Unmasking D.B. Cooper

On a rainy night in 1971, the notorious skyjacker jump= ed out of a 727 and into American legend. But recently, a chance lead to a Manhattan P.I. may have finally cracked the case.

By = Geoffrey Gray

Published Oct 22, 2= 007

<= o:p>

Le= ft: An FBI sketch of "D.B. Cooper." Right: Kenneth Christiansen, North= west purser and former paratrooper; the suspect.

(P= hoto: From left to right: FBI/AP; Courtesy of Sherlock Investigations, Inc.)

The detectives at Sherlock Investigations get strange requests all the time. There was the mysterious disappearance of Captain Jack, an iguana that was stolen out the window of a ground-floor apartment on West Twelfth. Or the elderly woman in Peter Cooper Village who thought= her neighbor was trying to kill her by shooting neutron beams through her kitch= en wall. (They checked it out. She wasn’t.) Or the jealous husband in Pa= rk Slope. He suspected his wife was cheating on him, and with his father. (She was.) So the e-mail that came in on March 19 didn’t set off any alarm= s. It read:

Dear Good People,<= span style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial; color:#232323'>
I would = very much like to contact Nora Ephron, Movie Directo= r of the movie, “Sleepless in Seattle.” I think she would be interested in what I have to say.
Sincerely, Lyle Christiansen.

When Sherrie Hart, the Sherlock detective commandeering the e-mail in-box at the time, read the note, her eyes rolled. Oh, boy, she thought. Here we go again. She typed back:

We would not be able to give you a famous person’s address. If you want to write a letter to Ms. Ephron, we would deliver it to her ourselves. The fee would be $495. Proceed?

Proceed. When Lyle Christiansen’s money order and letter came in the mail a few days later, Hart passed them on to the agency’s owner, Skipp Porteous. With wavy= hair, baggy eyes, and sandals on his feet, Porteous l= ooks more aging hippie than hard-boiled gumshoe. He breaks in the afternoon for a non-tough-guy ritual: meditation. Porteous was = once a preacher, but became disenchanted with religion, and in the course of writi= ng a book called Jesus Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, discovered he was good at digg= ing around. =

Porteous looked at the envelope. He studied the return address. Morris, Minnesota. He looked at a map. The town was two hours from Fargo, North Dakota. Population: 5,200. He opened the letter, and after peering inside for powde= rs, he read it. It barely made sense. It was a rambling confession of finding t= he answer to a “famous unsolved caper” that would make a great movie—and one only Ephron could direct, b= ecause she had “heart.” She could call this movie Bashful in Seattle—because the main character= in the caper lived near Seattle. Skipp thought, Strange, yes; dangerous, no. So he hailed a cab, rode over to Ephron’s build= ing on East 79th, and left the letter with her doorman. Ephro= n got the letter. She opened it and looked at it and put it down on the kitch= en counter. It stayed there for some time. Then it disappeared. “I don’t know what happened to it,” she says.
In Morris, Christiansen was waiting. He is 77 years old, ret= ired from the post office, and now works as an inventor and holds a few patents. Every day, he’d walk out to his mailbox hoping for a reply from Ephron. Nothing came. He sent Sherlock another letter, which Porteous had delivered. Weeks passed. No = word. Did she know he was paying all this money to reach her? Finally, Christians= en wrote to Sherlock: “As you know, I have been trying to contact Nora <= span class=3DSpellE>Ephron, but for some reason she doesn’t answer = my letters. Now I would like you to help me. I am sitting on the answer to a m= any decades mystery which has never been solved … No one was killed or injured in the caper but could easily have been … I hope you will thi= nk about this and let me know.”

Porteous was curious.= He began to probe with e-mails. Christiansen would often type back late at nig= ht, he said, so his wife wouldn’t discover his secret relationship with D= .B. Cooper. “Yes, I knew the culprit personally,” Lyle wrote one da= y. “He was my brother.”

