Still Missing: Rethinking the D.B. Cooper Case and Other Mysterious Unsolved Disappearances (17 page)

McCoy was convicted of taking over a United Air Lines 727, over western Colorado April 7 and forcing if off its Denver-Los Angeles path to San Francisco where 85 other passengers were let off and the ransom put aboard.

He then ordered the plane to fly a zig-zag course across the West, ending over his hometown of Provo, Utah, where he bailed out.

FBI agents arrested him two days later in the neatly kept house where he lived with his wife and two children. They found all but $30 of the ransom, a gun, parachute suits and a fake hand grenade in a cardboard box on the back porch.

The defense said after the trial the conviction would be appealed on grounds Ritter erred in allowing the introduction in court of items confiscated in McCoy’s home. Attorneys argued that the wrong FBI agent signed a search warrant.

McCoy, who was silent during the four-day trial, said; “I realize the pressure on you, judge, for the type of crime I was charged with.”

The judge issued the sentence without comment. McCoy was calm as his wife, Karen, wept.

After the trial, McCoy was promptly delivered to the federal prison in Lewisburg Pennsylvania, where he quickly decided that he wasn’t going to spend the next four and a half decades locked in a cage. McCoy, along with three other convicts, engineered a plan to escape by using a fake gun, carved from dental plastic, to hijack a garbage truck visiting the prison, and driving it through the front gate. The daring plan, just like his previous daring plan, worked! But just like his previous plan, according to this article printed in
The Dispatch
on November 9, 1974, this plan also ended in disaster:

LONG WANTED HIJACKER DIES
IN SHOOTOUT

Virginia Beach, VA. (UPI) After they had spent months living “underground,” the law finally caught up with convicted airplane hijacker Richard Floyd McCoy and another escapee on the bureau’s 10 most wanted list.

The two men broke out of the federal prison in Lewisburg, Pa., last August, and then moved from one hideout spot to another.

But late Saturday, McCoy, 31, was killed in a shootout with agents in the quiet Wolf’s Snare section of this resort community, where he was holed up with convicted bank robber Melvin Dale Walker, 35. Walker was recaptured and faced arraignment today on escape charges.

McCoy had been serving a 45-year term for hijacking a United Airlines jet with a grenade and a pistol, and bailing out over Provo, Utah, with $500,000 ransom. Melvin Dale Walker, 35, was in jail for a $16,000 North Carolina bank robbery.

The FBI said McCoy and Walker apparently had lived in Wolf’s Snare since September.

Authorities learned of their whereabouts Thursday and agents staked out the house while McCoy and Walker were away Saturday night.

“McCoy entered the front door with a key and one of the agents identified himself and told him to hold it right there,” Special Agent Gerald Coakley said. “The fellow went for his gun and got one shot off and the agent returned fire” with a shotgun.

McCoy may have died, in that November gunfight, but the controversy and suspicion of McCoy actually being Cooper did not die. His appearance did closely match the composite drawings created by the FBI from eyewitnesses’ descriptions, and his methods used during the hijacking were almost identical to Cooper’s, but eyewitness failed to positively identify McCoy as Cooper, which is pretty telling since McCoy’s hijacking was merely months after Cooper’s, and eyewitnesses would still have fresh images of the Cooper suspect in their minds.

Another suspect that briefly appeared soon after the hijacking was ex-convict and conman Jack Coffelt, who also claimed to have been the chauffeur and confidante of Abraham Lincoln’s last undisputed descendant, great-grandson Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith. He began claiming he was D.B. Cooper the year following the hijacking, and used a former cellmate by the name of James Brown as an intercessor, to sell his story to a Hollywood production company. He claimed he landed near Mount Hood, southeast of Ariel, Washington, and injured himself. He also claimed to have lost the ransom money. Photographs of Coffelt bared a vague resemblance to the FBI composite sketch, even though he was in his mid-fifties during the 1971 hijacking. Coffelt’s account of the incident was reviewed by the FBI, which concluded that it differed in many significant details from information that had not yet been made public. Soon after, he was removed from the FBI suspect list. Coffelt died in 1975.

