The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 83

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 1996 A Sectbn of the Sunday Examiner 6 Chronicle SUNDAY Zomi San Jranrisro (Djroiiirlr 5 ooper: Still Wanted After All ears If i i a nese I. i 'lit civ i Photos by Paul Kitagaki, Jr. For the Chronicle the parachutes were on board and the money was at hand. The agents had managed to find the $200,000 in the vaults of Seattle First National Bank, where it was kept available for humanitarian emergencies. Lucky for them that batch of cash was there each of the 10,000 $20 bills had already been microfilmed, making the money easily identifiable should any of it be spent.

The plane took off again a few minutes after 7:30 p.m. The hijacker sent stewardess Tina Mucklow up to the cockpit, then started negotiating with Rataczak on where to take the plane. Mexico City was out, Rataczak said, because the plane would not get there with the fuel-gobbling drag of the wheels and flaps slowing it down. Instead, he suggested going down the Pacific coast to San Francisco. "I wanted to get him out over the ocean, so if he jumped, he would drown," Rataczak said.

"He was threatening our lives and my objective was to kill him, pure and simple." But Cooper, smelling something wrong, told the co-pilot to file a new flight plan down Victor-23, an inland airway that goes south along Interstate 5 toward Portland, then on1 to Reno. Preparing to make his unscheduled departure from Flight 305, Cooper carefully scooped up his cigarette butts, made sure he had all his handwritten notes and strapped the money satchel to his body, using cords he cut from one of the surplus parachutes. By 7:45 p.m., a light on the airplane's dashboard indicated that Cooper, alone in the cabin, had lowered the rear stairwell. But the wind kept bouncing the ramp back up, so Rataczak increased the flaps to 30 degrees, slowing the plane to under 170 miles an hour. At 8: 12 p.m., "we felt a little bump and the air pressure changed," Rataczak said.

"I got on the radio to air traffic control and said, 'I think our friend just took leave of us. Mark the point on your And that was the last fix on D.B. Cooper. Cooper and his cash literally disappeared, plummeting to earth like a "greased anvil," as one of his biographers, Richard Tosaw, later put it. The Air Force had sent up two F-106 fighter planes to chase the 727 and try to keep Cooper's parachute in sight.

But the fighters were too fast and had to keep making giant S-curves in the sky to stay behind the 727. "The F-106 drivers never saw him," Rataczak said. "It was blacker than the ace of spades out there. They saw a flash of light from us and then he just vanished." There was also an Air National Guard helicopter, carrying FBI agent Ralph Himmelsbach and frantically trying to keep up with the 727. But the chopper was too slow.

For the next few weeks, hundreds of federal agents, helped by Army troops, searched through thick brambles and brush in the area near Cougar and Ariel, Wash. Sometimes, they would find bones, but: they were too old to be Cooper's. A small submarine searched nearby Lake Merwin. Agents tried to figure out the vagaries of parachuting and whether D.B., in another life, had been a skydiver. They know that when he got the parachutes, the first thing he did was to check the packer's card the written certification by the person who packed the chute.

This is something routinely done by experienced skydivers. El immelsbach says Cooper I strapped on one parachute, 1 took along another and left two on the plane and, he says, one of the two Cooper took was a dummy chute, inadvertently snatched up at a local skydiving supply store when agents were dashing around the Seattle area, rounding up money and parachutes. That chute's panels had been sewn shut and it was intended only for demonstrations at ground level. Did D.B. jump with a faulty parachute, one that would not open? And, the question everyone kept asking, and still keeps asking, if he.

jumped with a good parachute; Was he killed in the fall, or did he make it? Earl Cossey, a junior high school algebra teacher and veteran parachutist he figures he's made about 4,000 jumps packed the parachutes Cooper used. (In one of the conflicting details of the story, Cossey says the unusable parachute was still on the hijacked airplane when it landed in Reno, sans Cooper, hours later.) "lh easy to survive if you're experienced," Cossey said of jumping from a 727 at 10,000 feet. "As you leave that last step, you're going to be in that wind velocity and youll probably do somersaults for a while. Then you slow down to about 120, the falling speed of a human. You're falling belly to the ground.

