Part 50, page 178

Transcript

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

(continued from p. 73)

Florence Schaffner, the stewardess who accepted Cooper's ransom note, was a complete enigma to me. For years, she remained unavailable to the news media. ...She claimed that she had been warned never to talk to anyone about the skyjacking.

lingering nightmare. Since she never saw the ruddy-faced, heavy-accented skyjacker without his dark sun glasses on, she was unable to identify my 1974 snapshots of Coffelt.

There was another stewardess, however, who during the long flight from Portland to Seattle before she was released there by him (the plane circled high above Sea-Tac Airport for nearly two-and-a-half hours waiting for the ransom and four parachutes to be collected) was able to observe Cooper very closely, indeed intimately. In fact, the two even carried on a casual and sometimes enraptured conversation for much of that time.

Florence Schaffner, the stewardess who initially accepted Cooper's ransom note, (naively believing it to be a proposition) was a complete enigma to me. For years, judging from various news accounts of the skyjacking that I had researched, she remained completely unavailable to the newsmedia. Indeed, I had the distinct impression that she was being kept under some sort of "wraps" by the authorities. Even reporters from Time magazine and the Washington Post had been unable to contact her. She always remained mysteriously aloof from the wave of publicity generated in the skyjacking's aftermath.

Immediately after the crime she dropped completely out of sight and the public soon forgot, or was never even aware, that for over two hours that night she dutifully attended the "terribly lonesome man," as she described Cooper to me, rushing to bring him coffee and snacks, listening politely to his sad, vague ramblings suggestive of a checkered past and innocently wishing him, "Good luck . . . I hope you make it."

"Is there anything more that I can do for you?" she remembers asking Cooper when the plane finally touched down in Seattle. "Do you want me to leave now, or would you like

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