Part 50, page 174

Transcript

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

A retired U.S. Forest Service agent accompanied me to the place where Coffelt showed me he had stashed the World War Two Army jeep in the dense forests at the base of Mount Hood. Faded tire tracks were still visible where a vehicle had been backed into a stand of small maple trees years ago. A pile of rotted brushwood lay off to one side — the maple branches which Coffelt claimed he had used to camouflage the jeep. The expert forester immediately noticed a young tree growing through one of the tire tracks which revealed a past injury — an elbow hook disfiguration at its base which indicated the tree had been severely crushed by a heavy object years earlier. He sawed through the disfigured area and later analyzed the small segment at the agency laboratory. Amazingly, the annual growth rings — which record every event in a tree's life in a kind of fossilized record — revealed that the sapling had been damaged in the autumn of 1971—the time of the skyjacking!

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A cross-section of the maple sapling which was found at the place where Coffelt's jeep was parked. The growth rings reveal that the tree was damaged in the fall of 1971.

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Even though such intricate planning was involved in the heist — Coffelt claimed he had spent eleven months and $10,000 of his own money just setting it up — the crime ended in abysmal failure and nearly death for Coffelt himself! He could not possibly have foreseen, however, the raging intensity of the thunderstorms which descended upon the Cascades that night when he boarded the plane in Portland. In the Pacific Northwest, thunderhead clouds often rush inland from the ocean and envelope the mountains in a matter of minutes with violent force. Because of the storms, he was forced to descend the rear stairwell of the 727 earlier than planned in order to try to spot the signal fires on the landing field below him through the swirling cloud mass. The plane, plunging through the night like a battleship at a mere 200 miles per hour, and maintaining the 10,000 feet altitude he had ordered the pilot to stick to, was being buffeted by severe turbulence.

Coffelt, burdened by the two parachutes and the 25-pound sack of money looped over his arm, was having trouble holding onto the wide-flanged handrail of the stairway. He was craning his neck, peering under the starboard wing into the darkness ahead while struggling to hear the beeper signal from the hidden jeep through the radio receiver strapped to his wrist when all of a sudden, before he was fully prepared, the plane jolted in turbulence, he stumbled helplessly and was violently sucked out by the ferocious windstream, desperately trying to hold onto the money while falling head over heels into the murky oblivion!

Unknown to him, the authorities at Seattle had provided him with an inoperative chute — a sport-type demonstration model that had been sewn up. It was the one he was now wearing on his chest! After repeated attempts

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He hit the slope blindly at nearly thirty miles per hour and was dashed into the rocks! But he had made it. He was down. And as he told me later: "I wanted desperately to live!"

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to deploy this chest pack failed, he finally managed to get the military parachute on his back to open, but when the reserve chute's large 28-foot canopy billowed into the cross-current winds (in fact, according to experienced parachutists it was a miracle that it opened at all) he was hit by such a severe jolt that the bag of money slipped out of his arms and tumbled away into the darkness. To cap his awesome misfortune — the signal fires on the landing field below were nowhere to be seen! He had dived from the plane far too early. The landing field was still miles ahead! Far in the distance, through the dark sea of clouds, he could see the bright swath cut by the huge beacon light at Pine Hollow Reservoir — where his accomplice waited in vain. But soon, as he descended into a canyon, even that light disappeared.

Completely enveloped in a nightmare of darkness, he only realized he was at last hitting the ground when he crashed through the splintering, phantom-like branches of a hillside tree. He hit the slope blindly at nearly thirty miles per hour and was dashed into the rocks! But he was down. And as he told me

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later: "I came back to life at that first shocked breath. I wanted desperately to live!"

Almost semi-conscious, he had terrifying visions of paratroopers from the C-130 cargo pursuit plane alighting like ghosts on the slope around him. Before he had tumbled from the 727 he had seen the chase plane's search lights scanning the cloud mass behind him. Frantically, he gathered the surging folds of the parachute's wind-tossed canopy around his bleeding legs — the bright material was flapping wildly like a huge crippled moth straining to free itself — and compacted the reckless mass into a shallow depression he had clawed in the dirt. Then he placed the sport-type chest chute on top of this mass and sprayed the pile with a magnesium compound from an aerosol can and set it afire with a cigarette lighter. The nylon fabric was instantly consumed by the flames, melting like a mirage into the ground before his dazed eyes. Groping his way, he stumbled down the pitch-black slope in severe pain because, upon landing, he had squarely hit a tree limb between his legs and punctured his chest on one of the tree's sharp branches.

It took him fifteen hours to make his way out of the vast canyon lined with sheer rock-faced cliffs that he had fallen into. He spent the longest and most arduous night of his life desperately clawing his way through tangled underbrush and climbing over jutting boulders to finally see brilliant sunshine on a clear Thanksgiving Day morning, and feel "to the depths of my spirit" as he told me later, "a new appreciation for everything around me that was alive." The eerie neon glow of startled eyes revealing lurking cougars and timber wolves, and the ferocious menacing cries of the wild animals terrified him that night like demons, he told me. The experience in that awesome necropolis of nature would haunt him always.

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Today, the canyon remains as remote and undisturbed as it has been for centuries. Twenty miles to the east farmlands begin, where wheat and alfalfa grow peacefully under turquoise summer skies. Occasionally a tractor can be made out against the magnificent backdrop of verdant mountain forests by the dust it raises while furrowing a field on the plains nearby. No one knows the incredible drama which took place in those rugged hinterlands over a decade ago. Life goes on there as placidly, it seems, as the ageless mountains themselves.

The lost bag containing $200,000 still lies somewhere in those vast and secretive forests waiting for the day when some treasure hunter may stumble across it. Coffelt said that before he leaped from the plane — in case he himself were killed in the jump so that his accomplice would be able to find his body and retrieve the loot — he had stuffed a small electronic transmitter inside the bag before tying it

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70 NOVEMBER 1983/LAS VEGAS MAGAZINE

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DB Cooper-20779