Part 53, page 381

Transcript

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

FD-350 (Rev. 7-16-63)

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(Mount Clipping in Space Below)

House-to-House Hunt Seeks Hijacker Clues

WOODLAND, Wash. (UPI) - Deputies went from house to house in this western Washington area Friday trying to turn up a lead to the hijacker, who commandeered an airliner and escaped by parachute with 10,000 $20 bills stuffed in a white cloth bag.

Other searchers slogged through fog and rain in the muddy foothills of the Cascade Mountains.

But there was no trace of the swarthy middle-aged man dressed in black who hijacked the Northwest Airlines 727 jet Wednesday by brandishing a "bomb," collected $200,000 ransom and parachuted into the night somewhere between Seattle and Reno.

Law enforcement officers conducting the house-to-house investigation said they were not checking every residence, but picking them at random and asking residents if they heard anything unusual. "It is a terrible routine and seems endless," said Dep. Len Holsman.

Bundle of Currency Meanwhile, crew members of the hijacked jetliner disclosed that the ransom the hijacker secured at Seattle-Tacoma Airport Wednesday night was delivered in a white cloth bag, like a laundry bag, without a drawstring or fastener.

They said they did not know how he managed to parachute without losing the rest of the crew on the bulky bundle.

In Seattle, the Air Force said that as many as eight military planes were tailing the hijacked jet at various times on its flight to Reno, but that none of the pilots saw the hijacker parachute in the darkness.

The ground-and-air search started near Woodland Friday but FBI officials said the site was selected on "pure conjecture" because it was over that area that four crew members who remained on the jet had communicated for the last time with the hijacker.

They spent the rest of the trip to Reno locked in the forward cabin.

At Northwest's Minneapolis headquarters, the airline broke its two-day silence on the incident at a news conference in which pilot William Scott disclosed that the crew was as surprised as anyone when the plane landed at Reno and the hijacker was gone.

"I stepped into the cabin and asked if there were any more instructions, but there was no answer," Scott said. "I looked around the curtain and determined he was not there."

Stewardess Tina Mucklow, 22, of Richfield, Minn., said she sat with the hijacker for some time on his orders but was ordered forward with the rest of the crew on the way to Reno, after the ran-

som was paid in Seattle.

"The bomb," [guess: a device] with red cylinders and wires, along with the hijacker was missing when the plane landed at Reno. So were two parachutes of the four the hijacker demanded--and was given at Seattle.

One parachute would not have worked, it was disclosed Friday. Linn Emrick, a sport parachutist who supplied it, said he inadvertently picked a "ground training" chute when airport officials asked him for one to supplement two chutes furnished by the Air Force.

The other supplementary chute was supplied by Renton Aviation. Its manufacturer said it would "work fine."

Those were the two the hijacker apparently took, but officials said they doubted he actually used the nonfunctioning chute, because it was a chestpack and an experienced jumper would rely on Renton's backpack chute first. There was even some question as to whether the Renton chute harness would accommodate a [guess: second] one chest-pack device.

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(Indicate page, name of newspaper, city and state.)

[illegible]//Los Angeles Times Los Angeles, Calif.

Date: 11/27/71 Edition Saturday Final Author: Editor: Title:

Character: or Classification: Submitting Office: Los Angeles

☐ Being Investigated

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SEARCHED / INDEXED SERIALIZED / FILED NOV 29 1971 FBI LOS ANGELES

[illegible] b6 [illegible] b7c

DB Cooper-222 17