D B Cooper Unsolved Skyjacking

[b1jercat 0]

Link to video. http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-us&tab=g1124493656000&vid=01fb7550-5280-4ed8-b93d-f199c3b1d433&playlist=videoByTag:mk:us:sd:-1:sf:ActiveStartDate:ns:VC_Supplier:tag:Msnbc:vs:0&from=MSNHP>1=10547. worth watching.

blues

Jerry

[rainman 0]

Or:

http://tinyurl.com/27ebx7

Ramon

[b1jercat 0]

Thanks.

blues

jerry

[freeflysteve 0]

Apparently from a thread in the bonfire a guy called "Fish" found out who D B Cooper was but they don't give a name.
One helluva story

link is here

http://www.dallasobserver.com/2007-11-15/news/crazy-fish-story

sorry don't know how to make it clicky

Swooping, huh? I love that stuff ... all the flashing lights and wailing sirens ... it's very exciting!

[airtwardo 6]

Quote

Apparently from a thread in the bonfire a guy called "Fish" found out who D B Cooper was but they don't give a name.
One helluva story

link is here

http://www.dallasobserver.com/2007-11-15/news/crazy-fish-story

sorry don't know how to make it clicky

~ If you choke a Smurf, what color does it turn? ~

[freeflysteve 0]

Thanks

Swooping, huh? I love that stuff ... all the flashing lights and wailing sirens ... it's very exciting!

[NickDG 23]

Well, here's another piece of the puzzle . . .

This is from today's UK Sunday Times.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article2851719.ece

NickD BASE 194

The Sunday Times. November 18, 2007

The Hunt for the Invisible Man

In 1971 a man hijacked an airliner, demanded $200,000, and jumped out somewhere over Washington state — and straight into American folklore. The FBI investigated nearly 1,000 suspects and drew a blank. But now they may have finally cracked the caseGeoffrey Gray
The detectives at Sherlock Investigations get strange requests all the time. There was the mysterious disappearance of Captain Jack, an iguana that was stolen out of the window of a ground-floor apartment on West Twelfth. Or the elderly woman in Peter Cooper Village who thought her neighbour was trying to kill her by shooting neutron beams through her kitchen wall. (They checked it out. She wasn’t.) Or the jealous husband in Park Slope. He suspected his wife was cheating on him, and with his father. (She was.) So the e-mail that came in on March 19 didn’t set off any alarms. It read:

Dear Good People,

I would very much like to contact Nora Ephron, Movie Director of the movie, “Sleepless in Seattle.” I think she would be interested in what I have to say.

Sincerely, Lyle Christiansen.

When Sherrie Hart, the Sherlock detective going through the e-mail inbox at the time, read the note, her eyes rolled. Oh, boy, she thought.

Here we go again. She typed back: “We would not be able to give you a famous person’s address. If you want to write a letter to Ms. Ephron, we would deliver it to her ourselves. The fee would be $495. Proceed?”

Proceed. When Christiansen’s money order and letter came a few days later, Hart passed them to the agency’s owner, Skipp Porteous. With wavy hair, baggy eyes, and sandals, Porteous looks more ageing hippie than hard-boiled detective. He breaks in the afternoon for a non-tough-guy ritual: meditation. He was once a preacher, but became disenchanted with religion, and while writing a book called Jesus Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, found he was good at digging around.

Porteous looked at the envelope. He studied the return address. Morris, Minnesota. He looked at a map. The town was two hours from Fargo, North Dakota. Population: 5,200. He opened the letter, and after checking for powders, read it. It barely made sense. It was a rambling confession of finding the answer to a “famous unsolved caper” that would make a great movie – and one only Ephron could direct, because she had “heart”. She could call this movie Bashful in Seattle – because the main character lived near Seattle. Skipp thought: strange, yes; dangerous, no. So he hailed a cab, rode over to Ephron’s building on East 79th, and left the letter with her doorman. Ephron got the letter. She opened it and looked at it and put it down on the kitchen counter. It stayed there for some time. Then it disappeared. “I don’t know what happened to it,” she says.

In Morris, Christiansen was waiting. He is 77, retired from the post office, and now works as an inventor. Each day he’d go out to his letter box hoping for a reply from Ephron. Nothing came. He sent Sherlock another letter, which Porteous had delivered. Weeks passed. No word. Did she know he was paying all this money to reach her? Finally, he wrote to Sherlock: “As you know, I have been trying to contact Nora Ephron, but for some reason she doesn’t answer my letters. Now I would like you to help me. I am sitting on the answer to a many decades old mystery which has never been solved … No one was killed or injured in the caper but could easily have been… I hope you will think about this and let me know.”

Porteous was curious. He began to probe with e-mails. Christiansen would often type back late at night, he said, so his wife wouldn’t discover his secret relationship with D B Cooper. “Yes, I knew the culprit personally,” Lyle wrote one day. “He was my brother.”