You regain your senses, reach in, grab the ripcord, fall, land and live happily WANTED From Page 1 out just who D.B. Cooper was or is. In his enduring anonymity, he has inspired three books, a play, a movie, "In Pursuit of D.B. Cooper" (Treat Williams as Cooper), a song, dozens of D.B. Cooper bars and restaurants, thousands of tips (the FBI has investigated 933 suspects still gets sporadic calls on the TV reruns of the "Unsolved Mysteries" version, and a few copy- cat hijacks.

Perhaps the ultimate trib-'ute is the annual "D.B. Cooper Days" festival in the tiny Washington town over which Cooper was thought to have parachuted. (This year, the 25th anniversary party in Ariel will be on November 30. Nearly 5,000 bottles of beer have been ordered by the local tavernkeeper. Bring your own parachute.) Most people think D.B.

got away with it and even if he didn't, he should have. The Cooper of legend exuded an air of competence, the coolness of a Steve McQueen or Clint Eastwood. After it was over, people marveled at his calm expertise on how the plane worked and the type of parachutes he would need, along with his imaginative es-. cape route. yl "This is Robin Hood," says Jack 'G.

Collins, the federal prosecutor had the case until he retired ne year ago. "He's foiled the best of the Establishment. Also, guy had some guts. The plane's 170 miles an hour. It's the V.

middle of the night. And he walks )-down the ramp of an airplane. I Holy Smoke!" here has been only one trace of Cooper since he jumped out of I that airplane over the rugged Cascade Mountains. In 1980, an 8-year-old boy found a packet containing $5,880 of the ransom money on the north shore of the Columbia River, just west of the Washington city of Vancouver, across the river from Portland. The boy got to keep some of the bills, Northwest's insurance carrier got others, and the FBI has 14 of the best ones, to be used at.

trial in case D.B. is ever caught, not that anyone is dusting off a seat for him in a federal pen some place. "The prosecution would love that case," says Collins. "You spread those $20 bills all over the table, then you tell this fascinating story, take the jury through the whole narrative." (Lest anyone get any ideas, the airlines, clearly embarrassed that somebody found a way to get off an airplane 10,000 feet off the ground, quickly installed what is now called the Cooper Switch, a device that allows the staircase to be lowered only when the plane is on the ground.) On the night of Nov. 24, 1971,.

however, none of this making-of-a-legend was on the mind of William Rataczak, Flight 305's co-pilot and the man designated by the airline's headquarters to deal with the mysterious Dan Cooper, who sat in the back of his plane, chainsmoking Raleigh filter tips. As the plane circled over Seattle, Rataczak quickly learned he was not dealing with a novice. Like an artillery commander confidently giving orders on a complex fire mission, Cooper told Rataczak that after the money and parachutes had been delivered, he wanted the pilot to head south from Seattle, depressurize the cabin, fly no higher than 10,000 feet, leave the landing gear down, set flaps at 15 degrees and leave the rear door open. With the exception of the door, which had to be closed for takeoff, he got everything he asked for. "I was thinking, this guy knows a lot about the airplane," Rataczak, now a 57-year-old captain and still flying for Northwest, said the other day.

"With the gear down and the flaps at 15 degrees, it limits us to about 175 miles an hour. So I won--. dered, could he really equate flaps- at-15 with 175? The guy's no dum-Vmy." As for parachutes, Cooper got which made everybody won- der. Rataczak thought that maybe the hijacker was going to take a few of the flight crew with him and then, in honor, he thought, what if the FBI decided to summarily end the hijack by sabotaging all four parachutes. "We really got concerned with the possibility that we were going to get bogus parachutes," Rataczak said.

