American Thanksgiving: D.B. Cooper skyjacking is as much part of the menu as turkey

An army unit helped in the search for D.B. Cooper, March 1972. (seattlepi.com file/Bob Miller)

Think of today as “D.B. Cooper Wednesday,” if you will. Because on the Wednesday and day before American Thanksgiving 52 years ago, D.B. Cooper, with his audacious skyjacking, jumped into history on Nov. 24, 1971.

“Have we checked the spare parachute packing card slot? What about the rip cords? Wait, the parachute, was it a 24-foot canopy or a 26-foot canopy? Is there DNA on the tie clip? And, my goodness, how did the money end up at Tena Bar?” asked David Gutman, a Seattle Times staff reporter in a story Nov. 18.

“The questions linger, they spiral, becoming ever more arcane,” he noted.

“If you’re not versed, if you don’t know about the copycats and the diatoms and the titanium particles, it all sounds like Greek.

“But for those who’ve been hooked, captivated, enthralled, the legend of D.B. Cooper does not fade. It is a subculture.”

The number one song that day on Nov. 24, 1971 on AM transistor radios across the country was Isaac Hayes’ Theme from Shaft, the movie released four months earlier, starring Richard Roundtree as detective John Shaft.

Meanwhile, the chill surface temperature at ground level in Ariel, Washington, situated north of the Lewis River and on the northwest bank of Lake Merwin in Cowlitz County, not far north of the Oregon State line, was 20°F at 8:12 p.m. Pacific Standard Time (PST).

Around this time every November, searches on my blog spike upwards for all things D.B. Cooper related. It is, I noted on Facebook, “the story that keeps on giving.” Remarkably, most years there is still publicity throughout the media, especially in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, focusing on a newly discovered suspect, albeit they are all very old or dead now.

I came kind of late to writing about the D.B. Cooper case, first penning a column on it 12 years ago for the Thompson Citizen back on Nov. 23, 2011. I must have made up for lost time because less than five years later, “Fox Mulder will continue to investigate regardless. And possibly John W. Barker,” Ian Graham, then editor of the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, wrote on Facebook July 12, 2016.

On Wednesday, Nov. 24, 1971 – the day before American Thanksgiving that year – someone using the alias Dan Cooper, which quickly got mistakenly turned into D.B. Cooper, committed the most audacious act of air piracy in U.S. history with the mid-afternoon skyjacking of Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305, a Boeing 727 jetliner flying over the Pacific Northwest, en route from Portland, Oregon to Seattle, Washington with 36 passengers and six crew members aboard.

He paid $20 cash, which included tax, for his airline ticket in Portland. Once on board, Cooper, a nondescript man possibly with a slight Midwestern accent, ordered a bourbon-and-soda, before passing a note to flight attendant Florence Schaffner demanding $200,000 ransom in unmarked $20 bills and two back parachutes and two front parachutes. ‘I HAVE A BOMB IN MY BRIEFCASE. I WILL USE IT IF NECESSARY. I WANT YOU TO SIT NEXT TO ME. YOU ARE BING (sic) HIJACKED.’ Initially, Schaffner dropped the note unopened into her purse, until Cooper leaned toward her and whispered, “Miss, you’d better look at that note. I have a bomb.” Cooper smoked eight Raleigh filter-tipped cigarettes on the plane, but there was no evidence to show if this was a regular habit of his.

The day-before-Thanksgiving flight landed at Tacoma International Airport in Seattle, where passengers were exchanged for parachutes, including possibly an NB-8 rig with a C-9 canopy, known as a “double-shot” pinch-and-pull system that in 1971 would have allowed jumpers to disengage quickly from their chutes after they landed so that the wind did not drag them, and the cash, all in $20 bills, as he had demanded, although not unmarked it would turn out. The passengers were never aware of the threat onboard. A bank in Seattle was contacted and a bag of money, all $20 bills with recorded serial numbers, totaling $200,000, was delivered to the plane, which was refueled and cleared for takeoff. The bag of ransom money itself weighed 23 pounds.

The plane took off again, heading toward Mexico at the hijacker’s command, with only Cooper and the crew aboard about half an hour later. Cooper told the pilot to fly a low-speed, low-altitude flight path at about 120 mph, close to the minimum before the plane would go into a stall, at a maximum 10,000 feet, to aid in his jump. To ensure a minimum speed he specified that the landing gear remain down, in the takeoff and landing position, and the wing flaps be lowered 15 degrees. To ensure a low altitude he ordered that the cabin remain unpressurized.

He bailed out into the rainy night through the plane’s rear stairway, which he lowered himself, somewhere near the Washington-Oregon boundary in Washington State, probably near Ariel in Cowlitz County, or possibly around Washougal or Camas in Clark County.

Along with FBI, Washington and Oregon state police, and local law enforcement officials, about 1,000 army troops and helicopters were also used in the 1971 search for Cooper.

In 1978, a placard containing instructions for lowering the aft stairs of a 727 was found by a deer hunter east of Castle Rock in Cowlitz County, which was within the basic flight path of the plane Cooper jumped from, according to the FBI and news reports.

In February 1980, eight-year-old Brian Ingram, vacationing with his family on the Columbia River about 20 miles southwest of Ariel, uncovered three packets of $5,800 of the ransom cash, disintegrated but still bundled in rubber bands, as he raked the sandy riverbank beachfront at an area known as Tena Bar to build a campfire on the Columbia River about 20 miles southwest of Ariel.

This year’s suspect is Vince Petersen. When the hijacked plane landed in Reno, Nevada, a black necktie was found onboard. The JC Penney clip-on tie was later found to have had a number of Rare Earth Elements (REE) on its surface, including cerium and strontium sulfide, along with pure titanium particles, all found on it. The only place that used that metal at the time was a lab called Rem Cru Titanium Inc. in Midland, Pennsylvania. Petersen worked there in the 1960s. The titanium research lab consisted of eight men, a small group of engineers, who wore neckties in the lab.

Those elements were used at the time of Cooper’s hijacking by Boeing at its assembly plant in Everett, Washington, 29 miles north of Seattle, in the production of high-tech electronics such as radar screens for their Super Sonic Transport Plane.

The first 747 rolled out of the giant building in 1969. The plant is the size of 40 football fields. Boeing is among the largest global aircraft manufacturers; it is the second-largest defense contractor in the world based on 2015 revenue, and is the largest exporter in the United States by dollar value.

As the 1970s dawned, the airliner market was saturated and the United States was slipping into recession. Boeing laid off more than 25,000 workers in 1969 and another 41,000 in 1970. Then in 1971 the United States Senate cut funding for Boeing’s sleek new Supersonic Transport, known as the SST, and the company cut nearly 20,000 more jobs. The workforce hit a low of 56,300.

The so-called “Boeing Bust” had put 86,000 workers on the street in three years.

Did D.B. Cooper work as an engineer, project manager or contractor for Boeing near Seattle in 1971? Did he have white collar connections to the recently downsized Puget Sound aerospace industry of the time?

There have been a number of Cooper suspects and persons of interest over the years, some more frequently discussed than others: Kenneth Christiansen, Lynn Doyle Cooper, Richard Floyd McCoy, Jr., Duane Weber, Jack Coffelt, William Gossett, Barbara (formerly Bobby) Dayton, John List, Melvin Luther Wilson, and Ted Mayfield. Most had military combat experience. And one Canadian, a Winnipeger who disappeared in 1971, just days after Cooper’s skyjacking, on a return trip from Thompson, Manitoba, flying solo. James (Jim) Hugh Macdonald, 46, the owner of J.H. Macdonald & Associates Ltd., consulting structural engineers on Pembina Highway in Winnipeg, climbed into his Mooney Mark M20D single-engine prop aircraft, bearing the registration mark CF-ABT, and took off half an hour after sunset from the Thompson Airport in Northern Manitoba at 4:30 p.m. on Dec. 7, 1971 to make his return flight home and disappeared into the rapidly darkening sky to never be seen or heard from again. He was the sole occupant of the four-seater plane.

On Sept 21, 2013, while editing the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, I received a three-sentence e-mail from a reader out of the blue saying, “I just read your article on James Macdonald. I would never want to disrespect the deceased/missing, but he fits the description of Dan Cooper. The FBI suspects D.B. Cooper was from Canada.”

Claire Macdonald, his wife, told me in an interview in December 2012 that someone once wildly jokingly said to her, “Maybe he flew to Mexico.” She said her reply was: “How far can you go in that little plane in that winter weather?” But the close nexus in time between the two aviation disappearances in late 1971 and the fact both men were Caucasians in their mid-forties made at least some Cooper and Macdonald comparisons inevitable.

J.H. Macdonald & Associates Ltd. was a small firm with about seven employees. Jim Macdonald was the only professional engineer on staff and a few months after his disappearance, its business affairs were wound down.

One of Macdonald’s last projects as a consulting structural engineer was the construction of additional classroom space for special needs students at Prince Charles School on Wellington Avenue at Wall Street in Winnipeg. He was in Thompson on business the day his plane disappeared on Dec. 7, 1971 for what was to be an in-and-out single day trip, but it is not certain now exactly what the business was. It may or may not have been related to proposed work for the School District of Mystery Lake since school construction projects were one of his areas of expertise.

Macdonald, who graduated from the University of Manitoba with his civil engineering degree in 1950, often worked with architectural firms, including his brother’s. Other than working for a year in Saskatoon, he spent his entire career living and working in Winnipeg. Macdonald, who was born on March 20, 1925, trained as a pilot when he was 19 and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) shortly before the Second World War ended in 1945 and before he could be shipped overseas into the theatre of combat operations. His son, Bill Macdonald, was 15 when his dad disappeared in 1971 and is a Winnipeg teacher and freelance journalist, who in 1998 wrote The True Intrepid: Sir William Stephenson and the Unknown Agents, telling the story of the British Security Coordination (BSC) spymaster – codename Intrepid – set up by British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). Ian Fleming, the English naval intelligence officer and author, best known for his James Bond series of spy novels, once said of his friend Stephenson, a Winnipeg native: “James Bond is a highly romanticized version of a true spy. The real thing is … William Stephenson.”

Macdonald had filed a 3½-hour flight plan to fly Visual Flight Rules (VFR) via Grand Rapids to Winnipeg that Tuesday. It was around -30 C at the time of takeoff on Dec. 7, 1971 and the winds were light from the west at five km/h, according to Environment Canada weather records, said Dale Marciski, a retired meteorologist with the Meteorological Service of Canada in Winnipeg. Macdonald was reportedly wearing a brown suit jacket when he took off from Thompson and it was unknown whether the plane was carrying winter survival clothing and gear.

While there was some ice fog, Marciski said, the sky was mainly clear and visibility was good at 24 kilometres. Transport Canada’s VFRs for night flying generally call for aircraft flying in uncontrolled airspace to be at least 1,000 feet above ground with a minimum of three miles visibility and the plane’s distance from cloud to be at least 2,000 feet horizontally and 500 feet vertically. Transport Canada investigated the disappearance of Macdonald’s flight in 1971 because the Transportation Safety Board (TSB) had yet to be created.

Macdonald’s disappearance triggered an intensive air search that at its peak in the days immediately after the aviator went missing involved more than 100 personnel covering almost 20,000 miles in nine search and rescue planes from Canadian Armed Forces bases in Edmonton and Winnipeg, including a Lockheed T-33 T-bird jet trainer and two de Havilland short takeoff and landing CC-138 Twin Otters, two RCMP planes and 11 civilian aircraft.

