Fear and Loathing in D.B. Cooperland

Typical day in Cooperland

One thing about the D.B. Cooper case that makes it different, as in:

“Mrs. Gump…your boy…DIFFERENT…”

 

Is the amount of internet craziness going on within Cooperland that can get really wacko sometimes. Everyone thinks they have the right suspect. Others will play games, or tell any ridiculous tale to support their angle in the case. Sometimes the angle isn’t a suspect, but something else. Cornering the internet forum traffic related to Cooper, perhaps. Not to really solve the case on such forums, but to fritter away the time discussing it. Most of these discussions rehash the same old evidence and go nowhere.

There’s nothing wrong with discussions about old DB, of course. What makes the Cooper case different is when you start proposing a certain person may have been Cooper, and submit REAL evidence about that person. Then the claws come out, the wagons circle, and the dirty tricks emerge. Fear raises its ugly head, and loathing follows.

Unlike the Jimmy Hoffa case, or Scorpio, or even Jack the Ripper – SOLVING the D.B. Cooper case would be a horror to many of the people who discuss it. This is because actually solving it would mean the end of discussion and no more mystery. To them, it’s like trying to swallow a golf ball, or being forced to eat a plateful of sauerkraut laced with raw sardines. Not a pretty picture.

The jealousy among Cooper fans is rampant and predictable. This writer was once foolish enough to open his own discussion forum on the case. I named it: The Adventure Books D.B. Cooper Forum. At first, I tried to do it nicely. Listed all the suspects and their entries from Wikipedia, posted up about our upcoming eclipse campout to Oregon, and other reletively harmless stuff. I shouldn’t have bothered, since it turned out to be a waste of time.

It wasn’t long before other Cooper fans discovered the site and we got as high as twenty members, some of them were even relatives of Kenny Christiansen, the guy they are now making the first DB Cooper movie about down in Hollywood. But then I made a BIG mistake. I let it slip that the film producers planned to name Kenny as Cooper, not as a guess, or a maybe, but as a matter of historical record. Their decision was based on evidence I hadn’t revealed to the public, and I had to sign a confidentiality agreement to keep my trap shut regarding details on the movie. My mistake was telling Cooperland about the ‘historical record’ stuff.  

It wasn’t long before Cooperland went ballistic, of course….

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R.I.P. – Skipp Porteous: Private Eye, Freedom Writer, D.B. Cooper Sleuth, and FRIEND.

Skipp in 2008

It was tough getting the news that Skipp Porteous, my co-author on the book Into The Blast – The True Story of D.B. Cooper, had passed away. For the last few years he had suffered from aphasia, and he began having trouble using a keyboard or communicating verbally, although his mind remained sharp as a carpet tack.

 

 

The Cooper book wasn’t his first book, however. Before forming Sherlock Investigations in New York City, Skipp had actually been a fundamentalist preacher. Over the years, he had a change of heart about that work, and detailed his journey in his 1991 book, Jesus Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, which is still available at Amazon. I bought a copy not long after we started working together on the D.B. Cooper case, just to get a handle on the guy who was sending me on interviews all over the Northwest USA.

In the nine years I knew Skipp, I never actually met him. But over the years I grew to KNOW him quite well. He had skills on determining when people were lying, or hiding something, or when someone needed to be questioned. In late 2008, I saw his name mentioned in an article by author Geoffrey Gray, who would later go on to write his own book on the Cooper case, Skyjack. There was a mention by Skipp that he was considering a book on the suspect discussed in the article, Kenneth Peter Christiansen, a former US Army paratrooper and an actual employee of the airline that Cooper had hijacked for $200,000.

On the day I read the article, I made a fateful decision that would change my life. I decided to contact Skipp and offer him my services as a book editor, and to possibly even publish his book. I also said I lived just down the road from where his suspect once lived, and I found the whole subject interesting.

D.B Cooper – The Murder of Earl Cossey and the Mystery of the ‘Amboy Parachute’

Neither the local cops at the King County Sheriffs’ Department, or the Seattle F.B.I. have been forthcoming on a couple of issues in the D.B. Cooper case. The video below was shot in the Olympic Mountains of Washington State in October 2015. It speaks for itself:

Exact Location of the Instruction Placard From NWA Flight 305

ABOVE: A still picture from the Google Map. (The full interactive version of the map is shown below.) In this view, you would be facing in the same direction the airliner was traveling between Seattle to Portland. It is likely that Cooper jumped roughly twenty miles south of this spot, near the town of Ariel, Washington.

After hijacker D.B. Cooper jumped (most likely near Ariel, WA) on November 24, 1971 it was a little more than six years before any evidence surfaced, and it wasn’t from Cooper himself. An instructional placard showing how to open the aft airstairs was found in what was described as ‘a heavily-forested area six flying minutes north of Ariel’. The placard was discovered in early 1978 by Carroll Hicks of Kelso, Washington State, while he was out hunting.

The location of the found placard has been researched pretty heavily and is well-known. Today, the area is much less forested, and has been subjected to extremely heavy logging since 1978. The exact spot can be reached today (within about fifty feet accuracy or so) with any decent car or truck. The placard was turned over to police afterward, and its location on the ground was used to help confirm the flight path of the hijacked airliner.