The case of D B Cooper is one of the most famous crimes in US history. It is also the only unsolved skyjacking in the world. Over the past 36 years, the FBI has investigated nearly 1,000 suspects. They might as well be looking for Bigfoot. Cooper is folklore now. He’s inspired books, movies, safety regulations for aeroplanes, treasure hunters. A bar celebrates the anniversary of his heist with a D B Cooper lookalike contest. Poems have been inked. Songs too, like Chuck Brodsky’s The Ballad of D B Cooper:

It was Thanksgiving eve
Back in 1971
He had on a pair of sunglasses
There wasn’t any sun
He used the name Dan Cooper
When he paid for the flight
That was going to Seattle
On that cold and nasty night

That night changed aviation history. It started in Portland, Oregon, when a man walked up to the flight counter of Northwest Airlines (NWA). He was wearing a dark raincoat, dark suit with a skinny black tie, and carrying an attaché case. He had perky ears, thin lips, a wide forehead, receding hair. He gave his name, Dan Cooper, and asked for a one-way ticket to Seattle, Flight 305. The ride was a 30-minute puddle jump. He sat in the last row of the plane, 18-C, lit a cigarette, and ordered a bourbon and soda. The plane took off and he passed the stewardess a note.

Florence Schaffner was 23, cute, perky, the sexy stewardess. Working on planes, she’d been approached by so many men she’d begun wearing a wig on board to disguise herself. She dropped the man’s note in a purse, thinking: just another guy hitting on me. But he was insistent. “Miss. You’d better look at that note. I have a bomb.” She looked at the man’s eyes. She saw he was serious.

She read the note. It was printed in felt-tip pen. “I have a bomb in my briefcase. I want you to sit beside me,” it read. She did as he requested, then asked to see the bomb. She saw a tangle of wires, a battery and six red sticks. Then he dictated some instructions: “I want $200,000 by 5pm. In cash. Put in a knapsack. I want two back parachutes and two front parachutes. When we land, I want a fuel truck ready to refuel. No funny stuff or I’ll do the job.” He let her get up to take them to the captain. When she got back, the man was wearing dark sunglasses.

Schaffner’s mind was reeling. She imagined her parents in Arkansas watching the evening news. She imagined the plane exploding. She imagined this man taking her hard by the wrist and raping her right there. She took deep breaths. Inhale, exhale, repeat. Surprisingly, the man was able to calm her down. He was not a so-called sky pirate, which she’d read about, or a hardened criminal. He was not a political dissident with a wish to reroute the plane to Cuba, like many of the hijackers until then. He was polite. Well spoken. A gentleman. At one point he offered to pay for his drinks with a $20 bill and insisted the stewardess keep the rest as change ($18). He also seemed like a local, glancing out of the window and saying: “Looks like Tacoma down there.”

The plane landed on Seattle-Tacoma (Sea-Tac) airport’s tarmac. It was late, two hours late, because FBI agents needed time to collect Cooper’s ransom and to station their sharpshooters. Inside the cabin, Cooper ordered that all passengers be released. The airline staff then carried his ransom – $200,000 in $20 bills (the bundle weighed 21lb) and parachutes – onto the plane as it refuelled. The gentleman hijacker was getting anxious. “It shouldn’t take this long,” he said, and told the captain to get the plane back in the air. Where to? “Mexico City,” he said, and delivered more specific flight instructions: keep the plane under 10,000ft, with wing flaps at 15 degrees, which would put the plane’s speed under 200 knots. He strapped the loads of cash to himself and slipped on two chutes – one in front, one in back – and moved deeper into the vessel, toward the aft stairs, which were used to let passengers disembark from the rear of the plane. The 727 was the only model equipped with such stairs. He lowered them. The seal of the cabin broke, and there was engine noise in his ears and the cold, black, wet, windy night outside. He climbed down the stairs and hovered on a plank over southwest Washington. The plane was too high for him to see anything below. The cloud ceiling that night was 5,000ft, and some of the most rugged terrain in the US was beneath it: forests of pine, hemlock and spruce, canyons with cougars and bears and lakes and white-water rapids, all spilling out into the Pacific. And then, as the ballad goes:

Out a little service doorway
In the rear of the plane
Cooper jumped into the darkness
Into the freezing rain
They say that with the windchill
It was 69 below
Not much chance that he’d survive
But if he did where did he go?

They did look for him. The Feds scoured the forests the next day, and for days after, in a dense fog, praying for a parachute tear, a $20 bill, a body. One team of treasure hunters chartered a submarine and descended hundreds of feet into a lake. In Washington, DC at the headquarters of J Edgar Hoover’s FBI, agents co-ordinated a profiling campaign. The name, they soon found, was a fake. But Dan Cooper had already been immortalised as D B Cooper. The error happened when a reporter got the wrong name from a police source and it hit the wires. So what if it was wrong? It sounded good, mythic. It made it seem like Cooper’s jump meant something, and it did. “You know, it’s funny,” said one local resident at the time. “Folks are actually pulling for this man. That’s all anybody wants to talk about. I hear it all day long. ‘Hope he made it, he deserves it, hope he gets away with every nickel.’ Like he’s some kind of Robin Hood character.” He was also anonymous. “He was John Doe. He wasn’t some wild radical… He was you or me or your neighbour.”