The case of D.B. Cooper is one of = the most famous crimes in American history. It is also the only skyjacking in t= he world that has gone unsolved. Over the past three decades, the FBI has investigated nearly 1,000 suspects. They might as well be looking for Sasquatch. D.B. Cooper is folklore now. He’s inspired books, movies, safety regulations for airplanes, and treasure hunters. A bar celebrates the anniversary of his heist with a D.B. Cooper look-alike contest. Poems have = been inked. Songs too, like Chuck Brodsky’s “The Ballad of D.= B. Cooper”: <= /span>

It was Thanksgiving eve
Back in = 1971
He had o= n a pair of sunglasses
There wasn’t any sun
He used = the name Dan Cooper
When he = paid for the flight
That was= going to Seattle
On that = cold and nasty night

That night changed aviation history. It started in Portland, Oregon, when a man walked up to the flight counter of Northwest Orient Airlines. He= was wearing a dark raincoat, dark suit with skinny black tie, and carrying an attaché case. He had perky ears, thin lips, a wide forehead, receding hair. He gave his name, Dan Cooper, and asked for a one-way ticket to Seatt= le, Flight 305. The ride was a 30-minute puddle jump. He sat in the last row of= the plane, 18-C, lit a cigarette, and ordered a bourbon and soda. The plane took off and he passed the stewardess a note.

D.B. Cooper Executes His Plan

The Northwest airliner at the Se= attle airport in the midst of the hijacking.

(P= hoto: Bettmann/Corbis)

Florence Schaffner was 23, cute, perky, the sexy stewardess. Working on planes, she’d been approached by so many men that she̵= 7;d taken to wearing a wig onboard to disguise herself. She dropped the manR= 17;s note in a purse, thinking, Just another guy hitting on me. But the man was insistent. “Miss. You̵= 7;d better look at that note. I have a bomb.” She looked at the man’= ;s eyes. She saw that he was serious.

She read the note. It was printed in felt pen, all capital letters, elegantly formed. “I have a bomb in my briefcase. I want you= to sit beside me,” it read. She did as he requested, then asked to see t= he bomb. She saw a tangle of wires, a battery, and six red sticks. Then he dictated some instructions: “I want $200,000 by 5:00 p.m. In cash. Put in a knapsack. I want two back parachutes= and two front parachutes. When we land, I want a fuel truck ready to refuel. No funny stuff or I’ll do the job.” He let her get up to take them= to the captain. When she got back, the man was wearing dark sunglasses. <= /o:p>

Schaffner’s mind was reeling. She imagined her parents back in Arkansas<= /st1:State> watching the evening news. She imagined the plane exploding. She imagined t= his man taking her hard by the wrist and raping her right there. She took deep breaths. Inhale, exhale, repeat. Surprisingly, the man was able to calm her down. He was not a so-called sky pirate, which she’d read about in the papers, or a hardened criminal. He was not a political dissident with a wish to reroute the plane to Cuba, like many of the hijack= ers until then. He was polite. Well spoken. A gentlemen. At one point, he offered to pay for his drinks with a $20 bill and insisted= the stewardess keep the rest ($18) as change. He also seemed like a local, glan= cing out the window and saying, “Looks like Tacoma down there.”

The plane landed on the Sea-Tac tarmac, greased up by the squalls of the rainstorm. It was late, two hours late, because FBI agents needed time to collect Cooper’s ransom and to station their sharpshooters. Inside the cabin, Cooper ordered all passengers be released.= The airline staff then carried his ransom—$200,000 in $20 bills (the bund= le weighed 21 pounds) and parachutes—onto the plane as it refueled. The gentleman hijacker was getting anxious. “It shouldn’t take this long,” he said, and told the captain to get the plane back in the air. Where to?

