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Summary
Summary
"I have a bomb here and I would like you to sit by me."
That was the note handed to a stewardess by a mild-mannered passenger on a Northwest Orient flight in 1971. It was the start of one of the most astonishing whodunits in the history of American true crime: how one man extorted $200,000 from an airline, then parachuted into the wilds of the Pacific Northwest and into oblivion. D. B. Cooper's case has become the stuff of legend and obsessed and cursed his pursuers with everything from bankruptcy to suicidal despair. Now with SKYJACK, journalist Geoffrey Gray delves into this unsolved mystery uncovering new leads in the infamous case. Starting with a tip from a private investigator into a promising suspect (a Cooper lookalike, Northwest employee, and trained paratrooper), Gray is propelled into the murky depths of a decades-old mystery, conducting new interviews and obtaining a first-ever look at Cooper's FBI file. Beginning with a heartstopping and unprecedented recreation of the crime itself, from cabin to cockpit to tower, and uncanny portraits of characters who either chased Cooper or might have committed the crime, including Ralph Himmelsbach, the most dogged of FBI agents, who watched with horror as a criminal became a counter-culture folk hero who supposedly shafted the system--Karl Fleming, a respected reporter whose career was destroyed by a Cooper scoop that was a scam--and Barbara (nee Bobby) Dayton, a transgendered pilot who insisted she was Cooper herself. With explosive new information and exclusive access to FBI files and forensic evidence, SKYJACK reopens one of the great cold cases of the 20th century.
Author Notes
GEOFFREY GRAY writes about crime, politics, sports, travel and food. He is a contributing editor at New York Magazine, covered boxing for The New York Times and for programs like This American Life , writes for other newspapers and magazines, and once drove an ice-cream truck. SKYJACK is his first book.
From the Hardcover edition.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Who was the reclusive masked hijacker who in 1971 took over an airplane flying from Portland, Ore., to Seattle, made off with $200,000, and parachuted into mysterious oblivion? A contributing editor to New York magazine, Geoffrey Gray narrates this audio version of his attempt to solve the mystery of the famous D.B. Cooper case. His reading is calm and well paced. He has a sense of the dramatic, dropping into a whisper at moments of particular importance. He also ably renders the book's characters and uses his innate knowledge of the text to emphasize key points and passages. Gray is unlikely to quit his day job-although he'd probably make a pretty decent audio narrator-but for his own book, he's the ideal reader. A Crown hardcover. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A nonfiction mystery revolving around the identity of a legendary criminal who has never been apprehended.A few years ago, New York magazine contributing editor Gray heard a passing reference to the hijacking of a commercial passenger plane in 1971. When the author realized that the hijacker, who boarded using the name Don Cooper and because of imprecise media coverage eventually become known as D.B. Cooper, seemed to have committed the perfect crime, he began researching a feature story decades after the breaking news. After announcing the hijacking while the plane was airborne, Cooper demanded $200,000 cash and parachute equipment to make his eventual escape. Airline and law-enforcement authorities provided the money and the parachutes after the plane landed. Then those authorities allowed another takeoffafterthe passengersleft the plane safely. Gray located members of the crew from the flight as well as passengers, law-enforcement agents, amateur sleuths obsessed with the unsolved hijacking and experts of all sorts, especially regarding airplanes and parachuting. At first, the author fell under the sway of Lyle Christiansen, an octogenarian trying to sellfilm rights to the saga. Christiansen claimed he possessed documentation proving that his brother Kenny, deceased since 1994, had committed the crime.The narrative tension is built uponparallel story lines: Gray's re-creation of the crime (including the unsuccessful law-enforcement investigations) and his own investigation to learn Cooper's real name. It turns out that Kenny Christiansen is a credible possibility, but so are at least two other individuals out of thousands whose names have been bandied about. As the story unfolds, Gray becomesaware of his obsession with the search by himself and other sleuths, and his self-deprecation about hisunexpected obsession sets the tone.A thoroughly researched, quirkily written saga suggesting that truth is, in fact, often stranger than fiction.