Part 8, page 146

Transcript

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

[recounted] what happened next in a recent telephone interview.

"I think he wanted to get out of the plane as soon as it took off, as soon as the plane was high enough to jump," he said. "But he had trouble getting the stairway open. He had to get Tina to help him. Then he was looking out in the dark, the wind blowing like Billy Hell. It took a lot of time to work up his guts."

It took 35 minutes, in fact, for Cooper to depart the craft.

According to Brown, Coffelt recounted to him that as he descended the rear staircase in cold, blinding rain, turbulence jolted the plane and pitched him off before he could sight a beacon marking the location of a waiting partner.

Coffelt talked of tumbling through the stormy sky, trying frantically to open a faulty parachute on his back, then dropping the money as he grabbed for a chute on his chest, Brown said.

Himmelsbach said one of the four chutes was sewn up and given to the hijacker by accident. He denied claims the faulty chute was designed to foil the hijacker, emphasizing that authorities had feared Cooper planned to take a hostage with him.

"We don't have the right to sentence someone to death," the retired agent said.

Coffelt told Brown he crashed to the ground in a canyon miles from his planned landing spot, severely injuring his legs. He eventually was able to rendezvous with his unidentified partner, but he, his partner, the Browns and an army of authorities never were able to find the loot.

About $5,000 in bills with serial numbers matching those on the money given to Cooper was found on a sand bar near Vancouver, Wash., in February 1980, but the remainder is believed to be moldering in the rugged Cascade Mountain foothills.

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Himmelsbach said years of searching for Dan Cooper — who mistakenly was dubbed D.B. when a reporter wrote a story using hearsay information from police — have convinced him Cooper was "a loser, an ex-con who was reaching the end of his string."

The description fits Coffelt, who was born in Joplin, Mo., in 1916, raised in Picher, Okla., sentenced to a reformatory when he was 15, winding up in federal penitentiaries in Atlanta and Leavenworth.

After leaving Leavenworth, he attended the Univer- sity of Kansas at Lawrence, then lived in Lawrence off and on afterward.

Robert Hoyt, a Lawrence resident and technical writer for the CIA, said he knew Coffelt for years.

"Jack was full of stories, some of which were true and some of which weren't," Hoyt said. "Sometimes he had stories about the FBI. I don't know that he was ever seriously involved with them, but they knew every time he came to town."

Coffelt bragged of working with the FBI and CIA and flashed FBI identification, according to both Brown and Hoyt.

In Portland, FBI agent Dorwin Schreuder said that he had "heard of Coffelt's alleged participation" in the hijacking through Brown's work but when asked whether Coffelt ever had worked for the agency, he replied, "The FBI never comments on the use of its informants one way or another."

Reached in Hawaii, where her husband died of a heart attack in 1976, Tave Coffelt refused to discuss his past.

Robert L. Dobbs, a Memphis attorney who had represented Jack Coffelt, said the ex-con had claimed to do undercover work for the FBI. He said Coffelt once boasted, "With my reputation, I can get in with any criminal that they might want to check on."

Dobbs said he knew Coffelt had been in Portland shortly before the hijacking. Could his client have been the elusive Cooper?

"He was the type of person who wanted to do something daring and original before he left this Earth," Dobbs responded. "He'd come up with the spectacular, that's for sure."

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DB Cooper-185