Part 50, page 175

Transcript

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up. All through that long desperate night he had been haunted by the weakening signal coming through his wrist receiver from the bag of money. Once even, succumbing to merciless hallucinations that the bag was lying just over a nearby ridge, he backtracked thinking he must try to find it. But then he came to his senses and continued on towards the increasing clarity of the other signal, the one droning steadily from the hidden jeep, which now provided his only opportunity for a safe getaway.

Time seems ageless in the mountains. After years have passed the same landmarks still appear unchanged. When the money finally is found it will be by chance and not design, for Nature reveals her secrets sparingly as I have learned before. In the spring of 1977 I journeyed to that remote area once again and witnessed time itself standing still, as if it had been waiting forever for my visit! I came, with my father and two other men, to search for any remains that may have been left from the hasty and obscure events which occurred on that barren mountainside so long ago. The wind howls forever in that canyon, even when there are no storms. A mood of failure perpetually lingers there.

We searched the slope for half a day, but found nothing. The late afternoon sun, rapidly falling behind the surrounding cliffs, was casting an eerie orange glow through the trees as it suddenly turned bitterly cold. Finally, just before leaving, I tilled one last shovel-full of dirt when I suddenly realized that I was standing over the very spot where three years earlier, in 1974, Jack Coffelt showed me he had destroyed his parachute. Something in the fading sky felt hauntingly unreal to me as I noticed lying in the freshly-exposed dirt a white piece of cord about the length of a cigarette! I reached down to pick up the cord, but when I touched the edges three-quarters of it blew away instantly! The fine white ashes melted into the darkening sky like filaments of a seeding dandelion. Everything was silent but the wind. As if in a dream, I realized that I was holding a tiny piece of the cord in my fingertips.

My companions and I began furiously digging in stark amazement. We immediately found a larger patch of the same type fabric (which looked somewhat like snake skin, and must have been a fold of the parachute) lying just beneath the topsoil, but it too turned to ashes and melted in the churning wind! The canyon echoed the surging gusts like an amphitheater, drowning out the faint whisper of the past that had been so fleetingly revealed to me by the mountains. Jack Coffelt, a man who always strived to cover his tracks, had apparently stepped in one of them on that night long ago, crushing a parachute shroud line into the dirt beneath his boot where it escaped total destruction by the flames. Indeed, the cord I retrieved still shows charred markings from that

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moment in 1971 when Jack briefly illuminated the night sky with his fire.

After our return to Las Vegas, my father and I submitted the tiny piece of material to a local forensic lab used by the police and FBI—Atlas Chemical Testing Laboratories on Highland Drive in Las Vegas. There, under 300-times magnification the piece of material was identified as "NYLON CORDING"—identical to the type used in parachutes!

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The fragment of parachute cord which Byron Brown found in the remote canyon where Coffelt landed. The cord was burned and contains carbon deposits.

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I noticed lying in the dirt a white piece of cord about the length of a cigarette. I reached down to pick up the cord, but when I touched the edges three-quarters of it blew away instantly!

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In 1974, as my father and I travelled with Jack through remote areas of the West (we took backroads, staying away from major cities because Jack said "law people" were on the lookout for him) we were forced to pry information from him against his will. He had only one design for us, to lead us to the place where he lost the money so that we could search for it, if need be for the entire summer. But as we

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pressured him for more information about the crime, details which were starkly different from published accounts of the skyjacking, we began to fear that we were merely pawns in a dangerous game conducted by sinister elements. Parts of his story were so far-fetched—he threw out many red-herrings to steer us away from the truth, and claimed that a vast cover-up of the crime was being conducted by the government — that we grew increasingly paranoid as we travelled through rugged mountains and across lonesome canyonlands with the raggedly-desperate man. But as the trip wore on we learned many new and startling details about the crime that would later be verified by witnesses.

One of the most obscure features of his narrative concerned Coffelt's insistence that our search was for a green bag filled with money—not the white canvas mail bag which, according to news accounts, the authorities had delivered to him at Seattle-Tacoma Airport. When pressed to explain this discrepancy, Jack said that he took the green bag out of the briefcase which contained his bomb, and hoping that this green "rubberized" bag, as he called it, would prevent the money from getting wet and rotting in case he were pursued on the ground and had to bury it, slipped the canvas mail sack full of money into it. Then he selected one of the four parachutes which appeared the least trustworthy and tore it open, cutting the shroud lines off of it with a long, thin-bladed knife. He then wrapped the shroud lines tightly around the top of the green protective bag, leaving a loop in the cords for his arm to go through. He would hold the money in the crook of his elbow as he leaped from the plane.

At this point the jetliner had left Seattle and was heading south toward Reno. At Seattle he had allowed all of the passengers and two of the stewardesses to leave the plane, keeping a sole hostage — stewardess Tina Mucklow — with him in the back. As soon as the plane took flight he reached in the bag of money, he boastingly recounted, and grabbing a handful of the loot offered it to Tina Mucklow. "Take it, Honey," he cajoled, "they don't pay you enough!" — playing his tough-guy Bogart role, romantic and wry at the same time with just a trace of embarrassed compassion. But "the pretty little blonde, "as Jack described her, refused the loot, telling him she almost certainly would be given a lie detector test. Nevertheless, Jack placed the money on a nearby seat, thinking she might change her mind and later take it. She didn't, and shortly afterwards, just a few minutes before jumping, he threw the small bundle of money out the back of the plane along with his briefcase and other items that he no longer needed. By then he had already tied up the bag of money, and since he was wearing thick thermal underwear there was nowhere to stuff the small bundle of cash into his tight-fitting clothes, so he reluc-

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LAS VEGAS MAGAZINE/NOVEMBER 1983 71