Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper (41 page)

Jo Weber has enemies.

Orange1:
“Plenty of people
were
listening to Jo’s story … until it became clear that what there wasn’t so much a ‘story’ as a hodge podge of unverified statements, suppositions, grasping at straws and wild theories.”

georger:
“Jo, the mistake you make is thinking YOU are important. The rest of the world is laughing or trying to avoid
you, trying to work around you, or without you. You are living a lie here. The emotional part of your brain is running the rational part of your brain.”

nigel99:
“When the threads started your story was really interesting … over the last few months a very different picture has emerged and I strongly believe that you have been hoodwinked … I feel very sorry for you as I think you are probably an innocent old lady …”

Sluggo_Monster:
“Yes Jo … Whatever you say Jo. It’s obvious that you ‘Just Don’t Get It.’ Oh yeah … for everybody else: Did you know the FBI lied to Jo? I hadn’t heard that!”

snowmman:
“Oh and one more thing. Jo: you’re a nut case.”

Jo’s biggest enemy in Cooperland is Cooper hunter Jerry Thomas.

Jerry Thomas:
“Jo your still here shocking. I don’t Know why But it is cool that you are. Your funny in a ignorante way But still ypour post and fiction, Is refreshing. Have fun Kiddo. I’m sure everyone on this forum enjoys your fiction stories … One more thing leave this forum. Jerry”

Jerry’s cyber assaults bring Jo to tears. “That man is evil,” she tells me one night, crying. “He’s like the interrogators they use in Iraq.”

Why can’t she ignore him?

“You can call me anything you want, but you can’t call me a liar,” she says.

Jerry is unapologetic. The Drop Zone, which he recently discovered, is a place for a serious exchange of information. It should be presented accordingly. Jo has taken over the case with her hysterics, he and many others feel. She’s simply getting in the way.

So is Tom Kaye, Jerry thinks. After our field trip, they had a few conversations about Tom’s findings and the paper Tom was planning
to write. Jerry expressed interest in being a bylined contributor on his paper. Tom told Jerry he was not “part of the Team,” meaning his team of science buddies: Alan and Carol.

Jerry was offended.

“What does he mean I wasn’t part of the Team? Not part of the Team! He invited me!”

Three months after the trip, Jerry returned to the Washougal area to see how far the river had moved the packet of bills Tom had thrown in. Jerry walked down the path under the small bridge like we had done and followed the current as it moved. He scanned the water, looking for the money bundle with:
REWARD IF FOUND!

Jerry found it. Didn’t take long. It had traveled only about a hundred yards downstream. It was trapped in a pool of water, under a boulder. Tom was right. The Washougal was too weak to move the money to the Columbia. It would have taken a biblical flood to get the bills there.

Jerry is unfazed. Once the seasons change, he’ll be back and get his feet moving through the woods. If he can find the time.

His daughter, Charlene, is now living with him. After our trip, she split up with her husband and lost custody of her children. She slept on park benches and on the street for a few weeks. She was spending any money she had on drugs. She decided to walk the I-5 bridge that spans the Columbia River and commit suicide.

On the bridge, she called Jerry.

“Either help me or come to my funeral,” she said.

She later moved into a trailer on his land.

“It’s hard,” she tells me. “I’m not a bad person. He won’t let me do anything. Like the other night I want to go dancing. He tells me, ‘A mother your age should not be outside dancing.’ But it’s like, there are people fifty and sixty years old at that bar.”

Charlene overdosed a few months later. She had hitchhiked into town to go to a bar. When Jerry arrived at the hospital, the doctor told him that Charlene had died at least twice before she was resuscitated.
After checking out of the hospital, Charlene moved into town to look for a job. I ask her why she thinks her father has spent so long looking for Cooper.

“At first it was the money, he wasn’t doing too good then,” she says. “Now I think it’s the publicity. He’s a bragga-muffin.”

“The Curse, the goddamn Curse,” Tom Kaye says when we meet six months after the trip at his ranch. He’s in his basement lab. He is shaking his head.

“I’ve become one of
them
,” he says. “What separates me from Jo Weber?”

His forensic investigation has backfired. The implosion started when he returned from Seattle and had a conversation with another metallurgist about the high amount of silver in the Cooper bills.

The metallurgist was not surprised. In the 1980s, the FBI used silver nitrates to locate fingerprints on criminal evidence. Tom raced to Wal-Mart to get a nitrate test. He came home and tested the bills.

“They were loaded,” he says.

It was a gut-wrenching blunder. How did he manage to make such an epic mistake? He spent six months and thousands of dollars to discover the Bureau’s own fingerprint dusting solution.

“It was like finding a treasure map to the Lost Dutchman’s Mine, and digging and digging and there’s nothing there but dirt,” he says. “I don’t want to be part of that story. I want a success story.”

The pollen tests were revealing. Once Tom analyzed the sticky tape he’d used on the tie, he did not find traces of pine. The lack of pine pollen suggests the tie did not come from the Pacific Northwest. Relying on the expertise of a pollen expert in Belgium, Tom was able to ascertain the species of flower the pollen had come from: impatiens.

“The problem is, there’s about a thousand different varieties of impatiens,” Tom says. “It happens to be one of the most common flowers.”