“Mexico C= ity,” he said, and delivered more specific flight instructions: Keep the plane un= der 10,000 feet, with wing flaps at fifteen degrees, which would put the plane’s speed under 200 knots. He strapped the loads of cash to himse= lf and slipped on two chutes—one in front, one in back—and moved deeper into the vessel, toward the aft stairs, which were used to let passengers disembark from the rear of the plane. The 727 was the only model equipped with such stairs. He lowered them. The seal of the cabin broke, and there was engine noise in his ears and the cold, black, wet windy night outside. He climbed down the stairs and hovered on a plank over southwest <= st1:State w:st=3D"on">Washington. The = plane was too high to see anything below. The cloud ceiling that night was 5,000 feet, and some of the most rugged terrain in this country was beneath it: forests of pine and hemlock and spruce, canyons with cougars and bears and lakes and white-water rapids, all spilling out into the Pacific. And then, = as the ballad goes,

Out a little service doorway
In the rear of the plane
Cooper j= umped into the darkness
Into the freezing rain
They say= that with the windchill
It was 69 below
Not much chance that he’d survive
But if h= e did where did he go?

They did look for him. The Feds scoured the forests the next day, and for days after in a dense fog, praying for a parachute tear, a $20 bill, a body. One team of treasure hunters chartered a submarine and descended hundreds of feet into a lake. In Washington, D.C., at the headquarters of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, agents coordinated a profiling campaign. The name, they soon found, was a fake. But Dan Cooper h= ad already been immortalized as D.B. Cooper. The error happened when a reporter got the wrong first name from a police source and it hit the wires. So what= if it was wrong? It sounded good, mythic. It made it seem like Cooper’s = jump meant something, and it did. “You know, it’s funny,” said= one local resident at the time. “Folks are actually pulling for this man. That’s all anybody wants to talk about. I hear it all day l= ong. ‘Hope he made it, he deserves it, hope he gets away with every nickel.’ Like he’s some kind of Robin Hood character.” He was also anonymous. “He was John Doe. He wasn’t some wild radical ... He was you or me or your neighbor.”= ;

The FBI Interrogates Suspects

The FBI didn’t believe that. There were too many specific traits Cooper neede= d to pull off the jump. Cooper knew how to parachute, and in tough conditions. M= aybe he’d been in the Army. Better yet, they figured,<= /span> the paratroops. He was also familiar with planes (10,000 feet, fifteen-degr= ee wing flaps) and the area (“Looks like Tacoma down there”). They also kn= ew what Cooper looked like. They had a detailed sketch that Florence Schaffner helped create. And there was his personality. “He seemed rather nice,” said Tina Mucklow, another attendant on the flight. “He = was never cruel or nasty. He was thoughtful and calm.”<= /p>
THE WITNESS

Florence Schaffner <= span style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial; color:#232323'>
The flight attendant who received the note.

THE = OTHER D.B. COOPERS

Richard= McCoy
Suspected of being D.B. Cooper after committing a different skyjacking.

Duane W= eber
Suspected posthumously; he professed to his wife on his deathbed that he was D.B. Cooper.

Photographs: From top, Bettmann/Corbis (2)

Suspects came and went. Five mont= hs later, Richard McCoy, a former Sunday-school teacher from Utah and a Vietnam helicopt= er pilot, jumped out of a plane over Utah with a $500,000 ransom. He was snatched by the FBI a few days later with $499,970 in a cardboard box. McCoy told the Feds he wasn’t Cooper, but they didn’t believe him. He was sentenced to 45 years in prison. Then= he escaped, using a fake gun made from plaster of Paris stolen from dental supplies, and led a crew of convicts through the prison gates with a garbage truck. When the Feds found him again, there was a shoot-out. McCoy was kill= ed.

In 1980, some of Cooper’s money surfaced. A boy found $5,800 in decomposing twenties buried in a bag, a few feet from a river. The FBI searched the area again, hoping to find more bills—or, better yet= , a body. They found nothing.

The next major suspect was Duane Weber. Just before he died = in 1995, Weber’s wife claims, he told her, “I’m Dan Cooper.” The Feds eventually collected fingerprints and DNA samples, = but the case remains open.

The Cooper file is now a morgue of dead-end leads. It sits buried in the basement of the FBI’s Seattle field office and occupies several shelves in long rows that open and close by spinning black plastic wheels. The belief amo= ng agents handling the case now is that Cooper died in the jump—the conditions were simply too brutal to survive, and the twenties would have b= lown away. When a new tip arrives in the mail, the Feds typically shrug it off a= nd file it away.

