Las Vegan Magazine, 'The Discovery of D.B. Cooper: The Evidence Part II' (Nov 1983) by Byron H. Brown

THE DISCOVERY OF D.B. COOPER THE EVIDENCE PART II by Byron H. Brown

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EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION: This month marks the 12th anniversary of a crime which Time magazine said, "rivaled Alfred Hitchcock's more baroque fantasies" — the hijacking of a Northwest Airlines Boeing 727 enroute from Portland, Oregon to Seattle, Wash- ington by a bomb-wielding man known as D.B. Cooper. After he extorted $200,000 from the airline and was delivered four parachutes, as the jet headed south from Seattle to Reno, the skyjacker boldly made good a parachute escape and was never seen again. In our October issue Las Vegas investigative reporter Byron Brown revealed for the first time the true identity of the famous skyjacker. He was Bryant "Jack" Coffelt, a former Leavenworth Penitentiary inmate and life-long con-man, and also a friend of Byron's father, James Brown. In the summer of 1974 Coffelt asked the two to meet him in Joplin, Missouri. From there, they traveled to Oregon with him for the purpose of searching for the $200,000 ransom he had dropped when one of the parachutes he was wearing during the jump mal- functioned. The dummy chute was only one of many attempts by the authorities to foil the crime. The three were unsuccessful in their attempt to find the money, but Byron Brown was able to learn many obscure, never-exposed details about the skyjacking from Coffelt. During the next several years he conducted an extensive investigation of his claims, one which resulted in Coffelt's being identified as D.B. Cooper by two eye-witnesses on the hijacked plane. The investigation was a lonely personal odyssey for Brown, who encountered official resistance at every step of the way, perhaps because Coffelt, it turned out, was for many years a Washington D.C. government informant. Highlights from Brown's investigation, which promises to have far-reaching ramifications, are published for the first time in the following pages of Las Vegan. This month, as the town of Ariel, Washington celebrates its annual "D.B. Cooper Festival" in honor of the skyjacker, the participants should be pleased to know that he has finally been discovered. J.E.S.

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66 NOVEMBER 1983/LAS VEGAN MAGAZINE

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(above) The beautiful area around Mt. Hood, Oregon, showing the awesome forests where Coffelt dropped the bag of money. (opposite page) "Don't go to Vegas. You never win. Once when I was there I put a nickel in a parking meter and lost my car." —Bryant "Jack" Coffelt. Las Vegas reporter Byron Brown holds a picture of Coffelt, who has been identified as D.B. Cooper.

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"So the wrong-doer cannot do wrong without the hidden will of you all." —Kahlil Gibran The Prophet

America, and especially Las Vegas, is rife with legends of desperate characters who have suddenly struck it rich by forcing the odds, through skill or bluff, to turn in their favor — but few have been as enduringly popular as the lone bandit who heroically jumped from a lumbering jetliner into universal fame and also complete oblivion in the same moment.

He was erroneously called "D.B. Cooper" by a thrilled news media, which saw in his act the fulfillment of every man's secret hopes — even though he spelt his first name as "Dan" on his flight ticket. "D.B. Cooper,Where Are You?" became a kind of call-to-arms for the rebellious young generation during the early 1970's, when "dropping out" was the current fad. Cooper bravely symbolized the new mentality and daringly captured the public fancy with his crime. In an era when traditional heroes were fast dying, Americans had finally found one in a new breed of bandit.

Cooper's was the first and only successful skyjacking for ransom in American history, and largely because of the crime — which occurred on Thanksgiving Eve, November 24, 1971 — and a rash of other skyjackings which followed in its wake, a new era of electronic passenger screening was inaugurated at the nation's airports within a year. Commandeering a plane and threatening to blow innocent people

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out of the sky was not an exploit taken lightly by the authorities.

Clearly the crime could have resulted in tragedy, but since the daring skyjacker had not hurt anyone the public preferred to forget its more horrible aspects and instead remembered Cooper fondly as the man who had beat the system while thumbing his nose at authority. The skyjacking took on the aura of myth, Cooper's down-home, simple nom de guerre was honored everywhere, and it was hoped by many that he was happily enjoying his $200,000 in some secret paradisiacal haven.

The most erroneous part of the myth which prevailed, it is now apparent, was that Cooper was probably a small-time businessman, or even a timid corporate ladder-climber in the mold of Walter Mitty, who grew disgruntled at the pressures of modern life and decided one day to give it all up, perform a dramatic fool- proof heist, and sail off to Tahiti to spend the rest of his days in peace. Of course he had no real plan: the crime was a lark, a spur-of-the- moment decision to enact a smoldering dream —and if he failed? Then so what? It was worth the risk.

But to many familiar with the case this popular myth seemed entirely unfeasible. There were too many indications that Cooper had planned the job with cool foresight and calculated reason. He knew to the minutest detail technical aspects of the Boeing 727 air-

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craft which only a pilot or engineer could possibly know — such as the 15-degree wing- flaps configuration he ordered which restricted the plane's speed to barely 200 miles per hour, and how to put into effect the complicated maneuver of lowering the 727's rear stairway compartment. Also, another aspect which revealed the skyjacker's shrewd planning became clear only after the episode was over. On that Thanksgiving Eve — the day before a major holiday and one on which Northwest Airlines expected capacity loads of vacation travellers — Flight 305, upon departing Port- land, was barely one-third full. D.B. Cooper had called in a barrage of phony reservations — fictitious people who never showed — which left virtually the entire back half of the plane all to himself. No one could overpower him and wrest the bomb away. He was in complete control. At the time, some authorities called him a "cool master criminal" and speculated that he must have been an experienced para- chutist, possibly even a Green Beret.

The leads were so threadbare — a few cigarette butts were the only personal effects the skyjacker left behind — that the authorities were completely baffled. There was not even a solid clue as to where Cooper bailed out of the plane. The crew recalled feeling a strong "pressure bump" over the Woodland, Wash- ington area twenty miles north of Portland — but even so they never bothered to peer out the cockpit door to see if the skyjacker was gone.

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Instead, they flew on for three more hours until landing in Reno for a refueling stop, where it was discovered that Cooper and his $200,000 ransom had already disappeared into the night.

But it would have been highly impractical for the skyjacker to jump into the Woodland, Washington vicinity, which is dotted by small communities and farms. In view of the intricate planning which had otherwise gone into the crime, it makes little sense that Cooper would bail out there — taking the absurd chance, obviously, of landing in a farmer's apple orchard or a supermarket parking lot. By all appearances, Cooper wanted to survive the jump and escape to spend the money. He may have been at the end of an old rope, but he was also at the beginning of a new and, he hoped, better one.

In the twelve years since the crime occurred not one shred of physical evidence about Cooper himself has ever been uncovered anywhere near Woodland, Washington — not one reported sighting of the ruddy-faced villain nor the rotting remains of a dead body strapped to a parachute discovered lying in the forest there. It is only logical to assume, therefore, that Cooper had without doubt reconnaissanced a place where he could touch down safely in the parachute — a place far from scrutiny by either the authorities or amateur sleuths, and one remote enough to hide all traces of the crime or its brazen perpetrator.

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Far back in the rugged hinterlands of the Pacific Northwest there exists a site which can only be described as ideal for Cooper to have landed undetected in his parachute. The plains country of central Oregon boasts some of the most beautiful yet hauntingly isolated scenery in America. To the west of the rolling plains the treacherous Cascade Mountains tower thousands of feet into the sky. Nearby, adjoining the forested foothills which line the base of the range, sprawling wheat fields adorn the landscape in a checker-board fashion at random places where a juncture in the hills creates a valley or a smooth table-top plateau suitable for farming.