The search for Macdonald and his Mooney Mark M20D began only hours after his disappearance, on the Tuesday night. The Lockheed T-33 T-bird jet trainer flew the missing aircraft’s intended flight line from Winnipeg to Thompson and back to Winnipeg. The T-33 carried highly sophisticated electronic equipment and flew Macdonald’s flight plan both ways at extremely high altitude hoping to pick up signals from the Mooney Mark M20D’s emergency radio frequency, or the crash position indicator, a radio beacon designed to be ejected from an aircraft if it crashes to help ensure it survives the crash and any post-crash fire or sinking, allowing it to broadcast a homing signal to search and rescue aircraft, which was believed be carried by Macdonald on the Mooney Mark M20D.

The next morning – Dec. 8, 1971 – search and rescue aircraft re-flew the “track” in a visual search both ways, assisted by electronic listening devices, to no avail.

The area between Winnipeg and Thompson on both sides of the intended flight pattern was then zoned off and aircraft were assigned to particular zones and then flew the zones from east to west at one mile intervals until the entire area was over flown – first at higher altitudes and then again at lower altitudes.

Every private or commercial pilot flying the area assisted the organized search. Thompson Airport’s central tower was issuing a missing plane report at the end of every transmission, asking pilots in the area to keep a visual watch for Macdonald’s aircraft, and to listen for transmissions on the emergency band on their radios.

A second search for Macdonald and his Mooney Mark M20D single-engine prop aircraft was commenced almost six months later in May 1972, after spring had arrived in Northern Manitoba and all the snow had melted. Nothing turned up.

Who then was D.B. Cooper? The question still preoccupies old-time FBI agents and mystery aficionados alike. There have been a number of other Cooper suspects and persons of interest over the years, some more frequently discussed than others, including:

John List, a Second World War and Korean War veteran exited his ho-hum existence as a failed New Jersey accountant by killing his family in 1971, murdering his wife, three teenage children, and 85-year-old mother in New Jersey 15 days before the Cooper hijacking. After the murders, List withdrew $200,000 from his mother’s bank account and disappeared. He wasn’t arrested until 18 years later after Fox-TV’s America’s Most Wanted featured the case in a May 21, 1989 segment, displaying a bust of what an older John List might look like. The network estimated that 22 million people saw it. One was a woman in a suburb of Richmond, Virginia, who thought the bust looked like a neighbor, Robert Clark, a churchgoing accountant who wore horn-rimmed glasses. List, alias Clark, was arrested, tried and convicted, dying in custody in March 2008 at the age of 82.

William Pratt Gossett was a Marine Corps, Army and Army Air Force veteran who saw action in Korea and Vietnam. His military experience included advanced jump training and wilderness survival. Gossett died Sept. 1, 2003 at age 73, retired to Depoe Bay on the Oregon coast.

Galen Cook, a Spokane, Washington lawyer who’s been researching the Cooper case for more than 20 years, says Gossett once showed his sons a key to a British Columbia safety deposit box in Vancouver, which, he claimed, contained the missing ransom money.

His son Greg lives in Ogden, Utah, where he said his father told him on his 21st birthday that he had hijacked the plane.

“He said that I could never tell anybody until after he died,” Greg Gossett said.

Kirk Gossett, another son, says his father also told the story several times.

“He had the type of temperament to do something like this,” Kirk Gossett said.

After a career in the military, the elder Gossett worked in the early 1970s in Utah as an Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) instructor, the a college-based program for training commissioned officers of the United States Armed Forces, and also as a military law instructor at Weber State University in Ogden. He also worked as a radio talk show host in Salt Lake City, where he moderated discussions about the paranormal.

Late in his life, Gossett reportedly told his three sons that he committed the hijacking, but the FBI was never able to implicate Gossett, and could never place him in the Pacific Northwest at the time of the Cooper hijacking.

“There is not one link to the D.B. Cooper case other than the statements [Gossett] made to someone,” Seattle Field Office Special Agent Larry Carr told ABC News.

Kenneth Christensen had been a paratrooper whose first deployment came just after the Second World War. After he left the military, he worked as a mechanic and a flight purser for Northwest Orient Airlines, the carrier that Cooper targeted for his 1971 skyjacking. Christensen loved bourbon bought a modest house not long after the crime skyjacking of Flight 305.

Now add to the Cooper suspect list Robert Richard Lepsy, a Glen’s Market grocery store manager and married father of four, three boys and a girl, who mysteriously vanished from Grayling, in the middle of northern Michigan, on Oct. 29, 1969. Lake Ann, Michigan author and shipwreck hunter, Ross Richardson, a Benzie County Sheriff’s Department special deputy, who volunteers as a librarian at the Almira Township Library, wrote a book published last year titled Still Missing, Rethinking the D.B. Cooper Case and other Mysterious Unsolved Disappearances.

On the day he disappeared, Dick Lepsy, 33, called his wife, Jackie, 31, around lunch time and told her he was going to go for a ride. Jackie Lepsy noted at least as early as 1986 in interviews that her husband’s company wood-paneled station wagon was found abandoned two days later at the Cherry Capital Airport in Traverse City, Michigan, approximately 50 miles northwest of Grayling, or about an hour away, with the doors unlocked, a half-pack of cigarettes were sitting on the dash, and the keys in the ignition. Also left behind was an empty bank account and a safe at Glen’s Market missing $2,000.

Despite the circumstances, investigating officers from the Grayling Police Department and Michigan State Police believed that Lepsy had disappeared “on his own accord,” so he was never officially listed as a missing person. As he wasn’t officially wanted for any crime and was believed to have disappeared voluntarily, little police effort was expended trying to locate Lepsy. Local Michigan media ignored Lepsy’s disappearance because it was considered more likely to be an embezzlement case than a missing persons case, and police kept it quiet.

But a little more than two years after Lepsy disappeared from Michigan, his then 13-year-old daughter, Lisa Lepsy, was watching the CBS Evening News, and saw the story of the Portland skyjacking.

“We were all sitting on the couch watching Walter Cronkite,” she told WZZM13, the Tegna-owned ABC-TV affiliate in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Tegna is formerly Gannett Co., Inc. “When the composite sketch of D.B. Cooper came on the TV screen, everyone looked at each other and said, ‘That’s dad!’ We were stunned because the resemblance was unbelievable, and my brothers and I were all sure that was our dad.” The men were of similar height, about six feet tall, weighed about 180 pounds, and they both had brown hair and brown eyes. Lepsy, who had a high school education, was born in Chicago. Both Lepsy and Cooper wore black loafers and a skinny black ties. Cooper left a skinny black clip-on tie behind on the plane and, along with a tie clasp, while the skinny black tie was part of Lepsy’s mandatory managerial uniform at Glen’s Market in Michigan. DNA was extracted from Cooper’s tie finally 30 years after the skyjacking in 2001.

Lepsy’s family finally had his name added to the NamUs (National Missing and Unidentified Persons System) in 2011.

You can also follow me on X (formerly Twitter) at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Missing Persons, Mystery

D.B. Cooper, with his audacious skyjacking, jumped into history on Nov. 24, 1971

D.B. Cooper, with his audacious skyjacking, jumped into history on Nov. 24, 1971.

The number one song that day on AM transistor radios across the country was Isaac Hayes’ Theme from Shaft, the movie released four months earlier, starring Richard Roundtree as detective John Shaft.

Meanwhile, the chill surface temperature at ground level in Ariel, Washington, situated north of the Lewis River and on the northwest bank of Lake Merwin in Cowlitz County, not far north of the Oregon State line, was 20°F at 8:12 p.m. Pacific Standard Time (PST) 50 years ago today on Wednesday, Nov. 24, 1971. It was the day before Thanksgiving in the United States.

And around this time every November, searches on my blog spike upwards for all things D.B. Cooper related. It is, I noted on Facebook last year, “the story that keeps on giving.” Remarkably, for a soon-to-be 51-year-old news story, most years there is publicity throughout the media, especially in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, focusing on a newly discovered suspect, albeit they are all very old or dead now.

I came kind of late to writing about the D.B. Cooper case, first penning a column on it 11 years ago for the Thompson Citizen back on Nov. 23, 2011. I must have made up for lost time because less than five years later, “Fox Mulder will continue to investigate regardless. And possibly John W. Barker,” Ian Graham, editor of the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, wrote on Facebook July 12, 2016.

Along with FBI, Washington and Oregon state police, and local law enforcement officials, about 1,000 army troops and helicopters were also used in the 1971 search for Cooper.

The first 747 rolled out of the giant building in 1969. The plant is the size of 40 football fields. Boeing is among the largest global aircraft manufacturers; it is the second-largest defence contractor in the world based on 2015 revenue, and is the largest exporter in the United States by dollar value.

The so-called “Boeing Bust” had put 86,000 workers on the street in three years.

There have been a number of Cooper suspects and persons of interest over the years, some more frequently discussed than others: Kenneth Christiansen, Lynn Doyle Cooper, Richard Floyd McCoy, Jr., Duane Weber, Jack Coffelt, William Gossett, Barbara (formerly Bobby) Dayton, John List, Melvin Luther Wilson, and Ted Mayfield. Most had military combat experience. And one Canadian, a Winnipeger who disappeared in 1971, just days after Cooper’s skjacking, on a return trip from Thompson, Manitoba, flying solo. James (Jim) Hugh Macdonald, 46, the owner of J.H. Macdonald & Associates Ltd., consulting structural engineers on Pembina Highway in Winnipeg, climbed into his Mooney Mark M20D single-engine prop aircraft, bearing the registration mark CF-ABT, and took off half an hour after sunset from the Thompson Airport in Northern Manitoba at 4:30 p.m. on Dec. 7, 1971 to make his return flight home and disappeared into the rapidly darkening sky to never be seen or heard from again. He was the sole occupant of the four-seater plane.

The next morning – Dec. 8, 1971 – search and rescue aircraft re-flew the “track” in a visual search both ways, assisted by electronic listening devices, to no avail.

His son Greg lives in Ogden, Utah, where he said his father told him on his 21st birthday that he had hijacked the plane.

“He said that I could never tell anybody until after he died,” Greg Gossett said.

Kirk Gossett, another son, says his father also told the story several times.

“He had the type of temperament to do something like this,” Kirk Gossett said.

“There is not one link to the D.B. Cooper case other than the statements [Gossett] made to someone,” Seattle Field Office Special Agent Larry Carr told ABC News.

But a little more than two years after Lepsy disappeared from Michigan, his then 13-year-old daughter, Lisa Lepsy, was watching the CBS Evening News, and saw the story of the Portland skyjacking.

Lepsy’s family finally had his name added to the NamUs (National Missing and Unidentified Persons System) in 2011.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

D.B. Cooper

With his audacious skyjacking, D.B. Cooper jumped into history on Nov. 24, 1971 – 50 years ago today

_______________________________________________
The number one song that day on AM transistor radios across the country was Isaac Hayes’ Theme from Shaft, the movie released four months earlier, starring Richard Roundtree as detective John Shaft.

Meanwhile, the chill surface temperature at ground level in Ariel, Washington, situated north of the Lewis River and on the northwest bank of Lake Merwin in Cowlitz County, not far north of the Oregon State line, was 20°F at 8:12 p.m. Pacific Standard Time (PST) 50 years ago today on Wednesday, Nov. 24, 1971. And like this Wednesday today, it was the day before Thanksgiving in the United States.

At 10,000 feet altitude up in the troposphere above Ariel, it was an even chillier -7°F. It was also pelting freezing rain, and clouds mostly covered up the faint quarter moon out that night, cutting visibility to a minimum, as Dan Cooper, or D.B. Cooper, as he would quickly become known, jumped with a parachute from the bottom of the aft staircase of Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305, a Boeing 727-100, cruising at about 120 mph, close to the minimum before the plane would go into a stall, as Cooper jumped into history.

