Looking for D.B.

Looking for D.B.

Bob grew up in Washington State, and like many people, was fascinated by the skyjacking of the man they came to call D. B. Cooper, which happened when he was in high school. D. B. Cooper had boarded a plane from Portland to Seattle before Thanksgiving of 1971, told a flight attendant he had a bomb, got $200,000 ransom, took the plane and four crew members back south toward Portland, and literally jumped off the plane into a dark and stormy night, presumably with the money, and with a parachute of questionable quality. He was wearing only a trenchcoat and loafers, and the night was cold; after many years of looking, the FBI assumed he was dead. But he was never found, and that made the image of D. B. Cooper grow in the eyes of the public.

Two pieces of physical evidence were found on the ground; a placard giving instructions how to lower the back stairs of a 727 was found east of a town called Castle Rock, in 1978; and a package of $5800 was found buried in a place called Tena’s Bar, on the banks of the Columbia River, near Vancouver, in 1980. Mountains of evidence were collected and analyzed by the FBI, and dozens of people became suspects, but they had no solid evidence that he’d lived or died; they could find nobody like him who had disappeared on that Thanksgiving weekend.

Most people were obsessed with the general question of who D. B. Cooper really was; he clearly wasn’t D. B. Cooper, or Dan Cooper, as he’d told the airline when he bought the ticket. Bob, however, was more obsessed with what landed from the plane. He lived in Vancouver, Washington, and it wasn’t hard for him to go out looking in the rugged terrain of that part of the state; ge went for a few hikes up in the mountains and soon became eager for more. He had a friend, Gwen, who was also interested in the case of D. B.; they knew each other from high school. Though their personal and professional lives took them in different directions, as friends, they would see each other occasionally, and talk about D. B. Gwen frequently knew more of the FBI’s developments, since she was a forensic scientist and knew people in that field. Bob, however, got more into hiking and the terrain, as the years went by.

Like most people, and the FBI, Bob started his hunt near the town of Ariel, near Lake Merwin, and this didn’t change when the airline placard was found. But when the money was found, it seemed more like it had come down the Columbia River, and therefore it made more sense to check in the Washougal River valley, a little further east. Bob started out looking in public lands, wherever there were forests, and trails, and preferred the places that were less travelled. Soon, he became better at hiking; he got camping equipment; he gave himself more time.

Eventually, it occurred to him that he should use his education to figure out a little more about what had fallen from the plane. What possible flight path could a placard have? Three packets of twenty dollar bills? As the eighties went on, he studied vectors, and gravity, and wind conditions, and everything that could have influenced the falling of either the money packets or the placard. From their location, and from what he knew about the plane’s altitude, and speed, and wind conditions, he tried to determine what would be the best place to look.

There was no shortage of people, besides Gwen, who were willing to speculate and trade information about what had happened. The town of Ariel held D. B. Cooper Days, on a single day, once a year, and once Bob stumbled into it. But he came to dislike talking about it; he preferred hiking, alone, and thinking about various possibilities. When he talked to people, he found himself angry, either because they knew more than he did, or because they thought they knew more, or simply talked too much about it. He didn’t like talking about it, but he came to love the search itself. He maintained his friendship with Gwen, though, because they had actually been friends before the D. B. incident even happened. Somehow it was easy to talk to her, though she was a scientist, so different from him. And she kept up with his search; she knew what he was after.

The thing about the money was, there were really three batches. There was the $5800 that was found, in as bad condition it was in, buried at Tena’s Bar. But it had $200, all in twenties, pulled out of it, and none of that $200 was ever found. And the ransom that it was pulled out of, $194, 000, was never found either. Bob spent considerable time obsessing about what could have happened to either batch, or even, how the first batch could have ended up at Tena’s Bar, where a dredging of the river had probably buried it, by most accounts. He obsessed about the money because, unlike others, he didn’t care who D. B. Cooper actually was; also, he figured if he found the money, he would be likely to find the man himself, or the ruins of him, and he had to prepare himself mentally for that. He spent his weekends hiking in the most likely places. He did a consistent search of rugged mountain terrain that lasted much of his adult life, almost forty years.

He reasoned that the $5800 set of three packets which was found at Tena’s Bar had actually fallen into the Washougal River or the Columbia River watershed somewhere just on the other side of Vancouver, so during the eighties and nineties, he spent much of his time up the Washougal, on paths that led into the forested Cascades. He became very familiar with the Washougal River Road, and places like Prospector’s Creek, Meander Creek, the Silver Star Scenic Area, and the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. He started out on the marked trails, reasoning that anyone who was walking out of the forest would end up on these trails anyway, but he also took every chance he could to explore, off the marked paths, sometimes in a limited way, since he always had to worry about never getting lost. Altogether he spent many weekends in the woods, camping, taking pre-cooked meals and setting up a tent in little glades along the path. He enjoyed being alone. He thought of all the possibilities: where D. B. could have landed; under what scenarios he could have lived; what he could have done with the money if, after forty years, none outside of the Tena Bar packets had ever been found.

