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.

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 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.

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As Pete and Raymond Zaworonok look to retirement, will Crazy Petes carry on?

The brothers aren’t getting any younger. Pete Zaworonok is 77. His younger brother, Raymond is 72. Neither are in the best of health these days. So retirement looms, with Pete planning to relocate permanently back to his longtime home near Nelson, British Columbia, while Raymond’s home is in Calgary. Until recently, the brothers would often takes turns commuting back to their Alberta and British Columbia homes for months at a time, while the other brother remained in Thompson minding the store, Crazy Petes, their legendary eclectic small-town hardware-like store, at the corner of Hayes Road and Seal Road, with one of this, and two of that. On rare occasions, I’d come into the store while the brothers were together during a brief overlap.

Back 10 years ago, Jonathon Naylor, then the editor of The Reminder in Flin Flon and a freelancer for the Winnipeg Free Press, wrote a piece for the Free Press that nicely captured what Pete and Crazy Petes is all about:

“Need a campfire tea kettle or some high-end embroidery thread? How about a home potato chipper or military toys you thought were banned?” Naylor wrote. “A movie poster from 1991’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II or fishing tackle that looks designed to snag a whale?

“It’s all here, along with gas and a car wash,” Naylor wrote on June 20, 2013.

Pete, who was born in Germany, was living in Edmonton when, in 1967, he accepted a job as a technologist for INCO, now Vale, here in Thompson. After a decade, he left INCO to go into business for himself, running his own insulating company before operating what Raymond June 7 referred to as the brothers’ “three profit centres”: the original car wash and gas bar, along with the store he added to them to make a business trio in 1979. The car wash wasn’t open last Wednesday as a water line was still frozen up, Raymond said. Pete actually was in Thompson, but home recuperating from some aorta trouble a few months ago, he added. Raymond has had some prostate trouble of his own.

Truth be told, Pete and Raymond are two of the most creative business guys that I have ever met. When it came to customer loyalty cards, such as Aeroplan and PC Optimum Points Reward cards, Crazy Petes had the broadest definition of what constituted groceries than it has been my pleasure to discover.

Pete one time explained his marketing strategy to me by way of an illustration. He had some old cowboy belt buckles quite literally gathering dust on the shelves for years, not selling at all. One day, he simply doubled their price and they started to sell like hotcakes. The store has a collection of local indigenous music cassette tapes and CDs you won’t find anywhere else.

I have done my bit over the years to promote the wonders of Crazy’s Petes far and wide. With mixed results, I admit. In April 2022, the former University College of the North (UCN) Thompson campus librarian, Monica Mun, came back one day after making a trip with a pet to the vet, and mentioned to my then boss, former library technician Andrew Conner, that she had just seen lots of RCMP cruisers outside Crazy Petes store. “Isn’t that the place John was talking about?” she asked Andrew. At that point, Andrew may well have been advised to reply, “John who?” But he didn’t. Andrew, hailing from the Alex Murdaugh Lowcountry of South Carolina, shares something of that outlaw streak, or at least admiration for same, that I admittedly have.

I suspect we’re not alone. Hence the sympathetic notoriety enjoyed by some bank robbers, including John Dillinger, Clyde Barrow, Bonnie Parker, Butch Cassidy, Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, better known as the Sundance Kid, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Edwin Alonzo Boyd, or say someone like D.B. Cooper, who with his audacious skyjacking, jumped into history on Nov. 24, 1971 – the day before American Thanksgiving – with several parachutes and $200,000 in $20 bills from of Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305, a Boeing 727 jetliner flying over the Pacific Northwest, en route from Portland, Oregon to Seattle, Washington. Cooper, an alias, disappeared into the late autumn, as he bailed out into the rainy night via 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. Never to be seen again.

Any resemblance to Pete and Raymond, of anyone mentioned here, is, of course, coincidental, and if necessary, fictional, too.

Raymond says there have been some potential buyers sniffing around, wanting to take a look at the books, but no serious offers as yet. It strikes me as unlikely that a new buyer would replicate or maintain Crazy Petes inventory, all inseparable, I suspect, from the Zeitgeist that is the Zaworonok brothers.

Pete and Raymond.

Gone Fishin.’

Almost.

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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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

‘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.

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.

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

 

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 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.

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.

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 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.

