Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper (32 page)

A car barrels down the dirt road, pulls over. I see a white cowboy hat. It’s Sharon Power, Rena’s aunt. She was married to Bill Dayton, Bobby’s brother. Sharon is also the sister of Dixie, Bobby’s first wife. Sharon spent years on the ranch with the Dayton family. She learned to ride horses here. She walks around the property in her stiff dungarees and cowboy boots, pointing to where she and Bill and Bobby stabled Toots, Sugar, and Buck, their horses. She points to a patch of grass that was once a kitchen where Bobby’s mother, Bernice, made her hominy grits and tamale pie.

Sharon does not doubt that Bobby Dayton turned into Dan Cooper.

“He just had that kind of mind,” she tells me.

Sharon is a poet. She wrote a few verses to explain her theories.

A lonely man sat in the night
The spirit within, was just not right
.
The bomb he held was violently loaded
.
A move of his finger and it would be exploded
.
Stilts in his shoes raised him from short to tall
.
He had always hated being somewhat small
.
The unfamiliar tie was bothersome
.
Becoming edgy it troubled him some
.
He shot out in the turbulent air
In a free fall, if he died he didn’t care
.
In small pieces he burned the chute
And note by note he burned all the loot
.
This was his hidden treasure
No one would find it, not ever
.
He changed into women’s clothes
Put on makeup and powdered his nose
.
It would be a long walk to the road to catch a bus
SHE would find amusement in all of the fuss
.

Sharon’s daughter, Billie Dayton, lives nearby. Billie was close with Bobby too. Bobby was her uncle. When the hijacking occurred, Billie remembered her father hearing the news and saying, “That’s Bobby.”

Billie Dayton is a believer too. Her uncle Bobby was always trying to prove he could do something others could not. He was also suicidal over his sex change operation and depressed over his failure to obtain a commercial pilot’s license. Bobby was a man with a grudge.

After the operation, Billie’s father didn’t speak or visit with Barb until she got sick. She’d moved out of Seattle and into a trailer in the desert near Carson City, Nevada. She was broke, gambling all her money and social security checks away in slot machines.

When Bill and Billie arrived to visit, Barb was in the hospital.

Bill and Billie suspected she might have some of the Cooper bills. They searched her trailer for them, but nothing turned up.

Then a curious thing happened. In the hospital, Barb began to make strange gestures. Bill and Billie thought she finally wanted to confess to the hijacking. But Barb’s condition had deteriorated. She could no longer talk. Then she was gone.

“I have no doubt in my mind Bobby was D.B. Cooper,” Billie says. “I know it.”

August 2000
Pace, Florida

Jo Weber does not leave her house. She has too much work decoding the clues Duane left her. Her friends stop calling. Her daughters are embarrassed by her obsession with the Cooper case. But how can Jo let it go? She has to find a piece of evidence to prove Duane is Cooper. She has to prove it because she needs to show everyone who doubts her that she isn’t making up this story—that she isn’t a loo-loo.

She calls the FBI again. They don’t call back. What have they found? What are they hiding from her?

After the story about Duane is published in
U.S. News & World Report
, Jo gets calls from all over the country. One of them is from Bob Knoss.

Knoss knew Duane, he claims. He met Duane through Richard Floyd McCoy Jr. They were training for the hijacking together.

What?
Can’t be true. How could two Cooper suspects (Weber, McCoy) be involved in the Cooper hijacking?

Bob Knoss is a picture-framer who once lived in Bloomington, Minnesota. He had forgotten about Duane until the
U.S. News & World Report
story was published in July of 2000. Knoss had recently broken his back. He was marooned on his sofa, taking painkillers. Watching television, Knoss saw Duane’s face. That’s the dude, he thought to himself.

The memory Knoss claimed to have meshed together into a wacky comedy, a story about a gung-ho aspiring covert agent (McCoy), who in order to impress his rogue bosses recruited a charming crook from prison (Duane Weber). Together they conspired to hijack a Northwest plane, to accomplish the dual purposes of getting rich together and capturing the attention of legislators in Washington to increase airport security.

Knoss knew about it because he was involved, he says. His story is complicated. Knoss was a draft dodger who got caught. Instead of going to prison, he volunteered to help McCoy on the Cooper hijacking.
Knoss was McCoy’s witness, he tells Jo. In case McCoy got arrested, Knoss was to testify that McCoy was operating on behalf of interests friendly to the government.

And how did McCoy and Duane get involved?

McCoy got Duane out of prison, Knoss says. Only Knoss never knew Duane as Duane, Knoss tells Jo. He knew Duane by his nickname, Coop. And his alias, Dan Cooper.

Jo does not believe Bob Knoss’s story. How can she? But she does check it out.

One late night on the phone, she asks Mary Jane if she and Duane ever lived in Bloomington.

“No,” Mary Jane tells her. “We never lived in Bloomington, just stayed there for a few weeks.”

So it was true. Or possibly true. Duane had been in Bloomington, Minnesota. Bob Knoss could have known Duane. If that part of Knoss’s story is true, what about the rest?

She reads every book and article written on the case. She calls all the major witnesses. She flies to Washington to see if she can retrace her steps, to see if she can remember where Duane took her, that road near the town of Orchards where Duane said, “That’s where D.B. Cooper walked out of the woods.”