One of those tips that came in was from Lyle Christiansen. In fact, he claims he told the FBI about his older brother several times. “Dear Good People,” a copy of one of his letters, written in November 2003, begins. “Here’s the story of how I began to susp= ect my brother was D.B. Cooper.” He was watching TV one night, he told th= em, and flipped on the show Unsolved Mysteries, which had an episode about the Cooper case. “I sat up in my chair,” he wrote, “because my broth= er was a dead ringer to the composite sketch of D.B.” Suspicious, he rea= d up on the case. “There was so many circumstan= ces that I became convinced my brother was truly D.B. Cooper!”

“I’m not getting any younger,” Christiansen wrote to the FBI again, and for the final time, in January 2004. “Bef= ore I die I would like to find out if my brother was D.B. Cooper. From what I k= now I feel that he was and without a doubt.”

A relative of D.B. Cooper’s!= Skipp Porteous couldnR= 17;t believe what three decades of federal agents (and Nora Ephron) had missed. This would be the biggest case of his career. He could barely contain himself as he typed back to Christiansen: “This is potentiall= y a very hot story.” He wanted facts. Basic stuff: full name, age, Social, address. Lyle wrote back later that night: “Kenneth Peter Christianse= n; Born Oct. 17, 1926, deceased July 30, 1994 from cancer. Lived in his own home in Bonney Lake, WA. One could see Mt. Rainier from there.= So. Security #473 30 3599. = He retired from NWA as a purser. His employee #33983.̶= 1;

Lyle also dropped a few photos and documents in the mail, and began to tell Skipp about his family. They grew= up on a farm with cows and pigs and tractors and chickens. This was during the du= st bowls of the Great Depression. “All of us kids did not get lots of hu= gs when we were growing up and we missed a lot because of it,” Lyle says. “I think it made us all a little bashful and made us long for the hug= s. Our folks were so busy. Pa in the field and Ma, cooking= , sewing, washing clothes, canning, gardening, and also helping with the harvesting.” For fun, they went to the county fair, where his father once took on a prizefighter and earned $100 by lasting one full roun= d. Lyle and Kenny watched as their dad was paid out in five $20 bills. Kenny c= ould never forget those $20 bills, Lyle says. “That was a lot of money dur= ing the Great Depression.” Their father also invented things. One was “a contraption that was supposed to work as a [perpetual] motion machine,” Lyle remembers. It was made from wood and ran on marbles. <= o:p>

Similarities between D.B. Cooper and Ken= neth Christiansen

=

Ke= nny Christiansen's house.

Growing up, Lyle was different from Kenny. Lyle was into contact sports and girls. Kenny was into “classy things,” Lyle says. Kenny was so precise= in his drawings that he composed illustrations for the yearbook staff. He play= ed cornet in the band and sang in the men’s chorus. He danced tap. And acted in several school plays. And in sports, Kenn= y set school records for the half-mile. In high school, he was at the top of his class and had his pick of twelve private colleges. But the war was on, it w= as 1944, and Kenny enlisted. He thought of the Air Force, but decided on the A= rmy, and chose an elite, dangerous, and thus better-paying specialty: the paratroops. “Kenny was always looking for ways to make a buck,” Lyle says.

Training was brutal. By the time Kenny had strapped on all h= is gear—which could include parachute and reserve chute, helmet, canteen, cartridge belt, compass, gloves, flares, message book, hand grenades, mache= te, M-1 Garand rifle, .45 caliber Colt, radio batteries, wire cutters, rations, shaving kit, instant coffee, bouillon cubes, candy—the entire bundle weighed as much as 90 pounds. The paratroops donned such heavy gear (they h= ad to survive behind enemy lines for weeks) they couldn’t walk onto the transport planes on their own. They had to be pushed on. =

Jumps were also menacing. The quality of the parachutes was = primitive. You could not steer them out of the way of power lines or trees. You hit the ground hard on your boots, buckling the ankles and the knees, in some cases breaking them. Kenny trained with the 11th Airborne Division, the Angels, w= hich had been sent to the Pacific. But he never saw combat. When he was finally deployed, on August 16, 1945, his discharge papers show, the war was over. = He ended up in Japan, joining the initial occupation forces. He ran the mail room and made jumps = on the side for extra money.

