Part 50, page 164

Transcript

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

But many people, particularly FBI agents involved in the case, believed that Cooper died in the jump. "What we're looking for is a hole in the ground," said one agent. Their suspicions were bolstered by the fact that one of the chest packs Cooper was given turned out to be a sewn-up dummy chute used for classroom demonstration — according to George Harrison, who was Seattle transport manager for Northwest Airlines at the time. Also, if Cooper had survived the jump he was obviously in no hurry to spend the money. Not one of the $20 bills he had received — all the serial numbers had been recorded — ever turned up until a small bundle of Cooper's loot was discovered by a young Oklahoma boy, Brian Ingram, on the banks of the Columbia River nine miles north of Portland in February 1980. The FBI interpreted this find as proof that Cooper died in the jump, but they had trouble accounting for why this small bundle of money ended up in a place ten miles upstream from the place they have always maintained he jumped out — the area around the town of Woodland, Washington.

According to the crew of the plane, a series of strong "pressure bumps" occurred directly over this area of broad, flat farming country about twenty miles north of Portland, which seemed the most likely place for him to have jumped. Local authorities, familiar with the geography, doubted that he jumped much farther south. To do so would run the risk of bailing out into the cold, rugged, densely-forested Cascades, which were already thinly covered with snow. Survival there in street clothes would be nearly impossible, especially since the Cascades had been hit by fierce storms the night of the skyjacking. On the basis of the crew's information, a massive search was mounted. The day after Thanksgiving, when the weather cleared, a horde of official searchers invaded the Woodland area. FBI agents, local sheriffs and deputies, local police and Boy Scout troups, assisted by helicopters provided by the Army and Weyerhauser Lumber Company, searched exhaustively. But they found nothing. In the spring another search was conducted, this time by nearly three hundred soldiers from Fort Lewis, Washington. They too found nothing. It seemed that D.B. Cooper had disappeared forever.

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As soon as the plane was in the air, Cooper pushed the stewardess call button and ordered a bourbon. When Florence Schaffner brought it to him, she was puzzled that he was wearing a pair of white gloves.

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THE REVELATION

But now the mystery may be over. A confession, two eye-witnesses, and a mass of circumstantial evidence indicate that a man known to many as Bryant "Jack" Coffelt once committed a crime of such daring that it captured the imagination of a nation.

The story I related to the producer in Las Vegas was this: In 1974, when I was 16, my father asked me to join him on a camping ex-

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pedition to the Cascade Mountains of Oregon with an old friend of his, ostensibly so that we would have a chance to look over towns where I might decide to go to college. My father had been having a lot of trouble lately at a small beer and wine store that he ran. Recently, a county grand jury had revoked the store's license because of the many disturbances that occurred there, so my father had plenty of time on his hands to take this much-needed vacation. "Hell, I might want to move out there myself," he said, "if I can put together a little money."

We started out from our home in northeast Georgia, our truck-camper rig loaded with hiking gear, on the thousand-mile trip to Joplin, Missouri, where we were to meet his old friend. It was the third week in June. We met Jack Coffelt in Joplin as night was falling, and immediately proceeded to a seedy motel on the outskirts of town where we took a room for the night. In the small room, with a dim lamp il-

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luminating his face, Jack Coffelt looked me steadily in the eye and asked suspiciously, "Byron, you remember that fella that skyjacked that airplane out in Oregon a few years back? — Cooper, D.B. Cooper? You remember him?"

"Sure," I replied. "All my friends at school were talking about that for weeks after it happened." I thought he would tell me we were going to look for Cooper.

"Well, I'm Cooper," he said, thumping his chest with his forefinger. "I'm D.B. Cooper!" He gave me no time to think. "I need your help, Byron. I lost my goddam money! I dropped it when the parachute opened. Your father has promised to help, but we need your help too." He could see that I was dumbfounded. His and my father's eyes fell steadily upon me. "The bastards tried to kill me," cried Coffelt. "Gave me a rotten chute — no good. It wouldn't open. I kept clawing at it but it wouldn't open. Finally I got the other one open — the back pack — but it jolted me so bad I dropped the money! I dropped the bag of money!" The words echoed pitifully through the small room as Coffelt buried his head in his hands.

"Will you help me?" he pleaded. "You're young; we're just two old men. You can climb the mountains out there. I'm gonna give your daddy half, and we're going to buy you a brand new car." He [guess: hoisted] his shorts and showed me his legs all the way up to the thighs. They were horribly discolored — purple and yellowish bruises blending with the pale skin. He claimed he had hit a tree limb between his legs when he crashed down on a rugged mountain

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LAS VEGAS MAGAZINE DB Cooper-20769