Part 50, page 172

Transcript

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

Instead, they flew on for three more hours until landing in Reno for a refueling stop, where it was discovered that Cooper and his $200,000 ransom had already disappeared into the night.

But it would have been highly impractical for the skyjacker to jump into the Woodland, Washington vicinity, which is dotted by small communities and farms. In view of the intricate planning which had otherwise gone into the crime, it makes little sense that Cooper would bail out there — taking the absurd chance, obviously, of landing in a farmer's apple orchard or a supermarket parking lot. By all appearances, Cooper wanted to survive the jump and escape to spend the money. He may have been at the end of an old rope, but he was also at the beginning of a new and, he hoped, better one.

In the twelve years since the crime occurred not one shred of physical evidence about Cooper himself has ever been uncovered anywhere near Woodland, Washington — not one reported sighting of the ruddy-faced villain nor the rotting remains of a dead body strapped to a parachute discovered lying in the forest there. It is only logical to assume, therefore, that Cooper had without doubt reconnaissanced a place where he could touch down safely in the parachute — a place far from scrutiny by either the authorities or amateur sleuths, and one remote enough to hide all traces of the crime or its brazen perpetrator.

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Far back in the rugged hinterlands of the Pacific Northwest there exists a site which can only be described as ideal for Cooper to have landed undetected in his parachute. The plains country of central Oregon boasts some of the most beautiful yet hauntingly isolated scenery in America. To the west of the rolling plains the treacherous Cascade Mountains tower thousands of feet into the sky. Nearby, adjoining the forested foothills which line the base of the range, sprawling wheat fields adorn the landscape in a checker-board fashion at random places where a juncture in the hills creates a valley or a smooth table-top plateau suitable for farming.

A few miles west of the ghost town of Friend, Oregon, on the barren wind-swept plains in the north-central part of the state, one of these huge fields — in summer it glows like polished amber with its ripe harvest of wheat — lies abandoned every year after the autumn harvest, a mute testament to the long-ago mysterious skyjacking. In an unused farmhouse in the center of the field, the charred remains of bales of hay still litter the floor where someone threw them hastily years ago. A deputy sheriff in the area remembered it well: "About a week before that skyjacking there were strange fires up here," he told me. "Some local ranchers called me out to find out what was going on. I

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THE PICTURES WHICH SPOKE A THOUSAND WORDS... "O, that a man might know The end of this day's business, ere it come!" —William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

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(top) Coffelt's Leavenworth mugshots; (above) 1974 snapshots of Coffelt with Byron and James Brown.

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Coffelt's Leavenworth Penitentiary mugshots were almost impossible to obtain. When the records clerk at that Kansas prison was contacted, he said that there was no record ever of Bryant "Jack" Coffelt having been admitted to Leavenworth Penitentiary.

My father remembered two aliases that Coffelt had used when he knew him in Atlanta Penitentiary: "John Hardy, Jr." and "J. C. Ross." When the records clerk at Leavenworth was asked to check his file for these aliases, he found a cross-reference under the name of "John Hardy, Jr." which directed him to the file of "J. C. Ross." Under that fictitious name, all of Jack Coffelt's records were contained — one might say hidden. Anyone inquiring about Coffelt's years at Leavenworth who did not know his aliases would encounter a stone wall.

A source close to the Carter Administration, one having intimate knowledge of the policies of the United States Attorney General's office, told me: "A federal prisoner is sentenced to the 'custody of the Attorney General of the United States.' We can put him up in a motel room for his entire sentence if we want to." This Carter Administration "insider" finally managed to retrieve for us Coffelt's files from both Atlanta Penitentiary and Leavenworth.

Seattle attorney George LeBissoniere, who also identified my 1974 snapshots, claims that he identified Coffelt's Leavenworth photos as D.B. Cooper for the FBI six weeks after the skyjacking. "The FBI never called back," LeBissoniere told me. Florence Schaffner also identified both the Leavenworth photos and 1974 snapshots of Coffelt as Cooper, and has always believed that the FBI composite drawings of Cooper were "wrong." (See pp. 81-82) The former stewardess, who sat beside Cooper for over two hours, said that the FBI artist who drew the composites failed to follow her instructions concerning Cooper's true features. Even before she saw my photographs of Coffelt, she described Cooper to me as having a "longer, fuller face" than the FBI composites showed, with a hairline "not nearly as receding." (LeBissoniere and Schaffner both have preserved their testimony on videotape.)

My 1974 snapshots are the only photographs (other than his prison mugshots) known to exist of Jack Coffelt. He was, after all, a man who did not want his picture taken. B.H.B.

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68 NOVEMBER 1983/LAS VEGAS MAGAZINE

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DB Cooper-20777