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* This book isn't as much about the search for the identity of the famed skyjacker as it is about the author's immersion into Cooper culture. Today, four decades after Dan Cooper (D. B. Cooper is a misnomer, the result of a mistake by the media) parachuted out of a plane somewhere over Oregon or Washington, carrying a sack full of money, there is a thriving if not entirely rational subculture devoted to finding out who Cooper really was, where he is now, and what happened to his money. Common wisdom holds that Cooper is dead, but did he die back in 1971, after he jumped out of that plane, or did he live a long life before passing away? Was Cooper really Kenneth Christiansen, the former paratrooper who was a flight attendant for the airline (and whose apparent viability as a suspect prompted Gray to begin his odyssey)? Or was he one of a number of lesser but still tantalizing possibilities? Gray concentrates on the search for Cooper's identity but also on the searchers themselves, a rather motley group of conspiracy theorists, amateur sleuths, and self-taught scientists. The author never pokes fun, though: the searchers take their work very seriously, and Gray takes them seriously, too. The book doesn't end with a Big Reveal Cooper's identity is still up for debate but it does take readers on an exciting journey into the byways of popular culture. This is hardly the first book about Cooper, but it may be the first to treat his story for what it has become: an ongoing phenomenon, like the search for Bigfoot, with a remarkable ability to consume the imaginations and lives of generations of searchers.--Pitt, Davi. Copyright 2010 Booklist
Excerpts
Excerpts
July 6, 2007 New York, New York Skipp Porteous wants to talk and says can we meet and I say fine. He arrives in a suit that is South Beach white, and between the wide lapels is a T-shirt that is snug and black. He has leather sandals on his feet, no socks. His hair is curly and brown. His goatee is trimmed and gray in spots. He removes his sunglasses, which reveal hooded eyes, and gives the room a looky-loo. The bistro is typical midtown Manhattan. A fruit basket of martinis on the menu--mango, peach, Lillet. The clatter of voices at the banquettes and the clank of dishes ricochet over the roar of lunch talk. In the gilded mirrors on the walls are reflections of Windsor knots, hair gel, six-figure cleavage. I have dealt with Porteous before. He had a few story ideas; none worked. I can't remember why now. Porteous was his own story, and maybe I should have written about him. He used to be a preacher before he became a private investigator. In the late 1960s, Porteous ran a church in Los Angeles and worked the Sunset Strip with his Bible. He preached to hippies, the homeless, anybody who would listen to his salvation pitch. "Excuse me," he would say, "if you died tonight, where would you spend eternity? The game for Porteous then was to win souls for the Church, until he lost his own. He saw corruption in the Church and started digging around. What he found was that he was good at digging around, often in disguise. Porteous liked undercover work so much he made a second career out of it. For a small-town sheriff, he bought drugs as a narc. For the FBI, he infiltrated gangs and groups wearing a wire. It was a decent living. The feds paid on time, and in cash. His style is not tough-talking or pushy. Porteous has a holistic approach toward PI work. Some retired cops flash badges or guns. Porteous starts each investigative day with a meditation session. He also hires mostly women to do PI work. "Women have better instincts than men," he told me when we first met. Sherlock Investigations, his agency, had the gimmicky type of title that attracts a lot of attention on the Web. It snared me, and countless others needing help solving problems of an unusual kind. Like the disappearance of Captain Jack, an iguana that was stolen through an open window in Greenwich Village. Or the woman who called because she was convinced the actress Lily Tomlin was stalking her (she wasn't). Or the man convinced his wife was having an affair with his father (she was). Or the runaway from Israel they found living under a bridge in Arizona. Or the mother from India who wanted to spy on the man her daughter was dating, and all the suspicious spouses and suits who are convinced (and wrongly so) that their phone receivers are tapped and their offices are bugged. Sin and paranoia form the backbone of his business. It's loud in the bistro and I can't