Because Cooper had clearly signaled his intention to parachute from the plane, the FBI scrambled nearby military aircraft to keep tabs on Flight 305. But the fighter jets they chose were too fast and quickly lapped the 727. Conversely, the helicopter tailing the plane was too slow. No one saw Dan Cooper jump.

Cooper, with $200,000 in ransom money, may have died that night during his jump in the most audacious act of air piracy in U.S. history. Or survived and vanished.

In 1978, a placard containing instructions for lowering the aft stairs of a 727 was found by a deer hunter east of Castle Rock in Cowlitz County, which was within the basic flight path of the plane Cooper jumped from, according to the FBI and news reports.

I came kind of late to writing about the D.B. Cooper case, first penning a column on it 10 years ago for the Thompson Citizen back on Nov. 23, 2011.

“Following one of the longest and most exhaustive investigations in our history,” said Ayn Dietrich-Williams, a public affairs specialist with the FBI Seattle Field Office, “on July 8, 2016, the FBI redirected resources allocated to the D.B. Cooper case in order to focus on other investigative priorities. During the course of the 45-year NORJAK investigation, the FBI exhaustively reviewed all credible leads, co-ordinated between multiple field offices to conduct searches, collected all available evidence, and interviewed all identified witnesses. Over the years, the FBI has applied numerous new and innovative investigative techniques, as well as examined countless items at the FBI Laboratory. Evidence obtained during the course of the investigation will now be preserved for historical purposes at FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C.

”My friend, Ian Graham, who succeeded me as editor of the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News in 2014, posted on Facebook July 12, 2016 – four days after Dietrich-Williams’ announcement – that “Fox Mulder will continue to investigate regardless. And possibly John W. Barker,” Graham wrote at the time.

As it turns out, closing the official FBI investigation has not proven to be a bar to journalists, still milking or mining, depending on one’s perspective, of course, the D.B. Cooper story since the FBI signed off on the file almost 5½ years ago.

The man now known by the alias D.B. Cooper paid $20 cash, which included tax, for his airline ticket in Portland. Once on board, Cooper, a nondescript man possibly with a slight Midwestern accent, ordered a bourbon-and-soda, before passing a note to flight attendant Florence Schaffner demanding $200,000 ransom in unmarked $20 bills and two back parachutes and two front parachutes. ‘I HAVE A BOMB IN MY BRIEFCASE. I WILL USE IT IF NECESSARY. I WANT YOU TO SIT NEXT TO ME. YOU ARE BING (sic) HIJACKED.’ Initially, Schaffner dropped the note unopened into her purse, until Cooper leaned toward her and whispered, “Miss, you’d better look at that note. I have a bomb.” Cooper smoked eight Raleigh filter-tipped cigarettes on the plane, but there was no evidence to show if this was a regular habit of his.

The plane took off again, heading toward Mexico at the hijacker’s command, with only Cooper and the crew aboard about half an hour later. Cooper told the pilot to fly a low-speed, low-altitude flight path at about 120 mph. To ensure a minimum speed he specified that the landing gear remain down, in the take off and landing position, and the wing flaps be lowered 15 degrees. To ensure a low altitude he ordered that the cabin remain unpressurized.

In a 2018 piece in The Oregonian, headlined, “As new evidence upends D.B. Cooper case, the (un)usual suspects continue to fuel the legend,” Douglas Perry, who has written extensively about the case, wrote:

“He could be anybody – because he was nobody.”

Cooper was the ultimate Everyman. He was, as The Oregonian once put it, “a wild mix of John Dillinger, Evel Knievel and your neighborhood CPA.”

Geoffrey Gray, a contributing editor at New York magazine and the author of Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper, suggested in a New York Times article on Aug. 6, 2011 that it is that “not-knowing” that makes Cooper so compelling for us. “In an age when we receive answers to our questions so quickly – now as fast as a mid sentence trip to Wikipedia – the fact that we still don’t know who Cooper is feels somehow unfair,” Gray argues.

“Even some lawmen who scoured the woods for Cooper four decades ago suggested they hoped they would come up short.

“If he took the trouble to plan this thing out so thoroughly, well, good luck to him,” one local sheriff said.

To view Walter Cronkite’s original 1971 news clip on the CBS Evening News of the D.B. Cooper hijacking story, you can check it out at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksxyp4s6AXY

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

D.B. Cooper

‘The Hijacker Who Vanished: The Mystery of DB Cooper’ continues as BBC Four’s Storyville tackles the unsolved 1971 Pacific Northwest skyjacking of Flight 305

To mark the 49th anniversay of the most audacious and (possibly) only successful skyjacking in U.S. aviation history on Nov. 24, 1971, BBC Four has broadcast the new Storyville documentary The Hijacker Who Vanished: The Mystery of DB Cooper by John Dower, the director of My Scientology Movie, who picked through the evidence, considering possible endings as well as telling the stories of those who may have been, or claimed to be, D.B. Cooper. Since 1997, BBC’s Storyville has been working with filmmakers to bring “the globe’s best feature documentary stories to festival, cinema and television audiences,” BBC says.

“Fans of modern American folklore may be familiar with the story … but even those who are not should relish this authoritative opportunity to pull up a seat and get out the popcorn, writes Rebecca Nicholson in The Guardian.

I came kind of late to writing about the D.B. Cooper case, first penning a column on it nine years ago for the Thompson Citizen back on Nov. 23, 2011. I wrote:

“Who was D.B. Cooper?

“The question still preoccupies old-time FBI agents and mystery aficionados alike for it was 40 years ago tomorrow – Nov. 24, 1971 – a Wednesday and the day before American Thanksgiving, just as today is, that someone using the alias Dan Cooper committed the most audacious act of air piracy in U.S. history with the mid-afternoon skyjacking of Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305, flying over the Pacific Northwest, en route from Portland, Oregon to Seattle, Washington” with 36 passengers and six crew members aboard.

The man now known by the alias D.B. Cooper paid $20 cash, which included tax, for his airline ticket in Portland. Once on board, Cooper, a nondescript man possibly with a slight Midwestern accent, ordered a bourbon-and-soda, before passing a note to flight attendant Florence Schaffner demanding $200,000 ransom in unmarked $20 bills and two back parachutes and two front parachutes. ‘I HAVE A BOMB IN MY BRIEFCASE. I WILL USE IT IF NECESSARY. I WANT YOU TO SIT NEXT TO ME. YOU ARE BING (sic) HIJACKED.’ Initially, Schaffner dropped the note unopened into her purse, until Cooper leaned toward her and whispered, “Miss, you’d better look at that note. I have a bomb.” Cooper smoked eight Raleigh filter-tipped cigarettes on the plane, but there was no evidence to show if this was a regular habit of his.

The skyjacked flight landed at Tacoma International Airport in Seattle, where passengers were exchanged for parachutes, including possibly an NB-8 rig with a C-9 canopy, known as a “double-shot” pinch-and-pull system that in 1971 would have allowed jumpers to disengage quickly from their chutes after they landed so that the wind did not drag them, and the cash, all in $20 bills, as he had demanded, although not unmarked it would turn out. The passengers were never aware of the threat onboard. A bank in Seattle was contacted and a bag of money, all $20 bills with recorded serial numbers, totalling $200,000, was delivered to the plane, which was refuelled and cleared for take off. The bag of ransom money itself weighed 23 pounds.

The plane took off again, heading toward Mexico at the hijacker’s command, with only Cooper and the crew aboard about half an hour later. Cooper told the pilot to fly a low-speed, low-altitude flight path at about 120 mph, close to the minimum before the plane would go into a stall, at a maximum 10,000 feet, to aid in his jump. To ensure a minimum speed he specified that the landing gear remain down, in the take off and landing position, and the wing flaps be lowered 15 degrees. To ensure a low altitude he ordered that the cabin remain unpressurized.

Along with FBI, Washington and Oregon state police, and local law enforcement officials, about 1,000 army troops and helicopters were also used in the 1971 search for Cooper.

In the first five years after the skyjacking, the FBI considered over 800 suspects, KVAL CBS 13 in Eugene Oregon reported last week. And the suspect list since 2011, both living and dead, when I first wrote about it, has grown from nine frequently discussed suspects over the years: Kenneth Christiansen, Lynn Doyle Cooper, Richard Floyd McCoy, Jr., Duane Weber, Jack Coffelt, William Gossett, Barbara (formerly Bobby) Dayton, John List and Ted Mayfield, most of whom had military combat experience, to now also include most recently William J. Smith, Robert W. Rackstraw and Dick Lepsy, and as an outside long shot, James (Jim) Hugh Macdonald, 46, the owner of J.H. Macdonald & Associates Ltd., consulting structural engineers on Pembina Highway in Winnipeg, who climbed into his Mooney Mark M20D single-engine prop aircraft, bearing the registration mark CF-ABT, and took off half an hour after sunset from the Thompson Airport in Northern Manitoba at 4:30 p.m. on Dec. 7, 1971 – a couple of weeks after the D.B. Cooper skyjacking – to make his return flight home to Winnipeg and disappeared into the rapidly darkening sky to never be seen or heard from again. He was the sole occupant of the four-seater plane.

John List, a Second World War and Korean War veteran exited his ho-hum existence as a failed New Jersey accountant by killing his family in 1971, murdering his wife, three teenage children, and 85-year-old mother in New Jersey 15 days before the Cooper hijacking. After the murders, List withdrew $200,000 from his mother’s bank account and disappeared. He wasn’t arrested until 18 years later after Fox-TV’s America’s Most Wanted featured the case in a May 21, 1989 segment, displaying a bust of what an older John List might look like. The network estimated that 22 million people saw it. One was a woman in a suburb of Richmond, Virginia, who thought the bust looked like a neighbour, Robert Clark, a churchgoing accountant who wore horn-rimmed glasses. List, alias Clark, was arrested, tried and convicted, dying in custody in March 2008 at the age of 82.

“Following one of the longest and most exhaustive investigations in our history,” said Ayn Dietrich-Williams, a public affairs specialist with the FBI Seattle Field Office, “on July 8, 2016, the FBI redirected resources allocated to the D.B. Cooper case in order to focus on other investigative priorities. During the course of the 45-year NORJAK investigation, the FBI exhaustively reviewed all credible leads, co-ordinated between multiple field offices to conduct searches, collected all available evidence, and interviewed all identified witnesses. Over the years, the FBI has applied numerous new and innovative investigative techniques, as well as examined countless items at the FBI Laboratory. Evidence obtained during the course of the investigation will now be preserved for historical purposes at FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C.”

Fast-forward nine years and change 40 to 49, and that’s still the main story line. In the intervening years, I would write once more about the D.B. Cooper case at the Thompson Citizen in 2013, and have blogged about it in 2014, 2015, twice in 2017, and once again in 2018, 2019 and 2020.

In a 2018 piece in The Oregonian, headlined, “As new evidence upends D.B. Cooper case, the (un)usual suspects continue to fuel the legend,” Douglas Perry, who has written extensively about the case, wrote:

“He could be anybody – because he was nobody.

“The late journalist Darrell Bob Houston, writing in 1980, was explaining the fascination Americans had with the notorious, unknown skyjacker known as D.B. Cooper.

“That fascination continues today. One of the reasons: the famous outlaw – who jumped from a Northwest Airlines plane in 1971 wearing a parachute and carrying $200,000 in ransom – was the ultimate Everyman. He was, as The Oregonian once put it, “a wild mix of John Dillinger, Evel Knievel and your neighborhood CPA.”