“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

 

Another anniversary in the 33-year-old cold case slaying of Kerrie Ann Brown

Another year has come and gone in the Oct. 16, 1986 slaying of 15-year-old Kerrie Ann Brown, Thompson’s oldest unsolved murder case, which many 33 years later still believe is surrounded be a conspiracy of silence. But it was a year that saw the most comprehensive media ever done on the case, primarily by David Ridgen, a documentarian filmmaker whose original true-crime podcast “Someone Knows Something” spent season five looking at the Brown case. “Someone Knows Something” examines unsolved cases of missing or murdered individuals, and it is produced by CBC Radio One.

Ridgen’s earlier work has been credited with reopening other cold or historical cases, which have led to arrests and convictions (Mississippi Cold Case, Confession to Murder and A Garden of Tears).  In August, Ridgen noted he was working on season six, as well “as working on a new season five episode.”

“Someone Knows Something” is CBC’s most-downloaded original title, the network said Aug. 15. In its first-ever development slate of podcast-to-television series, the public broadcaster plans to adapt five popular, original CBC Podcasts, including “Someone Knows Something” with First Generation Films, a Toronto-based multi-media production company founded by Canadian producer Christina Piovesan, for the screen as a TV dramatic series.

Ridgen’s work last year on the Brown case featured a fascinating at-length interview with a key 1987 preliminary hearing Crown witness, Sean Simmans, living in Melfort, Saskatchewan at the time of the interview, as well as shining a spotlight on the early police investigative work done in 1986 by then Corp. Dennis Heald, and Const. John Tost, the two original lead investigators from the Thompson RCMP detachment, and Marnie Schaefer, a civilian RCMP telecom operator in Thompson at the time of the murder. Ridgen also took the investigation closer to home, talking to Ian Brown, Kerrie’s older half-brother, on a trip to Selkirk with their brother, Trevor Brown (https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1362084931649)  about his whereabouts the night Kerrie disappeared. Trevor was a year older than Kerrie.

Ridgen was also contacted by a woman in Thompson who said she remembers hearing her former boyfriend in Nelson House, Fred Spence, making reference to a white girl getting killed. Fred Spence has denied any involvement in Brown’s murder.

Schaefer, the former RCMP telecommunications operator, said she was working the night shift when the phone rang with an unknown caller around 2 a.m.

“He had said that he had just killed someone,” Schaefer recalled. “Seemed to be terrified that I was recording the conversation that we were having,” she told Ridgen.

The call came two hours after Kerrie Ann Brown vanished from the house party on Thursday, Oct. 16, 1986 – and almost 14 hours before she was reported missing.

That call may or may not have been followed up on, depending upon which RCMP officer you believe listening to “Someone Knows Something.”

Brown was slain sometime after attending a party at Doug Krokosz’s residence on Trout Avenue in Westwood on Thursday night Oct. 16, 1986.  Most of those in attendance at the Trout Avenue party were from ages 14 to 17. The party was held on a Thursday night because there was no school the next day for Kerrie and the others at R.D. Parker Collegiate. A 12-year-resident of Thompson at the time of her death in 1986, Kerrie’s family came to Thompson from Burk’s Falls, Ontario.  A Grade 10 student at R.D. Parker Collegiate, she had previously attended Juniper and Eastwood elementary schools. Her mom and dad, Ann and Jim Brown, had moved to Thompson like many so Jim could work in the mine at Inco, while Ann worked at Thompson General Hospital as a medical transcriptionist. Ann Brown died of cancer 15 years after Kerrie’s murder.

Kerrie was to walk home from the Trout Avenue residence that night with Nicole Zahorodny, who was the last person to see Kerrie at the party the night that she disappeared, but Zahorodny went back into the party for a few minutes. Krokosz, a year older than Kerrie, recalled for Ridgen trying to convince Kerrie to wait for Nicole instead of walking home alone. Kerrie asked Krokosz to find Nicole for her, he said, which he did while Kerrie waited at the stairs. When he returned some time later, Kerrie was gone, after stepping outside apparently to wait. When Zahorodny returned, Kerrie was gone. Several witnesses reported Kerrie was seen getting into a van between 10:30 p.m. and 11 p.m. Others believe she took a taxi to Brandon Crescent just before midnight. Or she may have walked somewhere from the party.

