FD-350 clipping: Larry Batson feature on Richard Tosaw's search for D.B. Cooper, Minneapolis Star and Tribune

Date: Edition: October 12, 1986

Title: D.B. COOPER

Character: 164A-73 or Classification: HIJACKING Submitting Office: MINNEAPOLIS

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They're still singing about D.B. Cooper, and 1 man is searching

There is a little latch near the tail of many airliners with rear stairways. During flight, the wind flips the latch up so no one can lower the stairs. In the industry the latch is called "the Cooper Vane." But it has been nearly 15 years since airlines began install- ing them, and some people have for- gotten why.

By Larry Batson National Correspondent

Vancouver, Wash. This time, Richard Tosaw says, he is going to find D.B. Cooper. "I know where he is," Tosaw said. "I don't know who he is, but he's from the Seattle area, and maybe we'll get lucky and there'll be a wallet with some piece of identification."

On Nov. 24, 1971, the night before Thanksgiving, a man who came to be known as D.B. Cooper held a North- west Orient airliner, its crew and, briefly, its passengers for ransom. He got parachutes, $200,000 in cash, released the passengers and part of the crew, ordered the pilot to take off for Mexico City, but quickly low- ered the rear stairway and leaped into the darkness, never to be seen again.

Not yet, anyway.

Tosaw maintains that Cooper's re- mains, his parachute and a canvas bag still holding $194,000 lie up- stream from a Columbia River

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beach where nearly $6,000 of the ransom was found six years ago.

And how did the $6,000 get there?

As Tosaw explains it, when Cooper released two of the three flight at- tendants in Seattle before the final take-off, he pulled some bills from the bag and offered them a "tip." They refused.

"I believe he stuffed those bills in- side his coat or clothing, maybe un- der his belt. That's the $6,000 that came up (Actually $5,800; 10 bills were missing from one packet). The rest is in the bag. If the bag had opened, a lot more would have been found. That beach is a popular place, with people on it every day of the year. Besides, the FBI dug up the whole beach area after the discov- ery."

Tosaw obtained the piece of evi- dence key to his theory long after the bills were found.

"The money was still in packets, with the rubber bands around them, though the bands broke as soon as they were touched," he said. "That showed it couldn't have come far. And it couldn't have been there long."

Early reports said the packets were scattered near each other and cov- ered with sand.

But while talking with the mother of Brian Ingram, the 8-year-old boy

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Larry Batson's America

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164A-73-1069 SEARCHED_ SERIALIZED OCT 1 5 1986 FBI - MINNEAPOLIS

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who found the money, Tosaw said he made a further important discovery.

"The packets were still in a clump, pressed together, not scattered, not really covered. They hadn't come far enough even to separate," he said. "That makes the eddy just above the beach the prime search area."

On Nov. 23, eve of the hijacking anniversary, Tosaw will put a team of divers into the river.

On Nov. 29, the Saturday after Thanksgiving, as is traditional, the annual D.B. Cooper Party will be held at Ariel, Wash., a hamlet in a logging and vacation area north of the site Tosaw will search. One the-… ory, of many, is that Cooper landed near Ariel.

Richard Purdy, 39, owns the Ariel store and bar where the parties are held. Purdy, a musician, wrote "The Ballad of D.B. Cooper" and has attended and played at most of the parties. He bought the bar this year.

If Tosaw finds Cooper, this will be the last party, Purdy said.

"I decided we'd keep it going until somebody found him, dead or alive. If he's dead, we'll hold a wake and bury the party with him."

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The man who bought a ticket from Portland to Seattle used a name only once. "Dan Cooper," he replied when the ticket agent asked. That night a reporter's mistake transformed it to D.B. Cooper and nobody would ever accept anything else, not even after the original remark became public. So D.B. Cooper, who wasn't, really isn't. Or however you want to put it.

He was middle-aged, said the young flight attendants — called stewardesses then. Medium everything. Unremarkable in every way. He walked aboard. There were no X-ray machines and luggage searches were rare. He sat in the middle of the last row and just before take-off handed attendant Florence Schaffner an envelope.

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She thought he was making a pass at her. She was annoyed but stuck it in her pocket. Cooper rose from his seat.

"You'd better read that note," he said.

