Part 7, page 4

Transcript

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

[...first line(s) partially cut off at top of page...] dressed in a business suit, top coat and brown oxfords, and he had $200,000 in ransom strapped to his chest. This exploit has become leg- end in the Northwest. A macabre cult has formed around him, and at least three subsequent hijackers have used Cooper's technique. All were later arrested. Cooper him- self remains a total mystery. The name he used to buy his airline ticket turned out to be an alias.

After Cooper jumped, it was two days before the heavy clouds cleared enough to permit a heli- copter search of the steep lava foothills and farmlands. The au- thorities figured that Cooper prob- ably came down near the shores of Lake Merwin. But the search yielded nothing, and heavy snows soon sealed the woods off.

Did Cooper get away or not? That is one of the questions that [guess: callused] loggers spend long hours debating around the stove in the Ariel general store and across the river at Nick's Tavern in Amboy. If Cooper did, then why haven't any of the ten thousand $20 bills—all carefully recorded by the FBI— shown up? Could the skyjacker have had an accomplice on the ground? Or if Cooper is hanging dead tangled in a fir tree out there

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above Merwin Dam, then why hasn't his body or the money been found? Have the searchers been looking in the wrong place?

No answers. The prospect of all that money sent fortune hunters racing into the woods last fall. And even today campers keep an eager eye out for the skyjack- er's loot. Meanwhile, the North- west has eulogized D.B. Cooper in song and verse. Promoters have capitalized on Cooper T-shirts and bumper stickers. Two men were ar- rested and charged with fleecing a writer of $30,000 by promising an interview with Cooper. An un- derground newspaper in Seattle published another "interview" with the skyjacker, but it was promptly debunked by authorities. With the

passage of time Cooper has as- sumed a certain Jesse James qual- ity. At the Ariel store, an auto- graph party was held this month to celebrate publication of Anna Friday's whimsical book on the skyjacking, entitled Skyjack: Guide—[guess: Please] Hold This Bomb While I Go to the Bathroom. The people are all kind of proud [illegible] [illegible] happened here. [illegible]

[Far-right column, heavily cropped and largely illegible:] Friday [on lo...] [...eryon] [wasn] and [in...] her [with] meet [...ed] [...at]

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