Two days after the party, Donna Covic, and another woman from the riding stable, discovered Kerrie’s nude body in a wooded area close to the hydro line between the horse stable and the golf course access roads. Her body was found on Saturday, Oct. 18, 1986, around 2 p.m. Brown had been sexually assaulted and severely beaten, bludgeoned repeatedly about the face and head causing massive injuries. A large, bloodstained stick was found at the scene.

A vehicle got stuck in the mud there and a blue and red air mattress and a black rubber floor mat were used to try and gain traction and extricate the vehicle, RCMP said publicly in 1996. Two eyewitnesses had spotted a white van and an older model mid-60s green sedan-type car at the scene just hours after Brown, who had been wearing a Pittsburgh Penguins hockey jacket earlier in the evening, disappeared from the party. Crime scene DNA samples gathered in 1986 came from at least two different men RCMP said in 1996, adding they have always believed more than person was involved in the killing.

In 2012, the RCMP began conducting a full review of Kerrie Ann Brown’s murder investigation. They rehired a retired homicide investigator, Sgt. Bert Clarke, who retired in 2009 as the commander-in-charge of the RCMP’s homicide unit in Manitoba, to assist in the review of the investigation, along with a second rehired former homicide investigator.

The two retired homicide investigators did not work on the Brown murder originally, although they were aware of it, but were brought into assist the historical case unit, which is the official RCMP name for Manitoba’s cold case squad, by bringing their expertise to the complex case by taking a fresh look at it. A daunting task given there were more than 2,000 subjects recorded and documented in the file.

DNA samples searching for suspect matches have been taken, most voluntarily, some pursuant to court orders, from more than 100 people across Canada in the decades since the crime. Administrative personnel were assigned to the case to “digitize” the investigation for present and future purposes.

The Brown cold case is the largest unsolved homicide investigation (more than three dozen banker boxes of investigative file material) that the RCMP have in Manitoba.

A remarkable letter to the editor of the Thompson Citizen appeared in the newspaper a few days after Kerrie Ann Brown’s murder. Written anonymously and signed with the nom de plume, “From her friends who want justice,” the author says in the singular that she is a 14-year-old girl and was a “good friend of Kerrie Brown.” She goes onto write – and remember, this appeared in print, published as a letter to the editor: “I have also heard that their (sic) was another murder on Wednesday [Oct. 15, 1986] and if that is true, how come we weren’t warned. I can understand trying to keep the whole thing quiet, but not warning the public just doesn’t seem right to me.” The same woman, age 20, apparently wrote a second letter to the editor six years later, signed again anonymously, but this time with a slight variation and the nom de plume being, “Her friends who believe in justice. ”

Shortly after Kerrie Ann Brown’s murder, Krokosz, Zahorodny, Brian Lundmark, now a Thompson city councillor, Vince Nowlin, who served as a trustee for School District of Mystery Lake school board between 2010 and 2014, Craig Jordan, Guido Oliveira, also a trustee, who who now chairs the finance, property and personnel committees of the School District of Mystery Lake, Kathy McGee and Janet McGee, were among those who formed an ad hoc group called “Youth for Tomorrow,” and began to raise money to create the Kerrie Brown Memorial Scholarship.

It was Brian Lundmark and Geraldine Hornan who came to the Brown residence about an hour after Kerrie’s body was discovered and told Trevor the news that a body had been discovered.

Ridgen also learned in the course of his investigation that there is no transcript of the 1987 preliminary hearing for a man charged with Kerrie Brown’s murder – the charges were dismissed by the judge due to lack of evidence.

Patrick Sumner, the only suspect ever charged to date in connection with the case, still lives in Thompson. His family moved here in 1968. He was 22 when he was charged in 1986 days after the crime with first-degree murder in connection with Brown’s murder in a case that was largely circumstantial. There were about 120 people in the courtroom for Sumner’s arraignment in 1986, while another 60 or so waited outside.

Sumner was freed four months later after being discharged by provincial court Judge Charles Newcombe without being committed to trial after a three-day preliminary hearing ended Feb. 20, 1987. Crown attorney Dale Perezowski prosecuted the case at the preliminary hearing. Richard Wolson, a Winnipeg criminal lawyer, recognized as one of the best in the country, represented Sumner. Newcombe ruled there wasn’t admissible evidence upon which a reasonable jury properly instructed could return a verdict of guilty, which is the legal test in Canadian law for committal to trial. Then NDP Manitoba attorney general Roland Penner did not exercise his discretion to issue a rare preferred indictment, which would have sent the case directly to trial, although his department considered that option. Ridgen also learned that the Brown family can’t obtain a new copy of her autopsy report to replace the one they lost. “The RCMP have told the chief medical examiner not to give it to us,” Trevor Brown said last year.

