Magazine feature by Richard Woodbury on the D.B. Cooper hijacking and search

[photograph of a display board/exhibit showing a printed magazine or newspaper article; upper portion heavily obscured]

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Was this a rehearsed Cooper getaway? The [illegible] don't know. On the night of the crime, like [illegible] about everyone else [illegible] Center they were attending a wedding at the Evangelical church.

This spring the army sent 300 men in for a three-week search, but they turned up nothing except a little local hostility. The folks in Etna are still angry at the disturbance that the soldiers and their helicopters caused. Clarence Anry's horse disappeared for three days, and two frightened cows ran themselves to death. A few days after the searchers left, Shir- ley Free and Howard Pearson's wife were out collecting old bot- tles at the grist mill on Cedar Creek when they stumbled upon a woman's hand in the underbrush. Then yet another body was dis- covered over on Studebaker Road. It wasn't Cooper. And now Cow- litz County has two unsolved mur- ders on its hands, as well as a phantom hijacker. RICHARD WOODBURY

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Friday, whose house looks down on long, frigid Lake Merwin. "Ev- eryone breathed a sigh when he wasn't found. They feel the glory —and the money—belong to us." In Mrs. Friday's book, which her brother-in-law, Bill, illustrated with cartoons (right), the skyjacker meets an ignominious end. In- deed, the FBI informed residents that Cooper may have been de-

voured by animals, and asked them to look for remains. But like most of her neighbors, Anna Friday doesn't believe that Cooper died. "It was too carefully planned for him to flub up at the last minute," she says, fixing a thoughtful gaze out through the low-lying fog. "And remember—there were just enough odd things that happened around here that night."

With a make-believe bomb, a passenger using the name D.B. Cooper (in FBI sketch, far left) hijacked this Northwest jet, then bailed out into the dense woods of southwestern Washington state (below).

A recently published book by Anna Friday (below, right) includes some cartoon speculation as to what may have happened to Cooper after he parachuted to earth.

Like down the road at Jess Hatfield's place. Old Jess heard a thumping on his roof, but by the time he got out there, rifle at the ready, there was nothing. In the nearby community of View, it was black and blustery—hardly a night for small planes—but at a seldom-used airstrip near the cemetery, there were strange goings-on. Emil Nelger's wife recalls seeing an aircraft circling for nearly an hour. She doesn't know if it landed, but Mrs. Melvin Anderson, who lives across the way, says that it did. Five miles to the west of La Center, there is another strip adjacent to Donald Haun's blackberry farm. On the preceding night, also in forbidding weather, Haun's wife remembers that a plane [illegible] descended with [illegible] rocking with the [illegible] lights [illegible] returned [illegible] on both [illegible] [illegible]. Was this a [guess: sighting] on Cooper's getaway? The Haun [illegible]

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[Caption partially legible near upper panel, appears to read:] [illegible] SINKIN [illegible]

[...first line(s) partially cut off at top of page...] dressed in a business suit, top coat and brown oxfords, and he had $200,000 in ransom strapped to his chest. This exploit has become leg- end in the Northwest. A macabre cult has formed around him, and at least three subsequent hijackers have used Cooper's technique. All were later arrested. Cooper him- self remains a total mystery. The name he used to buy his airline ticket turned out to be an alias.

After Cooper jumped, it was two days before the heavy clouds cleared enough to permit a heli- copter search of the steep lava foothills and farmlands. The au- thorities figured that Cooper prob- ably came down near the shores of Lake Merwin. But the search yielded nothing, and heavy snows soon sealed the woods off.

Did Cooper get away or not? That is one of the questions that [guess: callused] loggers spend long hours debating around the stove in the Ariel general store and across the river at Nick's Tavern in Amboy. If Cooper did, then why haven't any of the ten thousand $20 bills—all carefully recorded by the FBI— shown up? Could the skyjacker have had an accomplice on the ground? Or if Cooper is hanging dead tangled in a fir tree out there

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above Merwin Dam, then why hasn't his body or the money been found? Have the searchers been looking in the wrong place?

No answers. The prospect of all that money sent fortune hunters racing into the woods last fall. And even today campers keep an eager eye out for the skyjack- er's loot. Meanwhile, the North- west has eulogized D.B. Cooper in song and verse. Promoters have capitalized on Cooper T-shirts and bumper stickers. Two men were ar- rested and charged with fleecing a writer of $30,000 by promising an interview with Cooper. An un- derground newspaper in Seattle published another "interview" with the skyjacker, but it was promptly debunked by authorities. With the

passage of time Cooper has as- sumed a certain Jesse James qual- ity. At the Ariel store, an auto- graph party was held this month to celebrate publication of Anna Friday's whimsical book on the skyjacking, entitled Skyjack: Guide—[guess: Please] Hold This Bomb While I Go to the Bathroom. The people are all kind of proud [illegible] [illegible] happened here. [illegible]

[Far-right column, heavily cropped and largely illegible:] Friday [on lo...] [...eryon] [wasn] and [in...] her [with] meet [...ed] [...at]

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1046 2116 1149

[illegible — heavy scan artifacts throughout]

[partial, lower-right area of embedded clipping]: ...hijacker's note [guess: at] first mistaken as date [illegible]