She did. "I have a bomb in my briefcase . . . "

For the record, the plane was a Boeing 727-100, the flight had originated in Washington, D.C., but a new crew had come aboard at Minneapolis-St. Paul International: Commander William A. Scott, co-pilot William J. Rataczak, second officer Harold E. Anderson, attendants Alice Hancock, Schaffner and Tina Mucklow. At Northwest headquarters in Minnesota, Paul Soderlind became closely involved, talking with the crew throughout the flight, offering advice and direction, plotting a course and eventually outlining the area in which the search should be concentrated.

Cooper showed Schaffner the bomb, red sticks like road flares (or dynamite) wired to a battery. He picked up a second wire, " . . . all I've got to do is touch the end of this wire to the terminal . . . "

Schaffner carried Cooper's demands to the cockpit and spent most of the time there until she was released. He had Mucklow sit beside him.

"Tina was the only one to really see Cooper," Tosaw said. "I was able to talk with her by telephone with permission of her mother superior."

Mucklow is a nun now, a member of a cloistered order in Oregon. "She's very happy in her life," a friend said. The other two women are homemakers now, Tosaw said. Scott still flies for Northwest, and Soderlind retired and lives in Montana.

Cooper was polite but occasionally

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impatient, Mucklow said. What surprised her and what investigators considered a prime clue was his knowledge of the aircraft, of the Seattle area, of airport procedure. He knew the crew's terminology for equipment, how long it should take to refuel, how long to bring parachutes from McChord Air Force Base, that the rear staircase would lower in flight far enough to allow a jumper to clear the plane. Finally, when he had collected chutes and ransom, he told the pilot to take off, fly at 10,000 feet with landing gear down and to lower the flaps 15 degrees. Flaps govern speed and settings vary for various planes.

"He knew that plane intimately . . . and he planned to jump right away," Tosaw said. "Tina said he put the chute on as if he'd done it every day. He just had a little trouble getting the stairs down. He went farther than he planned. He had no idea where he was when he jumped."

Cooper had four parachutes brought to the plane. He cut cords from one of them to lash the money bag into a bundle and to tie it to his waist. Not long after take-off he sent Mucklow to the first-class compartment and told her to draw the curtains. At 8:13 p.m. crew members felt a sudden brief pressure in their ears. That, they decided, was when Cooper jumped. They took no chances, however, and flew on to Reno, Nev., where Cooper had said they could refuel.

The dangling stairs scraped the runway as Flight 305 landed. Sparks flew up.

It was eight years before anyone found any hard evidence to indicate what had become of Cooper.

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Ariel is the sort of place you fall in

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Batson Continued from page 14A

love with, Steve Jolly said, and work and scheme to find a way to stay. It's on the North Lewis River, in the Cascade Mountains, about 30 miles west of Mount St. Helens.

Richard Purdy's store and bar and a few houses hidden under gigantic evergreens is all there is to Ariel. When Cooper jumped, "I had a band, Cabin Fever, and I got caught up in the interest and wrote the song (The Ballad of D.B. Cooper). I bought this place in February from Vince and Germaine Tricola."

Airline calculations put Ariel and the lake behind nearby Merwin Dam in the center of the area where Cooper jumped. The FBI came, the Army came, private citizens came, said Germaine Tricola, who lives in nearby Woodland.

"The woods got so crowded for a while that a couple of people had to hide their stills. That was funny."

Tricola is a native of Hugo, Minn., and has relatives "there, in Edina, in St. Paul, half the state." In 1971 her husband worked for Boeing in Seattle while she ran the store. In 1976 she gave the first D.B. Cooper party.

"It was slow and dull and boring after Labor Day. Toilet-Seat Dave was there one day and I told him I'd just as well close. We got to thinking about how to liven things up. You have to make your own fun up here."

Everybody up and down the river calls him Toilet-Seat Dave. Several couldn't think of his last name. "He makes clear epoxy toilet seats with coins or whatever you want in them," Purdy said. "I guess that's how he got the name." No, said Tricola. "He worked for a plumbing supply company in Portland."

Anyway, his last name is Butterfield.

"It was just an excuse for a local party," Butterfield said. "But the television and all the media picked up on it. Germaine started getting calls from all over. People came from up and down the coast."

