'Who is it in the parking lot?' I asked Gayla Prociv. She was standing closest to the office window.
'Just Fed-Ex,' she said. 'Quit worrying.'
Quit worrying? Since last June, half the staff of my little publishing company, Adventure Books of Seattle, was forced to keep secrets from the OTHER half. It was driving everyone crazy, as well as my unexplained weekend absences while I drove all over the Northwest getting interviews and taking pictures.
Here's the deal: I usually work on weekends at the AB office, and for months I wasn't showing up. I also wasn't writing too many articles for Newsvine. So some of the staff began to ask if I were sick or something. And some of them got time off because I would call the office and tell Gayla to send everyone home because I was coming in that night with the results of another interview. Only Gayla, Greg our tech advisor, and I knew what was going on. All everyone else knew was that I was never at the office.
I'm getting ahead of myself. Here's how it all started:
Last June we were approached by Skipp Porteous, the president of Sherlock Investigations, New York City. He said he wanted to do a new book about skyjacker 'D.B. Cooper'. Well, I've heard all the stories before about Cooper, and frankly, no one had any real proof as to his identity. I wasn't that impressed. However, I went ahead and signed a confidentiality agreement with his company in exchange for the opportunity to view a large number of files and pictures he had gathered over the last four years on a possible suspect. After seeing the files and pictures, I was mildly impressed. He had quite a bit of circumstantial evidence on the guy, although no witness testimony or a smoking gun. It was obvious he needed more evidence before writing a book.
He claimed the hijacker was a World War II paratrooper and former employee of the airline named Kenneth Christiansen. Who was Christiansen? I asked. Porteous said maybe I already knew him, since Christiansen was living in my hometown of Sumner, Washington at the time of the hijacking in 1971.
He had my attention. I was a junior in high school in 1971, and I know a lot of people in Sumner, as well as the nearby city of Bonney Lake. Although I had not heard of Christiansen, investigating a local guy for the Cooper case sounded exciting, and as it turned out, it certainly was.
My job was to follow some initial leads provided to me by Skipp Porteous and try to get interviews with possible witnesses, take pictures, and gather any additional evidence if possible. I didn't think I would find out anything new about the case. It's been covered reasonably well over the years, although no one's solved it yet - until now.
That's right. As I did the interviews, many of the people referred me to others who had even more information about Christiansen - all of it pointing to him as the famous hijacker. It was like chasing a snowball down a hill. Soon, I was driving from one end of Washington State to the other and building a solid case against the guy. Most of the time these were cold-call interviews, since many of these folks either had no phone, or an unlisted number, or they lived in remote areas.
In the end, I was able to put a number on it. I was 90-95% certain that Kenneth Peter Christiansen and D.B. Cooper were one and the same person. I had a meeting with Greg and Gayla and told them we had to take some security measures until the book was released. I was mostly worried that the boys up at the F.B.I. office in Seattle would drop by with a subpoena and take our computers, files, and pictures. The Cooper case is still active and they continue to investigate leads, headed up by Special Agent Larry Carr. If they took everything from us, all of our work would be for nothing.
Besides, they already had forty years to solve the case. Now it was our turn.
To keep the possibility of leaks to a minimum, I restricted the number of staff who would be in the loop. Everyone knew we were doing the book, but only a few of us knew that we were actually interviewing witnesses and gathering information. The rest of them thought we were just publishing Skipp Porteous as a sole author.
When it was all finished, I told the rest of the staff the truth. I thought they would get mad at me, but they didn't. They just wanted to see the manuscript and help design the cover. It's now been finalized and sent to our printer/distributor at Ingram/LSI. It's been pointed out to me that our cover images use a sport parachute, while Cooper used a round one. But I didn't care. Once the manuscript was finished, I said the heck with it, we're not changing it now. It's the story that counts. I created a title page with a parachutist using a round chute and that would have to do. Upload the thing, I said.
I'm taking a vacation. My nerves are shot and I am seriously tired.
Robert Blevins is the co-author of Into the Blast: The True Story of D.B. Cooper and a managing editor at Adventure Books of Seattle.
Kenneth Christiansen couldn't have been D.B. Cooper. I know that alot of circumstantial evidence may point to Kenneth, but the money that he spent couldn't have been the ransom money, since the ransom money never has been found in circulation. Case closed. Whatever money he was suddenly spending was from somewhere else and not the skyjacking.
ReplyDeleteRegina says in part:
ReplyDelete'but the money that he spent couldn't have been the ransom money, since the ransom money never has been found in circulation. Case closed. Whatever money he was suddenly spending was from somewhere else and not the skyjacking....'
Robert replies:
Not true, Regina. After the first three to six months after the hijacking, no one was really looking for the money anymore. Here's an excerpt from the book:
'The FBI later printed the complete list of serial numbers of the 10,000 twenty-dollar bills given to Cooper and distributed them to banks, primarily in the Pacific Northwest. However, this list ran several rows of numbers per page and was thirty-four pages long. They were also non-sequential numbers.
The F.B.I. has had a few different Special Agents running the Cooper case over the years. In 2008, it was Larry Carr. He admitted in an audio interview (link at Wiki under the DB Cooper entry) that most banks gave up trying to check their incoming twenties against the ransom list within six months or less after the hijacking. The job was just more than bank tellers could handle, due to the sheer volume of different numbers involved. The U.S. Treasury Department also assisted in keeping an eye out for any of the bills, but they were already receiving tens of thousands of bills each day for normal damaged currency replacement. They were also unable to continue this effort for very long.
Although the F.B.I. once claimed that Treasury kept looking for years, a Treasury official contacted by the authors in 2010 contradicted this claim...'
Robert M. Blevins
Hey Robert-- I know you work for a firm that promotes and offers editing -- How about you go remove your review on my book. This is the Second negative review from your company-- different member, basic same wording. Leave my book alone please.
ReplyDelete