A few miles west of the ghost town of Friend, Oregon, on the barren wind-swept plains in the north-central part of the state, one of these huge fields — in summer it glows like polished amber with its ripe harvest of wheat — lies abandoned every year after the autumn harvest, a mute testament to the long-ago mysterious skyjacking. In an unused farmhouse in the center of the field, the charred remains of bales of hay still litter the floor where someone threw them hastily years ago. A deputy sheriff in the area remembered it well: "About a week before that skyjacking there were strange fires up here," he told me. "Some local ranchers called me out to find out what was going on. I

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THE PICTURES WHICH SPOKE A THOUSAND WORDS... "O, that a man might know The end of this day's business, ere it come!" —William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

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(top) Coffelt's Leavenworth mugshots; (above) 1974 snapshots of Coffelt with Byron and James Brown.

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Coffelt's Leavenworth Penitentiary mugshots were almost impossible to obtain. When the records clerk at that Kansas prison was contacted, he said that there was no record ever of Bryant "Jack" Coffelt having been admitted to Leavenworth Penitentiary.

My father remembered two aliases that Coffelt had used when he knew him in Atlanta Penitentiary: "John Hardy, Jr." and "J. C. Ross." When the records clerk at Leavenworth was asked to check his file for these aliases, he found a cross-reference under the name of "John Hardy, Jr." which directed him to the file of "J. C. Ross." Under that fictitious name, all of Jack Coffelt's records were contained — one might say hidden. Anyone inquiring about Coffelt's years at Leavenworth who did not know his aliases would encounter a stone wall.

A source close to the Carter Administration, one having intimate knowledge of the policies of the United States Attorney General's office, told me: "A federal prisoner is sentenced to the 'custody of the Attorney General of the United States.' We can put him up in a motel room for his entire sentence if we want to." This Carter Administration "insider" finally managed to retrieve for us Coffelt's files from both Atlanta Penitentiary and Leavenworth.

Seattle attorney George LeBissoniere, who also identified my 1974 snapshots, claims that he identified Coffelt's Leavenworth photos as D.B. Cooper for the FBI six weeks after the skyjacking. "The FBI never called back," LeBissoniere told me. Florence Schaffner also identified both the Leavenworth photos and 1974 snapshots of Coffelt as Cooper, and has always believed that the FBI composite drawings of Cooper were "wrong." (See pp. 81-82) The former stewardess, who sat beside Cooper for over two hours, said that the FBI artist who drew the composites failed to follow her instructions concerning Cooper's true features. Even before she saw my photographs of Coffelt, she described Cooper to me as having a "longer, fuller face" than the FBI composites showed, with a hairline "not nearly as receding." (LeBissoniere and Schaffner both have preserved their testimony on videotape.)

My 1974 snapshots are the only photographs (other than his prison mugshots) known to exist of Jack Coffelt. He was, after all, a man who did not want his picture taken. B.H.B.

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68 NOVEMBER 1983/LAS VEGAS MAGAZINE

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found these bales of hay, and some others along the edge of the field, piled up and smoldering. I thought smugglers were running drugs in here and using the fires as ground- pattern lights for a small airplane."

But the forest trails surrounding the huge field provided impenetrable refuge for who- ever was there, and the deputy sheriff captured no one. After the skyjacking, he recalled, the mysterious fires ceased. According to Jack Coffelt, who led me to the field in 1974, the bales of hay had been set afire to help guide him to a safe landing in the parachute in the dark. He and his accomplice, he explained, had practiced their escape maneuvers during the nights immediately preceding the sky- jacking.

But the scene on those vast tundra ranges grows even more compelling. A few miles south of the field, near an Indian reservation, lies a small man-made lake called Pine Hollow Reservoir. On one shore of the tiny lake stand a few small, dilapidated, privately-owned cabins which have been rented out to wayworn travellers for as long as people can remember. The place is secluded and peaceful, and amidst the little group of weather-beaten buildings, with the austere peak of Mount Hood reflected in the crystalline lake nearby, one feels utterly anonymous. But there is an extraordinary and baffling curiousity here: on the porch of one of the ancient structures stands a Navy battleship beacon capable of emitting a beam of light which can be seen well over a hundred miles!

The day I discovered it the beacon's glass face — nearly three feet in diameter — was resting on a steel swivel plate that was frozen solid with rust. Strangely, it was aimed on the compass reading which directed it towards Coffelt's landing field in the hills a few miles to the north! None of the locals recalls how the huge beacon came to arrive there, but Jack Coffelt told me in 1974 that he ordered the pilot of Flight 305 to "home in on a huge beacon" located south of the landing field — even though he never took me to where the beacon was eventually found.

The real reason I went to Pine Hollow Reservoir was because Jack informed me cagily, "The getaway car — my Cadillac — was parked beside a lake near an Indian reservation," as he pointed to the plains south of the landing site to indicate the general area. But he distinctly appeared to want to avoid that area, as if he thought someone there might recognize him. When I finally found the beacon there I was immensely impressed by the clear — indeed beautiful — design which its secret location revealed. As I gazed at the small enclave of cabins huddled together in that remote hideaway on the plains, it seemed the perfect place for his accomplice to have waited, with walkie-talkie in hand, for Jack to radio him that he had finally touched down in the

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The wheat field where Coffelt intended to land. He missed the field by one mile, landing in the canyon at upper right. His jeep was parked in the forests directly above the wheat field.

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Coffelt suspected chase planes would follow the skyjacked jetliner, and his hunch was right. Military fighter jets from McChord Air Force Base tailed the aircraft, but kept overshooting it and finally had to turn back.

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parachute. The confederate would then merely shut off the signal light, drive the few short miles to the landing site where he would pick up Jack, and from there the two would speed east across the plains.

In case something fouled up, however, there was an alternate plan. Coffelt suspected chase planes would follow the skyjacked jetliner, and his hunch was right. Military fighter jets from McChord Air Force Base in Tacoma, Washington tailed the aircraft, but kept over- shooting it and finally had to turn back. Also, a C-130 cargo plane loaded with paratroopers lumbered behind hoping to see the skyjacker bail out — at which point the paratroopers planned to follow suit and try to capture him on the ground. But the cargo plane's radar

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failed to pick up the falling skyjacker. Nevertheless, in anticipation of possible ground pursuit, Coffelt had stashed a World War Two Army jeep in the woods. The jeep was equipped with food and water, and was stationed high in the foothills a few miles west of the landing field. In case he was pursued on the ground he would bury the money, make his way to the jeep and from there maneuver the vehicle far down obscure forest trails to a cave-like hideout, lying low until the heat was off. The accomplice operating the Cadillac would stand by, passing the days quietly as just another tourist at the lonesome but tranquil cabins at Pine Hollow Reservoir — until the time was ripe for their escape. Then the two would rendezvous, retrieve the buried money, discard the jeep into a nearby river and set out in the Cadillac for their Midwestern haven. "It was the perfect crime," Coffelt told me. "We planned for every possibility."

Accordingly, the Army jeep served a dual

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At Pine Hollow Reservoir, James Brown sits beside the beacon which directed the plane to the remote landing site.

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purpose. In addition to serving as a back-up getaway vehicle, the jeep was stationed strate- gically to aid in the jump itself — it carried an electronic beeper which emitted a signal on a special radio frequency. As the skyjacked plane headed south from Seattle, Coffelt, listening through a receiver strapped to his wrist for the signal coming from the jeep, planned to jump when it was two or three pitches from its loudest intensity — a point at which he would be roughly a mile due north of the jeep itself, and from there he could easily float down-wind in the parachute to a pin-point landing on the field at the edge of the plains.

No trace of the jeep has ever been found. The Deschutes River, where according to Coffelt it was plunged into the waters and de- stroyed with dynamite, is extremely treacher- ous to divers due to its raging currents and rocky bottom, so the possibility of finding its remains there is remote. But a fascinating shred of evidence that such a jeep existed and was used in the skyjacking has been uncovered like a rare archaeological find.

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A retired U.S. Forest Service agent accompanied me to the place where Coffelt showed me he had stashed the World War Two Army jeep in the dense forests at the base of Mount Hood. Faded tire tracks were still visible where a vehicle had been backed into a stand of small maple trees years ago. A pile of rotted brushwood lay off to one side — the maple branches which Coffelt claimed he had used to camouflage the jeep. The expert forester immediately noticed a young tree growing through one of the tire tracks which revealed a past injury — an elbow hook disfiguration at its base which indicated the tree had been severely crushed by a heavy object years earlier. He sawed through the disfigured area and later analyzed the small segment at the agency laboratory. Amazingly, the annual growth rings — which record every event in a tree's life in a kind of fossilized record — revealed that the sapling had been damaged in the autumn of 1971—the time of the skyjacking!

