Part 2, page 6

Transcript

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

and drove home. "Exhilaration poured over him. 'I felt like I could have walked all the way to Chicago,' he said. 'Not only did I have the money, but I had a plan and carried the plan through under conditions that a lot of people would be reluctant to jump in. But then the reaction hit me, I became extremely nervous driving up the freeway. I became almost paranoid. Because if I were ever stopped, if I had to open the trunk, I was dead in the water. I considered stopping and getting rid of all the visible evidence. But where? So I figured the best thing I could do was keep on going. And this is what I did,' he said.

How Did It Go? What he feared was a roadblock. There was none. In his planning, he had figured that law enforcement wouldn't really begin to react until the next day. It takes a while for a bureaucracy to crank up. So he didn't spot a single lawman all the way home.

He got there at about midnight. His wife awoke long enough to say 'How did it go?'

He had told her he was going on a business trip. 'Same,' he said... 'Same old story.'

She went back to sleep. Cooper went to the kitchen, turned on the radio and listened to news bulletins about the skyjacking while he had coffee. Then he went out and brought in the money and examined it with a 'black' light to see if he could detect whether it had been marked by the law with special paint. It hadn't. He stowed the money.

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[Photostat images of two $20 Federal Reserve Notes] Visible serial number: L 20168977 A Visible text on bills: TWENTY DOLLARS / UNITED STATES OF AMERICA / WASHINGTON D.C. / $20

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Photostats of three $20 bills, given to LA editor Karl Fleming as proof of D. B. Cooper's identity, matched serial numbers on the list of stolen bills distributed by the FBI below. Cooper showed Fleming the actual bills, but said the rest of the money was buried in a remote hiding place.

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L33 524 933A 69 L33 526 898A 69 L54 899 276A 69 L20 150 975A 69 L33 528 092A 69 [L54 904 730A 69] L20 153 074A 69 L33 528 279A 69 L54 907 155A 69 L20 154 044A 69 [L33 529 797A 69] L54 929 823A 69 L20 163 957A 69 L33 530 471A 69 L54 984 623A 69 [L20 168 977A 69] L33 532 853A 69 L54 986 729A 69 L20 177 [illegible] L54 [illegible] L20 [illegible]

[Note: items in brackets were circled in the original document]

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After Cooper hit the ground, he stashed the money and parachutes in this marsh, walked to his car, returned to collect everything, and drove home.

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last hour over a period of three days last February. He also guided me by car over the route of his crime.

It had started when a man calling himself 'Seth Thomas' contacted me by phone on the night of Jan. 31, saying he was acting as 'intermediary for Cooper.' He said Cooper was interested in selling his story, but wanted to be paid because he couldn't spend the money he had stolen. He said he and Cooper had realized that the recent Clifford Irving-Howard Hughes hoax would devalue the Cooper story in the minds of potential publishers, but that they had thought and thought and finally agreed on what they considered to be a fair price: $45,000.

In subsequent negotiations, 'Seth Thomas' he soon revealed to me, as Jack Lewis, a Bremerton, Wash., real estate promoter, and Cooper showed me three of the $20 bills they said were part of the $200,000. I checked the serial numbers against the list distributed by the FBI. They matched. Doubts about whether I had the right man would arise later, but at that moment, I believed he was Cooper. I saw the money, and the incredibly detailed account of the skyjacking which he spun was too logical to be fiction.

Therefore, I paid Cooper $30,000 for his story. I handed it over in cash, $20 and $50 bills, to his intermediary, Seth Thomas, on the condition the money be set aside and used for Cooper's legal defense if and when he was captured.

Next prob: Why Cooper hijacked the plane, how he contemplated suicide, and why he asked for precisely $200,000.

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[Photograph — no text within image]