Tuesday, June 13, 2000

Benjamin Shors, Seattle Times staff reporter

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Skull goes from fable to clue

Grandmothers have stories, secrets really, that kids and grandchildren sometimes don't believe.

Elsie Rodgers' story was that she found a skull on the Columbia River in Washington, the = teeth worn but intact, as she searched for petrified wood. But Ty Vetter never believed his grandmother.

"She told family members about it, but it was just one of Grandma's fables," Vetter said. "We never believed her."

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But when relatives cleared out Rodgers' house in Cozad, Neb., after her death May 26, they found a skull wrapped in a plastic bag and a brown paper sack, sitting= in a hatbox on the floor of her garage attic.

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Now, fe= deral officials are investigating whether the skull is that of D.B. Cooper, who hijacked a Boeing 727 in 1971 and jumped out over the Columbia River with $200,000, never to be seen again.=

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The FBI= will use DNA analysis to compare the skull to physical evidence left by the infa= mous skyjacker, according to an FBI official in Seattle.

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Officia= ls declined to say what the physical evidence was, but they said the skull cou= ld be used, with carbon dating, to determine the gender, race and approximate = time of death.

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Vetter,= a barber from Imperial, Neb., turned the skull over to Cozad police Wednesday. His grandmother, who was 8= 5 when she died last month, apparently had never told anyone where she put the sku= ll, saying only that she'd found it along the Columbia R= iver in the early 1980s.

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The cha= nces that the remains are Cooper's are a long shot, said Ray Lauer, spokesman for the FBI in Seattle= .

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"S= he may have stumbled across an old Indian burial ground. She may have found a miss= ing hiker. . . . The possibilities are infinite," Lauer said.

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The sku= ll is being sent to the FBI in Washi= ngton, D.C., where it will be carbon-dated. The dating can't give an exact number of years since death, b= ut it can provide an approximation.

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"W= e've got to know how old the skull is," Lauer said. "It could be 2,000 yea= rs old. But if it's 15 years old, well, that certainly tweaks our curiosity.&q= uot;

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Five serious leads a year

The FBI continues to investigate about five serious leads a year in the Cooper case, from people who turn themselves in claiming to be Cooper to others who make deathbed confessions.

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"T= he case file is in excess of 100 volumes," Lauer said. "We've had about 1= ,100 serious suspects. We have people call after watching a television special or reading a story and say they saw him at a truck stop on Highway 65 in Indiana."

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Just ye= sterday, three people called the FBI's = Seattle office offering up a boyfriend, a brother and an ex-husband to be added to = the list of suspects.

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"S= omehow they all believe they know Cooper," Lauer said.

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An impo= rtant but missing fact in the Cozad case is where along the 1,200-mile Columbia River the skull was found. In 1980, $5,800= of the cash Cooper took from the plane was found on the shore of the river northwest of Vancouver, Wash., and traced to the skyjacking by serial numbers. The rest has never been found.

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"W= e don't know if the skull was found anywhere near the area," said Larry Holmquist, spokesman for the FBI in North Platte, Neb. "It could have been hundreds of miles away."

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The FBI= will interview relatives to try to pinpoint where the skull was found.

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"T= he reason we're going through the interviews is that, while it's certainly a possibility, there's nothing that links this to D.B. Cooper," Holmquist said. "It's certainly a mystery."=

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In Coza= d, population 4,200, the news that Cooper's skull may have spent the past 20 y= ears in a local house comes as a surprise but hasn't attracted that much attenti= on from residents.

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"I= really haven't given it much thought," said Mayor Catherine Walters, who said= she didn't remember much about Cooper. "I'm not much of a national-news follower."

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Police = Chief Mark Eaves, whose department has seven full-ti= me officers, passed the skull on to FBI offices in nearby North Platte.

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"I= t isn't somebody from Cozad, I wanted to assure people of that," Eaves said of= the skull. "We don't have a killer loose here."

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Vetter = said yesterday that Rodgers had apparently never reported the finding to authorities, despite initial reports that she said she had, only to be igno= red by law-enforcement officials.

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Vetter = said his grandmother had good intentions in keeping the skull and a 4- to 6-inch bone also found in the hatbox.

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"G= randmother never found anything that she didn't collect," Vetter said. "I th= ink she thought she was giving these bones a better resting place than along a river."

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