Part 9, page 203

Transcript

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

(Continued from A-1) The FBI said it was searching the area for more money and clues as to the fate of Cooper. The FBI displayed twelve weathered stacks of $20 bills during a meeting with the press. "This clue is the first we've had since the night of the occurrence," said Bill Baker, assistant special agent in charge of the Portland FBI office. He said wads of the money, bound by rubber bands, were found Sunday while Harold D. Ingram, his wife, Patricia, and their 8-year-old son, Brian, were preparing to build a picnic fire along the Columbia River five miles northwest of the Interstate 5 bridge linking Portland and Vancouver, Wash., where the Ingrams live. Ingram said at a news conference here that the money was found about 20 yards from the river's edge under a thin layer of sand. "My son ran up and said, 'Wait a minute, Daddy,'" Ingram said. "He raked a place out in the sand and there it was. There were three bundles" of money. "I thought it was play money," said Denise Ingram, 5, of Vancouver, Wash., in an interview with United Press International. She said she and her cousin Brian "both found it. It was buried in the sand." Denise's mother, Crystal Ingram, said in Vancouver there was no bag for the money. "We put it in a plastic bag from our bread," she said. "One of us did mention that it might have something to do with D.B. Cooper, but we kept on going with the picnic."

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Harold Ingram later took the money to the FBI. Baker said officials estimated there were several thousand dollars in the wads, but it was impossible to make an accurate estimate because of the deteriorated condition. Officials have called the commandeering of the Boeing 727 jetliner the only known unsolved hijacking. In 1977, just to make sure the hijacker did not escape prosecution via the statute of limitations, he was indicted on federal charges in absentia.

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[PHOTOGRAPH] Caption: MISSING MONEY FOUND IN SAND ALONG COLUMBIA RIVER ... but where has the other $197,000 gone?

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DB Cooper-907