For GPS users, the exact coordinates are:

46°14’38.4″N  122°41’01.3″W

An embedded, interactive Google map is shown below. To begin, click on ‘View Larger Map’. Then select ‘Satellite View’ and the 3-D option for best results. Zooming in or out also helps, and yes, Google can provide directions to the site. When using 3-D, hold down your CNTL button while moving your mouse to adjust the terrain view for best results.

Adventure Books of Seattle, who investigated the DB Cooper case for several years, and has hosted occasional summer campouts for the public, has named this spot as a possible future camping location for one of those events. The idea being that it might be fun, and campers could search the surrounding area for additional items that could still be lurking in the trees and brush. These include the (probably) phony bomb, the non-working reserve chute, and Cooper’s briefcase. They were not on the plane when it finally landed in Reno, and have never been found. Perhaps Cooper actually ripped off the placard and tossed it out the back, along with those other items, to throw off any ground search later. He could have done this before he jumped. It’s doubtful he tied them to himself, as he did the money bag. You never know. In any case, we’re considering a metal detector for this camping trip. 🙂

 

Did He Pay Cash or NOT? Our Final Result on How D.B. Cooper Suspect Kenny Christiansen Purchased a Home in Bonney Lake, WA Shortly After the Hijacking

The house in Bonney Lake, WA shortly after Christiansen purchased it from Ann and Joe Grimes in July 1972. He bought the adjoining lot out back from the same couple three months later.

Each time this writer does an interview with the media regarding Kenneth Peter Christiansen (and his alleged accomplice, Bernard Wayne Geestman) regarding their involvement in the hijacking, one question always comes up:  “In your book on Kenny and company, Into The Blast, you say that Kenny bought a house for cash shortly after the hijacking. You have also stated this on internet forums, such as Dropzone/DB Cooper. Is this true or not? Did he pay cash?”

The answer is:  NO, he did NOT.

The next question might be:  “So why is that statement still in your book?”

The answer is:  “Because it isn’t even a key part of the case against Christiansen, and we aren’t going to modify that book until the movie on Kenny is released.”

Question:  “If you were wrong on that, why don’t you just change it NOW?”

Answer:  “There are a couple of reasons. First, we have to modify the book beyond just that one bit, and include new parts about the movie. If we did it now, we would just have to modify the book again later when the movie is released. So for now, we just let it stand.”

The investigation into Christiansen and Geestman (by Adventure Books staff) began back in early 2009. At that time, we only knew the basics, and most of that early information came from the famous 2007 article by author Geoff Gray, and some from the initial investigatory files from private investigator Skipp Porteous. It was a deep cave we were exploring, with many twists and turns, and the flashlight was very dim. We didn’t have all the facts, and we had not yet interviewed the people who knew Kenny best. In other words, we were entering a world where all the information and evidence was not yet available, and none of the witnesses had spoken to us. And like most criminal investigations, we made a few missteps along the way. The idea that Kenny actually bought that house for cash was one of them.

These days, when I do interviews I often direct the media AWAY from the book, and TOWARD the actual 54-page report we sent to the Seattle FBI in June, 2015. The reason being, it is much more accurate than the 2011 book. However, the truth on how Kenny actually managed to buy that house in Bonney Lake just seven months after the hijacking is more convincing, and better evidence against him, that just plopping down cash for it. That type of purchase could be explained in any number of ways, none of which points to him as the hijacker without additional proof. When we discovered the full truth on the house, it was better evidence than just the idea of a cash purchase on an approximately $15,000 home.

The REAL Reason the F.B.I. Closed the D.B. Cooper Case

On July 8, 2016 the Seattle F.B.I. announced they were ‘allocating resources dedicated to the D.B. Cooper case to other matters’. Which means they were no longer going to investigate the case. According to a Seattle Times report, the F.B.I. did qualify this statement a bit by adding that if new or compelling evidence came forward, that the Bureau would reopen the case.

But if the Seattle F.B.I. was hoping that the Cooper case would simply ‘go away,’ and the constant tips stop coming in, they were wrong. Seattle F.B.I. agent Ayn Dietrich-Williams admitted the tips just kept on coming, no matter what the F.B.I. did to try and make the public lose interest. The F.B.I. also claimed they had investigated every possible suspect over the years, and checked out all credible tips.

Strangely enough, the F.B.I. has kept other famous cases open, such as the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa in 1975, as well as the Zodiac serial killer case that predates the Cooper case. Could there be a different, unsaid reason why the F.B.I. chose to close the Cooper case? If so, what could possibly be the reason they did?

Perhaps they had discovered the identity of the hijacker, found out he was dead anyway, and decided to leave it at that. This was the story presented to the staff of Adventure Books of Seattle about a month after the F.B.I. closed the case.

Bù lā dé Meltzer de jiěmì’kěn ní kèlǐsīdì ānsēn – zhōngwén bǎn (The ‘Brad Meltzer’s Decoded’ Episode on Kenny Christiansen – in Chinese)

Found this the other day at YouTube. Nothing like seeing you and your friends dubbed over into Chinese. I asked a friend who speaks the language, and she thought it was Mandarin.

Of course, she could have meant what kind of oranges she likes…

 

Late Night AM – The Interview at YouTube

Shown below is the interview done by Robert Blevins with Late Night AM’s Joel Sturgis, Dr. Clarissa Cole, and Eric Olsen.

Subject: The D.B. Cooper case, and why Hollywood finally decided to pay attention to the Kenny Christiansen story. Included are about forty images that play in the background throughout the interview.