The FBI didn’t believe that. There were too many specific skills Cooper needed to pull off the jump. He knew how to parachute, and in tough conditions. Maybe he’d been in the army. Better yet, they figured, the paratroops. He was also familiar with planes (10,000ft, 15-degree wing flaps) and the area (“Looks like Tacoma down there”). They also knew what Cooper looked like. They had a detailed sketch that Florence Schaffner helped create. And there was his personality. “He seemed rather nice,” said Tina Mucklow, another attendant on the flight. “He was never cruel or nasty. He was thoughtful and calm.”

Suspects came and went. Five months later, Richard McCoy, a former Sunday-school teacher from Utah and a Vietnam helicopter pilot, jumped out of a plane over Utah with a $500,000 ransom. He was snatched by the FBI a few days later with $499,970 in a box. McCoy told the Feds he wasn’t Cooper. He was sentenced to 45 years in prison. Then he escaped, using a fake gun made from plaster of Paris stolen from dental supplies, and led a crew of convicts through the prison gates with a rubbish truck. When the Feds found him again, there was a shoot-out and McCoy was killed.

In 1980, some of Cooper’s money surfaced. A boy found $5,800 in decomposing $20s buried in a bag a few feet from a river. The FBI searched the area again, hoping to find more bills – or, better yet, a body. They found nothing.

The next main suspect was Duane Weber.

Just before he died in 1995, Weber’s wife claims, he told her: “I’m Dan Cooper.” The Feds eventually collected fingerprints and DNA samples, but the case remains open.

The Cooper file is now a morgue of dead-end leads. It sits buried in the basement of the FBI’s Seattle field office. The belief among agents handling the case now is that Cooper died in the jump – the conditions were simply too brutal to survive, and the $20s would have blown away. When a new tip arrives in the mail, the Feds typically shrug it off and file it away.

One of those tips that came in was from Lyle Christiansen. In fact, he claims he told the FBI about his older brother several times. “Dear Good People,” a copy of one of his letters, written in November 2003, begins. “Here’s the story of how I began to suspect my brother was D B Cooper.” He was watching TV one night, he told them, and flipped on the show Unsolved Mysteries, which had an episode about the Cooper case. “I sat up in my chair,” he wrote, “because my brother was a dead ringer to the composite sketch of D B.” Suspicious, he read up on the case. “There was so many circumstances that I became convinced my brother was truly D B Cooper!”

“I’m not getting any younger,” Christiansen wrote to the FBI again, and for the final time, in January 2004. “Before I die I would like to find out if my brother was D B Cooper. From what I know I feel that he was and without a doubt.”

A relative of D B Cooper! Skipp Porteous couldn’t believe what three decades of federal agents (and Nora Ephron) had missed. This would be the biggest case of his career. He could barely contain himself as he typed back to Christiansen: “This is potentially a very hot story.” He wanted facts. Basic stuff: full name, age, social security, address. Lyle wrote back later that night: “Kenneth Peter Christiansen; Born Oct. 17, 1926, deceased July 30, 1994, from cancer. Lived in his own home in Bonney Lake, WA. One could see Mt. Rainier from there. So. Security #473 30 3599. He retired from NWA as a purser. His employee #33983.”

Lyle also dropped a few photos and documents in the mail, and began to tell Skipp about his family. They grew up on a farm during the dust bowls of the Great Depression. “All of us kids did not get lots of hugs when we were growing up and we missed a lot because of it,” Lyle says. “I think it made us all a little bashful and made us long for the hugs. Our folks were so busy. Pa in the field and Ma, cooking, sewing, washing clothes, canning, gardening, and also helping with the harvesting.” For fun, they went to the county fair, where his father once took on a prizefighter and earned $100 by lasting one full round. Lyle and Kenny watched as their dad was paid out in five $20 bills. Kenny could never forget those $20 bills, Lyle says. “That was a lot of money during the Great Depression.” Their father also invented things. One was “a contraption that was supposed to work as a [perpetual] motion machine”, Lyle remembers. It was made from wood and ran on marbles.

Growing up, Lyle was different from Kenny. Lyle was into contact sports and girls. Kenny was into “classy things”, Lyle says. Kenny was so precise in his drawings that he composed illustrations for the yearbook staff. He played cornet in the band and sang in the men’s chorus. He danced tap. And acted in school plays. And in sports, Kenny set school records for the half-mile. In high school he was at the top of his class and had his pick of 12 private colleges. But the war was on, it was 1944, and Kenny enlisted. He thought of the air force, but decided on the army, and chose an elite, dangerous, and thus better-paying speciality: the paratroops. “Kenny was always looking for ways to make a buck,” Lyle says.

