Part 53, page 273

Transcript

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

"Hunters and huckleberry pickers stop in here and they still talk about finding something up there, but not like they used to."

Nobody hurries at the Aeriel tavern in November. Muddy roads and snow have closed the woods to logging for the winter, and it's cold outside. Loggers drift in and out for a beer or a game of cribbage.

Through the smoke from an apparently communal pack of Camels talk drifts from the finer points of cribbage to Cooper and back to cribbage.

"Hey, Jimmy!" Germaine shouts down the bar. "Where's Cooper?"

"South America. Africa, maybe," says Jimmy, not looking up from his newspaper.

"You could go a long time on that kind of money in Mexico," she mused.

In the spring of 1972 the Army sent 200 men from Ft. Lewis, Wash. to [guess: fly] in a light plane waiting for him on a primitive airstrip."

search for 18 days, but nothing turned up. But Ariel Tavern consensus was that the cougars, coyotes and wild dogs in the hills would have made quick work of any body, and that searchers could be a few feet from what they sought and still miss it.

The FBI says most of its leads during four years came from missing person reports.

"There was one man who had left a suicide note, and cut his boat out to drift," Himmelsbach recalled. "That was two days before the skyjacking, and he looked pretty good as a suspect. Then we found him running an adult bookstore in Los Angeles."

Numerous other ideas and theories have been checked out, he said.

They include:

"Cooper landed safely and escaped

This assumes he knew where he was jumping, a possibility the FBI has ruled out.

If Cooper makes it another year to outlive the skyjacking charges, the U.S. attorney's office in Portland says, there may be other charges filed.

These could include possession of stolen money or income tax violations.

There is also the question of a civil suit from Globe Indemnity Corp. of New York, which had to pay the airline $180,000 of the $200,000 in ransom.

Himmelsbach said if it can be shown that Cooper fled the area to avoid prosecution, the statute of limitations might be suspended.

"But if he can prove he stayed around this area and didn't try to run, I guess he's beat us," he said.