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A cross-section of the maple sapling which was found at the place where Coffelt's jeep was parked. The growth rings reveal that the tree was damaged in the fall of 1971.

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Even though such intricate planning was involved in the heist — Coffelt claimed he had spent eleven months and $10,000 of his own money just setting it up — the crime ended in abysmal failure and nearly death for Coffelt himself! He could not possibly have foreseen, however, the raging intensity of the thunderstorms which descended upon the Cascades that night when he boarded the plane in Portland. In the Pacific Northwest, thunderhead clouds often rush inland from the ocean and envelope the mountains in a matter of minutes with violent force. Because of the storms, he was forced to descend the rear stairwell of the 727 earlier than planned in order to try to spot the signal fires on the landing field below him through the swirling cloud mass. The plane, plunging through the night like a battleship at a mere 200 miles per hour, and maintaining the 10,000 feet altitude he had ordered the pilot to stick to, was being buffeted by severe turbulence.

Coffelt, burdened by the two parachutes and the 25-pound sack of money looped over his arm, was having trouble holding onto the wide-flanged handrail of the stairway. He was craning his neck, peering under the starboard wing into the darkness ahead while struggling to hear the beeper signal from the hidden jeep through the radio receiver strapped to his wrist when all of a sudden, before he was fully prepared, the plane jolted in turbulence, he stumbled helplessly and was violently sucked out by the ferocious windstream, desperately trying to hold onto the money while falling head over heels into the murky oblivion!

Unknown to him, the authorities at Seattle had provided him with an inoperative chute — a sport-type demonstration model that had been sewn up. It was the one he was now wearing on his chest! After repeated attempts

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He hit the slope blindly at nearly thirty miles per hour and was dashed into the rocks! But he had made it. He was down. And as he told me later: "I wanted desperately to live!"

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to deploy this chest pack failed, he finally managed to get the military parachute on his back to open, but when the reserve chute's large 28-foot canopy billowed into the cross-current winds (in fact, according to experienced parachutists it was a miracle that it opened at all) he was hit by such a severe jolt that the bag of money slipped out of his arms and tumbled away into the darkness. To cap his awesome misfortune — the signal fires on the landing field below were nowhere to be seen! He had dived from the plane far too early. The landing field was still miles ahead! Far in the distance, through the dark sea of clouds, he could see the bright swath cut by the huge beacon light at Pine Hollow Reservoir — where his accomplice waited in vain. But soon, as he descended into a canyon, even that light disappeared.

Completely enveloped in a nightmare of darkness, he only realized he was at last hitting the ground when he crashed through the splintering, phantom-like branches of a hillside tree. He hit the slope blindly at nearly thirty miles per hour and was dashed into the rocks! But he was down. And as he told me

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later: "I came back to life at that first shocked breath. I wanted desperately to live!"

Almost semi-conscious, he had terrifying visions of paratroopers from the C-130 cargo pursuit plane alighting like ghosts on the slope around him. Before he had tumbled from the 727 he had seen the chase plane's search lights scanning the cloud mass behind him. Frantically, he gathered the surging folds of the parachute's wind-tossed canopy around his bleeding legs — the bright material was flapping wildly like a huge crippled moth straining to free itself — and compacted the reckless mass into a shallow depression he had clawed in the dirt. Then he placed the sport-type chest chute on top of this mass and sprayed the pile with a magnesium compound from an aerosol can and set it afire with a cigarette lighter. The nylon fabric was instantly consumed by the flames, melting like a mirage into the ground before his dazed eyes. Groping his way, he stumbled down the pitch-black slope in severe pain because, upon landing, he had squarely hit a tree limb between his legs and punctured his chest on one of the tree's sharp branches.

It took him fifteen hours to make his way out of the vast canyon lined with sheer rock-faced cliffs that he had fallen into. He spent the longest and most arduous night of his life desperately clawing his way through tangled underbrush and climbing over jutting boulders to finally see brilliant sunshine on a clear Thanksgiving Day morning, and feel "to the depths of my spirit" as he told me later, "a new appreciation for everything around me that was alive." The eerie neon glow of startled eyes revealing lurking cougars and timber wolves, and the ferocious menacing cries of the wild animals terrified him that night like demons, he told me. The experience in that awesome necropolis of nature would haunt him always.

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Today, the canyon remains as remote and undisturbed as it has been for centuries. Twenty miles to the east farmlands begin, where wheat and alfalfa grow peacefully under turquoise summer skies. Occasionally a tractor can be made out against the magnificent backdrop of verdant mountain forests by the dust it raises while furrowing a field on the plains nearby. No one knows the incredible drama which took place in those rugged hinterlands over a decade ago. Life goes on there as placidly, it seems, as the ageless mountains themselves.

The lost bag containing $200,000 still lies somewhere in those vast and secretive forests waiting for the day when some treasure hunter may stumble across it. Coffelt said that before he leaped from the plane — in case he himself were killed in the jump so that his accomplice would be able to find his body and retrieve the loot — he had stuffed a small electronic transmitter inside the bag before tying it

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70 NOVEMBER 1983/LAS VEGAS MAGAZINE

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up. All through that long desperate night he had been haunted by the weakening signal coming through his wrist receiver from the bag of money. Once even, succumbing to merciless hallucinations that the bag was lying just over a nearby ridge, he backtracked thinking he must try to find it. But then he came to his senses and continued on towards the increasing clarity of the other signal, the one droning steadily from the hidden jeep, which now provided his only opportunity for a safe getaway.

Time seems ageless in the mountains. After years have passed the same landmarks still appear unchanged. When the money finally is found it will be by chance and not design, for Nature reveals her secrets sparingly as I have learned before. In the spring of 1977 I journeyed to that remote area once again and witnessed time itself standing still, as if it had been waiting forever for my visit! I came, with my father and two other men, to search for any remains that may have been left from the hasty and obscure events which occurred on that barren mountainside so long ago. The wind howls forever in that canyon, even when there are no storms. A mood of failure perpetually lingers there.

We searched the slope for half a day, but found nothing. The late afternoon sun, rapidly falling behind the surrounding cliffs, was casting an eerie orange glow through the trees as it suddenly turned bitterly cold. Finally, just before leaving, I tilled one last shovel-full of dirt when I suddenly realized that I was standing over the very spot where three years earlier, in 1974, Jack Coffelt showed me he had destroyed his parachute. Something in the fading sky felt hauntingly unreal to me as I noticed lying in the freshly-exposed dirt a white piece of cord about the length of a cigarette! I reached down to pick up the cord, but when I touched the edges three-quarters of it blew away instantly! The fine white ashes melted into the darkening sky like filaments of a seeding dandelion. Everything was silent but the wind. As if in a dream, I realized that I was holding a tiny piece of the cord in my fingertips.

My companions and I began furiously digging in stark amazement. We immediately found a larger patch of the same type fabric (which looked somewhat like snake skin, and must have been a fold of the parachute) lying just beneath the topsoil, but it too turned to ashes and melted in the churning wind! The canyon echoed the surging gusts like an amphitheater, drowning out the faint whisper of the past that had been so fleetingly revealed to me by the mountains. Jack Coffelt, a man who always strived to cover his tracks, had apparently stepped in one of them on that night long ago, crushing a parachute shroud line into the dirt beneath his boot where it escaped total destruction by the flames. Indeed, the cord I retrieved still shows charred markings from that

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moment in 1971 when Jack briefly illuminated the night sky with his fire.

After our return to Las Vegas, my father and I submitted the tiny piece of material to a local forensic lab used by the police and FBI—Atlas Chemical Testing Laboratories on Highland Drive in Las Vegas. There, under 300-times magnification the piece of material was identified as "NYLON CORDING"—identical to the type used in parachutes!