Geoffrey Gray, a contributing editor at New York magazine and the author of Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper, suggested in a New York Times article on Aug. 6, 2011 that it is that “not-knowing” that makes Cooper so compelling for us. “In an age when we receive answers to our questions so quickly – now as fast as a mid sentence trip to Wikipedia – the fact that we still don’t know who Cooper is feels somehow unfair,” Gray argues.

“Even some lawmen who scoured the woods for Cooper four decades ago suggested they hoped they would come up short.

“If he took the trouble to plan this thing out so thoroughly, well, good luck to him,” one local sheriff said.

To view Walter Cronkite’s original 1971 news clip on the CBS Evening News of the D.B. Cooper hijacking story, you can check it out at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksxyp4s6AXY

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Christmas

Thompson Community Christmas Dinner and other traditions, times and places

Back a couple of weeks ago on Dec. 2, I noted a Facebook comment on my timeline from one of my oldest friends from high school in Oshawa some 40-and-more years ago now. It was one of those by-the-way (BTW) remarks that was an addendum to the main and unrelated comment. “ Incidentally, I am asking my loved ones how they usually spend their Christmas Day and the holidays in general. Would you care to elaborate about your usual traditions,” Annie asked. I was originally going to answer it right there, but it got me thinking, that maybe I’d wait and write a fuller, more complete post here on the question before Christmas. It’s an interesting topic, and I’m grateful for it as a writing idea that I hadn’t really thought about directly in a broader sense, although I have written a bit about Christmas movie traditions in the past. But Christmas is about more than movies when it comes to traditions.

Annie, who for many, many years now has lived in Ottawa, noted that one of her traditions is that she volunteers “at a soup kitchen at an Anglican church just up the street from my place.”

That’s the kind of tradition, it would seem to me is well worth emulating, although I am sorry to say, I haven’t come close. Way back in 2008, the second Christmas I lived in Thompson, Manitoba, I volunteered in the kitchen at St. Joseph’s Ukrainian Catholic Hall for the Thompson Community Christmas Dinner, which has been an annual holiday staple here since 1991, where folks are treated to a free turkey dinner with all the trimmings on Dec. 25. Another year, Bobbi Montean oversaw Jeanette and me, and a number of other volunteer drivers, delivering Christmas dinners to shut-ins who couldn’t make it out to St. Joe’s. What I remember best about that experience was that it was dark, very dark, and I was still relatively new to Thompson in terms of knowing the geography (a fact I apparently didn’t know until we started the deliveries), and it was brutally cold. But what am I saying. It is brutally cold every year (or at least it is in my memory)!

A couple of years ago, I also peeled some potatoes under the watchful eye of Nelson Pruder for the community dinner Christmas Eve, and a few other times Jeanette and I have I’ve turned out to take part in and enjoy some ad hoc music-making, and enjoy a turkey plate ourselves Christmas day.

Throughout the last 28 years, local members of the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA), St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, former Chicken Chef owner Dale Shantz, the Pruder family, particularly Emily, as well as Harlie, and Nelson, who took over from the local branch of the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) in organizing the annual Christmas Day event in 2013, and for the last two years, Mayor Colleen Smook, in her capacity as a private citizen, not as mayor, although if you know Colleen and you know the North, the two are kinda inseparable in some ways, and one of her daughters, Sharon Cordell, and her daughter, Tori Jade Cordell, have led the Thompson Community Christmas Dinner preparation and cooking effort. The dinner ends up feeding around 180 people each year. I worked with Sharon briefly a few years ago in what is now the Wellington & Madeleine Spence Memorial Library on the University College of the North’s Thompson Campus, so I am not at all surprised at this. Like Colleen, Sharon is all about community, albeit with perhaps a bit of an iron fist in a velvet glove activism when necessary to get people’s attention that something is important.

Christmas traditions are important, but not immutable, I think. To some extent, they seem to me to be dependent on where we are both in life, as it were, and geography, which even in a very virtual world, still matters.

One of the earliest family traditions I can recall is that of celebrating my grandfather, William Barker, same name as my dad’s, Christmas day birthday every Dec. 25. My grandfather had what I thought of as his “plant room” in a second-floor room of my grandparents’ home on Verdun Road in Oshawa. I spent a fair bit of time in it in the mid-1960s. It had large southwest facing windows, ideal for growing plants inside in the winter. My grandmother, who died in January 1965 when I was seven, lived long enough to instill a life-long love of Christmas fruitcake in me, whether it be from the monks of Le Magasin de l’Abbayea Val Notre-Dame in Saint-Jean-de-Matha, Quebec, or my local Safeway’s honey and ground almond marzipan-icing topped fruitcake, a love I was astonished to learn later in life is not shared by everyone. My grandfather, who died when I was 10 in September 1967, was hard of hearing, so from him I learned to speak loud enough to be heard even as a child, which has proved useful over the years. I also learned to love the raspberry canes in his garden and simplicity from my grandfather Barker.

My dad, after reportedly being a bit of a hell-raiser in the 1940s and 1950s – especially up at our Pop-In Cottage on Lake Simcoe – when he got together with his favourite brother-in-laws – Ray Seager, Fred Porter and Pat O’Leary – laid off the booze after his second bout of kidney stones, he told me years later.

But I well remember as a boy going into the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) on Richmond Street West at Centre Street in Oshawa the Saturday before Christmas every year to pick up a mickey of Canadian Five Star whisky (and in those days in the 1960s and 1970s the bottle actually had a plastic five-point star on the outside, not some chintzy image-only on the label) for my dad to have on hand for Uncle Ray, Uncle Fred and Uncle Pat Christmas night, when our family would gather at our home at 537 Nipigon Street in Oshawa to celebrate my grandfather’s birthday with a party. In those days before customer self-serve and wine and liquor lists, dad would peruse the list, even though he always picked up the Canadian Five Star whisky, but didn’t pick it up before he filled out his order slip by pen or pencil and handed it to the clerk at the counter, who would then purposefully retrieve it from some pigeonhole in the mysterious area at back.

As I’d say many years later living in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, “we had ourselves a time” at those long ago Christmas birthday parties!

From 1978 to 1991, I spent many a happy Christmas ensconced at the Dell family’s Noone House, built in 1820, on what is now Old Jaffrey Road in Peterborough, New Hampshire, or enjoying a hot toddy in nearby Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire at the Fitzwilliam Inn, built in 1796 as a stop on the old coaching road system between Boston and points north. I still marvel at the memory of opening Christmas presents for the first time in the Noone House library. A room completely given over to being a library in a private family home was almost beyond the ken of my imagination in 1978. While it seems like another lifetime ago now, and perhaps was in many respects, my memories of the love and hospitality extended to me by Heather, and her family, including her sister, Sara, brother Chad, and her parents, Ed and Carol Dell, remain among the post precious I cherish and treasure to this day. It is often said that grace is an “unmerited favour” or gift from God. My Christmas holiday time spent in New England over those 14 years as a young man from my early 20s to mid-30s is surely testament to that.

As Frank Sinatra sang so famously in 1968 in Jacques Revaux’s “My Way,” written a year earlier in France, “Regrets, I’ve had a few,” there will always be a tinge of sadness for the remembrance of things past. But I am also reminded of the words of C.S. Lewis, perhaps the finest apologist for Christianity of the 20th century, from the 1993 movie Shadowlands, where he says, “The pain now is part of the happiness then. That’s the deal.”

Coincidentally, if there are really coincidences, Chad Walsh, a mid-life convert from atheism to Christianity, as was Clive Staples Lewis, much better known by his initials C.S. Lewis, or to family, friends and academic colleagues, Jack Lewis, and his, wife, Helen Joy Davidman, also a convert from atheism to Christianity, wrote a biographical article on C.S. Lewis for the New York Times in 1948, and Walsh published the first biography of Lewis a few months later, entitled C.S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics, and was a close friend and neighbour of the Dell family on Lake Iroquois in Vermont, where both families had summer cottages.

Walsh, a nationally noted poet and author, was an English professor at Beloit College in Wisconsin. After moving to Beloit to teach there in 1945, he discovered a new interest in Christianity as a result of reading T.S. Eliot and Reinhold Niebuhr, and he joined the Episcopal Church and was ordained as an Episcopal priest in 1949. Ed Dell was also later ordained as an Episcopal priest, and Walsh was one of the most significant mentors and friends in his life, while Lewis, whom he had met, had a towering intellectual influence on him, which is saying something, as Ed Dell was neither easily impressed nor suffered fools gladly.

Helen Joy Davidman “corresponded with Chad Walsh about her many questions related to Lewis’s books and her new-found faith,” noted Lyle Dorsett, Billy Graham Professor of Evangelism at the Beeson Divinity School at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, in a 2005 article, “Helen Joy Davidman (Mrs. C.S. Lewis) 1915-1960: A Portrait,” published in Knowing & Doing, the quarterly journal of the C.S. Lewis Institute in Springfield, Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C. “Walsh understood and respected Joy’s pilgrimage so he and his wife, Eva, frequently entertained Joy and her boys at their summer cottage at Lake Iroquois, Vermont,” said Dorsett.

C.S. Lewis died in 1963 when I was only six years old, but I did have the distinct privilege of meeting and sharing a brief bit of time and conversation at that same cottage in the late 1970s with Chad and Eva Walsh.

Some of my traditions date back many years, others are of much more recent vintage, and are perhaps best described as being on the road to becoming tradition, although exactly where that demarcation line is drawn, is not completely clear to me. Take food for instance. I have been making sausage meat dressing or stuffing for the Christmas turkey for so long I can’t quite remember how or when I started. But I’ve made it everywhere it seems. For my parents, for my relatives in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, here in Thompson, Manitoba, you name it. Perhaps my fondest sausage meat dressing memories go back to 1994 or 1995 in Kingston, Ontario, when I was a graduate student at Queen’s University, and where I made what seemed many pounds and pans of stuffing, or at least so it seemed at the time, one Christmas dinner a quarter century ago now, for participants in Project Reconciliation, a volunteer-based effort, located in the basement of First Baptist Church at the corner of Johnson and Sydenham streets, and aimed at helping recently released federal parolees to integrate back into their local community. The standard joke in Kingston was that nearly all the residents of the Limestone City were either connected to the universities or federal penitentiaries, of which there were nine at the time, and it was often hard to tell at a glance who was connected with which institution.

On the other hand, making Land O’Lakes sour cream cornbread, with my own recipe addition of cream cheese, is much more recent, something I only started doing several years ago here in Thompson, but which I am happy to keep baking until it become a true tradition in time.

Likewise, it is only here in Thompson that I have resumed a tradition that I had long gotten away from: chopping down my own Christmas tree. Jeanette and I had been doing it intermittently since 2008, but if we make it out this year in the next nine days, it will be our third consecutive year since 2017 cutting down Christmas trees for both of us off Jonas Road, south of Thompson. The first year in 2017, the snow was already so deep, Jeanette used snowshoes to get in the adjacent bush with a hand-held saw.

I am also connected to long tradition at midnight mass at St. Lawrence Church here in Thompson, when I see Father Guna, robed in his white and gold sacramental vestments, swinging a thurible, a metal censer suspended from chains and holding burning incense – a scene I find comforting and liturgically meaningful in both sight and smell. Too often, we forget that as Catholics we use all our senses in a participatory way in worship.

Likewise, we recall the Great Antiphons, known as the O antiphons, those Magnificat antiphons chanted or recited at Vespers of the Liturgy of the Hours during the last seven days of Advent preparation known as the Octave before Christmas and also heard as the alleluia verses on the same days from Dec. 17 to Dec. 23 inclusive at mass.

