Part 79, page 11

Transcript

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

who found the money, Tosaw said he made a further important discovery.

"The packets were still in a clump, pressed together, not scattered, not really covered. They hadn't come far enough even to separate," he said. "That makes the eddy just above the beach the prime search area."

On Nov. 23, eve of the hijacking anniversary, Tosaw will put a team of divers into the river.

On Nov. 29, the Saturday after Thanksgiving, as is traditional, the annual D.B. Cooper Party will be held at Ariel, Wash., a hamlet in a logging and vacation area north of the site Tosaw will search. One the-… ory, of many, is that Cooper landed near Ariel.

Richard Purdy, 39, owns the Ariel store and bar where the parties are held. Purdy, a musician, wrote "The Ballad of D.B. Cooper" and has attended and played at most of the parties. He bought the bar this year.

If Tosaw finds Cooper, this will be the last party, Purdy said.

"I decided we'd keep it going until somebody found him, dead or alive. If he's dead, we'll hold a wake and bury the party with him."

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The man who bought a ticket from Portland to Seattle used a name only once. "Dan Cooper," he replied when the ticket agent asked. That night a reporter's mistake transformed it to D.B. Cooper and nobody would ever accept anything else, not even after the original remark became public. So D.B. Cooper, who wasn't, really isn't. Or however you want to put it.

He was middle-aged, said the young flight attendants — called stewardesses then. Medium everything. Unremarkable in every way. He walked aboard. There were no X-ray machines and luggage searches were rare. He sat in the middle of the last row and just before take-off handed attendant Florence Schaffner an envelope.

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She thought he was making a pass at her. She was annoyed but stuck it in her pocket. Cooper rose from his seat.

"You'd better read that note," he said.

She did. "I have a bomb in my briefcase . . . "

For the record, the plane was a Boeing 727-100, the flight had originated in Washington, D.C., but a new crew had come aboard at Minneapolis-St. Paul International: Commander William A. Scott, co-pilot William J. Rataczak, second officer Harold E. Anderson, attendants Alice Hancock, Schaffner and Tina Mucklow. At Northwest headquarters in Minnesota, Paul Soderlind became closely involved, talking with the crew throughout the flight, offering advice and direction, plotting a course and eventually outlining the area in which the search should be concentrated.

Cooper showed Schaffner the bomb, red sticks like road flares (or dynamite) wired to a battery. He picked up a second wire, " . . . all I've got to do is touch the end of this wire to the terminal . . . "

Schaffner carried Cooper's demands to the cockpit and spent most of the time there until she was released. He had Mucklow sit beside him.

"Tina was the only one to really see Cooper," Tosaw said. "I was able to talk with her by telephone with permission of her mother superior."

Mucklow is a nun now, a member of a cloistered order in Oregon. "She's very happy in her life," a friend said. The other two women are homemakers now, Tosaw said. Scott still flies for Northwest, and Soderlind retired and lives in Montana.

Cooper was polite but occasionally

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impatient, Mucklow said. What surprised her and what investigators considered a prime clue was his knowledge of the aircraft, of the Seattle area, of airport procedure. He knew the crew's terminology for equipment, how long it should take to refuel, how long to bring parachutes from McChord Air Force Base, that the rear staircase would lower in flight far enough to allow a jumper to clear the plane. Finally, when he had collected chutes and ransom, he told the pilot to take off, fly at 10,000 feet with landing gear down and to lower the flaps 15 degrees. Flaps govern speed and settings vary for various planes.

"He knew that plane intimately . . . and he planned to jump right away," Tosaw said. "Tina said he put the chute on as if he'd done it every day. He just had a little trouble getting the stairs down. He went farther than he planned. He had no idea where he was when he jumped."

Cooper had four parachutes brought to the plane. He cut cords from one of them to lash the money bag into a bundle and to tie it to his waist. Not long after take-off he sent Mucklow to the first-class compartment and told her to draw the curtains. At 8:13 p.m. crew members felt a sudden brief pressure in their ears. That, they decided, was when Cooper jumped. They took no chances, however, and flew on to Reno, Nev., where Cooper had said they could refuel.

The dangling stairs scraped the runway as Flight 305 landed. Sparks flew up.

It was eight years before anyone found any hard evidence to indicate what had become of Cooper.

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Ariel is the sort of place you fall in

Batson continued on page 15A

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DB Cooper-34303