In his lab, he pops a slide in a microscope to show me a grain of pollen. The slide is of a flower from outside his old house in Chicago. He brings the sample into focus. He discovers another problem. The pollen from his house flower looks similar to the pollen he saw on the Cooper bills. Was the expert in Belgium wrong? Could he be sure the pollen on the tie was actually impatiens? Even if he could, what would that prove? The pollen is another bust.

And what about the gunk he found in the tie?

“Just gunk,” he says.

What about the hair he found in the tie knot?

“Wool.”

Wool?

“It came from a sheep.”

And the dandruff?

“Plastic, or white paint from the clip of the clip-on tie.”

Analyzing the evidence, he was able to make one conclusion. Cooper did survive the jump, he thinks. Under the microscope, Tom noticed the money had been bound for so long, the ink of serial numbers on the bills had bled into each other. When he looked at them further, he found that they lined up precisely behind each other in the stack.

Tom did not expect this. When he used his fishing rod to cast a packet of bills into the Columbia River, what happened was clear: The bills fanned out in the water, like the fins of an exotic fish. So if the Cooper bills had floated loosely in the water, when they dried and stuck together, the serial numbers would not be in perfect alignment. They would be slightly off.

Which means what exactly?

“The money did not float down the river,” Tom says.

So how did it get to Tena Bar?

“Nonnatural means,” he says.

Which means?

“People … If there’s one story the money tells us, it’s that.”

He does have more information. A new lead, he says. He found it by accident, under his microscope. I can see he is getting excited just talking about it. The lead, he says, “could end the case once and for all.”

I push him. Is he telling me the truth? What kind of forensic matter could Tom have discovered that would be such a case closer?

He won’t tell me.

I push harder. He won’t budge. He and the Team are thinking of writing their own book.

“Either it’s the biggest and best thing to happen to us, or the biggest and worst,” he says. “The stakes are so high, success or failure, the balance is on a knife edge.”

I call around Cooperland. Tom did find something under his microscope. The forensic matter was in the fibers of the Cooper tie. It is titanium sponge.

Among the elements, titanium sponge is rare. Its primary use is in very fast airplanes. Titanium is extremely resistant to heat. So, engineers crafted planes such as the SR-71 and prototypes for the Boeing Supersonic Transport from titanium.

In light of the timing of the hijacking, the discovery of titanium sponge is curious. In the fall of 1971, Boeing canceled its Supersonic Transport program and laid off the program’s workers. Was it conceivable that a Boeing worker handled the titanium sponge while working on the Supersonic Transport, got particles of titanium sponge on his tie, then boarded Northwest 305 in a grudge-fueled moment after getting canned? More enticing is that extremely few companies processed titanium sponge for Boeing. The leading company is Timet, based out of Dallas. Was Dan Cooper a Timet employee?

Once I learn about Tom’s discovery of titanium sponge, I ask him about it. He refers me to his lawyer.

“This is business now,” he says. “Once it’s business, the guns come out.”

I call a few experts on titanium sponge. While Timet handled the bulk of titanium sponge, other companies handled it, too, they say. Titanium was also used on submarines as well as airplanes. A lot of people could have handled titanium sponge prior to the hijacking.

Titanium sponge was also prevalent in household items, especially white paint, experts say.

White paint? Tom told me the dandruff he thought he found had turned out to be flecks of white paint off the clip of the clip-on tie. Was this the source of the titanium sponge? Did Tom waste his first investigation on the FBI’s silver-heavy fingerprint solution, and his second investigation on flecks of white paint? Is Tom chasing himself around the case in circles? Am I?

Later, I get a call from Jerry Warner (aka Georger). He’s upset, needs to talk. In his own lab, Jerry Warner has made a new discovery on the Cooper bills, he says.

What is it?

“Silver.”

Silver again?

“There are other forms of silver
in
the fiber threads of the money,” he says. “Completely separate and distinct from the silver nitrate issue. Okay? And these little beauties are sitting there in patterns—oh, it is a sight to behold! It’s absolutely nature at its best!”

I need a minute to get this straight. Basically, there is natural silver in the Cooper bills, and it was there the entire time, masked by the silver nitrate that was contained in the FBI fingerprint solution that Tom found and ruined his hypothesis.

Warner is cackling with laughter. “It is absolutely hilarious. We finally proved there was silver! From a lab standpoint, this is really funny.”

Can he describe what the natural silver looks like under the microscope?

“Like little doughnuts.… And these little buggers are just being held in there by those cotton fibers like babies in a bassinet.”

So what does it all mean for the case? Does the natural silver suggest the money has been at Tena Bar the entire time?

“Not the whole time. I have reasons to believe it maybe came down in different stages,” Warner says.

But from where?

“We’re pursuing that,” Warner says. He claims to have interviewed scores of former agents and air traffic officials. Warner’s theory on the flight path is that Northwest 305 came west of the flight path, and close to Tena Bar.

“Whatever you do, I beg you, do not talk to Jerry Thomas about this information,” Warner says. “If the flight path points west, the Washougal, as you know, is out for good. Once he got wind of where we were going, he was not happy.”

I ask Warner why he thinks Thomas is trying to defend the Washougal theory so fiercely. Is it because he doesn’t want to look foolish after somebody proves he has been looking for Cooper for the last twenty-two years in the wrong place?