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The fragment of parachute cord which Byron Brown found in the remote canyon where Coffelt landed. The cord was burned and contains carbon deposits.

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I noticed lying in the dirt a white piece of cord about the length of a cigarette. I reached down to pick up the cord, but when I touched the edges three-quarters of it blew away instantly!

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In 1974, as my father and I travelled with Jack through remote areas of the West (we took backroads, staying away from major cities because Jack said "law people" were on the lookout for him) we were forced to pry information from him against his will. He had only one design for us, to lead us to the place where he lost the money so that we could search for it, if need be for the entire summer. But as we

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pressured him for more information about the crime, details which were starkly different from published accounts of the skyjacking, we began to fear that we were merely pawns in a dangerous game conducted by sinister elements. Parts of his story were so far-fetched—he threw out many red-herrings to steer us away from the truth, and claimed that a vast cover-up of the crime was being conducted by the government — that we grew increasingly paranoid as we travelled through rugged mountains and across lonesome canyonlands with the raggedly-desperate man. But as the trip wore on we learned many new and startling details about the crime that would later be verified by witnesses.

One of the most obscure features of his narrative concerned Coffelt's insistence that our search was for a green bag filled with money—not the white canvas mail bag which, according to news accounts, the authorities had delivered to him at Seattle-Tacoma Airport. When pressed to explain this discrepancy, Jack said that he took the green bag out of the briefcase which contained his bomb, and hoping that this green "rubberized" bag, as he called it, would prevent the money from getting wet and rotting in case he were pursued on the ground and had to bury it, slipped the canvas mail sack full of money into it. Then he selected one of the four parachutes which appeared the least trustworthy and tore it open, cutting the shroud lines off of it with a long, thin-bladed knife. He then wrapped the shroud lines tightly around the top of the green protective bag, leaving a loop in the cords for his arm to go through. He would hold the money in the crook of his elbow as he leaped from the plane.

At this point the jetliner had left Seattle and was heading south toward Reno. At Seattle he had allowed all of the passengers and two of the stewardesses to leave the plane, keeping a sole hostage — stewardess Tina Mucklow — with him in the back. As soon as the plane took flight he reached in the bag of money, he boastingly recounted, and grabbing a handful of the loot offered it to Tina Mucklow. "Take it, Honey," he cajoled, "they don't pay you enough!" — playing his tough-guy Bogart role, romantic and wry at the same time with just a trace of embarrassed compassion. But "the pretty little blonde, "as Jack described her, refused the loot, telling him she almost certainly would be given a lie detector test. Nevertheless, Jack placed the money on a nearby seat, thinking she might change her mind and later take it. She didn't, and shortly afterwards, just a few minutes before jumping, he threw the small bundle of money out the back of the plane along with his briefcase and other items that he no longer needed. By then he had already tied up the bag of money, and since he was wearing thick thermal underwear there was nowhere to stuff the small bundle of cash into his tight-fitting clothes, so he reluc-

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LAS VEGAS MAGAZINE/NOVEMBER 1983 71

THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER, AND A SMOKING GUN...

"And yet, my dear Watson, there is so very close a connection that the one is extracted out of the other." —Sherlock Holmes The Hound Of The Baskervilles

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The time was February, 1980. The prince was eight-year- old Brian Ingram. While on a fishing expedition and cookout with his parents, young Ingram was sent to fetch some sticks to start a fire. Instead, he found a few thousand dollars worth of rotted $20 bills. The boy had discovered them lying on a sand bar beside the Columbia River a few miles north of Portland, Oregon. The FBI later determined that the serial numbers of the bills matched some of those given D.B. Cooper! . . . The pauper was Jack Coffelt, who unfortunately dropped the bulk of his $200,000 farther to the south- east, near Mt. Hood. How did over $5,000 worth of his stolen loot end up on the banks of the Columbia River near Portland? Like everything else about this bizarre case, the leads proved as mysterious as the crime itself. Portland FBI Agent Ralph Himmels- bach, in overall charge of the D.B. Cooper investigation, said, "It is mind-boggling where the money was located." Indeed.

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SEATTLE Cooper delivered feet parachutes and $200,000 ransom

Plane heads south, landing in Reno 3½ hours later

KELSO

WASHINGTON

WOODLAND ARIEL Lake Merwin

FBI CONDUCTS FRUITLESS SEARCH FOR COOPER HERE

MONEY FOUND HERE, 1980

COFFELT THROWS PART OF MONEY OUT HERE

VANCOUVER

PORTLAND

Cooper hijacks plane enroute to Seattle, November 24, 1971

Mt. Hood Area COFFELT JUMPS HERE; BYRON BROWN DISCOV- ERS PARACHUTE RE- MAINS HERE, MAY 1977

OREGON

6/10 RENO

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Ever since the skyjacking occurred in late 1971, the FBI concentrated its search for Cooper around the town of Woodland, Washington — an area between 10 and 25 miles north of where young Ingram found the badly decomposed bills. The crew of the skyjacked plane had informed the FBI that a series of strong "pressure bumps" occurred directly over Woodland, suggesting that Cooper bailed out there. Also, a red warning light had gone on in the cabin, indicating that the 727's rear stairway had been lowered. But after Brian Ingram's find, according to UPI press dispatches, "the location of the money . . . caused the FBI to reconsider its calculations." Cooper, it became clear, could not possibly have bailed out over Woodland since part of his money was later discovered far south of there! The perplexed authorities were forced to admit that they spent years conducting a wild goose chase. As Jack Coffelt often used to say, "If I'm lying, God's a possum." But there was another problem. Originally, it was thought that the plane had veered west of Portland on its southbound flight, but the location of the rotted money, which FBI Agent Himmelsbach shrewdly noted "must have tumbled and rolled along the bottom of the Columbia River," proved without a doubt that the plane flew east of Portland — exactly as Jack Coffelt insisted! The wide and sedate Columbia flows from east to west; the money could not possibly have floated against the current. Jack Coffelt claimed that he threw a few bundles — perhaps $4,000 or $5,000 worth, he said — of the ransom money out the back of the plane over the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River, after stewardess Tina Mucklow refused to accept it. Nine years later, Brian Ingram apparently had found that money. But he was unaware of the importance of his discovery. The find at last provided proof that the plane had flown east of Portland, and also shot a gaping hole right through the FBI's belief that Cooper never made it to Oregon! On that sand bar beside the river, the astonished boy did not realize that he was holding a white-hot smoking gun... B.H.B.

---

tantly tossed it out over a "brightly-lit hydro- electric dam" — the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River. Incredibly, nine years later, in February 1980, the bundle of cash would be discovered lying in a sand bar beside the river — the soggy bills revealing serial numbers which matched the ones given D.B. Cooper! (See sidebar) But Jack was not yet through with the frightened young woman, who to this day still appears mesmerized by the skyjacker. Standing with only her in the empty corridor at the rear of the plane, he approached her and, as Jack put it, "felt her up a bit." She sensed his lone- liness and fear and whispered consoling words, trying to calm him, but he told her, sadly, "I have nothing to lose." His swaggering account to us: "She was the last woman I may have seen in my life! I wanted her to have something, you know, to remember me by." Original press accounts of the skyjacking, and public statements by the FBI, never re- ported these intricate details: nothing about a green bag, nothing about Cooper offering Tina Mucklow part of the ransom money or his using a knife with a long, thin blade to cut up the shroud lines from one of the parachutes was ever mentioned — except by Jack Coffelt. The authorities did reveal however (as if they were puzzled by the find) that cut-up parachute shroud lines were discovered lying on the floor in the back of the plane when it landed in Reno. But at a meeting with her in San Diego in 1977, Tina Mucklow confirmed each one of these obscure details — especially noting the green bag, which she thought was made of glossy paper or plastic, folded in a corner of Cooper's briefcase. Before he slipped the mail sack full of money into the green bag he ordered her forward into the cockpit. He did not want her to observe this move in case she informed the authorities, who might then be able to de- cipher his actions, which were designed to confuse any ground pursuers. Jack said that in case he were chased on the ground he would

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Stewardess Tina Mucklow sits beside Captain William Scott of Flight 305. Mucklow confirmed every one of Coffelt's details about the crime.

