Part 77, page 393

Transcript

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

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

---

'71 'Gold Rush' on for Hijack Loot

WOODLAND, Wash. (UPI) — A parade of autos, pickup trucks and motorcycles wound through the rolling foothills of the Cascade Mountains Friday, carrying peo- ple seeking a fortune that might never be found.

No one readily admitted he was looking for some or all of the $200,000 ransom a hijacker collected Thanksgiv- ing Eve before he bailed out somewhere between Seattle and Reno, Nev.

In fact, although the FBI was using the southwest Washington foothills as their operations base in searching for the hijacker, they were merely working on a hunch— no solid evidence — that he had bailed out in the area.

BUT THEY CAME anyway, 1971-style gold rushers tempted by the lure of easy money and undaunted by the long odds against their success.

In a gas station, three Portland area girls home from college for the Thanksgiving holidays admitted they en- tertained fantasies of finding the hijacker's loot.

One girl identified herself only as Anita. She and her two companions had driven to this area "just to have a look around."

"You start thinking about it," Anita said, "and you re- alize maybe he didn't live through the fall and there's $200,000 sitting all alone in the woods."

Would she turn it in? Anita smiled.

"IT WOULD BE tempting to keep it," she said, "even if they offered a reward for its return."

A young farmer in a battered pickup truck stopped at a combination gas station-general store at one of the many crossroads in the search area.

As he manned the gas pump himself, his two children smiled and waved from the cab of the pickup. At first his story was that he was "headed into battleground for a few things at the grocery store."

But as the conversation covered the hijacking and the unusually heavy traffic on the north Clark County roads,

---

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

1 St. Paul Dispatch — St. Paul, Minn.

Date: Nov. 27, 1971 Edition: Evening Author: Editor: H.G. Burnham Jr. Title:

Character: or Classification: Submitting Office: Minneapolis

☐ Being Investigated

---

[illegible] SEARCH SERIAL [illegible] [guess: 13] / 2 9 1971

b6 b7C

---

DB Cooper-33787