Discovery of parachute stirs new buzz
over D.B. Cooper
AMBOY,
Wash. (AP) — A tattered, half-buried parachute unearthed by kids had D.B.
Cooper country chattering Wednesday over the fate of the skyjacker, who leaped
from a plane 36 years ago and into the lore of the Pacific Northwest.
The
parachute is about all most people in this neck of the southwestern Washington
woods ever expected would be found as evidence of Cooper’s daredevil escape
attempt.
“Hunters
are all through here,” Idy Gilbert said Wednesday as
she served drinks at Nick’s Bar and Grill. “They find lots of bodies up here
all the time, people who are missing. They would have found some bones. All
they found was a chute.”
In
November 1971, a man identifying himself as Dan Cooper, later mistakenly
identified as D.B. Cooper, hijacked a Northwest Orient flight, claiming he had
a bomb. He demanded and got $200,000, then jumped out the back of the plane
somewhere near the Oregon line.
He
may have landed around Amboy, not 30 miles from Portland, Ore. That’s the same
area where children playing outside their home recently found fabric sticking
up from the ground where their father had been grading a road, FBI agent Larry
Carr said Tuesday.
The
children, responding to a publicity campaign, urged their father to call the
FBI, Carr said, and when their find became public this week, it reignited talk
of the region’s favorite folk hero.
In
Ariel, about 20 miles northwest of Amboy, the Ariel Store has an annual D.B.
Cooper party.
Dona
Elliot, owner of the store, said Wednesday she thinks Cooper hid out in brush
and trees for an accomplice to take him to the airport in Portland, about 60
miles south.
“It’s
the perfect place; no one would have looked for him there,” she said.
The
T-shirt for this year’s party will have a parachute theme, she said, even
though she’s skeptical that the artifact the kids found is Cooper’s.
“It
will be 37 years in November,” she said. “There can’t be too much left of that
parachute.”
The
FBI doesn’t want to excavate the property until it confirms, either through an
expert’s examination or scientific analysis of the fabric, whether the chute is
the right kind.
If
it is Cooper’s parachute, that will solve one mystery — where he apparently
landed — but it will raise another, Carr said.
In
1980, a family on a picnic found $5,880 of Cooper’s money in a bag on a Columbia
River beach, near Vancouver. Some investigators believed it might have been
washed down to the beach by the Washougal River. But if Cooper landed near
Amboy and stashed the money bag there, there’s no way it could have naturally
reached the Washougal.
“If
this is D.B. Cooper’s parachute, the money could not have arrived at its
discovery location by natural means,” Carr said. “That whole theory is out the
window.”
Retired
FBI agent Ralph Himmelsbach, of Woodburn, Ore., who
worked the Cooper case, said Wednesday he doubts the remnant found near Amboy
could be the nylon parachute Cooper carried when he jumped into poor conditions
over rough terrain.
“Lying
in the mud, mostly wet, would not be the kind of environment that would be good
for a parachute,” he said, though he conceded he could offer few alternate
explanations for how the chute got there.
Himmelsbach said his theory of
the case hasn’t changed.
“The
night it happened, I thought he had a 50 percent chance,” he said. “... It has
gone down since then.”
Locals
prefer to think he made it.
“I
think he’s out there enjoying his money,” Gilbert said. “Most people here say
they think he made it. We may never know.”
———
Associated
Press writers Gene Johnson in Seattle and Sarah Skidmore in Portland contributed
to this report.