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72 NOVEMBER 1983/LAS VEGAN MAGAZINE

Coffelt placed the money in a green bag like the one shown above, then tied up the bag with parachute shroud lines.

pretend to be one of the searchers, flashing his government ID to anyone who might question him, a green FBI badge with his name on it, in fact, which he showed me in 1974!

Tina watched him tear open one of the para- chutes and cut the shroud lines off of it using a long, thin-bladed knife which according to her "looked like a dagger." She recalled that he nervously chain-smoked Raleigh cigarettes. (Raleighs were Coffelt's favorite brand) and also admitted that Cooper offered her a handful of the loot, digging into the bag of money and shoving the small bundle at her, insisting that she take it. But when she was delicately prompted about whether the skyjacker had touched her "in any way," she flushed heavily and averted her eyes before answering faintly, "He may have made a pass at me." Many years had passed, but scars still remained from this ugly incident involving the desperate bandit who briefly but dramatically entered her life, then disappeared into total mystery again. She clearly remembered his hushed words, though, words which seemed to haunt her still— "I have nothing to lose" — the same phrase that Jack Coffelt repeated to me many times during our lonely journey together in 1974.

• • •

Even though Tina Mucklow confirmed every one of Coffelt's details about these hectic and obscure events which occurred as the plane headed south from Seattle, she was not in fact the person who had observed him most care- fully that night. As his sole hostage at that point, she remained with Cooper for only a few short minutes as he frantically prepared to jump and attempted to lower the 727's rear stairway compartment, a period in which she was scared half to death. Since he had de- manded four parachutes, the terrified crew, especially Tina herself, thought that he was planning to force at least one of them to bail out with him! Tina remembers these horrifying moments like the sordid images of a long-

(continued on p. 80)

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LAS VEGAN MAGAZINE/DB Cooper-20782

(continued from p. 73)

Florence Schaffner, the stewardess who accepted Cooper's ransom note, was a complete enigma to me. For years, she remained unavailable to the news media. ...She claimed that she had been warned never to talk to anyone about the skyjacking.

lingering nightmare. Since she never saw the ruddy-faced, heavy-accented skyjacker without his dark sun glasses on, she was unable to identify my 1974 snapshots of Coffelt.

There was another stewardess, however, who during the long flight from Portland to Seattle before she was released there by him (the plane circled high above Sea-Tac Airport for nearly two-and-a-half hours waiting for the ransom and four parachutes to be collected) was able to observe Cooper very closely, indeed intimately. In fact, the two even carried on a casual and sometimes enraptured conversation for much of that time.

Florence Schaffner, the stewardess who initially accepted Cooper's ransom note, (naively believing it to be a proposition) was a complete enigma to me. For years, judging from various news accounts of the skyjacking that I had researched, she remained completely unavailable to the newsmedia. Indeed, I had the distinct impression that she was being kept under some sort of "wraps" by the authorities. Even reporters from Time magazine and the Washington Post had been unable to contact her. She always remained mysteriously aloof from the wave of publicity generated in the skyjacking's aftermath.

Immediately after the crime she dropped completely out of sight and the public soon forgot, or was never even aware, that for over two hours that night she dutifully attended the "terribly lonesome man," as she described Cooper to me, rushing to bring him coffee and snacks, listening politely to his sad, vague ramblings suggestive of a checkered past and innocently wishing him, "Good luck . . . I hope you make it."

"Is there anything more that I can do for you?" she remembers asking Cooper when the plane finally touched down in Seattle. "Do you want me to leave now, or would you like

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80 NOVEMBER 1983/LAS VEGAN MAGAZINE DB Cooper-20783

So even though some ominous mystique still hangs over Henderson within the cloud (for even if it's totally safe, it still is there and people are ever aware of its presence), it apparently is no more than a distraction. Gary Johnson, executive director of the Chamber of Commerce, who has been a Henderson resident for 15 years and helped develop Clark County air quality information as a member of the County Citizens' Environmental Advisory Board, indicates that all studies done to date that list air alert areas in Southern Nevada don't even mention Henderson.

Now discussions of this seemingly tiny community (it actually is the largest city in Nevada, area-wise covering 70 square miles) revolve around the growth taking place there.

Henderson started out as a mining town called Basic Townsite, built by the government just prior to World War II to support the miners working at a plant constructed in a joint effort between the U.S. and England to manufacture magnesium. The town is now a thriving Las Vegas suburb.

The area was first selected for the plant in the early 1940's because of its proximity to hydro-power from Lake Mead and Hoover Dam. Nearby was an ore-mining site, as was the newly flourishing city of Las Vegas and the Las Vegas Gunnery Range (now Nellis Air Force Base). The spot was also a watering stop for the Union Pacific Railroad.

After the war, the magnesium stock-piled and the plant was closed. The Federal Government was ready to dismantle the little town around it. Local businessmen who had made a home there decided to establish a Chamber of Commerce and keep the community alive. They renamed it Henderson for Nevada's U.S. Senator Charles B. Henderson, in January of 1944.

Henderson's largest period of growth took place in the 1960's and 70's, until the economy slowed down. In fact, one local bank ran an article in its in-house publication that contained a study by the Federal Government predicting that Henderson, if the growth pattern of the city of 30,000 continued on its course, would come within 12,000 of the population of Las Vegas by the year 2,000. That prediction might have to be updated though, as the study was done before the economic slowdown of the late 70's.

With the economy now improving however, Henderson is once again on its quiet growth surge. Prior to the slowdown the largest section of growth was the western portion of the town with the flourishing Green Valley area supplying beautiful housing and much of the shopping facilities for local residents.

That area has also been the most prestigious, due to established businesses like Nick's Supper Club, the Boulder City Theater, and Timet, which have been joined in recent years by big name industries including Levi Straus,

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The northern area is most recently beginning to grow rapidly, with U.S. Homes doing a great deal of building, a new shopping mall going up with a new Senior Citizens Center adjacent to it, and the Henderson Convalescent Center with a 120-bed facility under construction.

With the recent completion of the new Convention Center, Henderson is also about to embark upon a $5 million Boulder Highway beautification project, which will benefit surrounding local communities as well.

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Parks and bicycle and pedestrian paths are also in the plans.

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There is also a rumor going around Henderson that seems to be more than just idle talk. It concerns the possibility of building a large hotel/casino in Henderson, something the town fathers know is the most needed commodity there. And, the names mentioned of those possibly interested are impressive indeed, with the Sahara/Hacienda Hotels' Paul Lowden included among them.

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LAS VEGAN MAGAZINE/DB Cooper-20784

me to stay with you?" Almost no one was aware that Florence actually believed that she herself, instead of Tina Mucklow, should have remained with Cooper as his hostage when the plane headed south from Seattle towards Reno because she felt that she had grown to know and understand him, in however strange a way. "He told me, like a spirit," she said with poignant nostalgia in her voice, "that I probably sat beside him somewhere else a hundred years ago." Florence, it is true, developed a profound sympathy for the lonely man while trying to comfort him in the back of the plane.

Dr. Dick Simmons, a psychologist special- izing in the field of abnormal perceptions, was on the flight but stole only a cursory glance at Cooper. Simmons pointed out that the further people get away from an event the more they are inclined to remember it the way they think it should have been. This is why some people reported Cooper as being no more than 45 years old, he felt, since skyjacking is not regarded as an occupation for the middle-aged. But this qualification would not necessarily apply in the case of Florence Schaffner, since she had spent so much time with Cooper and had obviously seen him clearly. Indeed, Florence would be an ideal witness, especially in view of her compassionate feelings for Cooper and her rapt attention to even minor details about him.

After weeks of searching for her I finally found Florence Schaffner, and after winning her confidence (she claimed that she had been warned never to talk to anyone about the sky- jacking and reluctantly declined to allow us to publish her photograph with this article) was able to learn many new and surprising facts about the crime, startling details which proved increasingly disturbing. To begin with, according to Florence, the FBI composite

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The FBI composite drawing of D.B. Cooper showing him veiled behind the dark sun glasses he wore part of the time.