Meanwhile the rest of the public kept up its search as well, although people were mostly fascinated with who D. B. Cooper could have been. By 2009 there was an independent group working with new technology to analyze old evidence; the FBI had given up on the case, but they were more than willing to share what they knew. Speculation focused on a tie D. B. Cooper had allegedly left behind on the plane; traces of metal were found on the tie that suggested he worked for Boeing or perhaps another manufacturing plant. The group was called the Cooper Research Team, and Bob, now quite a bit older, knew a few of the members; Gwen knew even more of them, and was either on the team, or very close to it. He was still hiking, almost forty years after he had started, up in the Washougal Basin, regularly. He still disliked talking about it, but kept up on developments the best he could from what they published, what they said, and what appeared on the news. There was great excitement anytime anything new was found; in fact, when the case appeared on television on the news, in any bar or restaurant in the area, people would perk up and listen. Bob was like everyone else in that regard. Unlike everyone else, though, he was very familiar with the terrain where D. B. had probably jumped. He knew wide swaths of that forest.

Oddly, money with the serial numbers of the ransom money had never appeared anywhere except Tena’s Bar. If D. B. had given $200 to the five people who had flown him over the Cascades, none of it ever appeared. If he had landed and walked out of the forest, as far as anyone could tell, he hadn’t spent a single bill of the ransom. The serial numbers were well-known, and published; people had been watching for them for forty years now. Not a single genuine one had been found, outside of the packets at Tena’s Bar.

But one day Bob, coming back from a two-day hike up near Mt. St. Helens, stopped in the town of Washougal to eat a lunch he had packed, at a place called Sandy Swimming Hole. It was a summer day, late in the afternoon, but Bob didn’t feel like swimming, since he needed to get home that evening. After he ate he took a walk down by the river, which he often did, but this time he found a scrap of a bill, a twenty, in the weeds by the river. It was worn, and it was just a piece; it didn’t have a serial number, but he knew it was a twenty, because he could see a piece of the word “twenty” that was written on it. It was well worn by time; it was now what, forty years since D. B. had dropped his money from the sky. Bob was certain that this was one of D. B.’s bills.

It occurred to him that he should turn in this piece, as a third piece of evidence, and that this piece was important, as it could prove what Bob and others had suspected all along, that the answer was in the Washougal River Valley, as opposed to up near Ariel, or Castle Rock, or perhaps across the Columbia, as others had speculated. Yet, in a way, he knew it didn’t prove a thing for sure. And it was now covered with his own fingerprints, making any DNA work harder to do, and ensuring Bob would be dragged in somewhere for questioning.

He happened to see Gwen at a local diner and sat down with her for a while to talk about recent developments. She had been drawn into the Cooper Research Team, partly because of her knowledge of hard metals and forensic evidence that was commonly found on things like ties. She was eager to tell how this had led to their mapping every place that could have had titanium and other such metals, at that time, in the 1970’s, when D. B. would have gone to these plants. Their search had inevitably led them to the Boeing complex, where they were aware there had been a huge layoff just before Thanksgiving of 1971. Still, at this point, they weren’t able to pin it down.

Bob watched Gwen, in the diner, silently trying to decide whether to tell her about his find. She, too, would know how to get DNA evidence off the bill; she would also probably be aware of other clues they could find from the frayed nature of the bill. Something held him back, though. She was an old friend of his, and he trusted her. But he was alienated from the process she was going through: finding the traces of minerals, tracking down the identity. He didn’t care about the identity. And, what he had found was so small, he told himself, it was probably only significant to him. He didn’t want to give it up.

In the end, he kept the piece of the bill, and never told anyone about it. He kept it as a souvenir, well preserved, as a memento of the many years he’d spent in the woods. He was already getting older, more tired; it was harder for him to walk fifteen, twenty miles a day on weekends, and he was beginning to let go of it. But, having found one piece of one bill, he at least felt vindicated. He had a role that very few people had; he’d uncovered real physical evidence. But its secrets would die with him; he decided not to share what he knew. Like other evidence that had been uncovered, this piece created more questions anyway, questions for which there really were still no answers. And it raised another question in his mind: were there people like him, out there, who knew things, but simply wouldn’t tell? He was sure there had to be. But he now felt like a member of a privileged club, and he intended to guard his own secret, however insignificant. He never told a soul what he’d found.

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