The plane at last stopped circling Seattle it was clear Cooper knew where he was because after glancing "Xout a window, he asked why the plane was over nearby Tacoma and landed on a remote section of the runway. Cooper ordered the -flight crew to get the "airstatrs" over the plane. Given his constant use of aviation jargon, the crew thought may have worked for Boeing or was a pilot Finally, the hijacker re-V leased the passengers. By 7 p.m., the plane was fueled. 1 ill I 1 "He's a legend," says Bill Partee, above, of D.B.

Cooper. At right, Delbert Thompson and his son, Paul, hang out at the Ariel Store where the party for Cooper is held each year. Dona Elliott, owner of the store, sits in the "Cooper's Corner" shrine in the tavern. L. 4 facts, and he casts a jaded eye on any speculation, no matter how tantalizing.

Concrete evidence is what Himmelsbach likes, the kind that surfaced in February 1980, when Bran Ingram, an Oklahoma boy picnicking with his family on the shore of the Columbia river, came across a waterlogged, sand-encrusted satchel containing 294 moldy $20 bills. All the serial num-" bers matched the list of bills last seen being strapped to the chest of D.B. Cooper in a jetliner eight years earlier This treasure trove got the FBI's attention. Helicopters flew reconnaissance over the area, squads of agents dug up the shore, searching for more bills, Cooper's body or a parachute. The case got a new injection of publicity.

But that, too, faded out Another hunter, Richard Tosaw a California lawyer who became obsessed with the case and wrote his own book, "D.B. Cooper: Dead or Alive?" is convinced Cooper is dead. He is just as convinced he will find the man's body somewhere near the Ingram family's picnic site. He said recently he plans to renew that search this week, digging up the shore once again. "The weather's lousy this time of year," Tosaw, now 71, said the other-day, "but there's something about the anniversary date that makes me think it would be appropriate.

I want to be out there, crawling along the bottom we'll hire three or four scuba divers, too and we'll have grappling hooks to stab into the (river) bottom. His body is probably gone, eaten by the bugs or the fish. But the parachute is key. It's made of real tough material." The parachute may be there, but an offbeat theory championed by a i 4 couple of retired FBI agents says D.B. Cooper never died in the Columbia River.

Instead, Nicholas O'Hara and Russell Calame say, Cooper was actually Richard McCoy, a Vietnam veteran and pilot turned bank robber who hijacked a United Air Lines jet in April 1972 in a nearly identical copycat crime, extorting $500,000 and then parachuting into a Utah desert. McCoy, however, was sloppy. Before he hijacked the plane, McCoy had told fellow pilots in Utah that Cooper went cheap he should have asked for $500,000. McCoy also left one of his notes on the plane, and agents later found all the money in his house. He got 40 years in a federal penitentiary, but escaped and died in November 1974 in a shootout with O'Hara at a Virginia motel.

O'Hara said the wording of McCoy's hijack messages, the way he carried out the crime and the remarkable physical similarity between McCoy and the composite drawing of Cooper "leads most people to believe they are the same guy." Himmelsbach, who is not most people, says, "Richard McCoy is not D.B. Cooper. He learned about Cooper's caper from reading newspapers. We established that McCoy was in Los Angeles on the night Cooper hijacked the Northwest plane. He wasn't Cooper.

But, of course, you can't disprove it because we don't know who Cooper was." At the Ariel Store, it doesn't really matter that they still don't know. What matters is the fact that Cooper did what he did. So, over the years, the store's owners have created a "Cooper's Corner" shrine in this backwoods tavern. The Ariel Store is where the big ever after." Cossey, though, says he thinks Cooper's parachuting skills were rusty. "I don't think he knew skydiving very well," he said.

"I'd slow that sucker down to where it practically stalled, and I'd be dressed a little different. I'd have goggles and a helmet keep in mind this was before they checked your luggage and a sweatshirt and strong boots." Cooper was wearing a raincoat, a suit and alligator-pattern loafers. So, Cossey says, "He steps out there and goes ass over teakettle and every way but up. He's heading for the earth at over 100 miles an hour. He's probably in a river, or a swamp ora tree." On the other hand, Cossey said Cooper "knew the airplane very well." Back in the early 70s, it was not well known that a 727's rear door could be opened in flight.