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According to Florence, the FBI drawings of Cooper were "misleading" and "erroneous."... The pretty half-Filipino stewardess took one look at my photographs of Jack Coffelt and gasped, "It's him! My God, it's him!"

pictures of D.B. Cooper that had been widely circulated in the press were, in fact, misleading and erroneous drawings. As she explained with a hint of lingering scornfulness, "The man had much fuller cheeks, and his hairline was not nearly as receding as shown by the composite pictures. I kept telling that FBI artist that his pictures were wrong . . . but he would not listen to me!"

This startling claim was the first hint ever by an unwilling participant in the skyjacking that the official version of the crime has been erroneous from the beginning. Florence then went on to confirm another aspect of Jack Coffelt's story that had long puzzled me. "Cooper took off his street shoes and put on a pair of boots," she affirmed. Jack Coffelt, in 1974, had insisted that he changed into a pair of boots on the plane. But press accounts, quoting the FBI, had long ridiculed the "hill- billy skyjacker" for jumping out in normal

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This FBI composite drawing of D.B. Cooper, and the one on the preceding page, were widely circu- lated in the press.

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82 NOVEMBER 1983/LAS VEGAS MAGAZINE

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DB Cooper-20786

street clothes. In fact, much of the FBI's long-standing belief that Cooper died in the jump is based on exactly this point, for after all, wearing only thin oxford slippers, how could he possibly survive the gruelling landing somewhere in the rugged forests of the Pacific Northwest? But the FBI never even bothered, it seems, to question Florence Schaffner thoroughly.

The stewardess related many other relatively minor points which nevertheless confirmed to the last detail Jack Coffelt's version of the crime. According to Florence, Cooper was — just as Coffelt had said — the last person to board the plane at Portland. Florence said that she actually had to fetch him from where he was peering out the terminal windows and lead him to the entrance-way of the plane. Coffelt told me that as he was peering out the terminal windows, watching for a Brinks truck that was supposed to deliver several million dollars — the real target of the skyjacking — in unmarked currency to the cargo hold of the 727, he "almost got left behind." In fact, when the Brinks truck failed to arrive as scheduled he was standing there deliberating whether or not to go ahead with the skyjacking when the girl approached him. It was then that he decided to demand the $200,000 for himself, his modest cut of the few million dollars that was to have been divided among other conspirators. Florence remembered that Cooper was well-dressed, wearing an old-fashioned black suit as Coffelt had claimed, not a "brown" or "dark" one as press accounts have always reported. And she also recalled that he wore white gloves, verifying Coffelt's claim that he wore gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints.

Her memory of that night was so clear, in fact, that in a most surprising development Florence insisted that she forgot to relay Cooper's request that the ransom money be collected in $20 bills; he refused to accept any other denomination. "I completely forgot about that part," she said. "I was so scared at the beginning of the whole thing." However, if no denomination is specified it is standard procedure for the FBI to deliver such ransom money in larger bills, 50's or 100's, since they are much easier to trace. But even though Florence forgot to tell anyone, Cooper was nevertheless delivered the ransom money in $20 bills by those on the ground!

These perplexing and darkly disturbing details faded into the background, however, when Florence at last provided major new evidence in the case. When I finally found her in July of 1977, the pretty, half-Filipino stewardess, who was then working for Frontier Airlines in Denver, took one look at my photographs of Jack Coffelt, her mouth dropped open, and she gasped, "Oh my God! Where did you get those? I never thought I would see that face again! It's him! My God, it's him!" • • •

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LAS VEGAS MAGAZINE/B[illegible]Cooper-20787

James Brown (l.) and Jack Coffelt at Bannock, Montana during their 1974 journey to Oregon. Photo by Byron Brown.

At various times, FBI agents close to the case have expressed the opinion that Jack Coffelt's story was too littered with "James Bondery" to be given any credibility. All his "wild bluster" about beepers sending out homing signals from a hidden jeep, fires set up on the ground as signal lights, and accomplices standing by with walkie-talkies evoked too much of a Hollywood aura. Why not just hide the parachutes instead of spraying them with a magnesium compound and torching them, as Coffelt claimed he did?

Even after Florence Schaffner identified Coffelt as the skyjacker, the FBI insisted that he was nowhere near Oregon when the crime took place, saying instead that he was then in the Washington D.C. area. But they wouldn't tell us where. "We've narrowed it down to days and hours," one agent told me flatly. "You've got the wrong man."

But one of Coffelt's most intimate acquain- tances, his best friend and trusted confidant, in fact, for nearly twenty years, Memphis attorney Robert Dobbs, who provided the old con-man with legal help more than once when Jack was in trouble, told me: "Jack was meticulous enough to have planned all the things" neces- sary to pull off the skyjacking. And for anyone who doubted it: "... then they don't know the real Jack Coffelt! You'd have to know Coffelt personally to be able to appreciate the significance of all of it!"

As tantalizing proof of his claim, Dobbs went to his library and brought back two valu- able relics straight from the dusky corridors of American history: the exquisitely carved ivory riding crop (a gift to the 16th President from the Emperor of Japan) and the gold pocket- watch and fob of Abraham Lincoln! "Jack gave me these once as payment for my legal services," he explained with a wink. The amazing story of how Jack came to acquire

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84 NOVEMBER 1983/LAS VEGAS MAGAZINE

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DB Cooper-20788

these relics reveals yet another one of the intricate and sophisticated scams which were clearly his modus operandi before he undertook the boldest of them all and the crown of his career: the skyjacking.

I had learned about Robert Dobbs and his association with Coffelt in a curious fashion. A friend of his had once received a cookbook from Jack as a gift. This friend, upon being interviewed during our long investigation of Coffelt, produced the cookbook. Inside was discovered a crumpled letter meshed between two pages. It was a 1969 correspondence to Jack from Robert Dobbs! Dobbs had written Jack, who was then involved in a particularly shady affair in Washington D.C., to warn him: "I think it would be ill-advised to meet with you at this time unless we could be absolutely certain that you were not being followed." He then closed with the stark advice: "Burn this letter."

---

When I tracked him down and told him that Jack had forgotten to burn his letter, Dobbs nevertheless managed a hearty laugh. "We never put much in writing to each other," he mused. "Perhaps Jack wanted to keep that letter as a souvenir." Half-expecting a denial, I informed Dobbs that Jack had confessed to being D.B. Cooper. The cagey attorney flashed a knowing smile. "I had a feeling he was involved in that thing," he replied without a trace of surprise in his voice. "You see, Jack would often call me, even from as far away as Europe or the Caribbean, wherever he was, to tell me that he was into something and if he didn't call back at a certain time for me to start checking. Well, when that thing happened I suspected Jack was involved in it . . . because right before the skyjacking he called me from Portland, Oregon!"

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LAS VEGAN MAGAZINE/[illegible] DB Cooper-20789

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Myriad leads connected over the years like the silken strands of a spider's web, one thin trail joining another at obscure crossroads along a pattern of seemingly infinite design. My father and I were able to find witnesses in Oregon who positively identified Jack as the man who came to their gas station and recrea- tion business twice, in the spring and fall of 1972, the year after the skyjacking. Along with another to this day unidentified man, Jack rented snowmobiles from them, driving the vehicles into the hills behind their station near the isolated jump site. These witnesses finally confirmed Coffelt's claim that our trip with him in 1974 to search for the lost money was not the first time he had been back to that remote place.