They are referred to as the O antiphons because the title of each one begins with the interjection “O”: O Sapientia (O Wisdom); O Adonai (O Ruler of the House of Israel); O Radix Jesse (O Root of Jesse); O Clavis David (O Key of David); O Oriens (O Rising Dawn); O Rex Gentium (O King of the Nations); and O Emmanuel (O God With Us). Taking the first letter of each and reversing the order – Emmanuel, Rex, Oriens, Clavis, Radix, Adonai, Sapientia – gives the Latin words ero cras, which means “tomorrow I will come.”

While the exact origins of the polyphonous O antiphons are now shrouded by the mist of time, they probably date back to the late 5th or 6th early century. At the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire in France, also known as the Abbey of Fleury or Abbaye Saint-Benoît de Fleury, one of the oldest Benedictine abbeys in Western Europe, founded in the 6th century, the O antiphons were traditionally recited by the abbot and other abbey leaders in descending rank, and then a gift was given to each member of the community.

We Catholics also share a collective memory and remember our saints and martyrs in Eucharistic Prayer 1, an essential of the rubrics comprising the Roman Canon or Missal, with origins that reach as far back as the 4th century, and which made an indelible mark on my Catholic boyhood, although it doesn’t have quite the same resonance for most of my Protestant friends, I’ve found.

“In union with the whole Church we honour Mary, the ever-virgin mother of Jesus Christ our Lord and God. We honour Joseph, her husband, the apostles and martyrs Peter and Paul, Andrew, James, John, Thomas, James, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Simon and Jude; we honour Linus, Cletus, Clement, Sixtus, Cornelius, Cyprian, Lawrence, Chrysogonus, John and Paul, Cosmas and Damian and all the saints. May their merits and prayers gain us your constant help and protection … to us, also, your sinful servants, who hope in your abundant mercies, graciously grant some share and fellowship with your holy apostles and martyrs: with John the Baptist, Stephen, Matthias, Barnabas, Ignatius, Alexander, Marcellinus, Peter, Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia, Anastasia and all your saints: admit us, we beg you, into their company, not weighing our merits, but granting us your pardon….”

Every pope from Peter up to and including Sixtus II, beheaded Aug. 6, 258 under the edict of Roman Emperor Valerian, was a saint and martyr, including Linus, Anacletus (Cletus), Clement I, Evaristus, Alexander I, Sixtus I (also called Xystus I), Telesphorus, Hyginus, Pius I, Anicetus, Soter, Eleutherius, Victor I, Zephyrinus, Callistus I, Urban I, Pontain, Anterus, Fabian, Cornelius, Lucius I and Stephen I. Sixtus II was the 24th pope.

Christmas movies also are a part of my Christmas tradition. And what, after all, is Christmas without an annual debate over whether Die Hard properly qualifies as a Christmas movie.

Die Hard, directed by John McTiernan and written by Steven E. de Souza and Jeb Stuart, follows the Christmas Eve exploits of John McClane (Bruce Willis), playing an off-duty New York City cop visiting in Los Angeles for the holidays to see his estranged wife, Holly Gennaro McClane (Bonnie Bedelia), and two daughters, as he takes on a group of highly organized criminals, led by Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman), at a holiday party in the L.A. skyscraper that is the American headquarters of the Japanese-owned business Holly works for, as Gruber and his men stage a heist under the guise of a terrorist attack using hostages, including Holly, to keep police at bay.

Die Hard is based on Roderick Thorp’s 1979 novel Nothing Lasts Forever, and was the sequel to 1966’s The Detective, which was adapted into a 1968 film of the same name that starred Frank Sinatra. Willis, not the first choice for the role (Sinatra declined to reprise his role 20 years after The Detective and action star Arnold Schwarzenegger turned the part down) was known primarily as a comedic television actor in 1988, particularly for co-starring as a private detective with Cybill Shepherd in Moonlighting on ABC between March 1985 and May 1989.

Die Hard changed all that and made Willis into an action star. Made for $28 million, Die Hard has grossed more than $140 million theatrically worldwide. The film’s success has spawned four sequels to date: Die Hard 2 in 1990; Die Hard with a Vengeance in 1995; Live Free or Die Hard in 2007 and a Good Day to Die Hard in 2013.

“Among the many holiday nods — 12 bad guys, wife named Holly, giant teddy bear gift in waiting and endless Christmas decor — there’s also a film score featuring ominous renditions of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy sprinkled with the jingling of sleigh bells,” Chin notes http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/die-hard-christmas-movie-debate-calgary-eyeopener-1.4450305

Mark Hughes, a film and television screenwriter, who has also worked as a media specialist and campaign ad writer. Hughes penned a piece for Forbes magazine on Dec. 14, 2011, where he picked Die Hard as number one on his list of “Top Ten Best Christmas Movies Of All Time,” as the story was headlined.

Wrote Hughes: “Die Hard is everything every Christmas movie should always be forever. It’s a mix of the baddie from The Grinch Who Stole Christmas; the unbeatable hero who shows up to teach everyone a lesson from Miracle On 34th Street; the ghosts of past, present, and future who bring insight and change from A Christmas Carol; plus every redemptive struggle about family and personal evolution and good versus evil, all wrapped up in a big shiny box with a bow made of explosions and bullets. There’s Christmas, and then there’s Christmas with punching terrorists in the face and winning back your entire family – which do YOU prefer? It doesn’t matter what you prefer, actually, because Bruce Willis prefers the latter, and Bruce Willis always wins. You’d know that if you watched the Die Hard movies. So start watching now, beginning with this one….”

While I’ve added Die Hard to my annual Christmas viewing list (at least some years), Dickens it ain’t.

Charles Dickens, a heterodox Anglican if ever there was one, of course, wrote A Christmas Carol after he journeyed to Lancashire at the age of 31 in the summer of 1843 to see for himself how life was lived in the industrial north of England. On the train back to London, impacted by the poverty and misery he had seen, he conceptualized A Christmas Carol on the eve of revolutions throughout Europe, counselling that hearts must hear and eyes must see for society to change. He began writing the classic Christmas story a week later. He completed the book that fall in six weeks and the book was published on Dec. 19, 1843, the 177th anniversary of which falls on Tuesday. Since the book was published in 1843, Christmas has never been the same.

“A merry Christmas, Bob!” said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. “A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you, for many a year! I’ll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of Smoking Bishop, Bob!”

Jeanette has a particular fondness for Linus, Charlie Brown, Lucy and Snoopy in A Charlie Brown Christmas, made in 1965 and one of the most successful animated Christmas specials in TV history. Peanuts creator Charles Schulz and animator Bill Melendez wrote the outline in one day, and the musical score was written by jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi. ABC celebrated its 50th anniversary two years ago with a special showing Nov. 30, 2015.

Me, I also like It’s a Wonderful Life, produced and directed by Frank Capra, based on the short story The Greatest Gift, written by Philip Van Doren Stern in 1939.

The film stars Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey, a man who has given up his dreams in order to help others, and whose imminent suicide on Christmas Eve brings about the intervention of his guardian angel, Clarence Odbody (Henry Travers). Clarence shows George all the lives he has touched and how different life in his community of Bedford Falls, New York would be had he never been born. Film historian James Berardinelli has commented on the parallels between It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol, noting that in both stories, a man revisits his life and potential death (or non-existence) with the help of spirits or angels, culminating in a joyous epiphany and a renewed sense of purpose and life.

It’s a Wonderful Life, released in 1946, is one of the most acclaimed films ever made, and was nominated for five Academy Awards including Best Picture, and has been recognized by the American Film Institute as one of the 100 best American films ever made.

Initially, however, it did middling business at the box office and opened to at best mixed reviews.

For their part, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) weighed in on May 26, 1947 with a memo stating: “With regard to the picture It’s a Wonderful Life, [redacted] stated in substance that the film represented rather obvious attempts to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a ‘scrooge-type’ so that he would be the most hated man in the picture. This, according to these sources, is a common trick used by Communists. [In] addition, [redacted] stated that, in his opinion, this picture deliberately maligned the upper class, attempting to show the people who had money were mean and despicable characters.”

In a similar vein to It’s a Wonderful Life, another movie destined to become a Christmas classic, Miracle on 34th Street, was released a year later in 1947. An old man going by the name of Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) fills in for an intoxicated Santa in Macy’s annual Thanksgiving Day parade. Kringle proves to be such a hit that he is soon appearing regularly at the chain’s main store in midtown Manhattan.

The Christmas movie genre is a rather big tent one, as we Catholics like to say. Who can forget the electrifying Griswold family of Chicago? National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation is a 1989 Christmas comedy directed by Jeremiah S. Chechik, written by John Hughes, and starring Chevy Chase, Beverly D’Angelo and Randy Quaid, with Juliette Lewis and Johnny Galecki as the Griswold children Audrey and Rusty. It is the third installment in National Lampoon’s Vacation film series.

More perhaps in the Die Hard vein, or at least not in the Frank Capra one, are some other Christmas bad-ass classics, including Canada’s 1974 contribution, the under appreciated genre classic Black Christmas, starring Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea, Margot Kidder, Andrea Martin, Marian Waldman and John Saxon.

The story follows a group of sorority sisters who are receiving threatening phone calls, while being stalked and murdered during the holiday season by a deranged murderer hiding in the attic of their sorority house.

Inspired by a series of murders that took place in the Westmount section of Montreal, the part urban legend “The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs,” and the true crime unsolved slaying of Janett Christman on the evening of March 18, 1950 in Columbia, Missouri, A. Roy Moore composed the script, which was originally titled Stop Me. Upon American director Bob Clark’s involvement, numerous alterations were made, primarily the shifting to a university setting with young adult characters. Parts of Black Christmas were filmed on the University of Toronto campus.

Nine years later in 1983, Clark would make the light-hearted Christmas classic A Christmas Story, following the adventures of youngster Ralphie Parker (Peter Billingsley), who spends most of his time dodging a bully (Zack Ward) and dreaming of his ideal Christmas gift, a “Red Ryder air rifle.”

The film was shot on an estimated budget of $620,000 in Toronto in the winter of 1973–74. Black Christmas was purchased by Warner Bros., who distributed the film in North America, releasing it in Canada on Oct. 11, 1974.

In the United States, Warner Bros. timed the release with the Christmas holiday, releasing it on Dec. 20, 1974. It screened at theaters in the United States through late 1975, and would internationally gross over $4 million at the box office.

It took some years after its release, but eventually Black Christmas would receive praise from film critics and historians for being one of the earliest films of its type to conclude without revealing the identity of its villain. It has also earned a following as a cult classic. The film is generally considered to be one of the earliest slasher films,serving as an influence for Halloween four years later in 1978.

And speaking of Christmas slasher films, who can forget the now 1984 Christmas cult classic Silent Night, Deadly Night, directed by Charles E. Sellier Jr., and starring Robert Brian Wilson, Lilyan Chauvin, Gilmer McCormick, Toni Nero, Linnea Quigley, Britt Leach and Leo Geter. Set during Christmas, the story concerns a young man, Billy, who suffers from post-traumatic stress over witnessing his parents’ Christmas Eve murder and his subsequent upbringing in an abusive Catholic orphanage. In adulthood, the Christmas holiday leads him into a psychological breakdown, and he emerges as a spree killer donning a Santa suit.

After negative reviews and something of a public outcry, the film was pulled from theaters a week after its release on Nov. 9, 1984.