Carlton Jackson and Robert Delaronde were also looked at as persons of interest by Ridgen.

Jackson was questioned following Kerrie’s disappearance, according to her brother Trevor and father Jim, and afterwards came to their house to tell Jim that he had nothing to do with her killing. Delaronde was implicated after the fact, mainly due to the fact that he had a somewhat violent history and had hanged himself in 1992, leading people to speculate that he may have been involved, though he was also diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Ridgen was told that Delaronde’s parents had not consented to his DNA being taken because they were worried that police would try to pin the crime on him after Sumner’s experience. Delaronde’s former girlfriend Heather McIvor also said that she had not let police take DNA from the child she had with Delaronde when police begin re-investigating the case more thoroughly several year’s after Delaronde’s death.

McIvor said Delaronde had been having a party on the night of Kerrie’s disappearance and that he had noticed Jackson and another man in attendance had left for a long time before returning.  Ridgen was told that Jackson may not have been able to remember what happened back then after receiving a blow to the head in a beating, but Delaronde’s sister told him that she had been recognized by Jackson in Winnipeg and that she didn’t notice anything off about him.

Trevor Brown first contacted David Ridgen to see if he would be interested in investigating the case in the spring of 2017, CBC says.

Ridgen, who first became involved in investigating unsolved crimes while working on a documentary about civil rights workers killed in Mississippi in 1964 by the Ku Klux Klan, said he was aware of the case before Brown reached out to him, but when he was contacted it hadn’t moved from the pile of possible Canadian crimes to investigate onto his active investigation subjects.

In early January, “Snow Day Podcast,” a local society and culture podcast, featuring Bruce Krentz, Les Hansen, George Alvarez, and special guest, Guy Hansen, which has been broadcast since early 2017, took a look at the case (https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-iiy7w-a4270a?fbclid=IwAR1DApTH4ZrfpVfx_qg2zBmlOWNQ3xbO2hx8LHcAgtt-aJfSfYmDyosiJj0#.XEdxdR4XmdM.facebook), offering an insightful discussion of the mindset, worldview, class issues, and historical issues at play among Kerrie Ann Brown’s high school peers in October 1986. It no doubt broke some previous taboos regarding what was and was not discussed around the kitchen table, and why or why not, in Thompson that long-ago fall.

Darren Lovell from Wimborne Minster, a market town in East Dorset in southwest England, has recently  written a song as a reflection about the unsolved murder of 15-year-old Kerrie Brown. You can listen to it at: https://soundcloud.com/darrenwlovell/kerrie-brown?fbclid=IwAR3Q95S43q8THHTi2Zi3mRPHjhYdYAy8NE-n5OvwlPWWGGq1EOJKdqK8PlI

Lovell says he was inspired by season five of “Someone Knows Something.”

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

Donna Wilson: True stories, some names withheld to protect the guilty

Donna Wilson decamps from Paint Lake and Thompson to Sanford on the LaSalle River, 15 minutes southwest of Winnipeg, this Sunday, where her lovely parents, Dorothy and Jack Dyke, have lived for several years now. After more than six years at the helm, today marks her last official day as general manager of Quality Inn & Suites Thompson, although she gave up her office a couple of weeks ago for her longtime number one, assistant manager Destinee Perry, to move up to the big chair as general manager.  Both have been with the hotel since 2013.

Donna Wilson. She knows everyone in Thompson. True fact, or pretty darned close.

Now, you’ve probably heard a lot over the years about Donna’s decades of volunteerism and service on what sometimes seems like every community service not-for-profit board in Thompson, including her signature annual cancer-fighting event, Relay for Life every April, followed closely in recent years with her involvement in Thompson Playhouse, as president,  and sometimes in the director’s chair, after making her directorial debut in 2011 with Dixie Swim Club, and since 2009, her Old Fashioned Christmas Concert every December in R.D. Parker Collegiate’s Letkemann Theatre Her “Out & About” column, summed up pretty much in the name, has run occasionally in the Thompson Citizen since 2007.

