FD-350 clipping: 'The Hero Left a Victim After All' by Darrell Bob Houston, Seattle Times

FD-350 (Rev. 12-5-78)

---

(Indicate page, name of newspaper, city and state.) p.A1 Seattle Times Seattle, Wa. Date: 2/15/80 Edition: Final Title: NORJAK Character: or 164-81 Classification: Submitting Office: Seattle

---

By Darrell Bob Houston

The big 727-100 shot spray as it powered down the runway at Sea-Tac, leaving an oily rainbow in its wake. The pilot began his climb, grabbing altitude at more than 3,000 feet per minute. He leveled off at 30,000 in the vicinity of Mount St. Helens, home of the legendary Sasquatch and a landmark in the nine-year ground search for D.B. Cooper.

I looked up from my manuscript and studied the cabin. Seat C, Row 18. That's where Cooper had sat on Flight 305, chain-smoking his Raleighs and fondling that attache case with the five phony sticks of dynamite inside. Mr. Nice Guy with the Rotary Club smile and the cheap business suit. Tobacco stains on his teeth — and larceny in his heart.

I glanced at the ventral stairwell. That had been the key to D. B.'s dream-ship. Located under the center engine, it allowed him to climb out and jump without being sucked into a turbofan or sliced to carrots on the flaps.

Now, a large red sign proclaimed: This stairway cannot be opened in flight. The D. B. door was closed — for good. Cooper had changed the specifications of a fleet of $5 million airplanes. He had also made me a hero worshiper. The stewardess came up the aisle. She stopped at my seat.

"I'm curious . . ." she began. My paranoia mounted. I fumbled around, trying to hide the manuscript that was open on my lap.

The stewardess was charmed by my modesty. "You're a writer, aren't you?" I mumbled a confession.

". . . And that's a book manuscript?" Her smile was very white. I thought of the froth on a Wyoming trout stream.

Faking a coughing attack, I bent over the thick pile of pages that constituted my D.B. Cooper novel.

"What's your book about?" I sat up straight. "It's about a man," I said. "A man who figured that we're all riding on an airplane. Its name is Earth — and its zooming through the Void at something like 66,690 miles an hour. "But even at that speed — or so his

theory went — most people are still bored spitless.

"This man gave us the answer: The only way to get off that angst ridden airplane IS TO JUMP!"

I saw it coming — all the way to the nearest FBI interrogation room. "What was his name?" "D. B. Cooper," I whispered. "Any relation to James Fenimore?" The stewardess wink said it all. I closed my eyes. I wanted to slip on my dark glasses — but why tempt fate any further? I would have to cringe openly.

I pretended to sleep all the way to San Francisco.

★ ★ ★

Emerson said that the trouble with heroes is not their ceramic feet. It's that eventually they become a pain in the ass.

I wonder if the Sage of Concord would have been all that blase about the acturial little gent who called himself Dan Cooper — especially if D. B. had kept him in groceries for almost 10 years.

When I think back to that stormy Thanksgiving Eve of 1971, the night Cooper half-gained his way to immortality, I find it hard to label him the criminal he officially is — dead or alive.

[illegible line]

I was huddled in bed in my $50-a-month pad on Summit Avenue, listening to the radio and eating noodles with a pair of borrowed chopsticks.

The noodles were even colder than the apartment. But after the first flash about the parachute skyjack, it didn't matter.

Apologizing to my pet cockroach, William S. Burroughs III, I scratched around on the floor and found a dime. I called the Los Angeles Times. The editors assigned me to do a D. B. story.

I was elated. I would eat again. So would Burroughs, who was as sick of monosodium glutamate as I was.

The first national D. B. Cooper epic was laid out in the March 19, 1972 issue of the L.A. Times' West Magazine. It covered seven full pages with six diagrams and photographs. Included, too, was a song called "The Ballad of D.B. Cooper." The lyric was catchy — and forgettable.

Then, after the huge presses at Times Mirror Square had already kicked in, the editors had second thoughts. With several thousand copies

run off, the Times pulled my story and replated — at considerable cost.

They said they loved the headline: "Coffee, Tea — or $200,000?" But they didn't want to glorify the skyjacker, who, after all, was a dangerous fugitive.

Now how in the hell was I going to rationalize that to a cockroach?

★ ★ ★

My hero-fixation surfaced next on a Seattle television show.

By that time I was really into my role. I had my own tacky attache case to go with my black suit and skimpy tie. I encouraged people to call me D. B. I wore my sunglasses — even on rainy days.

When my television host asked me if I thought Cooper was a new American hero, I was ready.

"Yes," I said. "He was a terrific hero. He screwed the System back — nonviolently, nonpolitically. He didn't hurt anybody, and he only took 200 grand.

"And best of all" — I had rehearsed the line for a week — "he didn't leave any footprints in the clouds."

The switchboard at the station turned into a pinball machine.

The most irate of the callers was Ernest K. Gann, the author and former airline pilot.

I still have a copy of the telegram he sent to the station the next day.

"The true depiction of all hijackers for what they are, instead of as heroes," it said in conclusion, "must be shown now or you and your loved ones may well, and very soon, be aboard the next of another Robin Hood's terrible adventures."

I fired back at Gann through Emmett Watson's column in The P-I. I repeated my favorite argument: D. B., with his lopsided grin and gentle manner, had left no victims.

I was not only smug. I was wrong.

★ ★ ★

---

The door to my apartment was ajar when I returned. A tall young wo[man] sat at my writing desk. Blonde hai[r] [fell] to her shoulders. Her posture st[ruck] me as incongruent to her beauty. Her slump was one of weariness — and defeat.

---

[handwritten] 1A - 1 - 9220 SCHED......CHED..... LIZED.......FILED....... FEB 19 1980 FBI - SEATTLE

---

FBI/DOJ DB Cooper-17374

"You must have the wrong apart- ment," I said, from the doorway. Her reply made no sense. "I had a nervous breakdown after the skyjack," she said in a dull voice. Excusing myself, I ducked into the bathroom. I wanted to wash my face, collect my wits. Dozens of D. B. Cooper freaks had sought me out over the years, but this was going too far. I fully expected this one to tell me that D. B. was really a woman. When I came out of the bathroom my visitor was gone. I ran down the hall and out into the streets. Nothing. She had pulled a classic D. B. and van- ished into the ozone. I returned to my apartment, shak- ing my head. Still puzzled, I leafed through my Cooper scrapbook. There it was—an old advance copy of the maga- zine article the LA Times editors had killed in 1972. One of the photographs showed the crew of the skyjacked 727 after the plane — sparks rising high from the still down ventral stairs — had landed at Reno. Tina Mucklow, the stewardess Cooper held hostage on the plane, was sitting on her suitcase. Her long blonde hair was scraggly. Her posture was slumped — and somehow defeated. I no longer worry about whether the woman who appeared at my apart- ment was real, imaginary — or a prankster. She simply was. D. B. Cooper left more than a stack of cigarette butts when he bailed out into that freezing rainstorm. He left behind a victim, one who doesn't laugh at skyjacking jokes.

---

DB Cooper-17375