Part 79, page 12

Transcript

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

Batson Continued from page 14A

love with, Steve Jolly said, and work and scheme to find a way to stay. It's on the North Lewis River, in the Cascade Mountains, about 30 miles west of Mount St. Helens.

Richard Purdy's store and bar and a few houses hidden under gigantic evergreens is all there is to Ariel. When Cooper jumped, "I had a band, Cabin Fever, and I got caught up in the interest and wrote the song (The Ballad of D.B. Cooper). I bought this place in February from Vince and Germaine Tricola."

Airline calculations put Ariel and the lake behind nearby Merwin Dam in the center of the area where Cooper jumped. The FBI came, the Army came, private citizens came, said Germaine Tricola, who lives in nearby Woodland.

"The woods got so crowded for a while that a couple of people had to hide their stills. That was funny."

Tricola is a native of Hugo, Minn., and has relatives "there, in Edina, in St. Paul, half the state." In 1971 her husband worked for Boeing in Seattle while she ran the store. In 1976 she gave the first D.B. Cooper party.

"It was slow and dull and boring after Labor Day. Toilet-Seat Dave was there one day and I told him I'd just as well close. We got to thinking about how to liven things up. You have to make your own fun up here."

Everybody up and down the river calls him Toilet-Seat Dave. Several couldn't think of his last name. "He makes clear epoxy toilet seats with coins or whatever you want in them," Purdy said. "I guess that's how he got the name." No, said Tricola. "He worked for a plumbing supply company in Portland."

Anyway, his last name is Butterfield.

"It was just an excuse for a local party," Butterfield said. "But the television and all the media picked up on it. Germaine started getting calls from all over. People came from up and down the coast."

This will be the 11th party. If it's like the others, upwards of 500 people will drift in and out. Most likely the FBI will be represented. The Cooper file is still open. People eat and drink, sing and dance, trot out their theories.

Sid Tipper comes to the party once in a while. Tipper, 87, born in England, came to Vancouver in 1923. He was fishing on the beach the day the boy found part of Cooper's loot. He was fishing the day the FBI moved in

---

to search. Unless it's Christmas and he is playing Santa at a local store, he'll be fishing there when Tosaw puts his divers in.

"I think Cooper's caught up in one of those creeks (along the Columbia)," Tipper said. "High water lifted that money out. It was one of the highest stages in years."

Many prefer to think otherwise.

"Personally," a man at the bar said, "I think he made it."

■

They wrote a song, they made a movie with Treat Williams as Cooper and Robert Duval as his nemesis. A person who claimed to know Cooper

the time and the money, so I decided to investigate."

Tosaw, 61, spent five years with the FBI before going into practice at Modesto and suburban Ceres, Calif. Investments in real estate left him comfortably fixed, he said. He still maintains two offices from which he operates the Bureau of Missing Heirs, which he started a year or so ago.

The bureau searches for heirs that the state of California can't locate. Tosaw writes the heirs, presents their claims in court, does the legal work, and collects a third as commission. Back to Cooper. Tosaw said that the accounts he found were inadequate. So he set out to trace the whole event for himself, "step-by-step, seeing everybody." He wrote and published a book himself, "D.B. Cooper, Dead or Alive?" more as an

---

got together with a writer and a book came out of that. S[illegible]ody wrote a letter to the New Yo[illegible] Times describing Cooper's motives and Minneapolis playwright John Orlock wrote a play about that.

"One of the great acts of imagination of our time," Orlock said of Cooper's feat.

"A stupid, desperate rascal who endangered many lives," said retired FBI agent Ralph Himmelsbach, who spent eight years on the case.

Tosaw came in late. He read a newspaper account on the tenth anniversary of the jump and it intrigued him.

"I couldn't believe that in 20th Century America a man could jump out of a plane and disappear. I'd just retired from my law practice, I had

aid to the search than for hope of profit. In it he listed the serial numbers of the bills Cooper got and offered a reward for one of them. They were from a Seattle bank's ransom fund (since discontinued) and had been microfilmed.

"I suppose I've spent, conservatively, $100,000 on the Cooper search," Tosaw said. "I spent at least six months up there, not all at once but on many trips. There was the book. I hired two secretaries ... No, I can't make any money on this. But I'd like to finish the job."

It's fun, he said, not an obsession. "It would be if I were depriving anyone, but I have no family." And he is stimulated by the keen interest of others. "If the boy hadn't found that money, I'd be prepared to believe almost any story," Tosaw said. "But once he found it, that should have

---

Minneapolis Star and Tribune Sun., Sept. 12, 1986 . 15A

foreclosed every other theory. There is no way the money, pressed together with rubber bands around the packets, could have ridden the current, been washed for miles, been dredged up or even carried and dropped there."

Last year Tosaw had two divers search the eddy just above the beach. This time, he said he will have 10 divers, cover a great deal more area, and bring Cooper up.

"People don't want me to find him. They don't want to hear that D.B. Cooper failed."

---

DB Cooper-34304