Back in 2001 ...
D.B. Cooper puzzle: The legend turns 30
If you believe a persuasive San Diego cabdriver, D.B. Cooper was a drifter and card player who died of a cocaine overdose in California 15 years after skyjacking a Northwest Airlines jet between Portland and Seattle.
If you believe an equally insistent Florida realtor, D.B. Cooper was her late husband, a chain-smoking ex-con who revealed his true identity to her six years ago as he lay dying of kidney disease in a Pensacola hospital.
And if you believe the FBI, the notorious skyjacker, after parachuting out of the plane at 10,000 feet with a 21-pound satchel of ransom money strapped to his chest, died in the jump. No matter that his body has never been found.
Three decades later, the only unsolved skyjacking in the country's history continues to fascinate mystery lovers, with many hoping the passenger known as D.B. Cooper — who physically hurt no one, except possibly himself — landed safely with the loot and got away"
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But the San Diego cabbie and the Florida realtor have no doubts. Not only are they certain Cooper survived the jump, they insist they know who he was.
The cabbie's tale
The two men were poker-playing buddies. Sitting in a bar one night in 1984, Rizzo said, he confided to Huddleston that he was a fugitive wanted by the FBI for counterfeiting.
Huddleston replied with his own confession: He had skyjacked an airplane in 1971.
Rizzo said he kept the secret until after Huddleston died in 1986 of an aneurysm brought on by a cocaine overdose at age 52. Rizzo told the FBI his tale. An autopsy of Huddleston revealed his legs were covered with scars, which Rizzo says were caused by the jump from the plane.
Rizzo said Huddleston gave him this account:
After plunging from the plane, he landed near a river, in a tree about 10 feet above the ground, where a sharp limb punctured his knee and ribs. The weather was so bad his shoes blew off, and ice and sleet coated his arms and back.
The strap that held the money tore, and that's how he lost the packet later found by the child on the riverbank. He crawled to a cave and later hitchhiked to Portland, where he spent months recuperating before eventually moving to San Diego.
He hid the money until 1978, when he took it to an Indian reservation in Montana to be laundered. When he returned to San Diego, he kept it stashed in the taillight of an old Cadillac.
Because he was constantly fearful of running into someone from the flight who would recognize him, he often changed his appearance, growing a beard and shaving his head, then growing a mustache and wearing a long ponytail.
Rizzo said Huddleston once said: "In the back of my mind, one day I'll be sitting on a bus, in a bar, and look into the face of the only person who could identify me. I'll see that stewardess. I know she will never forget my face."
Huddleston told Rizzo he'd bought the airline ticket under the name Don — his real middle name, not Dan — and was amused that the FBI went searching for a Dan Cooper.
"He was a James Dean type, a daredevil," Rizzo said. "This is not a story I could make up, but the FBI's never going to prove it."
The real-estate agent's tale
She claims she found the remote spot near Battle Ground, Clark County, where her husband, an insurance salesman and ex-con, took her in 1979. At the time, all he told her was that it was a sentimental journey for him.
It wasn't until 1995, when he was 70 and on his deathbed, that he whispered to her, "I'm Dan Cooper."
Jo Weber had no idea what he meant, and he angrily blurted, "Oh, let it die with me."
She has since uncovered a trail of stories, suppositions and what could just be coincidences. Among them:
Composite sketches of Cooper resemble her husband, who was a chain smoker. Because he'd served time for burglary and forgery on McNeil Island when it housed a federal penitentiary, he was familiar with the general area where Cooper is believed to have landed.
He sometimes talked in his sleep, drenched in sweat. "I left my fingerprints on the aft stairs," he mumbled. "I'm going to die."
When she asked him about it later, he was vague and evasive.
Jo Weber once found an old airline ticket from Portland to Seattle in a box of records. She came across it a second time when she was cleaning out clothes, but her husband said it didn't mean anything, and the ticket got lost again.
"I've offered to do anything I have to to prove I'm telling the truth," she said. "Now, I have to let God take care of the rest. I've given it five years of my life ... but I'm not going to use up the rest of my life trying to do the FBI's job for them."
Investigations 'just burn out'
The FBI has investigated a litany of stories like those from Rizzo and Weber but rejected them because there is simply no proof, Hope said. Except for the sodden bills along the Columbia, the forests have held Cooper's secret.
"Every so often one would come along, and I'd get the rush of adrenaline," said Himmelsbach, the retired FBI agent and author. "There's a guy in a bar with a bunch of $20 bills, he's limping on one leg and someone asks where he got the roll, and he says he might of hijacked an airplane. You track those things down, and they just burn out."
Another who discounts Weber's deathbed confession is Thomas, the retired Army infantryman who has spent the past three decades searching the thick forests of Southwest Washington for signs of Cooper.
"There's no way," said Thomas, 50, a survival expert. "... A lot of what (Jo Weber) is claiming came right out of a book."
Thomas pulls out a well-worn map and traces the forests around Washougal, Clark County. This, he believes, is where Cooper's remains rest.
But he is willing to entertain the notion that Cooper survived, so he walks the woods, sometimes with his grandchildren, searching for signs under branches and along creek banks.
"Unsolved cases really intrigue me. This is my life," Thomas said.
Some clues still kept secret
When Cooper commandeered the Northwest jet, skyjacking was hardly a novel crime. More than 25 were attempted in 1971 alone, but he alone did not get caught.
The following year, screening devices became mandatory in airports, and Himmelsbach said exit doors on airliners were modified with a device named the Cooper Vane so they could not be opened in midflight.
The FBI won't talk about suspects in an open case. But agents say they have kept some of their clues secret in hopes of someday solving the mystery. "There's stuff we know nobody else knows," Hope said.
The small town of Ariel, Cowlitz County, where some think Cooper landed, hosts an annual Cooper celebration; this year there will be no one parachuting from the sky because of security concerns over a nearby dam. After 30 years, the event still draws a crowd.
"It's that desperado mystique," said local historian Walt Crowley of the story's enduring fascination.
"It was an extraordinary audacious act to lower that rear gangway in flight and jump into a dark and stormy night," Crowley said. "He didn't hurt anybody ... and we all love a mystery."
Susan Gilmore can be reached at 206-464-2054 or sgilmore@seattletimes.com.
The friend of the Taxi driver, with the scars on his legs allegedly from hitting the ground
after jumping from flight 305,
died at age 52.The widow's husband
died at age 70 yrs. One has to ask: Did this man also have scarred legs?
....