The Legend of a Jet Age Jesse James

Music thumps. Boots stomp. Smoke swirls.

It rises like a dry mist from red-glowing cigarettes. It ebbs around an elk’s skull, five-point antlers still attached, and a muzzle loader hanging on the wall.

A potbellied stove washes its warmth over strutting men, women and children. A skinned-out bobcat dangles from the ceiling. A two-man chain saw with a 12-horsepower engine roosts on a canopy over the bar. A sign says: “This Business is Supported by Timber Dollars.”

Tab tops pop. Bartenders slide Budweiser and Rainier and Miller and Coors across the varnished bar top, 3,120 cans and bottles in all. On a wall nearby, these people have tacked up $40. The money is waiting for D.B. Cooper. If he ever shows up, they would like to buy him a drink.

All of this is in his honor. For 11 hours, a guitar and a bass and a mandolin and a sax and a dobro and an accordion and some drums do not stop, and neither does the dancing nor the singing nor the drinking nor the joking. One husky man lifts his redheaded lady high in the air, puts her feet gently back on the floor and gives her a big kiss.

Maybe that is him. Or maybe that is her. The thought stops conversation cold. If D.B. Cooper were a woman, would she be a redhead? “Nah,” shouts Bill Partee, over the pounding of the band. He is 64 and has lived here a dozen years. He has a full, white Old Testament beard, and he wears a cap that says: Ariel Store, Home of D.B. Cooper Days. “She had dark hair when she did this thing, but by now she’s a blond.”

What D.B. Cooper did was hijack a plane. It had just taken off from Portland, Ore. At Seattle, he forced airline officials to bring him four parachutes and $200,000 in $20 bills. In the air again, somewhere around here, high over the cedars and the firs and the hemlocks that cover the Cascade Mountains, he strapped on two of the parachutes, and he jumped out. He disappeared. Vanished. No ripped rigging. No bones. Nothing.

That was 25 years ago on Thanksgiving eve. People have found only two things in the wilderness to show that this hijacking ever happened: a placard that blew off the back door of the plane when he opened it, and money--a few bundles of $20 bills with serial numbers that match the loot. These prove that he died, some say. Others say no, he simply dropped some of the dough. Too bad, they add, not unkindly.

To many, D.B. Cooper is a folk hero. Nobody else in America has ever hijacked a commercial airliner for money and never been caught. He has become a legend, a new Jesse James, Butch Cassidy, Billy the Kid. Books have been written about him, a play staged, a movie filmed. He is the inspiration for ballads and bumper stickers and T-shirts and coffee mugs. Saloons across the country adopt his name and invite people to “drop in on us sometime.”

Every year, on the weekend after Thanksgiving, his fans gather here at the Ariel Store and Tavern, in this mountain town of 50 people, 35 miles north of the Oregon state line. This year they are 500 strong, and they come from as far away as Brooklyn, N.Y., and Birmingham, Ala., and even Seward, Alaska. Their appraisals of D.B. Cooper and what he did offer a case study in how Americans create mythic figures and the ways in which they worship them.

Some stand and read the walls in the southeast corner of the bar, which are covered with newspaper accounts of D.B. Cooper’s exploit. They scrawl their names on a white parachute canopy spread across the front porch. They eat D.B. Cooper stew and D.B. Cooper sausages. They shake their heads at a photograph of a headstone someone put up in a front yard across the Lewis River. “Here Lies D.B. Cooper,” it says. “We spent your money wisely.”

The headstone, regardless of its attempt at humor, runs contrary to an article of faith: that D.B. Cooper is very much alive and enjoying a modest and well-deserved decadence. To his fans, the headstone shows an impertinence that borders on the unseemly. They are relieved to learn that the stone and an oval of smaller rocks outlining a faux grave were judged in bad taste and that the attempted humorist finally removed them.

Mostly, though, they party. For much of Saturday and often into Sunday they holler and dance and set off roaring fireworks. Each explosion sends clouds of white smoke billowing into a light rain and then up through the trees. They draw for prizes, mainly D.B. Cooper T-shirts, and they stage a D.B. Cooper look-alike contest. One year the winner was a basset hound in D.B. Cooper’s trademark disguise: sunglasses.

