FD-350 clipping: 'My Search for D.B. Cooper — 9 Years Trailing The Phantom Skyjacker', Seattle P-I

FD-350 (Rev. 12-5-78) (Mount Clipping in Space Below)

Indicate page, name of newspaper, city and state.) p.A1 Post-Intelligencer Seattle, Wa. Date: Final Edition: Title: NORJAK Character: or Classification: 164-81 Submitting Office: Seattle

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My Search for D.B. Cooper

9 Years Trailing The Phantom Skyjacker

By Darrell Bob Houston

Tuesday's announcement of the finding of part of the D.B. Cooper loot was the first dramatic development in one of the nation's most publicized — and puzzling — skyjack cases. Seattle writer Darrell Bob Houston, who has devoted years of study to the case and who wrote the book "King of the Midnight Blue," herewith reviews the D.B. Cooper history and his own preoccupation with it.

My first mistake was having the same initials as D.B. Cooper. My second was writing a book about him. My third was allowing myself to become a D.B. Cooper expert. My fourth — and perhaps most dangerous — was when I scoffed at the supernatural overtones in the case. My fifth mistake was the most embarrassing. After nine years of checking out everything from the Raleigh filter cigarettes that D.B. smoked to the thin clip-on necktie he wore, I came to see him as a kind of avatar. The Last Invisible Hero. He could be anybody — because he was nobody. Punk or parlagon, he could go either way. Even the FBI doesn't know what he looked like. The thousands of flyers they plastered around the

conviction struck home. I had just finished a story for Saga Magazine called "The Phantom Skyjacker." I brushed off my world show Cooper's face hidden dark Montgomery Ward business behind the fattest pair of sun- suit. I flicked at a mote of dust on glasses this side of Hollywood Bou- my lowcut military brogans. I levard. D.B. is the only man ever to pushed my wrap-around sunglasses make the global Ten Most Wanted up on my forehead and exclaimed List — in disguise. But ask any to the skies: school kid who the first man to "It's true. I know too much. I walk on the moon was, and all you am D.B. Cooper." get is a stare. Mention D.B. and the kid will give you everything but the serial numbers on the ransom money. There I go, parroting the lines that I've fed to people for the past nine years. Especially people who wanted my help in turning "the real D.B. Cooper" over to the police. Many claimed to have been in jail with him. One caller, after reading one of my essays on Cooper, said D.B. was really his mother — in drag. Steadily it was building up, this feeling that I was hiding the truth from myself. I fought it back. Every time a new clue would turn up — a pair of soiled underwear in a Southwest Washington tree, the alleged sighting of a sasquatch, playing building-blocks with a pile of $20 bills — I would write another skyjack article. D.B. had become, in a sense, my life. And my livelihood. Then came the day when the

typewriter. And all the space-age jargon was there. He called the 727-100's engines "Pratt & Whitney jewels." He knew the skyjacked plane's fuel capacity — in U.S. gallons. And he knew how much 10,000 twenties weighed. It was smooth and authentic. Still, the writer could have gotten most of that stuff out of Jane's All the World's Aircraft. But one section struck home. The part that told about the delivery of the ransom aboard the 727 at Sea-Tac Airport: "The bills were the real McCoy. But all of them had been xeroxed to get their serial numbers. I know I snarfed them personally." Snarfed? A doozy of a verb, an active verb. One that might lead me straight to the skyjacker. To an all-time journalistic scoop. To fame, fortune — and a Hollywood contract. I read the letter a dozen times. It was signed like the rest of them: D.B. Cooper. This one, however, was different. After more than 200 bogus D.B.'s write to you, you can tell.

* * *

The address was an apartment house on Capitol Hill. The place smelled of pomade and insecticide. It was enough to make a health inspector call in sick. I knocked on Number 9. "He ain't here. Not if you're looking for D.B." [guess: The old man had] [illegible] up, behind me in the carpeted hall.

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My megalomania fled the next day. It was the letter that did it. From the opening paragraph, I was hooked. Here's how it began: Thanksgiving eve, 1971. A Northwest Orient 727 lumbers through the darkness. Its speed is barely above stall-point. A stairwell slowly distends from the big jet's belly. A man appears. He rides the swaying ladder like a tomcat on a fire ladder. He wears a dark suit and overcoat. Sunglasses are taped to his temples. Strapped to his waist is a canvas bag stuffed with the $200,000 ransom he collected at Seattle. Over his buttocks, on the same strap, an attache case dangles. It is black and contains five sticks of phony dynamite. The man is poised on the final step. His daughter rises in the wind. He spreads his arms wide and skydives toward the treetops — and the folklore of the nation. D.B. Cooper has arrived. The world will never be the same place again. I felt a pang of professional jealousy. This guy was good with the

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SEARCHED......INDEXED...... SERIALIZED......FILED...... FEB 15 1980 FBI - SEATTLE

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DB Cooper-26367