After the early 1970’s, incidents of skyjackings declined dramatically. This was due in most part to the installation of metal detectors and x-ray machines at airports across the country, as well as stiff penalties for those who were caught. Of all the skyjacking attempts that happened over American soil during the air piracy craze in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Cooper skyjacking suspect is the only person who hasn’t been captured, or at least identified.

By the mid 1970’s, the Cooper case had grown cold, ice cold. The FBI investigated hundreds of suspects, and one by one, they were all dismissed. An interesting phenomenon developed though: “Cooper Confessing.” Dozens of people, maybe more, came out of the woodwork to confess to the crime, or to turn in a relative that they thought for sure was the elusive skyjacker.

Fearing the statute of limitations (5 years for air piracy) could impede the prosecution of the Cooper suspect, if he were ever captured, a grand jury was convened to look at the case. In November of 1976, a Portland grand jury returned an indictment against “John Doe, aka Dan Cooper” for air piracy and violation of the Hobbs Act. The indictment in effect formally initiated prosecution of the hijacker that can be continued, should he be apprehended, at any time in the future. FBI Agent Ralph Himmelsbach was called to testify before the grand jury as its only witness, and he was pleased with the grand jury’s verdict.

It would be seven years until the first piece of physical evidence would emerge since the skyjacking itself. In the fall of 1978, a placard with the instructions for lowering the rear stairs of a 727 was found by a deer hunter about 13 miles east of Castle Rock, Washington. On January 18, 1979, The Herald Journal published the following article giving details of the discovery:

PLACARD COULD BE LINK TO
UNSOLVED SKYJACKING

Kelso, Wash. (AP)-A heavy plastic placard from a Boeing 727, found by a hunter in a thickly wooded area, could be a link to the unsolved 1971 D.B. Cooper skyjacking, authorities said Wednesday.

Cooper is believed to have parachuted from the Northwest Airlines jet near Woodland, about 10 miles south of here, with $200,000 in $20 bills.

The placard was described as an emergency warning notice of the type posted next to the rear exit of 727s.

“There isn’t any way that it could have come off a plane without the (rear) door being opened,” Said Cowlitz County Sheriff Les Nelson. “We know that two days after Cooper jumped that the placard was missing off the plane.

“This is the first probable, tangible piece of evidence that has surfaced in the D.B. Cooper case,” he added. “It’s inconceivable, it’s one in a million, that any other plane could have lost it in the area in which D.B. Cooper jumped.”

The placard was found about “six flying minutes” from where Cooper is believed to have jumped on Nov. 24, 1971, said Nelson. It was found last November by a hunter near a logging road north of Ariel, said Nelson.

The FBI and sheriff’s detectives withheld information about the find while trying to verify the origin of the placard, he said.

Ray Mathis, FBI spokesman in Seattle, said agents in the past have twice searched the area in which the placard was found. Both he and Nelson said there were no plans to conduct any additional searches. The federal statute of limitations for skyjacking is five years. But Cooper, if he is alive, is not a free man. He was indicted by a federal grand jury in absentia in 1976 as a “John Doe.” The Justice Department also has argued that there is no statute of limitations for capital crimes, and that what Cooper did was a capital crime.

Cooper has never been seen and none of the $20 bills given in ransom has surfaced in circulation.

The jet was en route to Seattle from Portland when Cooper handed a stewardess a note saying he had a bomb. After picking up the ransom and two parachutes in Seattle, and allowing the passengers and two of three stewardesses to disembark, Cooper ordered the crew to fly the plane to Reno, Nev.

When the plane landed in Reno, the rear boarding ramp was down, the 21 pound sack of money and one set of parachutes were missing and Cooper was gone. He left no fingerprints.

Just a little more than a year after the hijacked 727’s aft stairs placard was found, the most stunning and tantalizing Cooper Clue was found. A young boy was digging in a bank of the Columbia River and uncovered three stacks of twenty dollar bills. On February 13, 1980, an
Associated Press
article appeared throughout the nation exclaiming:

HIJACKER MONEY FOUND,
BUT WHERE IS HE?

