina.
”

Tina picks up the note near Flo’s feet. She reads it. It’s too late to turn back. The wheels are up. Flight 305 is already in the air.

Tina reaches for the interphone hanging outside the lavatory. The interphone is her direct line to the cockpit. She speaks into the receiver.

“We’re being hijacked,” she says. “He’s got a bomb and this is no joke.”

May 27, 1969
University Hospital, University of Washington, Seattle

“Nothing I do is phony,” Bobby Dayton would say.

It was true. When he wanted to go on a hike to clear his mind, he left with his dog, Irish, and came back three weeks later. He prospected for gold in the Yukon and nearly died from starvation. In the Merchant Marines, traveling the world in the hulls of the big ships, he went hunting in the Philippines and lived among the Māori warriors, who were famous for their guerrilla battle tactics. Back on the boat, he was nearly shot for being a deserter. Bobby spent plenty of time in the brig.

He could be nasty, a savage. He’d punch you in the face if you looked at him wrong. He’d spit on your shoes to get a reaction, then slug you. Bobby talked about robbing banks because there was never any good work around, and he once rode with the Hells Angels as they terrorized the State of California. He never killed anybody, but he could have and almost did several times. Once in Mexico. Once in Seattle, where he lives. A taxicab driver cut him off. In the dispute, Bobby got out of his Dodge, removed a chain from the trunk, and beat the cabbie to within inches of his life.

“Evidently, I’m a transsexual problem,” Bobby tells his doctor before the surgery. “My wife tells me I’m two people. She tells me when I’m Bob I seem bitter, but when I’m Barbara I’m a much nicer person.”

He is in the hospital for a psychological evaluation, which is necessary before sex change operations. He is wearing a long-sleeved blouse (to cover his tattoos) and high heels. There is lipstick on his cigarette.

The doctor studies his appearance and mannerisms. His teeth are in poor shape. His hands are rough. His speech is quiet and soft, and his gestures and hand movements are mildly effeminate.

The doctor asks what Bobby does for a living.

Until recently, Bobby was working on the Lockheed shipping yards, as an electrician. He was foreman to twenty men. It was uncomfortable for him to be in charge; men shouldn’t take orders from women, he thought, and so he quit.

“I feel better away from people,” Bobby says. “I feel they can see through me for what I am. I don’t feel like the other men. I feel if I was a woman I could let myself go.”

The doctor has a test for him, a game really. Free association, no wrong answers. The way it works is the doctor starts a sentence and Bobby finishes it.

The doctor starts.

“If I had ten thousand dollars …”

“I would buy myself an operation,” Bobby says.

“If I were invisible …”

“I wouldn’t do anything.”

“If I were an animal I’d be …”

“Bird. I like birds and flying.”

One early memory. Bobby is five. He wants to be Tinkerbell, from
Peter Pan
. She is trailed by magic dust. She can always fly away.

Even as a boy, looking in the mirror at his legs, which he thought were too shapely, Bobby thought he could see the woman inside him. He snuck into his mother’s dresser and placed his hands among her bras and panties to feel the fabric. Alone in a room he tried them on. Later, he slept in them.

His dreams were of men on top of him, pushing themselves into him. Sometimes Bobby put the family dog on top of his groin. He told the dog to sit and imagined the weight of the dog was the weight of another man.

Another early memory. He can see the airfield in Long Beach. The planes have propellers, fins, and wings—just like birds. He can see them coming in for landings and can hear the scream of their engines. He watches them scurry around the taxiway. How can these aluminum contraptions manage to fly?

Bobby looks through the airport fence. An older man is cleaning his plane. Bobby shouts to the man through the fence.

“How about a ride?”

The man shakes his head.

The next day Bobby comes back. The next day too.

Finally the old man hands Bobby a rag and Bobby wipes down his plane. In exchange, Bobby gets his ride and discovers a purpose in life: to fly.

“I don’t like being under someone else’s control,” Bobby says years later. “In my plane, I feel like I’m totally inside the sky, totally free.”

During his psychiatric evaluation, the doctor asks Bobby to describe his employment history.

“I’m a job jumper,” Bobby says.

He dropped out of high school and picked lemons with migrant workers for a quarter a day. He drove to Oregon to pick tomatoes and then found higher pay in the logging camps of the Pacific Northwest. When he was old enough he enrolled in the Air Force. He wanted to learn how to fly for free. But the exams required a background in mathematics. Doctors also noticed a problem with his eye. He didn’t qualify for flight school.

He vowed revenge. He would not give the military the satisfaction of good service. He would be a terrible, incorrigible soldier. He joined the Merchant Marines.

On Merchant ships, Bobby wrote home from ports that were hard to pronounce, names he tattooed onto his arms and chest. Eniwetok, Alang Alang, Kara Gara, Barugo, Batangas, Cagayan, Agoo, Tabao. He was in the South Pacific. He was in South America. He swam in shark-infested waters. He hunted with natives.

He was a violent case. He drank fifths of bourbon in gulps to impress other sailors (then wandered off to vomit). He followed other sailors into brothels and forced himself to have sex with women. Anything to protect his secret. In the dead of night, under the moon and adrift in the ocean, Bobby would crawl out from his bunk and sneak toward the front of the ship, where he would slip on his dress and his heels.

“You can’t live if you don’t do it,” Bobby tells his doctors about his cross-dressing. “It’s like medicine.”

After the Merchant Marines, Bobby changed jobs every month or so. He’s had more than 150 over the years, he tells the doctor. He can fix cars, washing machines, vacuum cleaners. He was a mechanic at Ford, Bethlehem Steel, Continental Can. He worked at Yosemite National Park.

He knows how to plaster and cement too—just like his father, Elmer.

“I can do anything he can do,” Bobby says about Elmer.

In the hospital, Cindy Dayton is interviewed about Bobby. Cindy is Bobby’s second wife. If she felt Bobby was a woman, the doctor asks, why did she marry him?

“I’m not sure why I married him,” Cindy says. “I wanted a husband and he seemed like a good provider. I like him as a person. He doesn’t lie or swear.”

Recently, Bobby tried to commit suicide, she says. For months they lived in Baltimore because Bobby was on the list for a sex change operation at Johns Hopkins. He was rejected. The doctors in Baltimore felt it would be too much of a challenge for Bobby to adapt in society as a woman. How could he pass with his bad teeth, his chain smoking, and his tattoos covering his body?

“I say he is a woman,” Cindy says. “He thinks like a woman.… He’s beautiful as a woman. He doesn’t overdress or over-makeup. As a man, he’s sloppy, and it’s a little embarrassing.”

November 24, 1971
Aboard Northwest Orient Flight 305

The jet is climbing. Ten thousand feet, fifteen thousand feet. In the cockpit, Scotty and copilot Bill Rataczak aren’t sure how to respond. A bomb? Is it real? Does it matter?

In total, there are thirty-six passengers in the cabin, six crew members. As captain, Scotty is in charge. What to do?

Scotty radios Northwest Orient flight operations in Minnesota.

A man in the back says he has a bomb, Scotty says. He doesn’t know who the man is or what he wants. Not yet.