Training was brutal. By the time Kenny had strapped on all his gear – which could include parachute and reserve chute, helmet, canteen, cartridge belt, compass, gloves, flares, message book, hand grenades, machete, M1 Garand rifle, .45 calibre Colt, radio batteries, wire cutters, rations, shaving kit, instant coffee, bouillon cubes, sweets – the entire bundle weighed as much as 90lb. The paratroops donned such heavy gear (they had to survive behind enemy lines for weeks) they couldn’t walk onto the transport planes on their own. They had to be pushed on.

Jumps were also hazardous. The quality of the parachutes was primitive. You could not steer them out of the way of power lines or trees. You hit the ground hard, buckling the ankles and knees – in some cases breaking them. Kenny trained with the 11th Airborne Division, the Angels, which had been sent to the Pacific. But he never saw combat. When he was finally deployed, on August 16, 1945, his discharge papers show, the war was over. He ended up in Japan, joining the initial occupation forces. He ran the mail room and made jumps on the side for extra money.

“Dear Folks,” Kenny wrote home in one letter dated August 4, 1946, from Sendai. “I went to church this morning. I went last Sunday also. I had more reason to go last Sunday, as after ten months of hibernation, I once again donned a chute and reserve and entered a C-46. 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 the whole affair was that

I never had time to worry about it… Don’t get the idea that I didn’t get that certain stomackless [sic] feeling, because I did.”

After that he visited Namazu, a fishing village south of Tokyo. “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,” he wrote. “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.”

Porteous couldn’t believe it. The profile that was coming into focus was remarkably exact. The paratroops? That’s exactly the kind of jumper the Feds were looking for. Not an expert who knew fancy equipment. A gutsy amateur who only specified “front” chutes and “back” chutes. He wanted to know more about Kenny. “This is fascinating stuff,” he wrote to Lyle, who then told him about all the odd and dangerous jobs Kenny did for extra pay. After college, Lyle said, his brother went back to the Pacific, this time to Bikini atoll in the Marshall Islands. The government was testing nuclear bombs there. Kenny worked as a telephone operator. It was lonely, though he liked being alone, and it was always beach weather. Kenny loved the beach. Even back home he saved money to spend on travel. In college, he took a job selling magazine subscriptions. He travelled once with a carnival, selling tickets. Then he’d leave for warmer climes: Jamaica, Laguna Beach, LA, Mexico City. Then Kenny learnt of a job at an airline.

Northwest, in Minneapolis, was looking for technicians to work on its planes in Shemya, an island in the Aleutians. He started as a mechanic and was rehired in 1956, as a flight attendant. He relocated to southwest Washington and was promoted to purser. It meant $50 extra monthly pay, dealing with customs and immigration agents and managing the plane’s money.

According to property records, Kenny was able to buy a house and some land. In October 1972, about a year after Cooper’s jump, Kenny paid $14,000 for a modest ranch in Bonney Lake, a small town, in the Cascades. A year later, a deed shows he paid $1,500 for a parcel of land.

“He was almost invisible,” says Harry Honda, a Northwest purser who worked with Kenny. “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.” “He was non-communicative,” says Mary Patricia Laffey Inman, also a Northwest purser. “He kept to himself. He was a plaid-shirt guy,” says Lyle Gehring, another Northwest purser, who worked alongside Kenny for years. “You ask people and say ‘Ken Christiansen’, they say, ‘Who?’”

At home, he always wore the same clothes: denim overalls and a blue-striped railway cap. “He looked like a farmer, you know,” says Rose Edmiston, a former Northwest flight attendant who lives in Bonney Lake. “That would probably be the last person in the world I would think could be D B Cooper.” Driving around town, she’d sometimes see him with younger men in front of his house, scrubbing down a car with soap or working under the bonnet. The rumours she heard about him were true: he was taking in troubled kids and runaways. One, she heard, he found sleeping in the launderette. Another kid was Kenneth McWilliams, or Mac, who lived with Kenny off and on for 20 years.

“He was an amusing character,” McWilliams says now of Kenny. He describes life in the house as “odd”. There were always other men around, men from the army whom Kenny knew and had relationships with. “It was uncomfortable to me, because I’m not like that, but not everybody lived in that house at night,” McWilliams says. Living there as a teenager was also liberating. When Kenny came back from Japan or Germany, there were always gifts: expensive food, bottles of aged sake, ceramic dolls. Kenny never held back financially. They always ate out. “Any restaurant, really,” McWilliams says. “He’d always call it ‘my turn’. He’d never accept that I pay for some of the things he ate.” Kenny also helped Mac and other young men who lived with them learn how to save. Once, McWilliams says, he wanted to buy a car. Kenny opened up a bank account for him and matched every dollar he earned. “There was always a little bit of cash, maybe a little bit in his dresser. Also in his wallet.” He thinks it’s possible Kenny was D B. “As a steward, they made good money, but they didn’t make that much money.”

