Part 50, page 176

Transcript

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THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER, AND A SMOKING GUN...

"And yet, my dear Watson, there is so very close a connection that the one is extracted out of the other." —Sherlock Holmes The Hound Of The Baskervilles

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The time was February, 1980. The prince was eight-year- old Brian Ingram. While on a fishing expedition and cookout with his parents, young Ingram was sent to fetch some sticks to start a fire. Instead, he found a few thousand dollars worth of rotted $20 bills. The boy had discovered them lying on a sand bar beside the Columbia River a few miles north of Portland, Oregon. The FBI later determined that the serial numbers of the bills matched some of those given D.B. Cooper! . . . The pauper was Jack Coffelt, who unfortunately dropped the bulk of his $200,000 farther to the south- east, near Mt. Hood. How did over $5,000 worth of his stolen loot end up on the banks of the Columbia River near Portland? Like everything else about this bizarre case, the leads proved as mysterious as the crime itself. Portland FBI Agent Ralph Himmels- bach, in overall charge of the D.B. Cooper investigation, said, "It is mind-boggling where the money was located." Indeed.

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SEATTLE Cooper delivered feet parachutes and $200,000 ransom

Plane heads south, landing in Reno 3½ hours later

KELSO

WASHINGTON

WOODLAND ARIEL Lake Merwin

FBI CONDUCTS FRUITLESS SEARCH FOR COOPER HERE

MONEY FOUND HERE, 1980

COFFELT THROWS PART OF MONEY OUT HERE

VANCOUVER

PORTLAND

Cooper hijacks plane enroute to Seattle, November 24, 1971

Mt. Hood Area COFFELT JUMPS HERE; BYRON BROWN DISCOV- ERS PARACHUTE RE- MAINS HERE, MAY 1977

OREGON

6/10 RENO

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Ever since the skyjacking occurred in late 1971, the FBI concentrated its search for Cooper around the town of Woodland, Washington — an area between 10 and 25 miles north of where young Ingram found the badly decomposed bills. The crew of the skyjacked plane had informed the FBI that a series of strong "pressure bumps" occurred directly over Woodland, suggesting that Cooper bailed out there. Also, a red warning light had gone on in the cabin, indicating that the 727's rear stairway had been lowered. But after Brian Ingram's find, according to UPI press dispatches, "the location of the money . . . caused the FBI to reconsider its calculations." Cooper, it became clear, could not possibly have bailed out over Woodland since part of his money was later discovered far south of there! The perplexed authorities were forced to admit that they spent years conducting a wild goose chase. As Jack Coffelt often used to say, "If I'm lying, God's a possum." But there was another problem. Originally, it was thought that the plane had veered west of Portland on its southbound flight, but the location of the rotted money, which FBI Agent Himmelsbach shrewdly noted "must have tumbled and rolled along the bottom of the Columbia River," proved without a doubt that the plane flew east of Portland — exactly as Jack Coffelt insisted! The wide and sedate Columbia flows from east to west; the money could not possibly have floated against the current. Jack Coffelt claimed that he threw a few bundles — perhaps $4,000 or $5,000 worth, he said — of the ransom money out the back of the plane over the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River, after stewardess Tina Mucklow refused to accept it. Nine years later, Brian Ingram apparently had found that money. But he was unaware of the importance of his discovery. The find at last provided proof that the plane had flown east of Portland, and also shot a gaping hole right through the FBI's belief that Cooper never made it to Oregon! On that sand bar beside the river, the astonished boy did not realize that he was holding a white-hot smoking gun... B.H.B.

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tantly tossed it out over a "brightly-lit hydro- electric dam" — the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River. Incredibly, nine years later, in February 1980, the bundle of cash would be discovered lying in a sand bar beside the river — the soggy bills revealing serial numbers which matched the ones given D.B. Cooper! (See sidebar) But Jack was not yet through with the frightened young woman, who to this day still appears mesmerized by the skyjacker. Standing with only her in the empty corridor at the rear of the plane, he approached her and, as Jack put it, "felt her up a bit." She sensed his lone- liness and fear and whispered consoling words, trying to calm him, but he told her, sadly, "I have nothing to lose." His swaggering account to us: "She was the last woman I may have seen in my life! I wanted her to have something, you know, to remember me by." Original press accounts of the skyjacking, and public statements by the FBI, never re- ported these intricate details: nothing about a green bag, nothing about Cooper offering Tina Mucklow part of the ransom money or his using a knife with a long, thin blade to cut up the shroud lines from one of the parachutes was ever mentioned — except by Jack Coffelt. The authorities did reveal however (as if they were puzzled by the find) that cut-up parachute shroud lines were discovered lying on the floor in the back of the plane when it landed in Reno. But at a meeting with her in San Diego in 1977, Tina Mucklow confirmed each one of these obscure details — especially noting the green bag, which she thought was made of glossy paper or plastic, folded in a corner of Cooper's briefcase. Before he slipped the mail sack full of money into the green bag he ordered her forward into the cockpit. He did not want her to observe this move in case she informed the authorities, who might then be able to de- cipher his actions, which were designed to confuse any ground pursuers. Jack said that in case he were chased on the ground he would

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Stewardess Tina Mucklow sits beside Captain William Scott of Flight 305. Mucklow confirmed every one of Coffelt's details about the crime.

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72 NOVEMBER 1983/LAS VEGAN MAGAZINE