And finally, in a check of all the passengers on Flight 305 as it left Portland Airport that stormy Thanksgiving Eve, I discovered that a prominent Seattle attorney, George LeBissoniere, had sat only three seats away from D.B. Cooper, so close that even the FBI told him that he was one of their best eye-witnesses. When Mr. LeBissoniere was shown photo- graphs of Jack Coffelt, he calmly identified the face as that of D.B. Cooper, unaware that stewardess Florence Schaffner had already identified the pictures. "That Leavenworth guy — right?" he asked, as if trying to refresh his own memory. "I identified these same pictures for the FBI six weeks after the sky- jacking." (refer to sidebar p. 68)

• • •

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86 NOVEMBER 1983/LAS VEGAS MAGAZINE

DB Cooper-20790

"There's a somebody I'm longing to see . . . Someone who'll watch over me." —Ira Gershwin

Jack Coffelt proudly called himself a "Jay- hawker" after a fictitious bird imagined by the Indians to possess the haughty pride of a Blue Jay and the cunning determination of a hawk. But in truth he was a Caucasian harboring an ornery supply of Cherokee blood which made his nature turn restless and rebellious.

He was born in that part of the Midwest known as "the Badlands" because of the robbers who have blossomed there like weeds in mud-filled creek beds. Jesse James and the Dalton Boys and Billy the Kid are only a few of the colorful criminals who once plundered this dust-ridden locale, which is also the major home in America of the proud Cherokee Indians — the bitter end of the Trail Of Tears. According to Jack Coffelt and my father, who wrote a book about the place while in Atlanta Penitentiary together, life there in the 1920's was picturesque but also incredibly bleak. I quote from their book:

"Stranger, you are entering the Tri-State District, a mining patch covering the corners of three states — Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas. The land is a flat stovelid. The sky is a pale blue liquid. Clouds drift in circles. Rays of the sun bounce and play tricks on the eyes. And in mid-July dust is instep deep and the creeks are shallow and ugly.

"The town of Picher is the hub of this district. Powder-monkeys send groans and rumbles through the earth and view with suspicion any man who receives more than two letters a week. Sidewashed lead and zinc glitter bold across jig tables. Mines and chatpiles crowd each other around the town. On the chatpiles children scavenge for empty bottles and used condoms. Renniker the junk dealer pays two cents each for short pints and half pints, a cent for beer and home brew, thirty cents a pound for washed rubbers. Vern Wilders runs the big game. A whorehouse sits on Main Street. That's it, Stranger. Picher, Oklahoma, has been sent for, went, and qualified."

Coffelt was born under an ill-star on Febru- ary 20, 1916, to a poverty-stricken family. In this inauspicious environment he quickly learned the benefits of a fast tongue and a slip- pery hand as he worked the booming lead and zinc mines by day and hung around the gam- bling halls and brothels at night as a mere youngster. When he was eight years old his father, Walter Coffelt, who had once owned a mine but lost it to booze, died of alcoholism, leaving his widow Ottie and Jack and his two sisters destitute. Ottie took up with another man called Ben Wooldridge who, according to Jack's sister, "was horribly mean to us kids." The children fled. The two young girls — ages sixteen and fourteen — married off as soon as possible. Jack continued in school, according

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LAS VEGAN MAGAZINE/NOVEMBER 1983 37

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to one prison record, through the seventh grade or to about 1929. Then he dropped out for good when he was about thirteen years old. His common-law stepfather, Ben Wooldridge, was also dead by that time, another victim of the bottle.

When Jack was only fifteen he broke into his grandfather's grocery store in nearby Baxter Springs, Kansas with a "false key" and, according to the courthouse records there, "stole diverse bars of candy and packages of gum and $10 in silver." His irate grandfather insisted on pressing charges and on May 20, 1932, Jack was convicted of burglary and larceny, third degree, and sentenced to the Kansas State Industrial Reformatory at Hutch- inson for a term "not to exceed five years." He was just sixteen years old. This was the beginning of the 20 years, eight months, and 13 days of his life that he was to spend in various jails and prisons. Two years later, when he was eighteen, he arrived at the for- bidding rock-walled fortress of McAlester prison in dreary southeastern Oklahoma for a three-year stretch upon being convicted for yet another burglary after his parole from the Kansas reformatory. His path in life — that of a hardened criminal — was already well- formed.

None of the charges he was ever convicted on, however, were for crimes of violence — unless you count grabbing a deputy's pistol in an escape attempt. "Jack said prison was awful. They'd never keep him locked up again — he'd escape," remembers his sister. Incar- ceration must have been terrible to him. One prison medical report states that in 1947 Jack underwent "two operations ten weeks apart" for being cruelly kicked in the "left groin," and the same report later states obliquely that "this prisoner has history of gunshot wound left foot." Had he been shot there? In 1974 Jack expressed nothing but hatred for the prison authorities, telling me vengefully, "I always wanted to get them back for what they did to me!"

His prison "rap sheet" was nearly impossible to obtain. At one point in our investigation, after we had secretly procured a copy of it, the government even tried to confiscate it on grounds that it was "federal property." But it makes long and often humorous reading, in- cluding items such as this one contained in his Atlanta Penitentiary Admissions Summary: "Presently he got into a reform school in Kansas where he was further disillusioned by indications of corruptions on the part of some of the officials and employees of the institu- tion!" On May 19, 1949, Jack began a ten-year sentence at Atlanta Penitentiary for interstate auto theft and attempted escape upon being rudely caught, and by that time he was un- swervingly bitter towards "the system." His dossier then best explains his state of mind:

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"He claims that he has been a professional gambler for years and in fact that he has never earned an honest dollar. He denies guilt on the current charge and states that fully half of his prison sentences have been based purely upon his record and were therefore unjust."

At Atlanta Pen Coffelt met my father, James Brown, a former Air Force pilot. Brown had worked as a reporter during his younger days and was a good writer, often compiling and editing the prison magazine single-handedly, while Coffelt was the press operator who printed it. They became good friends and spent three years filling the dreary days together by working on a long writing project about Coffelt's early life. My father was paroled in 1952. After his friend was gone, Coffelt trans- ferred to Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas to finish out his sentence, and there, on July 20, 1955, he was "conditionally released" — pending parole restrictions. He would be in a few small-town jails after that, but never another "awful" penitentiary.

• • •

In his new life on the outside Jack Coffelt emerged for the first time as a human being rather than a number. He was immensely proud of the book he had written with my father. Entitled Cleave The Liquid Sky, the novel, a colorful and spellbinding account of Coffelt's boyhood years in Oklahoma, was never pub- lished. But nevertheless, "with a book under my belt," as Jack told people, he had "finally achieved something." He had greatly matured and no longer wanted to be merely a petty thief. Instead, he would become a shrewd con-man.

As a result of one scam in Memphis, Tennessee, in the late 1950's, Jack came into a pile of money — around $50,000 — and with a healthy bank account to bolster his ego he grew courteous and extremely generous. He always grabbed the check when he took friends out to expensive restaurants and plush night- spots. He was charming, a "hell of a salesman" said one companion. He drank and smoked heavily. He often fascinated and regaled people with preposterous accounts of his past criminal exploits: wild tales of blowing open safes with nitroglycerin (carrying it in a vial around his neck so it would stay at body temperature), and dramatic holdups during drunken sprees of cross-country travelling. ("I'm gonna put you in the news — bang!")

Coffelt was always a chameleon — wonder- fully gifted in producing a vast range of personalities to suit the mood of any occasion. Referring to the same period of time, one person who knew him remembered, "He was really a remarkable man. Very kind, very generous, very colorful, almost like a kindly uncle," while another recalled, "I always had the feeling he could easily tear the room apart!" But he was steadfastly hypnotic. "The average person had no defense to him. He just

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mesmerized people," said his old friend Robert Dobbs, the Memphis attorney who re- ceived a call from Jack from Portland, Oregon, days before the skyjacking. Among these crowds, however, Jack always seemed to be ashamed of his prairie roots and the bitter poverty he experienced in his youth, poverty which had led him irreversibly, he believed, into a life of crime.

In early February of 1960 Jack's mother Ottie died a horrible death when her home burned to the ground in Baxter Springs, Kansas. Jack attended the funeral. He wore expensive suits and drove a late-model Cadillac, evasively telling relatives that he was "working back East somewhere." Where is not certain, but a year later, after meeting his red-haired confi- dante Tave in Las Vegas, Jack became per- manently established in the Washington D.C. area.

