3D"Seattle

Former cabbie's tale = is a wild ride

Thursday, November 22, 2001

By JON HAHN
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

&nb= sp;

Guess he never meant no har= m

By hijacking a plane,
And folks say that he bought the farm
When he jumped into the rain.

Ol' Dan Cooper was two mil= es high
When he parachuted out
Into a dark Thanksgiving Eve sky
On the Seattle-Portland route.

Thirty years he disappears
With his loot, 200-thou,
And ain't no way, to this very day,
We know exactly how.

The FBI says the angry sky
And the jump cost him his life,
But rumors that he lived to spend
The money have been rife.

And what ain't been said, Even if he's dead,
Is why he did it here,
But a cabbie's tale relayed to me
Could maybe make that clear.

Anon., Seattle, 2001.

There's some that say that Jerry Curtis drove around = the block one time too many in his 30-some years as a Seattle taxi driver, but = he swears one of his drive-around passengers was D.B. Cooper.

And it was about a month before the infamous Cooper's pulling off the only successful American skyjacking, on Thanksgiving Eve, 1= 971.

"In fact, I was probably the guy who helped him = decide to do an airplane," said Jerry, "because I talked him out of robb= ing a West Seattle supermarket."

Jerry, a Navy veteran who now lives on a meager disab= ility in Granite Falls, said he has "no reason= or hope of any gain by telling this now, but it should be told. I didn't put it all together until weeks after the hijacking, and I never told anyone until years later, and then they looked at me as though I said I'd seen Elvis Presley."

Jerry sent his story on tape, then met with me in Arlington, and sw= ears that the unidentified passenger who asked for hi= m by name at Gray Top Cab on that Saturday afternoon in October 1971, was the sa= me guy later identified as Dan Cooper, aka D.B. Cooper.

"I didn't have any action going at the Mayflower= Hotel then -- sometimes I'd take care of stuff for drunken seamen in town, or may= be a working lady hiding from her pimp -- but not on that day," he said. The man had used a direct line to call the cab company and asked for Jerry by n= ame.

After a brief back-and-forth, Jerry determined that t= his was the man his lawyer earlier said had been asking for someone like him. "My lawyer wouldn't say what or why," Jerry recalled. "In fa= ct, he said only that the guy was a client who needed someone like me, but that= was all he was gonna say about it."

Long story, short: The swarthy, athletically built fe= llow, maybe about 6-feet and maybe in his mid-40s and dressed in a light blue lei= sure suit, shiny white loafers and matching belt, put $5 on the cab seat and sai= d he wanted to ride around and talk ... about his plan for robbing a West Seattle supermarket. "He said he came here every year to do a job, then went b= ack home over the mountains and plowed the money back into his business," Jerry said.

"He said he was a solid citizen, belonging to the Junior Chamber of Commerce and the Lions, and that he had a wife, two kids,= a station wagon and a German shepherd. His plan was to put on a pair of white overalls and rob a supermarket and then ditch the overalls so that he'd look like a businessman taking a cab ride.

Even though the stranger offered him half of the take, Jerry nixed the idea, telling the guy that "whenever anything heavy go= es down in West Seattle, the cops always bl= ock off the five or six main routes in and out of there." They talked some more as Jerry drove him back to the Mayflower Hotel, where the man ended the session by saying that he "was gonna go ba= ck home and think about doing something else. He said he had an idea about 'do= ing something with an airplane,'" Jerry said.

About a month later, Jerry was driving cab again when= he heard the skyjacking action on his police scanner and saw the Northwest Airlines Boeing 727 isolated to one side at Sea-Tac Airport while police and airline officials scrambled to fill a duffle bag with more than 20 pounds of used $20 bills.

"But I didn't think any more of it till they rel= eased the composite sketch of this Cooper guy a week or so later. That was him. It was the same guy who wanted to rob a West Seattle supermarket!"

Jerry wasn't convinced when I showed him a wire photo= of Duane Web, who according to a news story last year confessed on his death b= ed that he was Dan Cooper. Web, who died of kidney disease in 1995, apparently filled some of the D.B. Cooper profile, including familiarity with the Puget Sound area, Army service and a criminal recor= d that included serving time in a Seattle-area prison. My own searching was unable= to link Web to the Cooper profile. And the Seattle lawyer who Jerry said referred the stranger to him has died.

Leaving us with another chapter i= n Puget Sound's Thanksgiving folklore. We coul= d call this one: "Cabbie Talks Turkey Into Stuffin= g West Seattle -- Coop Flies & Flees With Big Holiday Score."

Jon Hahn is a staff columnist who writes three times a week in the P-I. = He can be reached at 206-448-8317 or e-mail him at jonhahn@seattlepi.com.=

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