This will be the 11th party. If it's like the others, upwards of 500 people will drift in and out. Most likely the FBI will be represented. The Cooper file is still open. People eat and drink, sing and dance, trot out their theories.

Sid Tipper comes to the party once in a while. Tipper, 87, born in England, came to Vancouver in 1923. He was fishing on the beach the day the boy found part of Cooper's loot. He was fishing the day the FBI moved in

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to search. Unless it's Christmas and he is playing Santa at a local store, he'll be fishing there when Tosaw puts his divers in.

"I think Cooper's caught up in one of those creeks (along the Columbia)," Tipper said. "High water lifted that money out. It was one of the highest stages in years."

Many prefer to think otherwise.

"Personally," a man at the bar said, "I think he made it."

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They wrote a song, they made a movie with Treat Williams as Cooper and Robert Duval as his nemesis. A person who claimed to know Cooper

the time and the money, so I decided to investigate."

Tosaw, 61, spent five years with the FBI before going into practice at Modesto and suburban Ceres, Calif. Investments in real estate left him comfortably fixed, he said. He still maintains two offices from which he operates the Bureau of Missing Heirs, which he started a year or so ago.

The bureau searches for heirs that the state of California can't locate. Tosaw writes the heirs, presents their claims in court, does the legal work, and collects a third as commission. Back to Cooper. Tosaw said that the accounts he found were inadequate. So he set out to trace the whole event for himself, "step-by-step, seeing everybody." He wrote and published a book himself, "D.B. Cooper, Dead or Alive?" more as an

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got together with a writer and a book came out of that. S[illegible]ody wrote a letter to the New Yo[illegible] Times describing Cooper's motives and Minneapolis playwright John Orlock wrote a play about that.

"One of the great acts of imagination of our time," Orlock said of Cooper's feat.

"A stupid, desperate rascal who endangered many lives," said retired FBI agent Ralph Himmelsbach, who spent eight years on the case.

Tosaw came in late. He read a newspaper account on the tenth anniversary of the jump and it intrigued him.

"I couldn't believe that in 20th Century America a man could jump out of a plane and disappear. I'd just retired from my law practice, I had

aid to the search than for hope of profit. In it he listed the serial numbers of the bills Cooper got and offered a reward for one of them. They were from a Seattle bank's ransom fund (since discontinued) and had been microfilmed.

"I suppose I've spent, conservatively, $100,000 on the Cooper search," Tosaw said. "I spent at least six months up there, not all at once but on many trips. There was the book. I hired two secretaries ... No, I can't make any money on this. But I'd like to finish the job."

It's fun, he said, not an obsession. "It would be if I were depriving anyone, but I have no family." And he is stimulated by the keen interest of others. "If the boy hadn't found that money, I'd be prepared to believe almost any story," Tosaw said. "But once he found it, that should have

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Minneapolis Star and Tribune Sun., Sept. 12, 1986 . 15A

foreclosed every other theory. There is no way the money, pressed together with rubber bands around the packets, could have ridden the current, been washed for miles, been dredged up or even carried and dropped there."

Last year Tosaw had two divers search the eddy just above the beach. This time, he said he will have 10 divers, cover a great deal more area, and bring Cooper up.

"People don't want me to find him. They don't want to hear that D.B. Cooper failed."

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An artist's sketch suggests D.B. Cooper looked like this.

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Staff Photo by Marlin Levison

Richard Tosaw held a dummy of D.B. Cooper. The dynamite is a repli- ca of what Cooper used when he hijacked a Northwest Orient plane. [text cut off]

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14A. Sun., Oct. 12, 1986 Minneapolis Sta[r a]nd Tribune

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Staff Photos by Marlin Levison

Some of the folks who hold an annual D.B. Cooper party gathered at the Ariel, Wash., general store.

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From left, Dave Butterfield, Pat Butterfield and Lorrayne Williams boated on Merwin Lake near Ariel.

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Dave Butterfield, a.k.a. "Toilet-Seat Dave," stood outside his cabin in the woods near Ariel, Wash.

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Sid Tipper, 87, was fishing at a beach on the Columbia River the day part of D.B. Cooper's loot was found.

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