Also part of the Christmas movie genre is Bad Santa, made in 2003 and directed by Terry Zwigoff, and starring Billy Bob Thornton, Tony Cox, Lauren Graham, Brett Kelly, Lauren Tom, John Ritter, and Bernie Mac. It was John Ritter’s last live action film appearance before his death on Sept. 11, 2003. The Coen brothers, Ethan and Joel, were the film’s executive producers.

Willie T. Soke (Billy Bob Thornton)and his dwarf assistant Marcus Skidmore (Tony Cox) are professional thieves. Every year, Willie disguises himself as a department store Santa Claus and Marcus disguises himself as an elf in order for both of them to rob shopping malls at night, using Marcus’ wife Lois as their getaway driver and accomplice. Marcus takes his duty as an elf seriously, but Willie is a sex-addicted alcoholic, and is gradually unable to appropriately perform his Santa duties with children, plus his safe-cracking performance is being affected, much to Marcus’ dismay. When they are hired at the Saguaro Square Mall in Phoenix, the vulgar remarks made by Willie shock the prudish mall manager Bob Chipeska, who brings them to the attention of security chief Gin Slagel.

While some Christmas movies have quickly entered the pantheon of yuletide classics to virtual universal acclaim, others become classics more slowly over time, or perhaps as niche classics; Christmas favourites, but not for everyone.

Hometown Mayor Dan Reed (Ted McGinley) looks forward to each year with enthusiasm to all the events, friends and family that fill this special season in the small fictional town of Trapper Falls, Alaska (Seward).

Together with his brother Greg (Brad Stine), they dedicate time away from their adventure tour company to spread Christmas cheer, including annually putting up a 50-year-old hand-craved nativity set, given years ago to the town, in the public square.

Probably no need for a spoiler alert even if I tell you Christmas with a Capital C is a Pure Flix Entertainment Christian filmmaking entry in the culture wars and the so-called “War on Christmas” by secularists. Pure Flix Entertainment is owned by David. A.R. White, raised in a small Mennonite farming town outside of Dodge City, Kansas, brothers Kevin and Bobby Downes, and Michael Scott.

The Christian filmmaking genre, as I wrote in a post headlined “Flying largely under the mainstream cinematic radar: Christian movie genre is ‘hot’” back on Sept. 15, 2014 (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/flying-largely-under-the-mainstream-cinematic-radar-christian-movie-genre-is-hot/) regularly gets knocked — and truth be told, not unfairly often — by more “secular moviegoers for its heavy-handed theological scripts, clunky acting and cheesy sets, with mainly bad films, which, to be charitable, do little more than preach to the choir.”

Given that Christmas with a Capital C centers in part — although it will turn out not to be the main point — around the United States Constitution’s First Amendment Establishment Clause, which prohibits the government from making any law respecting an establishment of religion and not only forbids the government from establishing an official religion, but also prohibits government actions that unduly favor one religion over another, as well as prohibiting the government from unduly preferring religion over non-religion, or non-religion over religion, it can be a bit clunky going at times. Christmas with a Capital C may hold the distinction of being the first movie of the genre where the words “Establishment Clause” are actually uttered on screen. The plot has Dan’s old high school rival Mitch Bright (Daniel Baldwin), a mean-spirited and embittered militant atheist returning home after 20 years, Dan is immediately suspicious. Mitch is a highly successful big city lawyer who has never wanted anything to do with Trapper Falls.

Their rivalry re-ignites when the frustrated Mitch takes offense to what he sees as the town’s violation of his rights. Mitch wants the nativity scene removed from the front of City Hall and the word Christmas switched to Happy Holidays on all signs. Fifty years of tradition are now challenged not by an outsider but a former member of the community. As the conflict escalates it goes beyond one person’s opinion but magnifies into an entire town problem when Mitch enters into the mayoral race to have Dan replaced.

In the heat of the legal battle and facing certain defeat, Dan’s wife Kristen (Nancy Stafford) and their daughter Makayla (Francesca Derosa) wanting to show, what she believes to be, the true meaning of Christmas are inspired to launch a “Christmas with a Capital C” campaign as an effort to keep the town together. In doing so they discover the secret behind Mitch’s return.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

D.B. Cooper

D.B. Cooper: 1971 Thanksgiving Eve skyjacking still a mystery

It is a story that has kept on giving to all of us annually for 48 years now on the eve of American Thanksgiving – police officers, journalists, amateur sleuths, forensic detectives, and really, pretty much anyone over 60, who at one time eons ago were the folks who read newspapers and watched TV by necessity, as the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the military forerunner to today’s civilian internet, was just two years old in 1971, and getting today’s news on the internet was still almost another 25 years away for most of us.

If it is the Wednesday before Thanksgiving Thursday in the United States, and it is, someone, somewhere, getting reading for turkey and trimmings, as they speculate on who will win tomorrow’s Chicago Bears–Detroit Lions, division rivals since 1933, match-up at Ford Field in Detroit, is also speculating and asking again, who was D.B. Cooper and what happened to him?

I came kind of late to writing about the D.B. Cooper case, first penning a column on it for the Thompson Citizen back on Nov. 23, 2011, to mark the 40th anniversary of the most audacious and (possibly) only successful skyjacking in U.S. aviation history on Nov. 24, 1971. I wrote:

“Who was D.B. Cooper?

The plane took off again, heading toward Mexico at the hijacker’s command, with only Cooper and the crew aboard about half an hour later. Cooper told the pilot to fly a low-speed, low-altitude flight path at about 120 mph, close to the minimum before the plane would go into a stall, at a maximum 10,000 feet, to aid in his jump. To ensure a minimum speed he specified that the landing gear remain down, in the take off and landing position, and the wing flaps be lowered 15 degrees. To ensure a low altitude he ordered that the cabin remain unpressurized.

Along with FBI, Washington and Oregon state police, and local law enforcement officials, about 1,000 army troops and helicopters were also used in the 1971 search for Cooper.

John List, a Second World War and Korean War veteran exited his ho-hum existence as a failed New Jersey accountant by killing his family in 1971, murdering his wife, three teenage children, and 85-year-old mother in New Jersey 15 days before the Cooper hijacking. After the murders, List withdrew $200,000 from his mother’s bank account and disappeared. He wasn’t arrested until 18 years later after Fox-TV’s America’s Most Wanted featured the case in a May 21, 1989 segment, displaying a bust of what an older John List might look like. The network estimated that 22 million people saw it. One was a woman in a suburb of Richmond, Virginia, who thought the bust looked like a neighbour, Robert Clark, a churchgoing accountant who wore horn-rimmed glasses. List, alias Clark, was arrested, tried and convicted, dying in custody in March 2008 at the age of 82.

Fast-forward eight years and change 40 to 48, and that’s still the main story line. In the intervening years, I would write once more about the D.B. Cooper case at the Thompson Citizen in 2013, and have blogged about it in 2014, 2015, twice in 2017, and once again in 2018.

In a piece in The Oregonian last year headlined, “As new evidence upends D.B. Cooper case, the (un)usual suspects continue to fuel the legend,” Douglas Perry, who has written extensively about the case, writes:

“He could be anybody – because he was nobody.

“The late journalist Darrell Bob Houston, writing in 1980, was explaining the fascination Americans had with the notorious, unknown skyjacker known as D.B. Cooper.

“Even some lawmen who scoured the woods for Cooper four decades ago suggested they hoped they would come up short.

“If he took the trouble to plan this thing out so thoroughly, well, good luck to him,” one local sheriff said.

To view Walter Cronkite’s original 1971 news clip on the CBS Evening News of the D.B. Cooper hijacking story, you can check it out at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksxyp4s6AXY

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

D.B. Cooper

D.B. Cooper: A story that keeps on giving

As a writer, there are sometimes a few stories at least that you just love to write about. It was fun when you started and it never seems to get old to you (other readers, who knows, but pageviews suggest the interest is more than solitary). The story of D.B. Cooper is one of those types of stories. I’m not positive, as the story has long fascinated me, but I think I may have started writing about it almost nine years ago now in a Nov. 23, 2009 column for the Thompson Citizen, simply headlined, “The mystery of D.B. Cooper.” The bonus with the D.B. Cooper story is you can be pretty much guaranteed a new angle, often in the form of a previously unnamed suspect, about this time every November. Not bad for a crime story that began on Nov. 24, 1971 – the day before American Thanksgiving that year.

Other than the most important missing basic fact – the true identity of D.B. Cooper – most of the other basics have been canvassed comprehensively in the media over the last 47 years. On Nov. 24, 1971, someone using the alias Dan Cooper, which quickly got mistakenly turned into D.B. Cooper, committed the most audacious act of air piracy in U.S. history with the mid-afternoon skyjacking of Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305, a Boeing 727 jetliner flying over the Pacific Northwest, en route from Portland, Oregon to Seattle, Washington with 36 passengers and six crew members aboard.

My friend, Ian Graham, who succeeded me as editor of the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News in 2014, posted on Facebook July 12, 2016 – four days after Dietrich-Williams’ announcement – that “Fox Mulder will continue to investigate regardless. And possibly John W. Barker,” Graham wrote at the time. As it turns out, closing the official FBI investigation has not proven to be a bar to journalists, still milking or mining, depending on one’s perspective, of course, the D.B. Cooper story since the FBI signed off on the file 2½ years ago.

While the FBI closed the unsolved D.B. Cooper case on July 8, 2016, various new developments continue to crop up, as they have consistently for more than four decades now. Citizen Sleuths, formed in 2007, is made up of Cooper armchair detective hobbyists, albeit ones with scientific training and with electron microscopes, who were actively encouraged over the decade before the FBI closed the case to work on the Cooper puzzle.

Six months after the FBI closed NORJACK, its D.B. Cooper investigation after 45 years, America’s most famous skyjacking was back in the news in January 2017 with the Rare Earth Elements (REE) forensic discovery by scientists and investigators from Citizen Sleuths of cerium and strontium sulfide, along with pure titanium, adding another twist to the 1971 skyjacking story, after they examined the JC Penney clip-on tie left behind by Cooper. Citizen Sleuths discovered a number of Rare Earth Elements (REE) on its surface, including cerium and strontium sulfide, along with pure titanium, which indicate that Cooper may have worked as an engineer for Boeing Company before the historic hijacking – and went out on the shop floor. Only managers and engineers wore ties in such plants at that time. Using a fully automated scanning electron microscope, they were able to pull more than 100,000 particles from the tie, which contained traces of Rare Earth Elements. Those elements were used at the time of Cooper’s hijacking by Boeing at its assembly plant in Everett, Washington, 29 miles north of Seattle, in the production of high-tech electronics such as radar screens for their Super Sonic Transport Plane.

In October 2017, the FBI released more documents pertaining to the D.B. Cooper hijacking case, including a letter that may only deepen the mystery.

“I knew from the start that I wouldn’t be caught,” says the undated, typewritten letter from a person claiming to be the man who said he had a bomb and commandeered the Northwest Airlines flight from Portland to Seattle on Nov. 24, 1971. “I didn’t rob Northwest Orient because I thought it would be romantic, heroic or any of the other euphemisms that seem to attach themselves to situations of high risk,” he said.

The carbon-copy letter was turned over to the FBI three weeks after the hijacking by The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and the Seattle Times, which were each mailed a copy and published stories about its contents. The letter was in an envelope with a greater Seattle area postmark.

The FBI released a copy of the letter that was sent to The Washington Post in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by D.B. Cooper sleuth Tom Colbert, a Los Angeles TV and film producer. He believes the letter is real. Colbert believes Robert W. Rackstraw Sr., a retired university instructor and arbitration expert, now living in San Diego, California, is D.B Cooper, which Rackstraw has repeatedly denied.