BOY FINDS ‘SEVERAL THOUSAND
DOLLARS’ OF COOPER RANSOM ALONG COLUMBIA RIVER

Portland, OR - An 8 year old boy has uncovered part of a ransom missing since the only unsolved hijacking in U.S. history-but officials say the whereabouts of the legendary sky pirate D.B. Cooper is still a matter of conjecture.

The three bundles of weathered $20 bills found along the Columbia River are the first evidence uncovered since Thanksgiving eve, 1971, when Cooper bailed out of a jet over southwestern Washington with $200,000 tied to his waist.

It was the first case of a hijacking for money.

The FBI yesterday identified the cash through serial numbers. Bill Baker, special agent in charge of the Portland FBI office, said the money was so decomposed it was impossible to determine how much was there, but he said it came to “several thousand dollars.”

“I think we can only pursue at this time that because the money was found clumped together tightly in what we believe was the manner in which it was originally packed, it lends credence to the theory that at least the money did not make it out,” he said. “And from there, I would really leave it to conjecture.”

Baker said agents would now renew their search. “Of course, we will generate increased interest now in trying to locate D.B. Cooper or any remains that might be in the area,” he said.

The money was discovered Sunday by young Brian Ingram beneath a layer of sand as his family picnicked along the Columbia, five miles northwest of Vancouver, Wash.

Harold Ingram of Vancouver, told reporters yesterday he was preparing a fire when his son “ran up and said ‘Wait a minute, Daddy.’ He raked a place out in the sand and there it was.”

Ingram said he didn’t give any thought to spending the money.

“It didn’t look like I could spend it so I really didn’t think about that,” he said.

He also said he didn’t think about the cash being part of the Cooper loot. But he called the FBI because “I figured if anybody knew what to do it would be them,”  Baker said he presumed the money washed downstream, possibly from a Columbia River Tributary in the rugged southwestern Washington mountains, where Cooper is believed to have bailed out.

FBI agent Ralph Himmelsbach, due to retire in 17 days after being in charge of the Cooper Investigation since the hijacking, said he still believes there is less than a 50-50 chance Cooper survived.

One theory had Cooper falling to his death in Lake Merwin on the “Lewis River near Ariel, Wash. But the Lewis River enters the Columbia downstream from where the money was found. The nine year old mystery began Nov. 24, 1971, when a man calling himself Dan Cooper purchased a one-way ticket and boarded the Northwest Orient Airlines jet at Portland International Airport.

After takeoff, Cooper displayed what an attendant said looked like dynamite. Ordering the pilot to head for Seattle, Cooper demanded four parachutes and $200,000 from the airline.

In Seattle, passengers and two of three attendants were allowed to leave the plane. The money and parachutes were loaded, the plane took off for Reno and somewhere, Cooper jumped out.

His disappearance made him something of a folk hero – Ariel has a “D.B. Cooper Day” to mark the incident. “There is tremendous public interest in this case,” Baker said. “It has become almost a fad.”

The discovery of the Cooper ransom money was bittersweet for FBI Agent Ralph Himmelsbach. Though finding the money all but proved his theory that Cooper had died in the jump, Himmelsbach was only two weeks from retiring from the FBI in 1980, and knew he may never see a conclusion to the case.

After the excitement of the announcement of the finding of Cooper’s loot died down, lawsuits over the ownership of the money were filed, amateur sleuths (also known as “Cooper Sleuths”) investigated and speculated about the case, but no further physical evidence was located. It seemed as though the trail had grown cold yet again.

Over the years and decades that have passed since the Cooper hijacking, people have come forward and confessed to being D.B. Cooper to family and friends. Others have been volunteered as Cooper suspects by family and friends. Most have been investigated by the FBI, as well as Cooper Sleuths, as suspects in the case and most have been dismissed for one reason or another.

In March of 1995, Duane Weber made a stunning deathbed confession. He told his wife, Jo, “I’m Dan Cooper.” He repeated again, “I’m Dan Coooooper!” Jo was puzzled and didn’t give the reaction Duane wanted so he blurted out, “Oh, (expletive), let it die with me!”