A few memories come back to her. Especially down near the Columbia. She passes the Red Lion Inn. She’s been to the hotel before. Duane pulled the car over. She went to use the ladies’ room. When she came back to the car, Duane was gone. She circled the lobby. She checked the car again. Where did Duane go? Finally, she found him down near the river’s edge.

“What you looking at, Duane?” she asked.

“The bag,” he said.

Jo strained her eyes and scanned the river. She saw a paper bag. She didn’t know what was in it. Duane was using it for trash, she thought.

She scolded him for tossing trash into the river.

“You don’t do that!” she said. “You don’t litter like that!”

Now, after learning about the case, and about the Cooper bills Brian Ingram found on Tena Bar down the river, Jo wonders about that bag. Maybe it wasn’t filled with trash like she thought. Maybe Duane was throwing away the Cooper bills. The year was 1978. Or 1979. She can’t remember. She tells this story often. Few believe her. What if Jo is making up the entire story?

March 4, 2008
Woodburn, Oregon

I pull into the parking lot of an Arby’s south of Portland. I am here to meet Ron and Pat Foreman and Ron’s pilot friend Cliff Kluge. Our mission: find the rest of Cooper’s missing ransom.

We have a guide of sorts. In the late 1970s, when Barb Dayton confessed to being the skyjacker, the Foremans took notes. Our plan is to follow the notes, as if they are clues Barb left for us to use, like a treasure map.

“A white house,” the first note reads. “The front faces the south. There is an old tractor kitty-corner to the house. The pecan orchard is longer than it is wide and runs east and west. The money is hid in one of the irrigation cisterns.”

There is more. “Cistern at end, so not used.”

We drive down the freeway, retracing the flight path, until we get to turn into Woodburn.

“Woodburn,” according to the Foremans’ notes, “is exactly 38 miles south of Columbia River.”

The notes describe how Barb pulled the job. On the night of the hijacking, she rode a bus from Woodburn to Portland. Foreman note: “Bus not as conspicuous.” Her motive: “Bitterness against FAA & airlines. Too many rules against the average pilot. Everything for the airlines.” The bomb: “Two five-pound charges with detonator in zippered brown briefcase. Battery switch in pocket. Detonator was a staple remover with wires soldered to it.”

The staple remover, I think, is a revealing detail. After the hijacking, Tina Mucklow reported seeing a “a little clip at the end” of the wire of the hijacker’s briefcase bomb. Was the “clip” Tina saw really Barb’s staple remover?

I see grassy fields of the Willamette farms and labyrinths of trees in the orchards.

In the passenger seat, Ron Foreman looks at the sky to get his bearings.
As pilots, he and Barb flew over the flight path of the hijacked plane and the farms around which we are now meandering. Ron also knows where Barb says she jumped. According to his notes, her visual cue from the sky was “Aurora State Airport.” On the map, Aurora State Airport is a few miles south of Portland. In the night sky, Barb would have been able to see the lights of Vancouver, then Portland, then Aurora.

Note: “Jump was made from 10,000 feet with a 9,000 foot free fall. Speed of 727 was 220 mph. Wind was at 30 mph from the southwest.”

It’s true. How could Barb know such arcane details as wind speed and wind direction, and be right about them? According to the Bureau files, meteorologists reported the wind speed between Portland and Salem, Oregon, to be between 20 and 30 knots—so, on average, exactly 30 miles per hour on the night of the hijacking. And the wind direction varied between south and southwest. Was this coincidence? Or was Barb really Cooper?

In researching Barb’s past, Ron and Pat Foreman found other evidence they believe links Barb to the hijacking. They went through Barb’s medical records, and notes from doctors were revealing. In one interview before the surgery, Bobby Dayton told doctors about his hobbies. From the records:

He has also been a skydiver, but lost interest in that because he found it boring
.

Boring?! How could jumping out of a plane, Ron Foreman wondered, ever get boring?

The medical records also contained notes from follow-up visits. Eight days before the hijacking, on November 16, 1971, doctors noted that Barb was depressed. She was considering suicide again. Two weeks after the hijacking, on December 8, 1971, her mood had changed.

[Patient] doing well. Not depressed.… Is on welfare but strangely un-worried despite inability to get work. Welfare expires in three months
.

“Strangely unworried” about money? Why? Because she now had a $200,000 ransom, a ransom she hid in a cistern, a cistern that is somewhere around Woodburn, where we are now driving.

I see a white farmhouse out the window. Is the front facing south? It is. We follow the road along the trees to check the direction of the field. It looks just like Barb said: longer than it is wide. Now, where are the cisterns?

We drive farther, circling the orchard, past a trailer park. In the farthest corner, we park, get out, and there it is, over the fence: a cistern. It is just as Barb has described.

We look down the alleys of trees and check the orchard for big dogs and farmers with guns. This is private property. Should we go?

Ron Foreman stays with Pat in the car. Cliff and I hop the fence. I hear the distant buzz of a tractor. I look around the orchard. Far off, I see a plaid shirt. Who is that? Better hurry.

I close my eyes and cross my toes and pray, Oh Lord do I pray, that when we get the cistern open, there will be, just as Barb left it, the remaining portion of D.B. Cooper’s missing ransom. I want it bad. I want it now.

Screeching, scraping. Cliff and I are breaking sweat to pry the heavy metal cover off the cistern. Finally we get the thing off.

A hole in the ground is now open, a tunnel to our treasure.