As for the letter, “We have no doubt it’s from Cooper and the reason is that he cites he left no fingerprints on the plane,” Colbert said. “The reason that’s critical is because it’s absolutely true.”

“There were no prints found in the back of plane,” Colbert said. “They found 11 partial prints that’s all, sides, fingers, tips and palm. But no prints of value were found.”

The letter writer says, “My life has been one of hate, turmoil, hunger and more hate; this seemed to be the fastest and most profitable way to gain a few fast grains of peace of mind,” the letter said. “I don’t blame people for hating me for what I’ve done nor do I blame anybody for wanting me to be caught and punished, though this can never happen.”

The person wrote that he wouldn’t get caught because he wasn’t a “boasting” man, left no fingerprints, wore a toupee and “wore putty make-up.”

“They could add or subtract from the composite a hundred times and not come up with an accurate description,” the letter said, adding, “and we both know it.”

The most recent development came five days ago – Tuesday, Nov. 13, 2018 – when author and true crime journalist Douglas Perry in The Oregonian in Portland, identified in a longform piece William J. Smith as the latest new suspect in the Cooper case, a suspect unearthed by an anonymous U.S Army data analyst, who says he turned over his research to the FBI last summer (https://www.oregonlive.com/expo/news/erry-2018/11/e18eba2aa14557/new-suspect-in-db-cooper-skyja.html). The Daily Mail on Thursday described D.B. Cooper as “one of the 20th century’s most compelling masterminds.” Still, you might want to take that with a grain of salt as Wikipedia editors in February 2017 voted to ban Britain’s Daily Mail as a source for the website in all but exceptional circumstances after deeming the news group “generally unreliable.”

The move was highly unusual for the online encyclopedia, which rarely puts in place a blanket ban on publications and which still allows links to sources such as Kremlin backed news organisation Russia Today, and Fox News, both of which have raised concern among editors.

The Wikipedia editors last year described the arguments for a ban as “centred on the Daily Mail’s reputation for poor fact checking, sensationalism and flat-out fabrication.”

The FBI, for its part, has not commented on the latest development in the case-that-never dies, unlike Smith, who worked for Penn Central Transportation, and died when he was 89 last January. A 1946 high school yearbook of his included a list of alumni who were killed during the Second World War. One name jumped out, according to the Oregonian: Ira Daniel Cooper. Smith, a New Jersey native, also worked at the Oak Island rail yard in Newark, and served in the U.S. Navy. The anonymous army analyst drew his conclusions in part after reading a 1985 book called D.B. Cooper: What Really Happened, written by Max Gunther, the newspaper reported. Gunther wrote in the book he was contacted in 1972 by a man who claimed to be the infamous skyjacker. However, the mysterious man who contacted Gunther eventually cut off communication with him, forcing Gunther to move on from the story. Ten years later, a woman who identified herself as Clara reached out to Gunther and claimed she was the widow of “Dan LeClair,” who had previously reached out to the author claiming he was the real D.B. Cooper.

The anonymous army analyst believes that Dan Clair, a Second World War veteran, who died in 1990, and was supposedly Gunther’s original source in 1972, with Gunther’s 1985 book detailing the story of Clara, and her husband, Dan LeClair, who were actually William J. Smith, known as Bill, and his wife, Dolores Smith, but that it was Smith, a friend of Clair’s, who was actually D.B. Copper. The data analyst theorizes that Smith probably used his friend Clair’s life story to hide his real identity when corresponding with Gunther in 1972, and that his wife, Dolores, took over communication a decade later when Smith decided once again to tell his tale. Simple enough, eh?

The day-before-Thanksgiving Wednesday flight landed at Tacoma International Airport in Seattle, where passengers were exchanged for parachutes, including possibly an NB-8 rig with a C-9 canopy, known as a “double-shot” pinch-and-pull system that in 1971 would have allowed jumpers to disengage quickly from their chutes after they landed so that the wind did not drag them, and the cash, all in $20 bills, as he had demanded, although not unmarked it would turn out. The passengers were never aware of the threat onboard. A bank in Seattle was contacted and a bag of money, all $20 bills with recorded serial numbers, totalling $200,000, was delivered to the plane, which was refuelled and cleared for take off. The bag of ransom money itself weighed 23 pounds.

The plane took off again, heading toward Mexico at the hijacker’s command, with only Cooper and the crew aboard about half an hour later. Cooper told the pilot to fly a low-speed, low-altitude flight path at about 120 mph, close to the minimum before the plane would go into a stall, at a maximum 10,000 feet, to aid in his jump. To ensure a minimum speed he specified that the landing gear remain down, in the take off and landing position, and the wing flaps be lowered 15 degrees. To ensure a low altitude he ordered that the cabin remain unpressurized.

Along with FBI, Washington and Oregon state police, and local law enforcement officials, about 1,000 army troops and helicopters were also used in the 1971 search for Cooper.

By 1966, deciding that jumbo jets were the future, Boeing acquired Paine Field, an old wartime military base in Everett, and built what remained in 2015 the largest building by volume in the world. It was the assembly plant for the company’s new jumbo jet, the Boeing 747, and the workforce soon exceeded 20,000 at Everett alone. The first 747 rolled out of the giant building in 1969. The plant is the size of 40 football fields. Boeing is among the largest global aircraft manufacturers; it is the second-largest defence contractor in the world based on 2015 revenue, and is the largest exporter in the United States by dollar value.

The so-called “Boeing Bust” had put 86,000 workers on the street in three years.

Since January 2017, the FBI has released more than 3,000 documents to Colbert, who formed a volunteer team of 40 former law enforcement officials to investigate the hijacking. The FBI said in court papers that it has more than 71,000 documents that may be responsive to Colbert’s lawsuit.

The Citizen Sleuths began their investigation when FBI Seattle Field Office Special Agent Larry Carr, in charge of the Cooper file, decided to release more information about the crime to the public. Carr allowed this with the specific intent of having the case worked on without spending federal dollars, which was exactly the result. Tom Kaye, a paleontologist and associate researcher at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle, along with Alan Stone, president of Aston Metallurgical Services Co., Inc. in Wheeling, Illinois, and scientific-biological illustrator Carol Abraczinskas from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, became the lead investigators for Citizen Sleuths (http://www.citizensleuths.com/team.html).

There have been a number of other Cooper suspects over the years, some more frequently discussed than others, including Kenneth Christiansen, Lynn Doyle Cooper, Richard Floyd McCoy, Jr., Duane Weber, Jack Coffelt, William Gossett, Barbara (formerly Bobby) Dayton, John List, Melvin Luther Wilson, and Ted Mayfield. Most had military combat experience.

John List, a Second World War and Korean War veteran exited his ho-hum existence as a failed New Jersey accountant by killing his family in 1971, murdering his wife, three teenage children, and 85-year-old mother in New Jersey 15 days before the Cooper hijacking. After the murders, List withdrew $200,000 from his mother’s bank account and disappeared. He wasn’t arrested until 18 years later after Fox-TV’s America’s Most Wanted featured the case in a May 21, 1989 segment, displaying a bust of what an older John List might look like. The network estimated that 22 million people saw it. One was a woman in a suburb of Richmond, Virginia, who thought the bust looked like a neighbour, Robert Clark, a churchgoing accountant who wore horn-rimmed glasses. List, alias Clark, was arrested, tried and convicted, dying in custody in March 2008 at the age of 82.

His son Greg lives in Ogden, Utah, where he said his father told him on his 21st birthday that he had hijacked the plane.

“He said that I could never tell anybody until after he died,” Greg Gossett said.

Kirk Gossett, another son, says his father also told the story several times.

“He had the type of temperament to do something like this,” Kirk Gossett said.

“There is not one link to the D.B. Cooper case other than the statements [Gossett] made to someone,” Seattle Field Office Special Agent Larry Carr told ABC News.

Kenneth Christensen had been a paratrooper whose first deployment came just after the Second World War. After he left the military, he worked as a mechanic and a flight purser for Northwest Orient Airlines, the carrier that Cooper targeted for his 1971 skyjacking. Christensen loved bourbon bought a modest house not long after the crime skyjacking of Flight 305.

In 2015, the suspect list grew to include Robert Richard Lepsy, a Glen’s Market grocery store manager and married father of four, three boys and a girl, who mysteriously vanished from Grayling, in the middle of northern Michigan, on Oct. 29, 1969. Lake Ann, Michigan author and shipwreck hunter, Ross Richardson, a Benzie County Sheriff’s Department special deputy, who volunteers as a librarian at the Almira Township Library, wrote a book published in 2014 titled Still Missing, Rethinking the D.B. Cooper Case and other Mysterious Unsolved Disappearances.

On the day he disappeared, Dick Lepsy, 33, called his wife, Jackie, 31, around lunch time and told her he was going to go for a ride. Jackie Lepsy noted at least as early as 1986 in interviews that her husband’s company wood-panelled station wagon was found abandoned two days later at the Cherry Capital Airport in Traverse City, Michigan, approximately 50 miles northwest of Grayling, or about an hour away, with the doors unlocked, a half-pack of cigarettes were sitting on the dash, and the keys in the ignition. Also left behind was an empty bank account and a safe at Glen’s Market missing $2,000.

But a little more than two years after Lepsy disappeared from Michigan, his then 13-year-old daughter, Lisa Lepsy, was watching the CBS Evening News, and saw the story of the Portland skyjacking.

“We were all sitting on the couch watching Walter Cronkite,” she told WZZM13, the Tegna-owned ABC-TV affiliate in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Tegna is formerly Gannett Co., Inc. “When the composite sketch of D.B. Cooper came on the TV screen, everyone looked at each other and said, ‘That’s dad!’ We were stunned because the resemblance was unbelievable, and my brothers and I were all sure that was our dad.” The men were of similar height, about six feet tall, weighed about 180 pounds, and they both had brown hair and brown eyes. Lepsy, who had a high school education, was born in Chicago. Both Lepsy and Cooper wore black loafers and a skinny black ties. Cooper left a skinny black clip-on tie behind on the plane and, along with a tie clasp, while the skinny black tie was part of Lepsy’s mandatory managerial uniform at Glen’s Market in Michigan. DNA was extracted from Cooper’s tie finally 30 years after the skyjacking in 2001.

Lepsy’s family finally had his name added to the NamUs (National Missing and Unidentified Persons System) in 2011.

There is also a Manitoba connection to the D.B. Cooper story, at least in the minds of some.

On Sept 21, 2013, I received a three-sentence e-mail from a reader out of the blue saying, “I just read your article on James Macdonald. I would never want to disrespect the deceased/missing, but he fits the description of Dan Cooper. The FBI suspects D.B. Cooper was from Canada.”

The Dec. 7, 2012 story he referred to was about James (Jim) Hugh Macdonald, 46, the owner of J.H. Macdonald & Associates Ltd., consulting structural engineers on Pembina Highway in Winnipeg, who climbed into his Mooney Mark M20D single-engine prop aircraft, bearing the registration mark CF-ABT, and took off half an hour after sunset from the Thompson Airport in Northern Manitoba at 4:30 p.m. on Dec. 7, 1971 to make his return flight home and disappeared into the rapidly darkening sky to never be seen or heard from again. He was the sole occupant of the four-seater plane.

I have since received several similar e-mails, some anonymous, some not.