For years, Donna, and her good friend, Wally Itson, who retired as principal of R.D. Parker Collegiate in 2014, and then wound up running Thompson Gas Bar Co-op, would emcee many community events together annually, as well as providing sideline coverage for Paul Andersen’s Shaw Cable TV coverage of the Nickel Days Parade in June and Santa Claus Parade in November.

“Growing up I hadn’t heard much of cancer other then my mom mentioning her friend Daphne who had died of it,” Wilson said in connection with her Relay for Life involvement on her Canadian Cancer Society personal web page in 2012. “Then that word came around again when my best friend Cindy’s mom was diagnosed. It was pretty traumatic for us. Cancer took over her life. Years later my mom lost another friend, Regina.” Started in 1985 by Dr. Gordy Klatt, a colorectal surgeon in Tacoma, Washington, Relay for Life was first held in Canada in 1999. Relay for Life made its debut in Thompson in 2001 and has been held since then annually, with the exception of 2008 when it was postponed for a year because of extensive renovations to the C.A. Nesbitt Arena.

But many local readers know these things. Some will also have noticed Donna very gradually scaled back on sitting on some of those board and other public gigs she would do in recent years, knowing moving day was only a few years off, and giving the various boards plenty of time to recruit. I also saw a somewhat quieter, more reflective Donna, after her younger brother, Eric, was paralyzed after falling off a roof in Palm Springs, California in February 2017. Eric survived, but it was far from a given he would at the time. Today, he has made an amazing recuperation through lots of hard work by himself and with dedicated therapists, the support of family and friends, and God’s abundant grace, but becoming a paraplegic is a life-changing event for Eric and his family and friends. And for Donna Wilson, her family is EVERYTHING. Has been since the day she first became my boss and soon friend way back on July 4, 2007, and long before no doubt. Since Eric’s accident, Donna has become a fierce advocate for wheelchair users; want to know why you should observe painted lines and signage in a parking lot? Donna will tell you, probably on her Facebook page, what it means to wheelchair users when drivers don’t. She’s all in.

Donna has been an outstanding boss for seven of my almost 12 years to date in Thompson at two different jobs, and a friend for the entire dozen years. Through whatever quirk of fate, I may have worked for Donna longer than any other employee in Thompson over the last dozen years when you total both the newspaper and hotel jobs. No one, and I mean no one, throws a Christmas staff party like Donna! And no one, but no one, I suspect, has stories like those of us who have worked in both the newspaper and hotel industries in Thompson. Most of which, of course, aren’t suitable to be re-told publicly. To protect the guilty.

Donna, as I have said publicly many times, is the best boss I have worked for. People work for people, not positions, at least if they stay long, just like they leave bosses, not jobs, although I have joked with Donna more than once at the hotel, please don’t move next-door to Minute Muffler on Moak Crescent because I’m not sure I’m up to working in a muffler shop. But I did work for Donna for more than three years as editor of the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News when she was general manager (we started within weeks of each other in June and July 2007). I arrived knowing a lot about print journalism across the country, but next to nothing about Thompson. Donna was my remedy for that. She could unfailing predict in our meetings which story was going to explode when we published it, even if I thought it was innocuous, and which stories would fly OK, even if I thought they might be controversial. The amazing thing is she always had my back. If a hard story needed to be published in the public interest, we published it. Always. She never spiked stories even when she knew local advertisers were going to be sending her into damage control mode, ringing her phone off the hook first thing the morning the paper hit the street.

Mind you, after I wrote a fairly hard-hitting editorial in October 2008 about Spirit Way and delays in Phase 2 of expanding the 27-foot wide rockface sculpture to see five more wolves mounted, making it an additional 80 feet wide, which would have meant the largest rockface sculpture in Canada, Donna limited my vacation starts to leaving after my editorials were in print. You see, Jeanette and I had conveniently enough hopped on a plane for a short vacation, as she was running in the Prince Edward County half-marathon in Southern Ontario, after the editorial was written but yet to be published in print (the paper didn’t go online until the following year in June 2009.) When the paper hit the streets, it was a case of, as the late singer-songwriter, Warren Zevon, once so appropriately put it, “Send lawyers, guns and money. The shit has hit the fan.”

Lesson learned: Never, ever criticize a volunteer effort in Thompson unless you are prepared to delay the start of your vacation.

