Part 50, page 166

Transcript

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

Jack and Tave seemed prosperous in those years. Jack wore expensive suits and drove a late-model Cadillac.

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seemed hurt that the true merit — the intricate planning and deception — of his crime had never been fully appreciated. The whole idea that D.B. Cooper had just "jumped out in the night like Santa Claus" was perversely ridicu- lous to him. He claimed he had a perfect landing site — a wheat field that was plowed over in the fall of the year — in which to jump. There was a large beacon near the field — "you could see the damn thing for a hundred miles" — a bright light which he ordered the pilot to fly over. As part of his getaway plan Coffelt had stashed an old army jeep a mile or two from the field with a transmitter in it, so that he heard a steady bleeping sound through a receiver that he carried in the plane. The bleeping sound grew louder and louder as he approached the jump site. "When it was two or three pitches from full intensity — that's when I needed to jump," he said, a design which would allow him room to float in the parachute to a pin-point landing. "It was the perfect crime," he lamented wistfully many times, "the perfect crime."

But of course there is no such thing as a perfect crime. Many factors which he could· not have foreseen led to Jack Coffelt's defeat. He had planned to hook the backpack contain- ing the $200,000 to one of the military back- packs and belt it securely around his waist, but since stewardess Schaffner never relayed his request for the backpack and the money was

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He explained to us, with a look of horror and pain on his face, how he had spent over 15 hours clawing his way — at times on hands and knees — through the dense underbrush of the forest and up the side of a towering rock cliff.

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delivered to him in a mail sack with no hooks or belts, he was forced to open one of the para- chutes and cut the shroud lines, which he used to tie a loop for his arm to go through at the top of the mail sack. This left him two out of the three remaining chutes to choose from — and the chest pack he opted for was the one that was inoperative! As he descended the stairs, burdened by the two heavy parachutes and the 25-pound sack of money on his arm, he lost his hold on the handrail and — about a minute before he had planned — he was sucked out by the windstream, in his own words, "like a cork out of a bottle."

He knew even as he was falling that he must

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be nearly a mile too far north of his landing field. Afraid of hitting the jagged mountains which everywhere encompassed the landing area — he had planned to free-fall for almost thirty seconds — he tugged early on the rip- cord of the chest pack, but to his horror it did not open! Struggling to hold the money on his arm, he frantically reached over his shoulder and pulled the rip-cord of the military back- pack. He felt the pack release and then sensed a gentle tugging above him — it was only the guide chute opening — which he mistook for the main chute. Relieved that the back-up parachute had opened at all, he relaxed his grip on the money bag. Suddenly he was hit by a tremendous jolt as the 28-foot main canopy opened, and the bag of money slid off his dangling arm and tumbled away into the darkness.

Almost instantaneously, the billowing para- chute was tossed by ferocious winds from the thunderstorms which had moved in over the mountains earlier that night. He was helplessly tossed and thrown about. Sleet and hail pelted his face and soaked his clothes. He was unable to see any of the ground lights which he and an accomplice had set up to assist him in guiding the parachute to the landing field. Below him, somewhere in the immense darkness, waited jagged cliffs and vast forests of towering Ponderosa pines. He saw the lights of the Boeing 727 slowly disappear and, tailing about

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LAS VEGAS MAGAZINE/OCTOBER 1983 75 DB Cooper-20771