Part 2, page 15

Transcript

The scan is the source; the transcript is machine-generated from it.

LA November 4, 1972 10

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IS D.B. COOPER THE [truncated at right edge]

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LEGAL TROUBLES, MORAL PROBLEMS STOP PUBLICATION OF THE STORY

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By Karl Fleming

In the previous two segments of this series, the man who called himself D. B. Cooper described how he singlehandedly hijacked a Northwest Airlines plane last Thanksgiving Eve and parachuted to safety with $200,000, and why he did it — mainly to prove he wasn't "over the hill," the implied message he got when he was fired by Boeing where he had worked for 15 years as an engineer. He showed author Fleming three of the stolen bills, and told part of the story, whereupon Fleming paid him $30,000, and then got the rest of the story in vivid detail on tape and film. In this concluding installment, Fleming tells what happened after that.

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my classified ad in the Seattle Times, and decided to make contact with me — purely to sell Cooper's story for money. Having sold it, they expressed a desire to keep in touch. Before leaving Seattle after my interviews, I asked Lewis, who said he was an engineer, to send me

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aerial maps showing the area where Cooper claimed he landed, 30 miles north of Portland. When the maps arrived, they came in a package containing a worn brass and wood hat rack — that being the antique "Gift" Lewis mentioned in his letter.

By the time he wrote, I had resigned from Newsweek, had been married, and had completed the backbreaking job of transcribing the eight-odd hours of taped conversations with Cooper. Ordinarily, a reporter doesn't do that. He takes notes, and if he uses a tape recorder, he merely selects nuggets from the tapes as he plays them back.

But this was important stuff. I had, in fact, recorded my clandestine conversations with Cooper with two tape machines. I also had a 30-minute filmed interview with him, as well as several rolls of film, and photostats of some of the stolen money.

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Curtain Act

Originally, I saw the Cooper story as but a fitting curtain act at Newsweek, which I was leaving, with mixed emotions, after 11 eventful and satisfying years. And it would be, if the timing