Northwest’s salaries were notoriously meagre. For pursers, the saying was “$212 a month and all you can carry”, and that meant stealing toilet rolls from the aeroplanes’ bathrooms to supplement your salary. Female flight attendants were forced to adhere to strict mandates, such as weight checks. They couldn’t wear glasses. Or have their own rooms during stopovers. Men could. All of which created an atmosphere of hostility towards Northwest. Workers would strike. Workers sued. Kenny was never vocal in his outrage: “He’d always just sit in the back at a union meeting, or not [go] at all,” says Gehring. Quietly Kenny hated the strikes, as it meant he had to find quick work, like picking apples on a farm. “He built up a little hatred for NWA for laying people off and forcing them to go on strike,” according to Kenny’s brother. “I think he thought he could sock it to them by pulling off the hijacking.”

When the package of photos from Morris arrived in the mail, Skipp looked at Kenny Christiansen for the first time. “It was uncanny, really,” Skipp says. “He looked just like the sketch.” He had more questions for his brother. Did Kenny ever make extravagant purchases? Only his house and some land, Lyle said. Did Kenny drink bourbon? Yes, Lyle said. Kenny loved bourbon so much he collected bourbon bottles. Did he smoke? Yes. It all added up. There was a wealth of detail, a full portrait of a man who possessed so many of Cooper’s traits – a polite, quiet paratrooper with a secret life.

Still, there was no concrete testimony, nothing direct. Then Lyle told him about a conversation he had with Kenny when his brother became sick with cancer. Lyle suspected the cause was radiation he’d suffered at Bikini atoll. On his deathbed, Lyle remembers, his older brother pulled him close. He then said something that didn’t make sense to him then. It does now.

Kenny said: “There is something you should know, but I cannot tell you!” Lyle didn’t want to know. “I don’t care what it is you cannot tell me about. We all love you.”

One of the only living eyewitnesses to the Cooper case is Florence Schaffner. She now lives in Lexington, South Carolina. One Sunday last month, we had lunch.

Flo, as she calls herself, has blonde hair and deeply tanned skin. Her hands were shaking. Just thinking about the Cooper case makes her nervous, she said. She was never the same after his jump. She took a month off and went to live with her family in Arkansas. She also became paranoid. If Cooper was living, she feared he’d come after her. Eliminate the witness. She’d look under her car for bombs, turn her keys really slowly.

Over the years the FBI has shown her photos of dozens of suspects, and she has yet to identify any of them. I’d brought the photos of Kenny, and she spread them on the table. She zeroed in on the passport photo, all blown up. She rubbed his features on the page. “The ears, the ears are right.” She moved to the lips. “Yes, thin lips. And the top lip, kind of like this, yes.” Then the forehead. “A wide forehead, yes.” Then the hair. “Receding, yes, the two areas – yes, yes – sort of like this.” She was pushing down on the photo hard now, rubbing the image like a charcoal drawing. “There was more hair, though.” The eyes. “About like that.” The eyebrows. “Yeah, about like that.” The images were closer in resemblance to Cooper than any of the suspects she’d ever seen, she said. But? “But I can’t say ‘yay’.” We got up from the table. “I think you might be onto something here,” she said.

The definitive expert on the Cooper case is Ralph Himmelsbach. He was the FBI’s lead agent on the hijacking for eight years. He’s retired and lives on a farm in Oregon. I wanted to see what he thought of Kenny as a suspect, and one afternoon this summer we sat outside on his patio. A plane passed by. “It’s an AT-6 Texan,” Himmelsbach said, looking up. “A North American AT-6.” He knows planes and lives to fly. I asked him if he’d ever investigated anybody who worked for Northwest Airlines. “No,” he said, and explained. “We had an awful lot of suggestions by people that said, ‘I think it’s an inside job.’ It is inconceivable for several reasons. The most obvious, if you know anything about airline procedure, is that it is not possible for a conspiracy to form, because the individuals are not in charge of what flights they’re going to go on.” But what about a lone employee? Himmelsbach ruled this out too. “If you were acquainted as I was with many of the people in the airline industry,” he explained, “they are exceptional people. They are head and shoulders above the standards and the values and the character of normal, average Americans.”

I pulled out photos of Kenny. He studied them.

“Not bad,” he said. “Except for the hair.” I then showed him Kenny’s army discharge papers. He looked at Kenny’s height (5ft 8in), weight (150lb), and eye colour (hazel). “Well, he’s too short, not heavy enough, and has got the wrong colour eyes.” I then told him about Kenny’s history: his service in the paratroops, and working for Northwest and living near Sea-Tac airport, and his quiet mien. He lit up like somebody had plugged him into the wall socket. “All of this makes him look like a good suspect,” he said. “If I was still on duty and it were up to me, I’d say, ‘This guy is a ‘must investigate.’”