This year the contest is hard-fought. Dona Elliott, 59, owns this combination country store and saloon, built in 1929 of clapboard and shingles, uphill from the river and hard by a narrow woodland road. She holds one hand over a young man, then an older man, both in sunglasses; then a man with a $20 bill pasted on his forehead; then a couple wearing torn clothes and parachute rigging with fir twigs snagged in the straps.

By hooting and yelling and applauding, the crowd decides. Jim Rainbow, 48, a Susanville, Calif., mortician, tangled in the rigging and the twigs, is here with his wife for their 10th anniversary. He runs second. The older man in sunglasses, Eldon Heller, 70, a retired contractor from Washougal, Wash., wins by a hair. He thinks for a minute about D.B. Cooper’s current age and then smiles. “I’m just about right, huh?”

The crowd cheers again, and the band, called the Enlightened Rogues, swings through another verse about “good women who drink with the boys.” Dona Elliott is short, soft-spoken and has wavy brown hair, but she has been known to throw unruly drunks out the front door bodily and by herself. She pronounces the event a good one.

She knows that celebrating D.B. Cooper angers pilots, the airlines and especially Ralph Himmelsbach, 71, a retired FBI agent who spent the last eight years of his career trying to find him. He has written the most authoritative book about the hijacking, called “NORJAK: the Investigation of D.B. Cooper.”

Himmelsbach, who code-named the case NORJAK when he was still with the agency, spends D.B. Cooper Day at his home in Redmond, Ore. To him, Cooper is “a bastard,” nothing more than a “sleazy, rotten criminal who jeopardized the lives of more than 40 people for money.”

“That’s not heroic,” he declares, and he means it. “It’s selfish, dangerous and antisocial. I have no admiration for him at all. He’s not at all admirable. He’s just stupid and greedy.”

Elliott understands. She knows why people on the hijacked plane, for instance, might not appreciate what goes on here. But she wishes that Himmelsbach would come up anyway.

Himmelsbach, for his part, says: “I know I wouldn’t be welcome there.”

“Oh, sure he would!” Elliott responds. She chuckles. “He’s chicken.”

Thanksgiving Eve 1971

As people here tell and retell the tale of D.B. Cooper and his feat, they praise Himmelsbach’s book as the most thorough.

Folklore has entwined itself around the story like heavy brush. But from Himmelsbach’s account and news reports at the time, this much can be said:

Shortly before 2 p.m. on Nov. 24, 1971, a man stepped out of a blowing rain at the airport in Portland, Ore., and walked to the Northwest Orient Airlines ticket counter. He asked for a seat on the next flight to Seattle.

The man was middle-aged, pleasant. He stood nearly 6 feet tall. He had olive skin, dark brown eyes and dark hair. It was cut short, neatly trimmed. He wore a lightweight black raincoat and loafers, a dark business suit, a crisp white shirt, a narrow black tie and a pearl stick-pin.

He had no luggage to check. In his left hand, he carried an attache case.

Returning?

“No,” the man replied.

His name?

“Dan Cooper.”

The fare was $20. He placed a $20 bill on the counter.

Ticket in hand, he walked to Gate 52, unhindered at the time by X-ray machines or metal detectors. As he walked, he slipped on a pair of dark glasses.

Departure was scheduled for 2:50 p.m. He waited and smoked a cigarette, a filter-tip Raleigh. Finally a gate agent called Flight 305 for Seattle. Dan Cooper shuffled into line. He handed his ticket envelope to the agent, who took it and checked off his name on a boarding list, then handed back the envelope and his boarding pass.

Cooper stepped onto the plane. It was a jet, a Boeing 727. It had a pilot, a co-pilot and a flight engineer. It had three flight attendants, and it offered nearly 100 seats. But it was less than half full. Besides himself, there were only 36 passengers. He walked to an empty row in back and sat in seat 18C. But he did not take off his sunglasses or his raincoat.

The plane began to taxi. A flight attendant, Florence Schaffner, took a seat nearby. She asked him to put his attache case beneath the seat in front of him.

She settled in for the roll-out and climb.

He handed her a note.

It was Thanksgiving, and he was away from home, and she was attractive. She thought that he was proposing something indiscreet. So she paid no attention and put the note aside.

“Miss,” he said, “you’d better look at that note.”

He paused. “I have a bomb.”

To Jim Lissick, 69, of South St. Paul, Minn., who is here at the Ariel Store and Tavern to celebrate with a son and a daughter, such good manners are a sign that Cooper is a gentleman. “He was a caring person,” Lissick says, then catches himself. “Still is.”