“You are one stubborn man but we always managed to work it out and I’m so happy to have you as my friend” Donna wrote several weeks ago. “Donna wrote that you are stubborn,” Jeanette laughed, thinking it an amusing and not untrue statement. While I never changed my mind about the rockface editorial, and continue to stand by it almost 11 years later, I did come to have a bigger picture view of Spirit Way in general over the years, and in particular Volker Beckmann, who might well be considered kind of a stubborn guy himself at times. I would go onto write several editorials praising Volker as a “visionary,” and suggesting Thompson could use a few more visionaries like him. As recently as May 25, I wrote on Facebook, “While we don’t see eye-to-eye always, or agree on some issues, Volker is a much needed and often under-appreciated visionary (“Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown”: Luke 4:16-30). Well-deserved recognition in the Manitoba Legislature from Thompson PC MLA Kelly Bindle, causing me to do what I might have otherwise thought unlikely; share a YouTube video from the Manitoba PC Caucus.”

Before I met her, Donna had done a good-length stint as a morning show host for Tom and Sue O’Brien over on Cree Road at what was then Arctic Radio CHTM-610 AM. She also ran Ducky Promotions, and later, Beautiful Plus Fashions, on Fox Bay.

Between leaving the paper in 2010 and becoming general manager again, but this time of a hotel, Donna indulged her love for all things Newfoundland and Labrador, her home country (oops … province) serving up her own signature dish of “Uptop Fries,” featuring French fries, topped with dressing, onions, bologna and gravy, at Nanny’s Diner-Baking Catering at Westwood Shopping Mall. “Back home in St. John’s my father used to always talk about being on the boat called the Uptop, so I named the dish after the boat,” said Wilson. She also once worked as a cook at the old Highway Inn here, and wrote her own cookbook, which she sold for charity in 2010 to help raise funds for A Port in the Storm in Winnipeg.

She operated Nanny’s between December 2011 and May 2013, when she was recruited by Dr. Alan Lagimodiere, a veterinarian, and since 2016 PC MLA for the provincial constituency of Selkirk, and Al’s wife Judy, to run the Quality Inn & Suites Thompson. The Lagimodieres are among the Accommodations North ownership group which owns the Choice Hotels Quality Inn & Suites Thompson franchise.

Discretion is of paramount importance in the hotel business, so alas no juicy hotel stories to share here. Not that they don’t exist, just not here. Donna calls them our “headshaker” memories … like that time a guest stepped off the elevator at 5 a.m. and was … ah, yes, you can’t work together at a hotel and a newspaper and not have a few headshaker memories.

But newspapers are a bit different, as tell-all beasts, so I suppose one  brief remembrance of things past wouldn’t be too far out of line perhaps.

We needed one of our reporters one morning for a deadline story. He was a talented reporter, but he liked to stay very late at the paper most nights, obsessing over multiple drafts and rewrites of his stories before turning them in, making sure they were just right. More like a novelist then your typical first draft of history type journalist. This, of course, sometimes meant he was very sleepy. Too sleepy to make it into the office the next day for 8 a.m., 9 a.m. or even 10 a.m. Unable to raise him on the phone, we drove over to his apartment, and tossed pebbles at what we figured was his upper-floor window to rouse him, which we did eventually. This was a career first for me. In 25 years of journalism, I had never before tossed pebbles at a reporter’s window to rouse him or her from sleep. He indicated he’d be ready shortly, and buzzed us through the security door into the building. So far so good. Except in the lobby we somehow mixed the apartment numbers up, and wound up banging on the wrong door it turned out.  That’s odd we both thought. No answer. Surely he couldn’t have fallen back to sleep after just buzzing us in. And that would be right about the time the door slowly opened, and we were looking into a very darkened apartment. And a woman, unknown to me, standing in her doorway looking very sleepy and confused.

The woman, of course, was not unknown to Donna Wilson. “I’m sorry,” Donna gasped. “We’ve got the wrong apartment.” Without missing a beat, the woman stepped out of the shadows into some hall light. “Would you both like to come in for a cup of tea, Donna?” the woman asked. Turns out she was a police matron for the RCMP holding cells, and had just recently gone to sleep after working an overnight shift. But she had known Donna for years, and thought maybe we were just drooping by, although Donna hadn’t known until that moment the woman lived there at the time. Or we wouldn’t be waking her up.

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

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.

“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 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 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 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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 take off 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.

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

 

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

“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.

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.

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.”