“Dear Folks,” Kenny wrote home in one letter dat= ed August 4, 1946, from Sendai. “I went to church this morning. I went last Sunday also. I had more reason to go last Sunday, as after ten months of hibernation, I once again donned a chute and reserve and entered a C-46. I cringed a good deal, but I managed once again to pitch myself into the blast. That jump was worth $150. The nicest thing about the whole affair was that I never had time to worry about it … Don’t get the idea that I didn’t get that cert= ain stomackless [sic] feeling, because I did.”=

After that jump, he vacationed in Namaz= u, a fishing village south of Tok= yo. “I spent most of my time up on the roof during the day; nights I usua= lly lounged in a beach chair down by the water’s edge,” he wrote. “They had a group of Hawaiian guitar players down there. With the mus= ic, the breeze off the Ocean, and the waves crashing the shore, I felt like a millionaire enjoying his millions.”

“There is something you should know, but I cannot tell you,” Kenny Christiansen told his brot= her on his deathbed.

Porteous couldn’t believe it. The profile that was coming into focus was remarkably exact. The paratroops? That’s exactly the kind of jumper the Feds were looking for. Not an expert who knew fancy equipment. A gutsy amateur who only specified “front” chutes and “back” chutes. He wanted to know more about Kenny. “This is fascinating stuff,” he wrote Lyle, w= ho then told him about all the odd and dangerous jobs Kenny did for extra pay. After college, Lyle said, his brother went back to the Pacific, this time to Bikini atoll, in the Marshall Islands. The government was testing nucl= ear bombs there. Kenny worked as a telephone operator. It was lonely, though he liked being alone, and it was always beach weather on Bikini. Kenny loved the beach, Lyle said. Even back home, he saved to spend on trav= el. In college, he took a job selling magazine subscriptions on the road. He traveled once with a carnival, selling tickets. Then he’d leave for warmer climes: Jamaica= , Laguna Beach, L.A., Mex= ico City. Then Kenny learned of a job working for the airlines.

Northwest, based in Minneapolis, was looking to hire technicians to work on its planes in Shemya, an island in the Aleutians. He started a= s a mechanic and was rehired in 1956, as a flight attendant. He relocated to southwest Washington and was promoted to purser. This meant $50 extra monthly pay, and dealing w= ith Customs and Immigration agents and managing the plane’s money. <= /o:p>

According to property records, Kenny was able to purchase a house and some land. In October 1972, about a year after Cooper’s jum= p, Kenny paid $14,000 for a modest ranch in Bonney Lake, a small mountain town, in the Cascades. A year later, a deed shows he paid $1,500 for a parcel of land.

Kenny Christiansen's Lifestyle Raises Questions

=

Tr= eat Williams as the skyjacker in the 1981 movie The Pursuit of D.B. Cooper= .

(P= hoto: Universal Pictures/Everett Collection)

“= ;He was almost invisible,” says Harry Honda, a Northwest purser who worked with Kenny. “If you asked somebody on his plane who was the purser on that flight, they couldn’t tell you—that’s how quiet this= guy was.” If they had a layover, Kenny would not go out with the staff. “He was noncommunicative,” says Mary Patricia Laffey Inman, a Northwest purser. R= 20;He kept to himself. He was a plaid-shirt guy,” says Lyle Gehring, another Northwest purser, who worked alongside Kenny for years. “You = ask people and say ‘Ken Christiansen,’ they say, ‘Who?’”

At home, he always wore the same clothes: denim overalls and= a blue-striped railroad cap. “He looked like a farmer, you know,” says Rose Edmiston, a former Northwest flight attendant who lives in Bonney L= ake. “That would probably be the last person in the world I would think co= uld be D.B. Cooper.” Driving around town, she’d sometimes see him w= ith younger men in front of his house, scrubbing down a car with soap or working under the hood. The rumors she heard about him were true: He was taking in troubled kids and runaways. One, she heard, he found sleeping in the town <= span class=3DSpellE>laundromat. Another kid was Kenneth McWilliams, or Ma= c, who lived with Kenny off and on for twenty years.