Certainly, Lissick says, people such as D.B. Cooper can be tough and extremely demanding. But history, he says, is full of hard cases who were unfailingly polite to women and always kind to children. All of this, he adds, simply becomes part of the mythology that grows up around them.

Mike Holliday, 40, agrees. He has lived in this area since the days when loggers came to the Ariel Store and Tavern after work, hung up their wet clothes to dry and sat around the potbellied stove in their long johns drinking beer and telling stories.

To him, D.B. Cooper shows the unflappable cool of a modern Robin Hood. “But I doubt like hell that he is the kind of guy who gives money away.”

3 p.m.

Florence Schaffner glanced at the man’s note. It was neat, clear. She looked at the man’s face. He was not joking.

The note specified his demands. Take it up to the captain, he ordered, and then bring it back with his response. The man repeated: Return the note.

She hurried to the cockpit and gave the note to Captain William Scott and First Officer Bill Rataczak. They radioed that Flight 305 was being hijacked: A man with a bomb wants $200,000 in negotiable bills, a money sack and a pair of back-pack parachutes.

Schaffner returned to Dan Cooper with his note. He opened his attache case. She saw red cylinders, a battery and wires. She hurried back to the cockpit and described the contents to Scott and Rataczak. They radioed authorities on the ground: It looks like dynamite.

Cooperate, responded Northwest Airlines headquarters in Minneapolis, and try not to alarm the passengers. By now Flight 305 was over Seattle, but Cooper refused to let it land until the money and the parachutes were ready. Scott told the passengers that the plane had a mechanical problem requiring it to circle and burn off fuel. The flight attendants served drinks. Cooper had a bourbon and water. He paid with a $20 bill.

Tina Mucklow, another of the flight attendants, sat down next to him. She was easygoing, pretty and wore her hair long and flowing. They developed a rapport. He smoked another Raleigh. She lit it for him so he could keep both hands on his briefcase. “He wasn’t nervous,” she recalled later. “He seemed rather nice. He was never cruel or nasty. He was thoughtful and calm.”

Now Cooper wanted two more parachutes, for a total of four--two front packs and two backpacks. Four meant that he might jump with a hostage, and this signaled: Do not tamper with the gear. The Air Force offered two. But Cooper demanded civilian models. Civilian parachutes meant that he might free-fall away from the flight path before pulling the rip cord, and this signaled: A tail plane will be useless.

As Flight 305 circled over Seattle, airline officials, FBI agents and Seattle police scrambled to get the money that Dan Cooper was demanding. They rounded up $20 bills from several banks. Twenties would be easy to pass and would signal cooperation. It took time, but they found enough--10,000 of them. The bills weighed 21 pounds and filled a white cotton sack. The FBI microfilmed every one.

Cooper grew impatient. He ordered another bourbon and water. Then he demanded that a truck meet the plane and refill it with fuel when it landed in Seattle. He said he would release all passengers, but he wanted meals brought on board for the crew.

A skydiving school finally came up with four civilian parachutes. In a mistake that the rigger would not discover until later, they included a dummy chute that would not open.

At 5:39 p.m., a message went by radio up to Flight 305. “Everything is ready for your arrival.”

Captain Scott eased the jet onto runway 16R. He taxied to a corner of the airfield. “He says to get that stuff out here right now.”

A fuel truck drove over.

Dan Cooper sent Tina Mucklow out to get the money and the parachutes.

Then he let the passengers go.

It is commonly held in Ariel that all of this demonstrates beyond the silly doubt of any pinch-nosed naysayer exactly how brilliant D.B. Cooper really is.

“He pulls it all off pretty good,” says Steve Forney, 40, of Kelso, Wash., a biker who parks his 1979 Harley shovelhead in a special spot at the door that Dona Elliott reserves for motorcycles.

A friend, Jim Smith, 49, of Castle Rock, Wash., who pulls up on a 1987 Harley blockhead, wipes the rain off his leather jacket. He declares with approval:

“D.B. Cooper is one smart outlaw.”

6 p.m.

Arguably, ground crews were less smart. The first fuel truck they sent out to the plane had a vapor lock. The second ran dry. Finally a third topped off the tanks.