My next stop was Bonney Lake. I wanted to see Kenny’s house. On the drive north from Portland it became clear why so many agents believed Cooper never survived the jump. The trees are hundreds of feet tall in the Cascades, a snow-capped collection of volcanoes and glaciers and miles of snowfields. Mount Rainer is the centrepiece, sitting high at over 14,000ft, watching.

Kenny’s place is now a print shop on the main drag. I parked and looked at Mount Rainier. It looked, just as Lyle said, “like it was across the street”. The shop was closed. I peered through the dark windows. I tried to imagine Kenny in there. In his purser’s uniform, getting home from a trip to Tokyo, with the young runaways he housed. I tried to imagine where the kitchen was. Lyle said he hung a poster there for inspiration.

THERE ARE THREE KINDS OF PEOPLE, the poster read.
Those who MAKE things happen.
Those who WATCH things happen.
And those who WONDER what happened.
And I wondered myself: which one was Ken Christiansen?

From New York Magazine. Copyright 2007 New York Media. Distributed by Tribune Media Service

D B Cooper Timeline

November 24, 1971

A passenger called Dan Cooper skyjacks a Boeing 727 en route to Seattle. Armed with an attaché case he says contains a bomb, he demands, and receives, $200,000 and four parachutes. He skydives from the plane over southwest Washington state

DECEMBER 8, 1971

The US attorney general releases the serial numbers of the $20 bills that made up the ransom. Initially, no bills are recovered, fuelling the theory that Cooper perished in his jump

FEBRUARY 1980

Brian Ingram, eight years old, finds $5,800 in decomposing $20 bills by the Columbia River near Vancouver city. The serial numbers match. It is the only Cooper money ever recovered

1985

D B Cooper: What Really Happened is published. The book claims a woman known as Clara discovered an injured Cooper two days after the skyjacking and fell in love with him. Many discredit this account

1986

The FBI agents Ralph P Himmelsbach and Thomas K Worcester’s Norjak: The Investigation of D B Cooper is published. The pair suspect that Cooper died in the jump

JUNE 1, 1989

John List, a fugitive, is arrested for shooting his mother, wife and three children in 1971. The former agent Himmelsbach calls List a ‘viable suspect’ in the Cooper case, but List denies any involvement

1991

Russell Calame, an FBI agent, and Bernie Rhodes, a former parole officer, publish D B Cooper: The Real McCoy. The book supposes that a man called McCoy was Cooper because he had newspaper clippings about Cooper in his car and because his family claimed that a mother-of-pearl tie clasp Cooper left behind on the jet belonged to McCoy

NOVEMBER 24, 1996

The Ariel Store and Tavern, in southwest Washington state, throws an 11-hour party to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Cooper’s jump, drawing 500 people from across the US. Ariel, a town of 50, is thought by some to be where Cooper landed. The Ariel store throws a Cooper party every year around Thanksgiving. The festivities include a Cooper lookalike contest

JULY 24, 2000

A US News and World Report article states that Duane L Weber confessed to being D B Cooper on his deathbed.

Weber’s wife recalls compelling circumstantial evidence about him, but the FBI dismisses him as a suspect after analysing fingerprints 2007Lyle Christiansen contacts the detectives at Sherlock Investigations, a private-investigation agency on the Upper West Side, claiming that his brother, Kenny, was ‘without a doubt’ Cooper

[skyjack71 0]

Thanksgiving Eve. brings so many memories back to me. I recalled Thanksgiving weekend in Ft. Collins, Co ... and a house we rented there in the late 70's. This would have been 1979 - after our trip to Washington earlier that yr.

This was not a night of dreams - he was very drunk.
He was talking about his feet being very cold - I just didn't understand why he sat there looking at the wallpaper and talking to himself.

When I asked if he was alright - he started talking about the wallpaper and silly little stories about what the patterns reminded him of. He kept taking his slippers off and on - saying "I never want to be that cold again". Again he was very drunk--- I was not finding it amusing.

Now, when I think back on the yrs. I remember how important Thanksgiving and Christmas were to him. I am not sure what he would want me to do with all of this - all this information I have in my head about him and his past that he did not tell me.

I cannot conceded to the FBI - they have not let me know if the FBI file prints are the same prints that he had in SanQuentin and Folsom and McNeil - do those prints match the FBI file which is prints taken from his last incarcination in Jefferson? Why can't the FBI just make copies of his old prints and compare them to the last prints that became part of the computer system (They do not match).

The stewardess - needs to see the photos, I did not reveal on-line, but I can't get her to talk to me. I have called, but whoever answers the phone claims she is not Florence Shaffner. The writer with N.Y. Mgz has photos of his subject and calls me from a busy restaurant asking me to email to his phone pics of Duane. He said that she said "He's too Old."

Ms Shaffner needs to know I do not have photos closer to the crime time line except for the three not so very good polaroid shots. These photos I acquired from the ex-wife, but Duane had told me that all pictures of him had been lost. Others are prison records and the younger ones are from his brother who shared what he had with me. The brother was 10 yrs older and lived with his grandparents.

