Part 62, page 214

Transcript

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

Eleven days after the Cooper hijacking, Coffelt [guess: began] a job as a surgical technician at [a] [guess: northern] Virginia hospital. His superior there, a woman, told sources that Coffelt had difficulty walking and at one point showed her his "badly discolored legs" — injuries which some believe he sustained in the parachute jump. He worked at the hospital through most of 1972, then in June of 1973 he contacted his old cell mate, James Brown, for the first time in years.

A year later, in May 1974, Coffelt told Brown for the first time that he was D.B. Cooper and disclosed some details of the crime that, if true, presumably only the hijacker could have known. For example, according to Brown, Coffelt described changing into boots before jumping and boasted of flirting with one of the stewardesses. Coffelt also said that he dropped the $200,000 ransom during the parachute jump and had never recovered it.

Coffelt told Brown that he wanted to go back into the Cascades and look for the small fortune, but he needed help. Brown agreed to accompany him, and in July of that year, the two men and Brown's muscular, [guess: 6]-foot-plus, 17-year-old son, Byron, made a weeklong trek into the mountains.

According to Brown, Coffelt was then so ill that at one point he nearly collapsed on a steep grade. However, after a week in which they made themselves as inconspicuous as possible, they found no money and quit.

Still, to this day, James Brown remains unshaken in his conviction that his old cell mate was D.B. Cooper.

After the Cascades trip, Coffelt moved to Hawaii and died there in June 1975. Brown, who did not learn about Coffelt's death for more than a year, had written down everything Coffelt told him, and began writing a book manuscript. But he knew he needed help, preferably from a promoter familiar with Hollywood wheeling and dealing.

Brown found free-lance producer Dirk Summers, who was in Las Vegas while producing a Ken Norton heavyweight title fight for CBS Sports.

Summers said in an interview that he subsequently had Brown and his son take lie-detector tests concerning the five weeks they spent with Coffelt. "They passed with flying colors," Summers said. "But all that meant was that Brown believed Coffelt's story. I kept thinking, if this story is true, it's the story of the century."

Summers began his own investigation, and he and Brown organized an expedition into the Cascades in 1977, back to where Coffelt had taken Brown three years earlier. This time, thanks to a metal detector and energetic digging, the search party unearthed a solid piece of physical evidence: a 1½-inch piece of cording that [guess: appeared] to be synthetic nylon of the type used in parachute shrouding — and it was 5 to 7 years old.

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"It's a strong piece of circumstantial evidence," said Summers. "We had a lab report confirming that (the) cording ... was from a parachute and several years old. No one has ever asked me, but I'll be happy to take a lie-detector test about where we found it, and how we dug it up. We were very careful uncovering it. I took soil samples which I turned over to the lab so I would know something hadn't just been buried there."

"The area where we found this was very primitive, remote wilderness," Summers explained. "This was Big Foot country. We had to lower ourselves down a cliff to get to the site. There was a dead tree that Jack (told Brown) said he hit. And this enormous, two-story high rock with markings on it. "Xs" and "Os" that Coffelt said he had scratched into the rock the night he landed there. That was where we dug. You could even see the narrow trenches, where his feet had hit the ground."

Summers became a believer in the story, and he, too, is still convinced that Jack Coffelt was D.B. Cooper.

In addition, Summers believes that the FBI has gone to great lengths to cover up and otherwise derail the case.

Summers added he suspects that the FBI may have known all along that Coffelt was the hijacker, but didn't go after him because they knew he had stories to tell about his earlier cooperation with the agency.

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DB Cooper-25921