Inside the plane, Cooper announced that he wanted to go to Mexico City, and he wanted to fly in a certain way: with the landing gear down, the wing flaps down and the aft air-stairs down.

Flaps?

“Fifteen degrees,” Cooper said, with precision.

This meant that he knew the rear stairway on a 727 could be lowered in flight. It also meant that he knew flying with the gear and the flaps down would slow the plane, and he knew how far the flaps could be lowered to do it safely.

He gave another order: Stay below 10,000 feet.

This meant that he knew flying any higher with the aft door open would be risky. At 10,000 feet, the outside air had enough oxygen in it to make it safe to breathe. But any higher it did not.

First Officer Bill Rataczak figured that flying this way would burn a lot of fuel. By his calculation the plane would have a range of only 1,000 miles. Mexico City was 2,200 miles away.

This called for refueling stops on the way. Cooper agreed that one would be Reno, Nev.

He freed attendants Alice Hancock and Florence Schaffner but kept Tina Mucklow seated next to him. At 7:37 p.m., Flight 305 was back in the air.

Cooper told Mucklow to go up to the cockpit and pull the first-class curtain closed behind her. She glanced back once. He was cutting cord from one of the parachutes and tying the money bag to his waist.

At 7:42 p.m. Captain Scott saw a cockpit light indicating that the aft stairs were down.

The plane leveled off at 10,000 feet and cruised at 196 mph. Outside it was dark, stormy and 7 degrees below zero. Now First Officer Rataczak’s watch showed almost 8 p.m.

“Everything OK back there?” he asked on the intercom. “Anything we can do for you?”

Finally a light showed that the stairs were fully extended.

“No!” Cooper replied.

At 8:12 p.m., the nose of the plane curtsied, and its instruments showed a small bump in cabin pressure. This meant that the tail had suddenly gotten lighter and that the stairs had bounced up and into the plane and then dropped down again.

Dan Cooper had jumped.

Around the potbellied stove in Ariel, two airline employees marvel at D.B. Cooper’s knowledge.

Phil Brooks, 34, of Speedway, Ind., an aircraft dispatcher, thinks that Cooper either was involved with an airline or did his homework very well.

“He was intelligent and gutsy,” Brooks says. “That tells me he had a good background, maybe Special Forces or intelligence. He didn’t work down at the carwash. And he was a major stud; he had the guts to jump out of an airplane at night in the winter.”

Brooks proudly shows off a Cooper Vane, a device named after D.B. Cooper, which locks aft air-stairs from the outside during flight. It was installed on all 727s after the hijacking to prevent further Cooper capers. Years later, Brooks found the hijacked jet in a Mississippi scrap yard. He recovered the Cooper Vane from the Cooper plane.

With Brooks is Dan Gradwohl, 30, a first officer on 727s for Ryan International Airlines, a charter service. “Cooper knew something about the 727,” Gradwohl says, “or he had to have talked to somebody and learned about it.

“He beat the system,” Gradwohl points out, and spectacularly so. “If D.B. Cooper would have simply robbed a bank, he wouldn’t be a legend.

“But he robbed several banks, and then he parachuted out of a plane.”

When Flight 305 landed in Reno, the FBI found two parachutes, the butts of eight filter-tip Raleighs and 66 fingerprints. None matched prints in the FBI files.

The next day in Seattle, the parachute rigger realized his mistake. Cooper had jumped with a good parachute and a backup that would not open.

At one point, a reporter for United Press International spotted FBI agents at the Portland police station and asked a clerk what they were doing.

“They’re looking for a guy named Cooper,” the clerk replied. “D.B. Cooper.”

The reporter phoned in his information. While it was a fact that agents were checking out a man named D.B. Cooper, they cleared him almost immediately.

But the initials stuck.

Dan Cooper entered history--and folklore--with the wrong name.

The only significant evidence that Ralph Himmelsbach ever processed was the $5,800, found on a Columbia River sandbar by Brian Ingram, 8, of Vancouver, Wash., while he was picnicking with his family. Himmelsbach matched the $20 bills to Cooper’s loot.

Will D.B. Cooper ever be located?

“I doubt it,” Himmelsbach says.

Officially, though, the FBI case against Dan Cooper is not closed. Ray Lauer, an agency spokesman in Seattle, says:

“We’re still trying to find the guy.”

Researchers Paul Singleton, Julia Franco and Steve Tice contributed to this story.