Part 50, page 167

Transcript

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

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.

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half a mile behind it, the lights of a C-130 cargo plane carrying would-be pursuers — a paratrooper squadron from McChord Air Force Base in Tacoma, Washington. But they had not seen him jump. Due to the raging storm the cargo plane's scanning radar was rendered useless.

Coffelt crashed down on a mountain slope, hitting a tree limb between his legs and crushing his ankles as he plowed into the rocky surface. But even though he was in severe pain, he gathered the billowing chute around his legs, clawed a hole in the loose scree and compacted the chute into it, then sprayed it with a magnesium compound — he explained the magnesium would burn so hot it would melt even the metal harness buckles — and set a match to it so there would be no evidence for any would-be pursuers to ever find.

Coffelt 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, finally coming out the next morning into a meadow where he saw a trail that was familiar to him. He walked along the narrow logging trail until he found the hidden jeep, then, using the vehicle's two-way radio, contacted his accomplice who had been cruising a highway twenty miles away hoping to see signs of the fallen parachute. He rendezvoused with this accomplice — whom he described vaguely as "an Army man" — at an isolated point along the deep and swift-moving Deschutes River which meanders through central Oregon, and there pushed the jeep over a cliff into the rushing waters, blowing it to pieces with a charge of dynamite as it went down. Then he climbed in the back seat of the getaway car and was driven two thousand miles across back roads to a place somewhere in the Midwest, where a friendly doctor quietly treated his injuries.

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My father, by nature a deeply suspicious man, grew increasingly worried. "What are we getting ourselves into?" he asked me over and over again.

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THE CONSPIRACY

Coffelt had returned to the Oregon area twice — in the spring and fall of 1972 — to search for the missing money, each time without success, until in desperation he decided to solicit my father's help. He further maintained that the FBI had tried to kill him in connection with the crime. "They wanted to silence me," he said. "I had to leave Washington D.C. fast." So he had moved with Tave to the Seattle area — like a true conman secretly returning to the scene of the crime — and rented an apartment in the middle-class suburb of Lynnwood. There, in that cold and rainy environment, his health deteriorated. He began taking nitroglycerin tablets — a habit which he continued during our journey — to prevent clotting of his blood. He was a terribly desperate man, "That job was my last chance," he mused. "It meant everything to me. I had nothing to lose." Nothing except his life.

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Try as he might to downplay them, hints of a broad, complex conspiracy began to weave their way into Coffelt's story, and we grew more and more worried the closer we came to our destination of Oregon. According to him, there were at least three co-conspirators still lurking about who had vested interests in the money being found. One of these men, whom Coffelt called the "ring-leader," was actually a former pilot who was "grounded because of heart trouble," and who was thus terribly embittered at life. This man, relying on his years of experience in flying over the area, had actually picked the Oregon locale as the best place in the country to pull off the skyjacking. Also, there was the mysterious engineer whom Coffelt claimed had instructed him about the workings of the Boeing 727 aircraft, and then there was the "Army man" — the accomplice waiting on the ground for him.

To satisfy all these mysterious people, the real take was supposed to be several million dollars of used bank notes that were to be loaded onto the plane at Portland by an armored Brinks truck. "But the goddam Brinks truck never showed," said Coffelt. "I kept watching out the terminal windows for it. I almost got left behind." It was then that he decided to put into effect "Plan B" — the demand for a $200,000 ransom. "If someone was trying to double-cross me," he explained, "I'd get my share anyway." But some, or all, of these people never believed that he lost the money and with growing impatience had beleaguered him for their cut. He had been threatened, and had counter-threatened to blow the whole story if they didn't take the heat off. "I feel like a hunted animal," he said to me many times. "You and your father are the only people I can trust anymore."

But the two old prison buddies could not recapture the past. There was a gulf between them that could not be filled. My father, who had left his prison years behind him like a bad dream, had gone on to become an engineer, and his critical mind was thirsting for hard details about the sky[guess: jacking]. He constantly quizzed Coffelt. "Who helped you plan this thing, Jack? What's this man's name — this engineer? What about this former pilot? You trying to tell me he was the brains behind it?"

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76 OCTOBER 1983/LAS VEGAS MAGAZINE

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DB Cooper-20772