hear the private investigator so good. I lean over my moules, anxious to hear what case has come over Porteous's transom. Another missing pet? Another teenage runaway? Gypsy scams? Nope. It's a new client, Lyle Christiansen. His intel is sparse. From what the private detective has pieced together, Lyle Christiansen appears to be a kooky old man, an eccentric, and prodigious. He is eighty years old, and lives in Morris, Minnesota, a prairie town closer to Fargo, North Dakota, than it is to Minneapolis. Lyle grew up in Morris and worked for the post office there. In retirement, he has become an inventor. He is in the process of patenting a hodgepodge of household contraptions: the Yucky Cleaning Wand (it slips into the neck of a bottle to clean the tough-to-reach places), an egg breaker that cracks eggs perfectly every time, and a shirt that disguises the appearance of suspenders (he finds them distasteful--in his version, you wear them on the inside of the shirt). Christiansen's wife, Donna, has a creative mind, too. Over the years she has assembled a collection of expressions, adages, sayings, idioms, clichés, and senseless American verbiage. The title of her book is As Cute as a Bug's Ear . It has 2,270 entries, ranging from "As Bald as a Billiard Ball" to "You've Got it Made." Great. But so what? What's the story here? Why would a retired post office worker and aspiring inventor from Bumblef***, Minnesota, need the services of a Manhattan sleuth-for-hire like Porteous? Porteous was puzzled too. The first e-mail he received from Christiansen was cryptic. It read: "Dear Good People at Sherlock Investigations, I would very much like to contact Nora Ephron, Movie Director of the movie, "Sleepless in Seattle". I think she would be interested in what I have to say. The Sherlock employee who handled the note was Sherry Hart. Before she became an investigator, Hart tried to make it as a singer-songwriter and actress. Her training in the dramatic arts now helps with her undercover work. She's handled hundreds of cases for Porteous, and as she read over Christiansen's e-mail she thought, Here we go . Another whackjob . She wrote back: We would not be able to give you a famous person's address. If you want to write a letter to Ms. Ephron, we would deliver it to her ourselves. The fee would be $495. Proceed? Proceed. Christiansen's check and letter arrived shortly thereafter. Porteous handled the letter with caution, as if it contained a nuclear code. He held the envelope to the light to examine it. He rotated the edges. He peered through the fibers of the paper and checked the pockets for powders. The note was clean. He read it. Lyle's letter to Ephron was a pitch for a movie. Lyle wanted to base the film on the life and times of a person he knew. The language was vague. The person he knew was quiet and shy. Bashful was Lyle's word. Mr. Bashful also happened to be a culprit to a major unsolved crime, Lyle said. He also suggested a title for the film: The Bashful Man in Seattle. A tip of the hat to Nora Ephron's blockbuster, Sleepless in Seattle. Reading the bizarre note, Porteous did not attempt to understand it. He wasn't getting paid to understand it. He hailed a cab to Ephron's building on Park Avenue and approached the doorman. "Nora Ephron live here?" he said. "Yes," the doorman said.Porteous placed Lyle's envelope in the doorman's white-gloved hands. He then hailed a cab home. Easy money. As the weeks passed, Lyle Christiansen was patient. Did Ephron know he was a retired civil servant living on little income, and paid so much money to send her a note? Ephron's films were so warm and tender. How could she be so cold and rude as to not respond with a note of her own? In her home on Park Avenue, Ephron did receive Christiansen's letter. She saw his note on her kitchen counter and maybe later in the office. Or did it land in the wastebasket with her junk mail? She couldn't be sure. It disappeared. In Morris, Christiansen was flustered. He decided to write Ephron again. Did she not receive his first letter? Would Porteous deliver it for him? Whatever the fee was, he'd pay it. Porteous was baffled. Why was Christiansen so desperate to reach Nora Ephron? And what was he talking about when he said he knew a person connected with a famous crime? Which crime? How famous? In e-mails, Porteous prodded for more information. The old man was cagey. He wanted to tell his story to Nora Ephron, give her the exclusive. But Ephron never wrote him back. Lyle finally gave up. He told Porteous everything. His hunt started on television. Excerpted from Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper by Geoffrey Gray All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