I need to talk to her about his voice and let her hear a tape. I need to talk to both of them regarding - grammar and expressions. It takes things like tonight to bring memories back. I am sure they are as fed up as I am of being made a fool of in the media.

I had sworn not to post in the forum, but I need help in getting pictures to Florence and being able to sit down with her. If she could do this for a N.Y. newswriter - why not for me?

I remember a plane trip we took while living in Co.-(from 1978 - to 1980) - We were flying to ATL. I do not recall what airlines we were flying, but Duane got real nervous - what he said made me think he had been involved with this stewardess on the flight and he didn't want her to recognize him. He didn't order a drink as usual and he kept his face in a magazine. I even remember what I wore on that flight...but, not why we were going to ATL.

On the return trip he was his old self and I found out later that he had stashed something (which could have put me in prison) in a gift he got me. I never forgave him for that - but, I did let it go.

This Thanksgiving brought old memories back to me - but, why? The stewardess "thing", he was a risk-taker, the gamble he took on stashing something in my belongings.....I don't know......
I have recalled this incident before, but do not know if I ever shared it with anyone.

Perhaps now the memory nags at me because, just maybe that stewardess on that fight was one of the stewardesses on the 1971 flight.

I have not been able to let go - and cannot until I get the answers from the FBI that I need and to meet both stewardesses. To see that hotel registration I have begged for and to learn more about the boat incident he talked about in WA.
There is just too too much - I cannot walk away from this.......and yet I know not how to get the answers I need.

Copyright 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 2013, 2014, 2015 by Jo Weber

[NickDG 23]

A special holiday message from a friend of ours . . .

Here

NickD BASE 194

[Ckret 0]

http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/119588193341980.xml&coll=7&thispage=1

Well written story about what I am trying to do and why. I would be willing to answer questions about the Cooper case with my theory left out. One request, can we keep it civil?

[Orange1 0]

clicky:
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/119588193341980.xml&coll=7&thispage=1

Are you saying you are Carr?

One thing i have difficulty understanding is why the fact that Cooper only had one or two drinks is repeatedly used as "evidence" that he wasn't a heavy drinker. Surely anyone attempting a risky jump like that would not want to do it under the influence...

Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

[Ckret 0]

I am Carr,

Having only one drink is not evidence someone is or is not a heavy user of alcohol or that he is even a user of alcohol. It is simply evidence used in making a value statement. What is the most probable statement? Deduced from human behavior it is most probable that whoever DB Cooper was, he was not a heavy user of alcohol.

Human behavior would dictate that a person who was a heavy user of alcohol, would have had more than one drink given the circumstances Cooper put himself in. He was on the plane for several hours and drinks were offered to him on several occasions. If he regularly consumed alcohol, reason would dictate he would have accepted the offer. Not to the point of intoxication, but he could have easily consumed four drinks and still have had his wits about him

Having written that, DB Cooper may have been an alcoholic and spent few hours out of the day in a sober state.

More likely he drank from time to time and used the request for one as a means of passing the note to Schaffner, not quelling thirst.

[grimmie 173]

Ckret,
How many "missing persons" were reported up to a week before or month after the jump? If DB went in you would think a friend or relative would be worried and report it.

[quade 3]

Quote

If DB went in you would think a friend or relative would be worried and report it.

Depends on a number of factors.

A week seems trivial.

My guess is that there have been times in my life when I could have disappeared and not have been noticed as such for up to a month and I'm not even trying. My further guess is that if somebody was particularly isolated, a loner, that time could be pretty long, maybe 2 or 3 months; maybe forever.

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[airtwardo 6]

Having written that, DB Cooper may have been an alcoholic and spent few hours out of the day in a sober state.

~~~Or...he may have had a few on the way to the airport, or may have been hitting the flask in his pocket...or...or...or...



It is simply evidence used in making a value statement.



~~~Which any 'investigative journalist' knows, is the difference between fact & fiction...reporting or speculating.

You are speaking from YOUR circle of experience which is limited in these matters I take it, from the content of your 'story'...(but then again that's just speculation on MY part)

It IS an editorial piece and not to be construed as an actual reporting of facts right?

~ If you choke a Smurf, what color does it turn? ~

[Ckret 0]

One of the factors in the case that has not been resolved is the missing person aspect. It would stand to reason if DB Cooper went missing, someone would miss him. That does not seem to be the case here. It seems as if no one has missed him or did not realize their missing loved one was in fact DB Cooper. That means if DB died the night he jumped he most likely was a loner with few ties to anyone or anywhere.

As far as hitting the flask during the flight, none of the witnesses ever stated he was drinking from a flask during the flight nor did they state he smelled of an alcoholic beverage, or acted in an intoxicated state. From this I am sure he had the one drink on the flight and not much more anywhere else.