To this day, the Winnipeg private pilot and civil engineer, who would be 93 if he were still alive, is still listed by the RCMP as a “missing person,” as no remains or wreckage were ever found, and is featured on the website of “Project Disappear,” Manitoba’s missing person/cold case project managed by the RCMP “D” Division historical case and major case management units in Winnipeg at: http://www.macp.mb.ca/results.php?id=76. “The file is currently still under investigation and is with the RCMP “D” Division historical case unit,” retired Sgt. Line Karpish, then senior media relations spokesperson for the Mounties in Winnipeg, said Dec. 6, 2012. The file number for the Macdonald missing person case is File #: 1989-10514. Anyone with information on Macdonald’s disappearance almost 47 years ago is asked to contact Winnipeg RCMP by email at: ddiv_contact@rcmp-grc.gc.ca

Macdonald, who graduated from the University of Manitoba with his civil engineering degree in 1950, often worked with architectural firms, including his brother’s. Other than working for a year in Saskatoon, he spent his entire career living and working in Winnipeg. Macdonald, who was born on March 20, 1925, trained as a pilot when he was 19 and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) shortly before the Second World War ended in 1945 and before he could be shipped overseas into the theatre of combat operations. His son, Bill Macdonald, was 15 when his dad disappeared in 1971 and is a Winnipeg teacher and freelance journalist, who in 1998 wrote The True Intrepid: Sir William Stephenson and the Unknown Agents, telling the story of the British Security Coordination (BSC) spymaster – codename Intrepid – set up by British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). Ian Fleming, the English naval intelligence officer and author, best known for his James Bond series of spy novels, once said of his friend Stephenson, a Winnipeg native: “James Bond is a highly romanticized version of a true spy. The real thing is … William Stephenson.”

Macdonald had filed a 3½-hour flight plan to fly Visual Flight Rules (VFR) via Grand Rapids to Winnipeg that Tuesday. It was around -30 C at the time of take off on Dec. 7, 1971 and the winds were light from the west at five km/h, according to Environment Canada weather records, said Dale Marciski, a retired meteorologist with the Meteorological Service of Canada in Winnipeg. Macdonald was reportedly wearing a brown suit jacket when he took off from Thompson and it was unknown whether the plane was carrying winter survival clothing and gear.

Macdonald’s disappearance triggered an intensive air search that at its peak in the days immediately after the aviator went missing involved more than 100 personnel covering almost 20,000 miles in nine search and rescue planes from Canadian Armed Forces bases in Edmonton and Winnipeg, including a Lockheed T-33 T-bird jet trainer and two de Havilland short take off and landing CC-138 Twin Otters, two RCMP planes and 11 civilian aircraft.

The next morning – Dec. 8, 1971 – search and rescue aircraft re-flew the “track” in a visual search both ways, assisted by electronic listening devices, to no avail.

So why do we remember D.B. Cooper some 47 years later? Was the 1971 jump from 10,000 feet into the sub-freezing temperatures and bitter wind-chills during freefall even survivable?

Geoffrey Gray, a contributing editor at New York magazine and the author of Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper, suggested in a New York Times article on Aug. 6, 2011 that it’s the “not-knowing” that makes Cooper so compelling for us. “In an age when we receive answers to our questions so quickly – now as fast as a midsentence trip to Wikipedia – the fact that we still don’t know who Cooper is feels somehow unfair,” Gray argues.

“Even some lawmen who scoured the woods for Cooper four decades ago suggested they hoped they would come up short.

“If he took the trouble to plan this thing out so thoroughly, well, good luck to him,” one local sheriff said.

Several years ago Gray released nearly 200 pages of material collected during the research phase for Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper, published six years ago in 2012.

“(Some of) these files have never been seen before, and they’re rife with information,” Gray said.

For the really serious D.B. Cooper aficionados, the free 2018 D.B. Cooper Conference is taking next Saturday on Nov. 24 – the 47th anniversary of the still unsolved skyjacking – in Portland at the Columbia Edgewater Country Club. You can read the details here at https://dbcoopercon.com/

And to view Walter Cronkite’s original 1971 news clip or the CBS Evening News of the story, you can check this out at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksxyp4s6AXY

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Christmas, Popular Culture and Ideas

‘Yippee Ki Yay’ …. Die Hard: The ultimate Christmas heart warmer

And so this is Christmas, John Lennon noted in 1972. Time once again then to watch the greatest Christmas movies ever made and debate that age-old question (at least since 1988): Is the explosive action thriller Die Hard, starring Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman, the ultimate Christmas heart warmer, the greatest of them all? I jest not.

Falice Chin, a producer with CBC Radio One for Calgary Eyeopener, is one of the latest to weigh in. Chin posted an online analysis piece for CBC News Dec. 15, headlined “Why Die Hard is the ultimate Christmas movie — despite naysayers.”

While I’ve added Die Hard to my annual Christmas viewing list (at some years), Dickens it ain’t. Charles Dickens, a heterodox Anglican if ever there was one, wrote A Christmas Carol after he journeyed to Lancashire at the age of 31 in the summer of 1843 to see for himself how life was lived in the industrial north of England. On the train back to London, impacted by the poverty and misery he had seen, he conceptualized A Christmas Carol on the eve of revolutions throughout Europe, counselling that hearts must hear and eyes must see for society to change. He began writing the classic Christmas story a week later. He completed the book that fall in six weeks and the book was published on Dec. 19, 1843, the 177th anniversary of which falls on Tuesday. Since the book was published in 1843, Christmas has never been the same.

Me, I also like It’s a Wonderful Life, produced and directed by Frank Capra, based on the short story The Greatest Gift, written by Philip Van Doren Stern in 1939.

Initially, however, it did middling business at the box office and opened to at best mixed reviews.

After negative reviews and something of a public outcry, the film was pulled from theaters a week after its release on Nov. 9, 1984.

Over the last several years, Christmas with a Capital C, directed by Helmut Schleppi, and shot in February 2010 in Seward in southern Alaska in an inlet on the Kenai Peninsula, has become a favourite for me to watch when the time arrives for Christmas movies.
Hometown Mayor Dan Reed (Ted McGinley) looks forward to each year with enthusiasm to all the events, friends and family that fill this special season in the small fictional town of Trapper Falls, Alaska (Seward).

Given that Christmas with a Capital C centers in part — although it will turn out not to be the main point — around the United States Constitution’s First Amendment Establishment Clause, which prohibits the government from making any law respecting an establishment of religion and not only forbids the government from establishing an official religion, but also prohibits government actions that unduly favor one religion over another, as well as prohibiting the government from unduly preferring religion over non-religion, or non-religion over religion, it can be a bit clunky going at times. Christmas with a Capital C may hold the distinction of being the first movie of the genre where the words “Establishment Clause” are actually uttered on screen.The plot has Dan’s old high school rival Mitch Bright (Daniel Baldwin), a mean-spirited and embittered militant atheist returning home after 20 years, Dan is immediately suspicious. Mitch is a highly successful big city lawyer who has never wanted anything to do with Trapper Falls.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

D.B. Cooper

D.B. Cooper and American Thanksgiving: Forever linked in the popular imagination

Forty-six years ago tomorrow – on Nov. 24, 1971, the day before American Thanksgiving that year, someone using the alias Dan Cooper, which quickly got mistakenly turned into D.B. Cooper, committed the most audacious act of air piracy in U.S. history with the mid-afternoon skyjacking of Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305, a Boeing 727 jetliner flying over the Pacific Northwest, en route from Portland, Oregon to Seattle, Washington with 36 passengers and six crew members aboard.

The day-before-Thanksgiving Wednesday flight landed at Tacoma International Airport in Seattle, where passengers were exchanged for parachutes, including possibly an NB-8 rig with a C-9 canopy, known as a “double-shot” pinch-and-pull system that in 1971 would have allowed jumpers to disengage quickly from their chutes after they landed so that the wind did not drag them, and the cash, all in $20 bills, as he had demanded, although not unmarked it would turn out. The passengers were never aware of the threat onboard. A bank in Seattle was contacted and a bag of money, all $20 bills with recorded serial numbers, totaling $200,000, was delivered to the plane, which was refueled and cleared for takeoff. The bag of ransom money itself weighed 23 pounds.

Along with FBI, Washington and Oregon state police, and local law enforcement officials, about 1,000 army troops and helicopters were also used in the 1971 search for Cooper.

Six months after the FBI closed NORJACK, its D.B. Cooper investigation after 45 years, America’s most famous skyjacking was back in the news in January with the Rare Earth Elements (REE) forensic discovery by scientists and investigators from Citizen Sleuths of cerium and strontium sulfide, along with pure titanium, adding another twist to the 1971 skyjacking story, after they examined the JC Penney clip-on tie left behind by Cooper. Citizen Sleuths discovered a number of Rare Earth Elements (REE) on its surface, including cerium and strontium sulfide, along with pure titanium, which indicate that Cooper may have worked as an engineer for Boeing Company before the historic hijacking – and went out on the shop floor. Only managers and engineers wore ties in such plants at that time. Using a fully automated scanning electron microscope, they were able to pull more than 100,000 particles from the tie, which contained traces of Rare Earth Elements. Those elements were used at the time of Cooper’s hijacking by Boeing at its assembly plant in Everett, Washington, 29 miles north of Seattle, in the production of high-tech electronics such as radar screens for their Super Sonic Transport Plane.

Last month, the FBI released more documents pertaining to the D.B. Cooper hijacking case, including a letter that may only deepen the mystery. During the course of the 45-year NORJAK investigation, the FBI says it exhaustively reviewed all credible leads, co-ordinated between multiple field offices to conduct searches, collected all available evidence, and interviewed all identified witnesses. Over the years, the FBI has applied numerous new and innovative investigative techniques, as well as examined countless items at the FBI Laboratory. Evidence obtained during the course of the investigation is now preserved for historical purposes at FBI Headquarters in Washington.

Last month, the FBI released a copy of the letter that was sent to The Washington Post in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by D.B. Cooper sleuth Tom Colbert, a Los Angeles TV and film producer. He believes the letter is real. Colbert believes Robert W. Rackstraw Sr., a retired university instructor and arbitration expert, now living in San Diego, California, is D.B Cooper, which Rackstraw has repeatedly denied.

“There were no prints found in the back of plane,” Colbert said. “They found 11 partial prints that’s all, sides, fingers, tips and palm. But no prints of value were found.”

The person wrote that he wouldn’t get caught because he wasn’t a “boasting” man, left no fingerprints, wore a toupee and “wore putty make-up.”

“They could add or subtract from the composite a hundred times and not come up with an accurate description,” the letter said, adding, “and we both know it.”

The so-called “Boeing Bust” had put 86,000 workers on the street in three years.

Since January, the FBI has released more than 3,000 documents to Colbert, who formed a volunteer team of 40 former law enforcement officials to investigate the hijacking. The FBI said in court papers that it has more than 71,000 documents that may be responsive to Colbert’s lawsuit.

The Citizen Sleuths began their investigation when FBI Seattle Field Office Special Agent Larry Carr, in charge of the Cooper file, decided to release more information about the crime to the public. Carr allowed this with the specific intent of having the case worked on without spending federal dollars, which was exactly the result. Tom Kaye, a paleontologist and associate researcher at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle, along with Alan Stone, president of Aston Metallurgical Services Co., Inc. in Wheeling, Illinois, and scientific-biological illustrator Carol Abraczinskas from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, became the lead investigators for Citizen Sleuths (http://www.citizensleuths.com/team.html).

There have been a number of other Cooper suspects over the years, some more frequently discussed than others: Kenneth Christiansen, Lynn Doyle Cooper, Richard Floyd McCoy, Jr., Duane Weber, Jack Coffelt, William Gossett, Barbara (formerly Bobby) Dayton, John List, Melvin Luther Wilson, and Ted Mayfield. Most had military combat experience.