Part 43, page 159

Transcript

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"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, add- ing with a smile that they were so de- composed, "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 recov- ered 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, Bak- er 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 up- stream, 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 Port- land, or that his bones are so entan- gled 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 down- stream 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. [illegible]

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DB Cooper-17363