A certain local editor turned down my pitch for Geoffrey Gray’s new book Skyjack: The Hunt For D.B. Cooper saying, and I quote,” I didn’t see a very local connection.” I don’t know this person as mentally disturbed. I could only assume then, that this person was simply too young to have heard of D.B. Cooper. And that made me feel very old indeed.
The Cooper in question actually took off from Portland–a detail I myself had either forgotten or never picked up. Forty years ago last Thanksgiving, he told the crew he had a bomb. He wanted $200,000. Authorities put that together for him in Seattle. At Sea-Tac airport, he let the passengers of that Northwest Orient Airlines Boeing 727–100 disembark; then the plane took off again with only the crew and himself.
He asked for two parachutes.
Somewhere over southern Washington state (we think) he used one of them. He has never been caught. It remains the only unsolved skyjacking in American history.
Mr. Gray, a prominent New York magazine writer, begins his narrative himself largely ignorant of the Cooper case’s endlessly baffling nature. By his own admission he thinks unmasking the man (who gave his name on the plane as “Dan Cooper”; the “D.B.” was just the first distortion of many) as simple as connect-the-dots: Surely the skyjacker was a military man suspected by his own brother.
Unless, the skyjacker was a former Mormon Sunday-school teacher who broke out of jail with a plaster-caster pistol.
Unless the skyjacker was a career criminal who rarely gave anyone his real name–especially not while locked up alongside the Sunday-school teacher.
Unless the skyjacker was a transsexual with remarkably bad teeth and crude tattoos left over from her male days….
So, Mr. Gray doesn’t get the brass ring, but he has a hell of time on the merry-go-round. He understands through experience, by the book’s end, how people can get lost in the story and never come out. Will Cooper, quite likely dead by now, ever be unmasked? Some people honestly don’t want an answer to the riddle. By the book’s end, Gray can only go on, and on. He’s abandoned his breezy concept of easy answers. But in the words of Tom Petty, he’s working on a mystery, going wherever it leads.
