Part 54, page 178

Transcript

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

[worse] night for a bailout. Two layers of clouds covered Oregon and Washing- ton, one [at] bases at 2,500 feet, the other from [5,]000 feet up to 10,000 feet and more over Portland. Winds were gusting from 25 to 45 knots at Portland International Airport.

Lelooska, Indian artist who lives at Ariel, Wash., was driving home along the Lewis River about 8 p.m. and re- ported the wind and rain was buffeting the car so hard that he pulled off the road to wait for a break in the storm.

Himmelsbach, an experienced pilot, took off from Portland International Airport in a National Guard helicopter as the hijacked plane passed overhead.

"We were going to try and follow the 727," Himmelsbach said. "But the air was so rough and the clouds so low that we were called back before we got past downtown Portland."

The next day, Himmelsbach, who holds a commercial pilot rating, flew almost the entire route of the hijacked plane in his own airplane, accompanied by an experienced Civil Air Patrol ob- server.

"We flew directly over the area where we later estimated he had land- ed, but there is hardly a chance of see- ing even a parachute canopy in the dense woods and brush that cover much of the area."

About 200 officers and men of the 3[d] Armored Cavalry from Ft. Lewis, equipped with five helicopters, searched the target area for two weeks in mid-March, poking through brush and blackberry patches and searching farm buildings.

They found the body of a murdered girl. They found some parachute cano- pies, orange and green — attached to weather balloons — but not a single valid clue to the missing Cooper. Coop- er's parachute was all white, snow white.

"It is impossible to conduct a 100 per cent effective search in some of this area," Himmelsbach said. "There are acres and acres of blackberries so dense as to be impenetrable and some of the terrain is too steep to be searched on foot. A man could fall into one of those backberry patches and just disappear. We would have to burn out the under- brush or cut it out by hand to conduct a thorough search."

"I have never thought Cooper went into the lake. From all I've seen I lean to the hypothesis that he landed in the dense woods either dead or mortally hurt. It could be years before he is found. Planes have disappeared in that kind of terrain and been missing for 10 years or more."

When Capt. William Scott, Flight Engineer H. E. Anderson, and First Offi- cer Kataczak landed the 727 at Reno with the rear stair door still dragging, they [and] Tina Mucklow, stewardess, found the cabin empty except for one

chest pack, the good one, and the sky divers' parachute, "the one he should have used." (Flight [Atte]ndant Florence Schaffner and a th[ird] stewardess had been left behind in Seattle.)

The money was missing. So was the attache case in which he carried the crude dummy "bomb." The FBI found two personal items which they are not revealing. That was all. No fingerprints, no clues. The hijacker even reclaimed the hijack note he had written when he first boarded the plane.

Not one of the 10,000 $20 bills Cooper obtained has turned up. The FBI circulated a list of the numbers to po- lice, sheriffs and banks throughout the country. FBI and other agencies have been swamped with calls from people who think they have found one of the bills.

"We are still getting a score or more calls a week," Himmelsbach said. "Ac- tually if everyone who gets a $20 bill gave us a call we would be swamped. We want to check every suspicious bill, but we could eliminate 70 per cent of these calls if people would first take a look at the face of the bill.

"At the lower right hand of the pic- ture of Andrew Jackson you will find a date and a letter — like 1973, with a C under it. That is the date the bill was issued.

"Obviously if it was issued after 1971 it could not be one of the missing bills," Himmelsbach pointed out.

The list of 10,000 numbers has been entered in the National Crime Informa- tion Computer system.

Almost every police station and sheriff's office has access to this com- puter, which can tell in two seconds whether the bill is on the wanted list, Himmelsbach said.

The FBI has not given up. The search goes on. While Cooper has cost the airlines and law enforcement agen- cies millions of dollars, his hijacking — the first one motivated strictly by greed — led to an airport security program which has resulted in the confiscation of thousands of weapons and the arrest and successful prosecution of hundreds of other criminals, Himmelsbach points out.

The Federal Aviation Administra- tion reports five possible hijackings or other crimes against civil aviation were prevented by the security system in the first six months of 1976 and 2,840 fire- arms and seven explosive or incendiary devices were seized and 422 persons arrested.

P.S. If by some miracle Cooper should escape the FBI, he would still be wanted by the IRS. The Portland office of the Internal Revenue Service esti- mates Cooper would owe $217,523 on his $200,000 loot in taxes and penalties for failure to file and failure to pay. A possible civil penalty could raise that figure another $60,000 — all of which goes to show that crime doesn't pay, the IRS says.

---

DB Cooper-23107