Part 54, page 306

Transcript

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

[Stefano] moved to a rural [area here] from Redondo Beach, Calif., 12 years ago to escape the drug prob-lem.

Their grocery store and gas station, with residents in the [tear], constitutes the entire wide spot in the road that is the town of View. The town used to have a church but that is now abandoned.

I was home alone when I saw a plane out the back window about 8:30, said Mrs. [Distefano]. It flew over the store twice very low, and it had a big red light on the tail. It seemed bigger than a light plane. It was raining and the wind was blowing.

I thought, What's he doing out here this time of night? It was weird to me because we don't see many planes at night here. He was so low that he could have hit a mountain.

There are no mountains in the immediate vicinity but several including majestic, snow covered Mt. St. Helens, (elevation 9,677 feet), are within a radius of 30 miles.

Mrs. Melvin Anderson, who resides just across the road from the north end of the McClellan [landing] strip, said she heard a plane land there and saw lights indicating that it was turning around.

He was parked an hour or so and then it left, she said.

Connection Doubted

I doubt if it was connected to the hijacker. The McClellans probably had a visitor. They have friends who fly.

But the McClellans insist that they had no visitor drop in that night.

Further stirred about the possibility of a dangerous swoop down to pick up the hijacker because of the experience the previous evening of Mr. and Mrs. Don-ald Haun, a young couple who own and maintain a public airstrip on the same county road as the McClellan makeshift field but four miles to the west.

The Haun airstrip, cutting across an alfalfa field next to a berry patch, is well known to Portland, Ore., area skydivers because they frequently used it for jump flights until two years ago.

The unlighted field is across the road from the Hauns' farm residence.

We were sitting and watching TV Tuesday night when a plane landed in the rain, explained Mrs. Haun. A car also drove up. The car's park-ing lights were left on and the driver got in the plane. They were gone 45 minutes to an hour and then came back and landed. The car drove off and the plane took off again.

I thought it was a little strange.

The FBI has questioned Mr. and Mrs. Haun several times about the mysterious airfield meeting, which could have been a dress rehearsal and reconnaissance mission for making a getaway on Thanksgiving eve.

The Huans were not at home on the night of the hijacking, so they have no way of knowing if their airstrip was used that night.

Like many others in the countryside on Thanksgiving eve, the Hauns were attending the wedding in

the town of La Center (pop. [3007]) of a neighbor girl, Celeste Rau, and the popular La Center high school music teacher, Ter-ry Vander Stoep.

Nearly everybody in town and for miles around was at the wedding, said La Center grocery and general store owner Elmer Soehl. There were 300 at the wedding and reception so that kept a lot of people in the area occupied for a couple hours, just when the hijacker was supposed to be making his escape.

Because of the bad weather and uncertainty as to where to look, until flight information was fed into computers, the search was not begun on a full scale until Friday morning. 36 hours after the hijacking.

The search employed some 25 to 30 Clarke County and Cowlitz County sheriff's deputies, Woodland's police chief and FBI agents, plus several pilots flying planes and helicopters, and even two boats on Lake Merwin.

The lake is a manmade body of water stretching behind a dam on the Lewis River, which marks the division between very rugged country to the north and [more] gently rolling, partly cleared land to the south.

The search area encompassed about 150 square miles to the north and south of the Lewis, but computer data pinpointed the hijackers descent at two miles south of the Lewis. That would have put him some two miles north of the McClellan air strip.

Clarke County Sheriff Eugene Cotton, who displays on his office wall a diploma from the FBI Academy for law enforcement officers, said the north half of the search area was scanned only from the air.

If he landed in there, he's in trouble, said Cotton.

Only last Nov. 13, a 16-year-old boy became separated from his father when hunting in that area and has not been found.

Joe May, Woodland police chief and an ex-Navy divebomber pilot, flew a light plane over the rugged terrain and pointed out to a reporter some of the hazards: Steep cliffs, thick fir trees, mountain stream gurgling down a valley and 5,000-foot Davis peaks.

The area south of the Lewis is not so forbidding. It has many small farms on which the farmer raises [a few] chickens, cattle or sheep to supplement a job in town.