D.B. Cooper – Wrapping Up Our Investigation Into the Cooper Case and Moving Forward – Part 2 of 2

Submitted by Robert Blevins:

In Part One, this writer discussed the history of Adventure Books of Seattle as it relates to the DB Cooper case. To call it a roller coaster ride would be an understatement. Praise from some people, outright hatred and anonymous attacks by others, TV appearances, a media contract, (we later bailed on that because we didn’t like the submitted script) and more things than this writer can list, even in a two-part article.

They don’t call it the Cooper Vortex for nothing.

Our job on the Cooper case, which we took up more than a dozen years ago, is finally coming to an end. Did we solve the case? Can we prove beyond any reasonable doubt that Kenny Christiansen and Bernie Geestman were the perpetrators of the only unsolved hijacking in US history?

Don’t be silly. Of course we can’t. Not beyond any doubt. But if I were to bet the farm on it, I would bet we are right. When FBI agent Dr. John Jarvis (pretty much) spilled the beans on Kenny and company to three of his friends shortly after the FBI closed the case…all three of them possessing security clearances…this only convinced us we were probably right about Kenny and Bernie all along. But without a direct admission from the FBI itself, there is no way to tell for sure.

Either Dr. Jarvis should say WHY he told his friends Christiansen was Cooper, or the FBI should clear up his statements with the truth on Kenny. At the time Jarvis told three friends that Kenny was Cooper and indicated it didn’t matter because Kenny was dead anyway, both the Seattle FBI office and the HQ in Washington, DC had been in possession of our report on Christiansen for about a year. Dr. Jarvis is pretty high up the food chain at the FBI. He is the Academic Dean for the FBI Training Division and former Chief Criminologist in the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit. If anyone would be privy to certain information regarding Christiansen or the D.B. Cooper case, it would certainly be HIM.

The most fun memories I have about investigating the Cooper case have nothing to do with the interviews, the traveling to do them, the TV appearances, or even the results of our investigation. It is the memories of the four Cooper Campouts we sponsored over the last few years. The Campouts were invitation-only gatherings mostly held in the Olympic National Forest above the Skokomish River valley area near Hoodsport, WA. Usually about 20-25 people would show up at the designated location and then it was Party Time Galore, usually over a weekend.

We also sponsored the very last party ever held at the famous Ariel Store and Tavern, the place that had tossed an annual Cooper Days party since the mid-1970’s. I attended two previous parties, the ones held there each November by the late, great Dona Elliot. Her friendly smiling face and the stew she served at those parties became world-famous. When she died in 2015, the store and the responsibility for keeping Cooper Days going fell to her son, Bryan Woodruff.

Above: Dona Elliot. She bought the store from Germaine Tricola and continued Tricola’s Cooper Days tradition for nearly 40 more years.
Below: Germaine Tricola, the original owner and founder of Cooper Days.

Bryan Woodruff’s mother, Dona Elliot, had recently passed away when this picture was taken by Adventure Books staff. She left the store to Bryan before she died. But then Bryan had to get his own business licenses in his own name. When the county refused to re-issue a business license to the store after her death because of needed improvements, we tried to assist him by sponsoring a final party at the store in August 2016. Although we raised over $3,000, Bryan Woodruff was diagnosed with cancer soon afterward and died before he could reopen the store. It was eventually purchased by the people shown in the picture below, who hope to restore it and bring back the Cooper Days celebration.

New owners of the Ariel Store and Tavern. We wish them luck in their efforts to reopen the store.

It has now been fourteen years since I first contacted New York private investigator Skipp Porteous and became involved in what Cooper fans call the ‘Cooper Vortex’. And what a ride it was indeed. I think I have contributed all I possibly can to the case, and everyone at Adventure Books of Seattle is proud of the work we did, the parties we tossed, and our efforts to bring the public into the Cooper case. Other Cooper investigators were more focused on simply being big fish in a relatively small pond, and thought the public were mostly ignorant and a waste of time. I had a real problem with that attitude, plus the lies and the phoniness involved with these people. We never really got along, and I finally realized it didn’t matter.

But at some point you have to close the book on things, and we decided that now was as good a time as any to do that. Our final contribution to the Cooper case is a big party (we love parties) being held near Mt. Rainier the second weekend of July, 2022. This time, it involves not only Cooper folks, but UFO/Bigfoot/I-was-abducted-by-aliens folks as well. And except for answering the unending messages that come in to us about the Cooper case, our public participation in the Cooper case has finally come to an end. The book Into The Blast, as well as the 54-page report on Christiansen and Geestman, and the fifty-plus articles at this blog on the Cooper case will remain available into the foreseeable future. And if major media ever contact us regarding this or that in the Cooper case, we will be happy to oblige them.

I always tell people about the Blast book: It is just a primer on Christiansen and Geestman. We actually found out much more about those two, and their possible involvement, AFTER the book was published. This happened mainly because members of Geestman’s family, the guy we allege as Christiansen’s accomplice in the hijacking, started volunteering information that pointed to ‘Uncle Bernie’s’ possible involvement in the hijacking. One of the biggest pieces of information came when his own family (and two friends of his) testified that he went missing over the week of the hijacking with Christiansen…but at the same time they were seeing Geestman telling History Channel that Kenny could certainly be Cooper. At the time of his TV appearance on the Decoded show, Geestman did not know his own family was testifying against him. When this author interviewed Geestman early on in the investigation, he claimed that Kenny could not possibly be Cooper. He has told so many lies to me, to History Channel content researchers, and to the cast of the TV show Brad Meltzer’s Decoded, that I started calling him Pinocchio.

But this July will be the final public event we do that has anything to do with one D.B. Cooper. I’m satisfied with that, and ready to move on to something else. And since we have made many friends in the past year in the UFO/Bigfoot/Aliens Exist community, we figure to focus on those subjects, which will surely be more interesting than a fifty-year-old skyjacking.

But one thing is for sure. It was one hell of a ride during my time in the Cooper Vortex.

To go back to Part One of this article, click HERE.

To contact us about anything you read on this blog, just drop a line to adventurebooksofseattle@gmail.com