He never held a steady job there, but at various times he managed to come into "large sums of money" according to Tave herself — tens of thousands of dollars at the drop of a hat. To close friends he hinted that he was a "bag- man," someone hired by the Mafia to distribute bribes among crooked politicians. But then, one of his old Kansas cronies who visited him in Washington in the late 1960's watched J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI Director, throw a warm and friendly bearhug around Jack. Coffelt, it seems, had learned to play both sides of the fence shrewdly and with great finesse. He had finally become a valuable commodity.

Whatever murky substrata of society his operations belonged to, they were never, it seems, restricted entirely to the nation's capital. As one intimate source wrote, "I don't know if you are aware of the long 'tentacles' Jack had . . . in other parts of the world." It was a dark hint at the vast Rosicrucian circles which the shrewd con-man had learned to move in during those years of especially shady "power politics" when internationally moti- vated plots of intrigue ran rife in the capital. "That part of your letter where you said you weren't sure that I was real tickled me," Coffelt responded to one enthralled disbeliever. "I'm as real as I appear."

But this "modern Indian warrior," as my father and others often thought of Jack, finally fell prey to the white man's fated disease — Love. Those who knew Jack and Tave said he always referred to her as his "sister" or "cousin," never anything more. Most were of this opinion, summed up by one: "She always seemed to be watching him, like a plastic doll, in some sort of official capacity."

But then, in the latter half of the 1960's, along came another girl — a beautiful German blonde who was a research scientist. Jack "procured" her, as he himself described it. Her version: "I do everything Jack orders. DB Cooper-20794

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90 NOVEMBER 1983/LAS VEGAN MAGAZINE

Whatever he tells me to do, I do." What they did was set into operation a bizarre plot to wrest away the fortune from a famous multi- millionaire jet-setter! But this incredible scam which involved an illegitimate child, court- ordered blood tests, hush-money paid to poli- ticians, and sealed court testimony describing activities bordering on the occult, backfired ignominiously.

Jack came under intense pressure by the early 1970's to get out of Washington D.C. or face the threat of another long prison sentence, or even worse punishment at the hands of those who sought to keep a lid on the scam! The beautiful German girl secretly set sail for Europe on an ocean-liner. She would hide out in France and Germany, finally neutral Switzerland where American agents were un- able to bribe that government's politicians into turning her over. Jack, from afar, constantly supplied her with money, draining his own re- sources to the end.

"I never loved anyone like I loved her," Coffelt told me in 1974 as tears welled in his eyes. By 1971 his luck had at last run dry. The days of free spending and high living were over, leaving him more embittered than ever before. More than one person who knew him then recalled, "He said he was going to 'get the government.'" To me, his constant refrain about the skyjacking — "I had nothing to lose" — always became deeply intertwined around the story of his passionate love for the beautiful German geisha!

Henry James once wrote, stretching irony to its furthest limit: "It is far better to be killed than to be destroyed." The colorful and fasci- nating Jack Coffelt was plotting, however, one last way to beat the "system." In November 1971, as Nixon's White House flourished and the Vietnam War raged on, Bryant "Jack" Coffelt became an American legend by para- chuting from an airplane with a bag of stolen money.

• • •

A bland grey stone lying in an obscure corner of a Hawaiian cemetery bears the simple legend: Bryant Coffelt — [born] February 20, 1916; [died] June 19, 1975. But the stone — which may one day prove as cryptic as Rosetta's — tells nothing more about the dark circum- stances surrounding Jack's days in Hawaii, why he went there, or what he did. It is known, however, among other things, that his death certificate has been secretly altered.

In Hawaii, the palm fans sway in gentle breezes, mangos and pineapples fill the air with tropical aromas, and the emerald ocean fades before sunset to what Jack would fondly call "indigo blue." Peaceful surfs splash the sand-swept beaches like time itself coming home to rest. At last, perhaps, Jack has found a serenity that he never knew in life.

The FBI has finally admitted that Jack was a

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THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH CERTIFICATE... "Your nationality and your politics did not show when you were dead." —Ernest Hemingway, For Whom The Bell Tolls

#1 The date of Coffelt's death is listed as June 19, 1975.

#2 Tave Coffelt was the "Informant."

#3 Strangely, he was not buried until one week later, on June 24th.

#4 The certificate was altered 11 days after the date of death.

CERTIFICATE OF DEATH [Certificate details partially legible] Bryant Coffelt February 20, 1916 Queen's Medical Center [Various fields with entries largely illegible at this resolution] ORIGINAL RECORD ON FILE [illegible] September 3 1975

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During the course of our investigation my father and I hired a Las Vegas private detective agency to procure a copy of Jack Coffelt's death certificate from the Research and Statistics Office at the Hawaii Department of Health. But we were promptly informed by the detective agency that the Hawaii FBI had been somehow "alerted" by its inquiry there — a very strange occurrence indeed. Why would the Bureau be alerted?

Tave Coffelt, who is listed as the "informant," apparently stated at the top of the docu- ment (item #10) that she and Jack "never married." Note the addition marked "ALTERED June 30, 1975" in the lower right half of the certificate. To alter a death certificate requires at least a number of official signatures from various government agencies, if not a court order. Why was the certificate changed (and by whom?) 11 days after it was issued to show that Coffelt died on June 19 at 12:40 AM rather than on June 18 at 11:25 PM? It is a differ- ence of not quite an hour, but legally it shifts the death one day later. Even though no autopsy was performed (item #19a), the body was not buried until one week after that, on June 24th. Did Coffelt's friends fly in from around the world for an extended wake before the funeral? It seems highly unlikely.

Only weeks before June 19, 1975, Jack Coffelt was seen by old friends of his 5000 miles away — back in Kansas! And in a letter to my father dated September 20, 1976, nearly a year and a half after Jack's alleged death, Tave Coffelt used a strange verb tense in referring to him: "Jack knows," she eerily began, "so many people throughout the world and so many would be interested . . . in information which they think I might provide them, it would only result in their coming here to see me, which I do not want."

Many unanswered questions still linger . . .

In another letter just one week after that, responding to a direct inquiry about whether she knew for certain if Jack was D.B. Cooper, Tave did not deny that he was, but instead replied with the cryptic warning: "The subject to which you referred to [the skyjacking] . . . in my opinion is a can of worms — and could only result in trouble in the future!" B.H.B.

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LAS VEGAS MAGAZINE [illegible] cooper-20795

major suspect in the skyjacking all along. Out of 933 suspects in the D.B. Cooper case, Coffelt was "in the top 20" of those the Bureau had spent the most man-hours working on — according to Agent Gary Penrith, then in charge of the FBI's anti-hijacking unit at headquarters in Washington D.C. "We can't rule him out," Penrith admitted.

It is virtually certain that Coffelt was the skyjacker. Solely because of our efforts, two people have identified him as D.B. Cooper, he has been placed in Portland when the crime occurred, physical evidence has been found confirming where he jumped, and a mass of circumstantial evidence overwhelmingly supports all the details of his story. More than anything, Jack was afraid of slow destruction. After spending half of his adult life that way, he wanted no more of poverty or lonely prison cells. He was stunned to the very essence of his being by the crime's horrible failure — this perverse modern tragedy which so miserably revealed the fatal flaw of rabid pride which stained his character. As Robert Dobbs, Coffelt's trusted Memphis confidant put it: "He would laugh Death in the face if he thought he could pull something over on somebody . . . and Jack always wanted to do one big thing before he left here!"

○○○○

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BRYANT COFFELT. FEBRUARY 20, 1916 JUNE 19, 1975

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Daily I search the realms of Hades For the soul of the hawk, That I may offer him the friendship Of one whom life wounded and caged. —Edgar Lee Masters "The Unknown"

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BYRON BROWN'S BOOK ON THE SKY- JACKING IS CURRENTLY UNDER NEGOTIATION FOR SALE. LAS VEGAN MAGAZINE WILL REPORT FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS IN THIS EXTRAOR- DINARY CASE AS THEY OCCUR.

©by Byron H. Brown and Las Vegan Magazine

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92 NOVEMBER 1983/LAS VEGAN MAGAZINE

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DB Cooper-20796