“He was an amusing character,” McWilliams says n= ow of Kenny. He describes life in the house as “odd.” There were alwa= ys other men around, men from the Army whom Kenny knew and had relationships w= ith. “It was uncomfortable to me, because I’m not like that, but not everybody lived in that house at night,” McWilliams says. Living ther= e as a teenager was also liberating. When Kenny came back from Japan or <= st1:place w:st=3D"on">Germany, there were always gi= fts: expensive food, big bottles of aged sake, ceramic dolls. Kenny never held b= ack financially. They always ate out. “Any restaurant, really,” McWilliams says. “He’d always call it ‘my turn.’ He’d never accept that I pay for some of the things that he ate.̶= 1; Kenny also helped Mac and other young men who lived with them learn how to save. Once, as a teenager, McWilliams says, he wanted to buy a car. Kenny opened up a bank account for him and matched every dollar he earned. “There was always a little bit of cash, maybe a little bit in his dresser. Also in his wallet.” He thinks it’s possible Kenny was D.B. “As a steward= , they made good money, but they didn’t make that much money.”<= /span>

Northwest’s salaries were notoriously meager. For purs= ers, the saying was “$212 a month and all you can carry,” and that m= eant stealing toilet paper from the airplanes’ bathrooms to supplement your paycheck. Female flight attendants were forced to adhere to strict intercom= pany mandates, like weight checks. They also couldn’t wear glasses. Or have their own rooms during layovers. Men could. All of which created an atmosph= ere of hostility toward Northwest. Workers would strike. Workers sued. Kenny was never vocal in his outrage toward Northwest, “He’d always just = sit in the back at a union meeting, or not [go] at all,” says Gehring. Quietly, Kenny hated the strikes because it = meant he had to find quick work, like picking apples on a farm. “He built u= p a little hatred for NWA for laying people off and forcing them to go on strike,” according to Kenny’s brother. “I think he though= t he could sock it to them by pulling off the hijacking.”

When the package of photos from Mo= rris arrived in the mail, Skipp looked at Kenny Christiansen for the first time. “It was uncanny, really,” Skipp says. “He looked just like the sketch.= 221; He had more questions for his brother. Did Kenny ever make extravagant purchases? Only his house and some land, Lyle said. Did Kenny drink bourbon? Yes, Lyle said. Kenny loved bourbon so much he collected bourbon bottles. D= id he smoke? Yes. It all added up. There was a wealth of detail, a full portra= it of a man who possessed so many of Cooper’s traits—a polite, qui= et paratrooper with a secret life.

Still, there was no concrete testimony, nothing direct. Then Lyle told him about a conversation he had with Kenny when his brother got s= ick with cancer. Lyle suspected the cause was radiation he’d suffered at = Bikini atoll. On his deathbed, Lyle remembers, his = older brother pulled him close. He then said something that didn’t make sen= se to him then. It does so now.

Kenny said, “There is something you should know, but I cannot tell you!”

Lyle didn’t want to know. “I don’t care wh= at it is you cannot tell me about. We all love you.” <= /p>
One of the only living eyewitnesse= s to the Cooper case is Florence Schaffner, the stewardess who accepted Cooper’s note. She now lives in Lexington, South Carolina. One Sunday = last month, we had lunch at Lizard’s Thicket, a local chain in Columbia that ser= ves fried chicken for brunch.

Flo, as she calls herself, has frosted blonde hair and deeply tanned skin. Her hands were shaking on the table. Just thinking about the Cooper case makes her nervous, she said. She was never the same after Cooper’s jump. She took a month off and went to live with her family = back in Arkansas. She also became paranoid. If Cooper was living, she feared that he’d = come after her. Eliminate the witness, you know. She’d look under her car = for bombs. She’d turn her keys over real slow.

