Part 3, page 4

Transcript

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

In last week's first installment, the man claiming to be D.B. Cooper told how he explained the hijacking; for more than a year, how he did it alone; how he decided where to do it; how after he parachuted to earth with $200,000, he walked to his car and drove home; how he discovered he couldn't spend the money. This week he explains why he did it.

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THREE WEEKS AFTER D.B. COOPER skyjacked a Northwest Airline plane and got away with $200,000, the following letter appeared in a Reno newspaper: "I didn't rob Northwest Orient (sic) because I thought it would be romantic, heroic or any of the other euphemisms that seem to attach themselves to situations of high risk. I am no modern-day Robin Hood. Unfortunately, I do have only 14 months to live. My life has been one of hate, turmoil, frustration and more hate. This seemed like the fastest and most profitable way to gain a few la[illegible]rains of peace of mind. I am not holed up in some obscure backwoods town. Neither am I a psychopathic killer. As a matter of fact, I've never even received a speeding ticket." Here, the long-trained reporter's instinct suggested, was a man who wanted to talk, to justify, to rationalize and to do verbal penance for his deed. What he had done was to execute the most daring and ingenious airline holdup in history—doing it all alone and diving out of the plane with $200,000 booty—and to all appearances, getting away with it. Half the FBI agents in the country were looking for him. Hundreds of military troops fanned out on foot to search the countryside around Lake Merwin, Wash., where it was believed he landed after parachuting. Northwest [text continues, cut off at column break]

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there that he would surface and expose himself to capture? If Cooper was smart enough to essay such a slickly pulled-off crime, he doubtless would be smart enough to know with what appetite agents of the law were seeking his capture. His getting away with it, after all, would only encourage others to mimic his deed, at God knows what cost to the airlines in hard dollars and possibly in human life.

Advertise!

Still, there remained the fact of the letter: After several days of pondering, I decided to try a scheme I had successfully used once before: to lure from hiding a member of a secret under-

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The man who says he is D.B. Cooper.

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ground revolutionary bomber group to tell his story: advertising. Accordingly, I placed a classified advertisement in several Pacific Northwest newspapers, addressed to Cooper, inviting him to contact me, and assuring him we could talk without exposing him to capture. An imprudent and wasted effort, probably. I had not been one to shy away from risks. No one was there but a tiny chance Cooper would respond, but a minefield of booby-traps and pitfalls lay in wait. I would be working alone and underground, outside the law, treading a delicate constitutional line. If I found Cooper, would I have constitutional privilege as a reporter to keep my source of information secret? Or would I be obligated as a citizen with knowledge of a crime to turn Cooper in? Moreover, suppose, in fact, someone came forward representing himself as Cooper. How could I know he was the right man? After all, the Clifford Irving hoax was much in the press. How could I be sure someone wouldn't try the same scheme on me? There was one way, it seemed, to prove his identity: if Cooper responded to my ad, I could demand that he produce the money from the skyjacking. That would be strong proof. Preparing for such an eventuality, I obtained the 34-page FBI booklet containing the numbers of every one of the stolen bills. The FBI was circulating it to banks and other money institutions.

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Midnight Phone Call

Then an entire month passed. The few respondents to the ad were cranks. Nothing more. Then on the night of Jan. 31, precisely at midnight, my phone rang and when I answered a voice said: "This call is from the Pacific Northwest." I was fully awake in an instant and said "Don't say a word more. Call me tomorrow night at 9 o'clock and I will have made arrangements for us to talk on a safe telephone." As many a reporter who has been involved in hairy, dangerous stories (I had covered Birmingham, Selma, Jackson, Watts, and four assassinations) I was careful almost to the point of paranoia about telephone tapping. Once down South, a reporter friend was dictating his integration story to his office by long-distance call when a voice, obviously white, probably cop, broke in and said: "You goddamned nigger-loving son-of-a-bitch." One learned to be careful about phones. By next morning, I had arranged an elaborate system involving four phones: my answering service was in-