But the CIA had been doing it for years in Southeast Asia, dropping agents into enemy territory from the back end of an unmarked Boeing 727, For a while, the FBI thought Cooper was ex-military and might have moonlighted for the CIA. It's something they looked into. They also spent an enormous amount of time on "discovered" parachutes. For years, Cossey said, "I had a parade of FBI agents bringing me pieces of cloth, which they said was his parachute. 'Does this look like it? Does this None of the material came close to the chutes Cossey packed.

The trail, as it does in any case that isn't immediately solved, went from lukewarm (they never had a clue about his identity) to ice cold. But Himmelsbach stayed on it and made Cooper his personal crusade. He scoured files, he checked out every tip, no matter how wacky. He wrote a book about the case the FBI's case name for D.B. Cooper) and even now, at the age of 70 and white of hair, he is the FBI's major resource on D.B.

Cooper. Tipsters who call the FBI about the Cooper case are quickly referred to Himmelsbach. He listens sometimes for quite a while and then forwards the more worthy tips to the fledgling federal agents whose notion of terrorism is framed largely by the bombings of Pan Am 103 and New York's World Trade Center. And it's not as if these Himmelsbach tips are for naught, thanks to a literally last-minute dash to get Cooper indicted. On the afternoon of Nov.

24, 1976, the day the five-year federal statute of limitations would have expired on Cooper's crimes the feds had nightmares of headlines saying, "D.B., Come Home, All Is Forgiven" Himmelsbach and Collins rushed the case into a grand jury room and, by sundown, had secured a "John Doe" indictment against Cooper on charges of air piracy and extortion. That means the case is still open and Cooper can still be prosecuted, something Himmelsbach, even though long retired, appears to relish. Himmelsbach is no fan of Mr. Cooper. He does not wallow in the D.B.

lore. He does not drop in to share a beer at the annual Cooper lovefest in Ariel. "I've avoided that," he says. Those people are the flaky type. They admire Cooper.

Well, he's not a bit heroic to me. He jeopardized the lives of 42 people and he used foul language to the stewardesses. He's a sleazy, rotten scumbag and I hope he died a miserable, wretched True to the nature of a pure detective, however, Himmelsbach doesn't want to guess about whether Cooper lived or died. He prefers 1 if' 5 i 1 it)' ft party is each year. It is a smoky, pleasant bar and restaurant near Lake Merwin, far from anything urban.

It is nestled smack up against, the thick forest from which many of the patrons expect Cooper to emerge any day now, asking for a long, tall cold one. On the wall of Cooper's Corner are dozens of yellowing newspaper stories "Ariel, Invites You to Drop In Any Time, D.B." "D.B. Cooper Legend Lives. Does He?" -and a movie poster shows a grinning well-dressed man, his fist full of dollars, bailing out of the stern end of a 727. The caption asks, "Who says you can't take it with you?" Store owner Dona Elliott says she is gearing up to serve D.B.

Cooper stew (beef and vegetables), 200 cases of beer and 20 pounds of kielbasa to 450 of the faithful, who will turn up for the big do two weeks from now. There'll be a D.B. Cooper lookalike contest (lots of 40-ish men in dark suits and dark glasses), and half-a-dozen parachutists will make a jump over the store, landing as close to the beer as possible. Why all this fuss? After all, he was just another skyjacker, wasn't he? This is the kind of careless question that makes the pool game at the Ariel Store come to a sudden stop The radio goes quiet All you hear, for a moment, is the hum of the beer cooler. Bill Partee, a 64-year-old handyman with a long white beard and a Budweiser hat, turns around slowly on his barstool, considers the question and says, not unkindly: "He's a legend.

He stole the sheriffs horse and he didn't get caught Then pauses for a moment "I'm sure he's deader 'n hell," he says. "But it runs in your -ft.