I have poured over the files in this case and have a large knowledge base on the subject matter. If I don't have an answer I have access to the answer in regard to the investigation to date. I did not write the piece, I spoke to the reporter, he wrote the piece.

[airtwardo 6]

I did not write the piece, I spoke to the reporter, he wrote the piece.

Quote

Got it....thanks.

~ If you choke a Smurf, what color does it turn? ~

[bozo 0]

Quote

I have poured over the files in this case and have a large knowledge base on the subject matter. reply]

Baloney. You guys keep saying how violent the jump was and that youre quite sure he died.
Have you made any jumps ? Whats your knowledge base on that ?
I am quite certain me or any number of the posters to this thread and literally hundreds of jumpers that never come here could do this jump and survive.

Theres a huge knowledge base you know nothing of, such as the things to look for on a nite jump where to land.....what does a roadway look like at nite with and without traffic....what does a waterway look like at nite. Tree landing in the forest ? Smokejumpers do it all the time.
Ive done 220 nite jumps, with rounds and squares, and my knowledge base on the subject could be called extensive.

bozo
Pain is fleeting. Glory lasts forever. Chicks dig scars.

[Ckret 0]

Bozo, no I have not jumped day or night, but I never stated I had a knowledge base in jumping, just the investigation to date. Experts at the time were interviewed regarding the jump and gave the opinion that he most likely did not make it and if he did was in no shape to walk out.

[grimmie 173]

It's interesting to think no one would ever miss even the most recluse of people. The Unabomber even had friends in Lincoln, MT and his brother ratted him out when the manifesto he had published looked eerily like Ted's writing.
I think whoever DB was he...
had a working knowledge of the aircraft.
had made a jump before the skyjack.
thought it out carefully.
A guy just doesn't attempt to pull off a haphazard crime like that without leaving a ton of clues that point to him.
JMHO

[bozo 0]

Quote

Bozo, no I have not jumped day or night, but I never stated I had a knowledge base in jumping, just the investigation to date. Experts at the time were interviewed regarding the jump and gave the opinion that he most likely did not make it and if he did was in no shape to walk out.

I would hazard a guess they were wrong.

bozo
Pain is fleeting. Glory lasts forever. Chicks dig scars.

[airtwardo 6]

Experts at the time were interviewed regarding the jump and gave the opinion that he most likely did not make it and if he did was in no shape to walk out.

Quote

Those 'experts' were people that were interviewed at the time, not necessarily anyone with the actually knowledge as to the realistic feasibility.

The 'experts' have been proven wrong in this case literally thousands of times as 727 jumps are almost common place these days...and I have nearly as many night jumps as Bozo, carrying a lot more stuff on me than D.B. did.

Remember...the sun orbited the earth which was flat, until the experts were proven wrong.

~ If you choke a Smurf, what color does it turn? ~

[Ckret 0]

The experts are two jumpmasters with the Army and the person who packed the chutes Cooper used for his jumps. The packer was also an instructor at Seattle Sky Sports (he was not the one who provided the dummy reserve).

They all stated the jump could be done with not much training or skill, under the right conditions and using the right equipment. When they factored in the conditions, equipment and dropzone they all came to the same conclusion, "most likely didn't make it and if he did he probably wouldn't have been able to walk out.

Of course almost anything is possible.

[airtwardo 6]

The experts are two jumpmasters with the Army and the person who packed the chutes Cooper used for his jumps. The packer was also an instructor at Seattle Sky Sports (he was not the one who provided the dummy reserve).

Quote

I know who the experts were...it's a small world this skydiving thing.

Did you ever give thought to the possibility that it may have been somewhat discouraged disclosing the rudimentary planning and simplicity it actually took to pull this off?

If the 'experts' would have said...So easy a caveman could do it, forests everywhere would be littered with parachutes.

~ If you choke a Smurf, what color does it turn? ~

[Ckret 0]

I would go with all of your points but the last, he thought it out.

Just a few points to ponder:

-Why not ask for hundreds? He knew he was going to make a challenging jump so if he planned it out why would he not ask for 100's. He only requested negotiable US currency. He got 20's, if he would have said 100's he could have reduced his weight by almost 15 pounds and bulk by a wide margin.

-Why not ask for a specific flight path? He never made that request nor did he ever ask the aircrew where along the flight path they were, he just jumped without much of a clue were they were at.

-Why not ask for good equipment, ParaComanders were available.

I don't have the answers just a guess on my part, but if he planned it to me those seem like important issues that could lead to success or failure.

From 1968 to 1972 there were approximately 133 hijackings in the US. They were on the news constantly and it was known airlines would be compliant with demands. It did not take much planning to hand over a note and pack a suitcase with road flares to receive $200,000. It's all of the details missed by Cooper after that leads one to think maybe he didn't put much into it.

Maybe he was that cavalier and daring that the details of the jump never bothered him, maybe he winged it and made. If so, hope he calls me, it's going to be one hell of a story.