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 92 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 44 years ago is asked to call Winnipeg RCMP at (204) 983-5461 or contact them by email at: ddiv_contact@rcmp-grc.gc.ca

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.

So why do we remember D.B. Cooper some 45-plus 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.

Gray said recently he is releasing nearly 200 pages of research material collected during the research phase for  Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper, published five years ago in 2012.

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

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Thompson back on top in new Stats Can Violent Crime Severity Index

While the American poet T.S. Eliot told us that “April is the cruelest month” when he wrote his poem The Waste Land in 1922, that might well be modified to July for Thompson, Manitoba. The fourth week in July is when Statistics Canada typically releases its annual Juristat Crime Severity Index values for police services policing communities over 10,000 in population, including the Violent Crime Severity Index. It’s a story I have followed and written about for a decade. Even if I was somehow to forget the story one year, my “search engine terms” for https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/, which indicate what kind of things readers are searching the blog for on any given day, start to show this search term every year in late July: “juristat crime severity index,” reminding me it’s that time of year again.

Truth be told, the story hasn’t changed much since I arrived in Thompson in 2007. The usual suspects – North Battleford and Prince Albert in Saskatchewan, along with Williams Lake, British Columbia, and Thompson, Manitoba – more or less rotate the deck chairs on their version of the violent crime Titanic every year, trading spots from time to time for most violent crime community for places of similar size across Canada. Over the last three years, Thompson has finished in fourth, third – and now, as of Monday – top spot with a score of 414.95. Thompson previously had a three-year run as Canada’s most violent crime city in 2010, 2011 and 2012, before improving to a second-place finish in 2013, according to annual federal statistics.

North Battleford posted a Violent Crime Severity Index score of 337.13 for 2016. “It is very good news that North Battleford is no longer the number 1 community in Canada for violent crime,” said Mayor Ryan Bater. “We believe that is due in part to the increased patrols and added emphasis on Community Safety through our Community Safety Strategy.”

To put the new 414.95 score in some perspective, Thompson’s 2014  Violent Crime Severity Index (fourth-highest in the country) score was 227.14, while the score rose to 243.95 in 2015 (third-highest in the country.) Nationally in 2016, Statistics Canada reported July 24, “the overall volume and severity of violent crime, as measured by the violent CSI, was 75.3 and virtually unchanged from the previous year.”

The major crime severity indexes include the Violent Crime Severity Index; Non-Violent Crime Severity Index and Overall Crime Severity Index index – and scores are calculated by assigning crimes different weights based on seriousness as measured by each crime’s incarceration rate and the average custodial sentence courts mete out for each crime. The weighted offences are then added up and divided by population. The crime severity indexes are standardized to a base of 100 which is derived from the index values for the year 2006. A comprehensive review of police-reported crime statistics, the Juristat report covers crimes reported to police, rather than overall crime, which Statistics Canada reports in its General Society Survey of crime victimization undertaken every five years.

If Thompson’s score of 414.95 on the Juristat Crime Severity Index values for police services policing communities over 10,000 in population seems high – and it is – consider some of the earlier 2015 scores in Northern Manitoba: Shamattawa had a Violent Crime Severity Index score of 1,711.18 in 2015, while Leaf Rapids had a score of 1,001.25 two years ago. The score in Nelson House in 2015 was 864.70.

As well since 1962, Statistics Canada has collected information on all criminal incidents substantiated and reported by Canadian police services through its annual Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Survey. In addition to the UCR Survey, Statistics Canada also collects information on victims’ experiences with crime through the General Social Survey (GSS) on victimization, conducted every five years. Unlike the UCR Survey, the GSS collects data on victim’s perceptions of crime which include criminal incidents that may not have been brought to the attention of the police. These complementary surveys are the main sources of data on crime in Canada.

Each year, the UCR database is “frozen” at the end of May for the production of crime statistics for the preceding calendar year. However, police services continue to send updated data to Statistics Canada after this date for incidents that occurred in previous years. Generally, these revisions constitute new accused records, as incidents are solved and accused persons are identified by police. However, some new incidents may be added and previously reported incidents may be deleted as new information becomes known.

Revisions are accepted for a one-year period after the data are initially released. For example, when the 2016 crime statistics were released July 24, the 2015 data was updated with any revisions that have been made between May 2016 and May 2017. The data is revised only once and then permanently frozen.

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