Over the years, the FBI has shown her photos of dozens of suspects, and she has yet to identify any of them. I’d brought the ph= otos of Kenny Christiansen, and she spread them on the table. She zeroed in on t= he passport photo all blown up. She rubbed his features on the page. “The ears, the ears are right.” She moved to the lips. “Yes, thin li= ps. And the top lip, kind of like this, yes.” Then the forehead. “A wide forehead, yes.” Then the hair. “Receding, yes, the two areas—yes, yes—sort of like this.” She was pushing down on the photo hard now, rubbing the image like a charcoal drawing. “There= was more hair, though.” The eyes. “About like that.” The eyebrows. “Yeah, about like that.” The images were c= loser in resemblance to Cooper than any of the suspects she’s ever seen, she said. But? “But I can’t say ‘<= span class=3DSpellE>Yay.’” We got up from the table. “I= think you might be onto something here,” she said.

&= nbsp;

FBI agent Ralph Himmelsbach inspects the evidence

T= he definitive expert on the Cooper case is Ralph Himmelsbach= . He was the FBI’s lead agent on the hijacking for eight years. He’s= now retired and lives on a farm in Woodburn, Oregon. He’s got a me= tallic white mustache trimmed just so and bushy eyebrows that curl into a wave. I wanted to see what he thought of Kenny as a suspect, and one afternoon this summer we sat outside on his patio. A plane passed by. “It’s an AT-6 Texan,” Himmelsbach said, looking up. “= ;A North American AT-6.” Himmelsbach knows planes and lives to fl= y. I asked him if he’d ever investigated anybody who worked for Northwest Airlines. “No,” he said, and explained. “We had an awful = lot of suggestions by people that said ‘I think it’s an inside job.’ It is inconceivable for several reasons. The most obvious, if y= ou know anything about airline procedure, is that it is not possible for a conspiracy to form because the individuals are not in charge of what flights they’re going to go on.” But what about a l= one employee? Himmelsbach ruled this out too. “If you were acquain= ted as I was with many of the people in the airline industry,” he explain= ed, “they are exceptional people. They are head and shoulders above the standards and the values and the character of normal, average Americans.= 221;

I pulled out photos of Kenny. He studied them slowly.

“Not bad,” he said. “E= xcept for the hair.”

I then showed him Kenny’s discharge papers from the Ar= my. He looked at Kenny’s height (five-eight), weight (150 pounds), and eye color (hazel), then pushed the papers back. “Well, he’s too short, not heavy enough, and has got the wrong color eyes.” I then told him about Kenny’s history: his service= in the paratroops, and working for Northwest—as a purser, a flight attendant, a mechanic—and living near Sea-Tac, and his quiet mien. The old man lit up like somebody had plugged him into the wall socket. “A= ll of this makes him look like a good suspect to me,” he said. “If= I was still on duty and it were up to me, I’d say, ‘This guy is a ‘must investigate.’”

My next stop was Bonney Lake. I wanted to see Kenny’s house out there. On the drive north from Portland, it became clear why so many agents believed that Cooper never survived the jump. The trees are hundreds of feet tall in the Cascades, a snow-capped collection of volcanoes and glaciers and miles of snowfields that never mel= t. Mount Rainer is the centerpiece, sitting high at over 14,000 feet, watching. =

Kenny’s place is now a print shop on the main drag. I parked in the back and looked at Mount Rainier. It looked, just as Lyle said, “like it was across the street.” The shop was closed. I peered through the dark windows. I tried to imagine Kenny in there. In his purser’s uniform, getting home from another trip to Tokyo, with the young runaways he housed. I tried to imagine where the kitchen was. Lyle said he hung a poster there for inspiration.

THERE ARE THREE KINDS OF PEOPLE, the poster read.=

Those who MAKE things happen.
Those who WATCH things happen.
And thos= e who WONDER what happened.

And I wondered myself: Which one was Ken Christiansen? =

D.B. Cooper: A Timelin= e

·      =             &nb= sp; By Catherine Coreno

Published Oct 22, 2007

=

(P= hoto: Bettmann/Corbis)

February 21, 1931
In what historians consider the first skyjacking, Peruvian rebels demand the pilot of a Ford tri-motor craft fly over Lima so they can = drop political leaflets.

