Part 9, page 201

Transcript

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Continued from First Page have believed that Cooper died in his plunge from the Boeing 727 because he was wearing only a business suit and street shoes when he jumped into a howling wind and freezing rain in an unreliable parachute. It has been estimated that he hit the ground at a speed of 50 to 70 m.p.h.

The saga began when "Cooper" boarded the jetliner in Portland for an evening flight to Seattle. Once airborne, he demanded that the airline have $200,000 in $20 bills and three parachutes on hand when the plane landed in Seattle. He threatened to blow up the plane if his demands were not met.

The airline complied, providing the parachutes and money. However, the FBI said Tuesday that the serial numbers of the bills had been recorded.

Cooper permitted the airliner's 36 passengers to leave the plane in Seattle. He then ordered the crew to take the plane to Reno and told the pilot to fly at a relatively low altitude and to open the plane's rear stairway.

Crew members last heard his voice on the plane's intercom when they were over the Washington-Oregon border. They said they believe he jumped, using the least reliable parachute.

The decomposed money was found 17 to 20 miles from the jump site by the Ingrams' older son, Brian. The bills were partly buried in sand that the Ingrams were scooping out to build a fire.

"Here's some more wood for the fire, Daddy," the father recalled his son as saying.

"It wasn't wood," Ingram said. "He (Brian) thought he had struck it rich."

Ingram said he assumed the bills might be part of the Cooper money. He turned them over to the FBI, adding with a smile that they were so decomposed, "I couldn't have spent it."

In leafing through the rotting bills, Baker said, the FBI made about "nine or 10 immediate hits"—matches with the numbers of the missing money. The bills were flown to Washington for further analysis and tests by the FBI laboratory.

An FBI official said the packaging and number sequence of the recovered bills indicated they had not been separated and "are in much the same order as when they were given to the hijacker."

The initial search, confined to an area several hundred yards long and 40 yards wide, turned up "fragments of more money"—nothing more, Baker said. He said the money appeared to have washed up on the bank.

Once that search is completed, probably by this afternoon, a scaled-down number of agents will move upstream, continuing the hunt.

Law enforcement officials in the Pacific Northwest have theorized that Cooper's body is at the bottom of Lake Merwin, 30 miles north of Portland, or that his bones are so entangled in giant wild blackberry bushes that they will never be found.

Ralph Himmelsbach, the FBI agent who has worked on the hijacking since it took place, said the money probably had been washed downstream from a Columbia tributary in Washington. But he said he doubted that it came from the Lewis River, the tributary that flows out of Lake Merwin.