Part 43, page 98

Transcript

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

Eleven days after the Cooper hijacking, Coffelt [guess: wrote] a [guess: strong] piece of circumstantial evidence," began a job as a surgical technician at [guess: a town] said Summers. "We had a lab report confirming that Virginia hospital. His superior there, a woman, told (the) cording ... was from a parachute and several years [guess: sources] that Coffelt had difficulty [guess: adjusting] [guess: to] old. No one has ever asked me, but I'll be happy to take point showed her his "buddy" [guess: described] [guess: from] a [guess: metal]-detector test about where we found it, and how injuries which some believe he sustained in the've dug it up. We were very careful uncovering it. I parachute jump. He worked at the hospital through took soil samples which I turned over to the lab so I most of 1972, then in June of 1973 he contacted his old would know something hadn't just been buried there." cell mate, James Brown, for the first time in years. "The area where we found this was very primitive,

A year later, in May 1974, Coffelt told Brown for remote wilderness," Summers explained. "This was Big the first time that he was D.B. Cooper and disclosed Foot country. We had to lower ourselves down a cliff some details of the crime that, if true, presumably only to get to the site. There was a dead tree that Jack (told the hijacker could have known. For example, accord- Brown) said he hit. And this enormous, two-story high ing to Brown, Coffelt described changing into boots rock with markings on it. "Xs" and "Os" that Coffelt before jumping and boasted of flirting with one of the said he had scratched into the rock the night he landed stewardesses. Coffelt also said that he dropped the there. That was where we dug. You could even see the $200,000 ransom during the parachute jump and had narrow trenches, where his feet had hit the ground." never recovered it.

- Summers [guess: believes] a believer in the story, and he, Coffelt told Brown that he wanted to go back into too, is still convinced that Jack Coffelt was D.B. the Cascades and look for the small fortune, but he Cooper. needed help. Brown agreed to accompany him, and in In addition, [guess: Summers] believes that the FBI has July of that year, the two men and Brown's muscular, gone to great lengths to cover up and otherwise derail 6-foot-plus, 17-year-old son, Byron, made a weeklong the case. trek into the mountains.

Summers added he suspects that the FBI may have According to Brown, Coffelt was then so ill that at known all along that Jack Coffelt was the hijacker, but one point he nearly collapsed on a steep grade. However, after a week in which they [guess: made] themselves didn't [guess: publicly] [guess: identify] him because they knew he had stories as inconspicuous as possible, they found no money and to tell about his earlier cooperation with the agency. quit.

Still, to this day, James Brown remains unshaken in his conviction that his old cell mate was D.B. Cooper.

After the Cascades trip, Coffelt moved to Hawaii and died there in June 1975. Brown, who did not learn about Coffelt's death for more than a year, had written down everything Coffelt told him, and began writing a book manuscript. But he [guess: knew] he needed help, preferably from a promoter [guess: and/or] with Hollywood wheeling and dealing.

[guess: He] Brown found free-lance [guess: producer] Pat Summers, who was in Las Vegas while [guess: producing] a Ken Norton heavyweight title fight for [guess: CBS] Sports.

Summers said in an interview that he subse- quently had Brown and his son take lie-detector tests concerning the five weeks they spent with Coffelt. "They passed with flying colors," Summers said. "But all that meant was that Brown believed Coffelt's story. I kept thinking, if this story is true, it's the story of the century."

Summers began his own investigation, and he and Brown organized an expedition into the Cascades in 1977, back to where Coffelt had taken Brown three years earlier. This time, thanks to a metal detector and energetic digging, the search party unearthed a solid piece of physical evidence: a 1½-inch piece of cording that [guess: appeared] to be synthetic nylon of the type used in parachute shrouding — and it was 5 to 7 years old.