May 1, 1961<= span style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Georgia;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial; color:#232323'>
In the first American skyjacking, Antulio Ramirez Ortiz holds a knife to a pilot's throat and points a gun at the co-= pilot of a National Airlines flight en route to Key West. He demands to go to Cuba, and the plane returns safely to Florida after dropping him off. Ortiz is arrested fourteen years later in Miami trying to reenter the U.S.

November 24, 1971
A passenger identifying himself as Dan Cooper sk= yjacks a Boeing 727-100 en route to Seattle-Tacoma Airport. Armed with= an attaché case he claims contains a bomb, Cooper demands, and receives, $200,000 and four parachutes. He skydives from the Northwest plane somewhere over southwestern Washing= ton State. <= /span>

December 8, 1971
U.S. Attorney General John N. Mitchell releases the serial numbers of the $= 20 bills that made up Cooper's ransom. Initially, no bills are recovered, fuel= ing the theory that Cooper perished in his jump. But the publicity surrounding = the event may have just driven Cooper further underground.
April 7, 1972
Richard Floyd McCoy hijacks a Boeing 727, demands $500,000 and four parachu= tes, and jumps out of a plane over Provo, Utah. The FBI suspects him of being Cooper, but a Las Vegas alibi clears him of any connection.

1978
Northwest sells the plane used in the Cooper skyjacking to Piedmont Airline= s, in North Carolina= . A hunter in Washington finds a placard verified to be from the aft stairs of Cooper's 727.

=

Brian Ingram.

(Photo: = Bettmann/Corbis)

February 1980
Brian Ingram, an 8-year-old boy, finds $5,800 in decomposing $20 bills by t= he edge of the Columbia River near Vancouver, Washington. The FBI matches= the serial numbers on those bills to the Cooper ransom. It is the only Cooper m= oney ever to be recovered.

1985
"D.B. Cooper: What Really Happened" is published. The book is bas= ed on interviews with a woman known as Clara who claims to have discovered an injured Cooper two days after the skyjacking and then fell in love with him. Many discredit this account.

1986
FBI agents Ralph P. Himmelsbach and Thomas K. Worcester's "NORJAK: The Investigation of D.B. Cooper" is published. The pair suspect Cooper di= ed in the jump.

May 1986
Brian Ingram, now 14, receives $2,760 from his discovery of the small porti= on of Cooper loot. An equal share is given to the insurer of Northwest Orient.= The last $280 is kept as evidence.

June 1, 1989=
John List, a fugitive, is arrested for shooting his mother, wife, and three children in 1971. Former FBI agent Himmelsbach calls List a "viable suspect" in the Cooper case, but List denies any involvement.

1991
Russell Calame, an FBI agent who worked the McC= oy case, and Bernie Rhodes, a former parole officer, publish "D.B. Cooper: The Real McCoy." The book supposes that McCoy was Cooper because he had newspaper clippings about Cooper in his car and because his family claimed = a mother-of-pearl tie clasp Cooper left behind on the = jet belonged to McCoy.

November 24, 1996
The Ariel Store and Tavern, a bar in southwestern Washington, throws an eleven-hour party to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Cooper's mysterious jump, drawing 500 people from across the U.S. Ariel, a town of 50, is thoug= ht by some to be the place Cooper landed. The Ariel store throws the Cooper pa= rty every year near Thanksgiving. Festivities include fireworks, raffles for Co= oper memorabilia, and a Cooper-look-alike contest.

=

Kenneth Christiansen in his Northwest uniform.

(Photo: Courtesy of Sherlock Investigations, Inc.)

The Boeing 727-100 aircraft used in the Cooper skyjacking is scrapped in a Memphis junkyard.

July 24, 2000
A U.S. News and World Report article states that Duane L. Weber confessed to being D.B. Cooper on his deathbed. Weber's wife recalls compelling circumst= antial evidence about him, but the FBI dismisses him as a suspect after analyzing fingerprints and DNA samples.

2007
Lyle Christiansen contacts the detectives at Sherlock Investigations, a P.I. agency on the Upper West Side, claiming his brother, Kenny, is "withou= t a doubt" Cooper.

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