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S= eptember 04, 2005

Tomas Alex Tizon, Los Angeles Times

Vancouver, WA — Some people spend their summer days lounging on beaches or hiking up mountains. Others retreat into movie houses and bookstores.

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For California lawyer and former FBI agent Richard Tosa= w, summer means trekking to the Columbia River and continuing his 24-year search for the legendary skyjacker known as D.B. Coo= per. Thirty-four years ago above this southwest Washington town, Cooper parachuted fro= m a jetliner with $200,000 -- and into folk-hero stardom. He was never seen or heard from again.

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The FBI= calls his crime the only unsolved skyjacking in history, and the agency continues= to keep the case open.

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Tosaw b= elieves the skyjacker's remains lie somewhere in the river. This month he hired a t= eam of divers to scour a stretch of the river where a small portion of the rans= om money was found. It was Tosaw's second trip to the river this summer. He's = made the journey often enough to call it a tradition.

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"I= know guys who go elk hunting every year," said 80-year-old Tosaw, who lives= in the Modesto area. "I look for Mr. Cooper. It's my hobby." <= /p>

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It's an expensive hobby, but Tosaw, a bachelor with no children, said he "can afford to have a little fun." He paid the three-man dive team $2,500 a= day for four days, searching an area on the Washington side of the river about = five miles west of Vancouver. The team used a barge, pushed by a tugboat, as a command center. Tosaw, in jeans and sweatshirt, manned the barge like a captain, overseeing the activity and occasionally offering direction. =

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With the searchers wearing camera-equipped helmets, Tosaw watched the search as it happened, seeing what the divers saw in real time.

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The riv= er is about 400 feet across and 40 feet deep at that location. The divers concent= rated on the shallows, going no deeper than 30 feet along the bank. They found all kinds of debris, including a 2,000-pound anchor believed to be about 100 ye= ars old -- but no sign of Cooper.

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The hop= e was to find something sticking out of the silt: a leg bone or belt buckle or walle= t. Tosaw said the water in the Co= lumbia was cold enough that Cooper's body probably would be well-preserved if it w= as down there.

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"H= e could also be under 5 feet of sand," Tosaw said. "It's a needle in a haystack, I know. You'd have to be a lot lucky to = find him."

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What dr= ives him, he said, is plain curiosity and stubbornness.

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"I= 've always liked solving mysteries, and this is a big mystery," he said. "How can a person in America in the 20th century jump from an airplane with $200,000 in ransom money and nobody knows who he is or where he is? That does= n't sit well with me. There's got to be an answer."

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Tosaw h= as spent most of his life solving mysteries of one kind or another. As a new graduat= e of a Denver law school, he joined the FBI in = 1951 and served as a special agent for five years before starting his law practi= ce in California. After a quarter century of law, he started a business tracking down heirs of people who died with unclaimed estates.

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He was = never officially involved in the search for Cooper, but he said he was always intrigued by the case and became friends with some of the lead investigator= s. In 1981, he read a newspaper article on the 10th anniversary of the skyjack= ing, and Tosaw has been looking ever since.

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On his = own time, he interviewed the crew and passengers of the skyjacked plane and eventually wrote and published in 1984 a book titled "D.B. Cooper: Dea= d or Alive?" At one point, Tosaw offered a $25,0= 00 reward for the fugitive. Each year he uses the latest in high-tech search equipment to search the Columbia River, = which is calmest and clearest during the summer.

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He's al= so surveyed more than 100 parachutists on whether they thought Cooper could ha= ve survived the jump; about three-fourths said it was possible if he had serve= d in the military as a paratrooper. At that time, military service was the most likely way to have learned how to parachute. Cooper was believed to have be= en in his 40s at the time of the skyjacking, which means he could have served = in the Korean War.

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The sky= jacking happened on Thanksgiving eve 1971. A white man wearing a white shirt, narrow black tie, dark suit, raincoat, sunglasses and carrying a briefcase boarded Northwest Airlines Flight 305 in Portland, Ore. During the flight, he = informed the crew that his briefcase contained a bomb and that he would detonate it = if he wasn't given $200,000 in ransom money and four parachutes.

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The Boe= ing 727 landed in Seattle, where the passengers were released and authorities complied with Cooper's d= emands. The plane took off for Portlan= d with only Cooper and the crew left on the plane. About 45 minutes later, Co= oper offered the flight attendants $2,000 each as a tip and then opened a door in the back of the plane and bailed out -- into darkness and a driving rainsto= rm.

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That wa= s the last anybody saw of Cooper. Authorities don't even know whether that was his real last name. The name he provided when he bought his airline ticket was = Dan Cooper. After the skyjacking, a newspaper reported that police had intervie= wed an Oregon man named D.B. Cooper, who turned out to be the wrong man, but the name stuck. =

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Cooper = made it to the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list.

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"T= his is a guy who tweaked Uncle Sam's nose and appears to have gotten away with it,&q= uot; said retired FBI agent Ralph Himmelsbach, trying to explain Cooper's folk-h= ero status. Himmelsbach, who once headed the investigation, said that although Cooper broke the law, he didn't hurt anyone -- except probably himself.

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Himmels= bach said Cooper jumped from 10,000 feet into a minus 7 degree temperature -- 69 degrees below zero when calculated with wind chill -- while wearing "a business suit and slip-on loafers. ... It's a long shot he survived." =

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In Febr= uary 1980, an 8-year-old boy picnicking with his family along the Columbia River found a muddy wad of $20 bills totaling $5,800. Authorit= ies confirmed the money had been part of Cooper's loot. The find corroborated t= he theory that Cooper probably was dead at the bottom of the river, but others speculated that he was clever enough to have placed the money in the river = as a diversion.

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It is n= ear this spot -- an area where debris naturally collects -- where Tosaw has concentr= ated his efforts over the past several summers.

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"P= eople want to believe he got away with it. They want to believe he's alive somewhere," Tosaw said. "I just want to find his wallet, so the w= orld will know who the hell D.B. Cooper really was."

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This article appeared on page A-21 of the San Francisco Chron= icle

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