It was an article from New York magazine, written by Geoffrey Gray and published last month. Gray and a private investigator from New York had located a man in Minnesota who believes the notorious skyjacker was his late brother, one Kenneth Christiansen.
The story made a compelling case, one that's probably impossible to prove.
Still, it was as good a way as any to kick off what a Seattle columnist dubs D.B. Cooper Month, the annual apex of answers to the question: D.B. Cooper, where are you?
Cooper, or a well-dressed, mild-mannered man in his 40s, commandeered a Northwest Orient Boeing 727 on Thanksgiving Eve in 1971. Somewhere above the Cascade Range in Washington, he parachuted into legend with $200,000 in $20 bills.
Nine years later, a boy found $5,800 of the bills near the Columbia River. No other definite connections, before or since, have been made to the crime.
Postulations of Cooper's true identity and the fate of the rest of the money keep the story alive, and sometimes result in new leads. The New York article seems to have done both.
“It kind of adds to the mystique of the whole thing,” said Schwarz, who has his own reasons for paying attention.
Now 74, retired and living in Missoula, Schwarz was a 38-year-old air traffic controller at the Missoula airport on Nov. 24, 1971, when Northwest Orient Flight 305 came through. The man who came to be called D.B. Cooper boarded the same plane a few hours later in Portland, Ore. It was headed for Seattle and destiny.
“The FBI at one time thought Cooper had boarded in Missoula,” Schwarz explained. “That wasn't the case.”
Authorities determined as much the same night, but didn't bother to tell Schwarz. He read about it in the newspapers.
“It was a hellish evening, I remember that,” Schwarz said. “Jim Goodrich, a newscaster from KYSS Radio, was up in the tower pumping us, seeing what we knew. We didn't know anything.”
A Sentinel High School teacher by the name of Michael Cooper did board Flight 305 in Missoula that day. He was flying home for Thanksgiving dinner with his parents in Sequim, Wash., and was among the 36 passengers Cooper released at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport after receiving the cash and parachutes he requested.
For a few unpleasant hours Michael Cooper was mistaken, in very public fashion, for the skyjacker. Schwarz still doesn't know if that's why the FBI questioned him.
“For a while that night there was all kinds of rumors,” he said. “They were calling me on the telephone, asking questions. Did you see anything? Did you notice anything?”
He laughs at the idea now. He's asked around but can't remember who his partner in the tower was that night. Their job was to “separate” flights as they landed and departed from the Missoula airport. Once the planes were airborne, they became the responsibility of the Salt Lake City control center.
“We don't even look at the airplanes when they're on the ramp. That's not our job,” Schwarz said. “When the airplane's parked on the ramp, that's somebody else's responsibility.”
Goodrich made it to the tower, Schwarz said, because the veteran radio newsman was a pilot.
“We had kind of an open-door policy to the tower for pilots. A lot of times pilots came up to the tower just to chat,” he said.
Schwarz grew up in Bozeman and joined the Navy during the Korean War. When he left it in 1956 and started casting around for jobs, he landed, in an ironic twist, in Portland as an air traffic controller. Later he worked at the grass strip of an airport in Whitehall, then with the U.S. Air Force in Klamath Falls, Ore.
Montana beckoned both Schwarz and wife Mary, who also came from Bozeman. When the control tower in Missoula opened in 1961, at what was then called the Missoula County Airport, Schwarz was among the first hired.
He retired in 1985, after 28 years in what is considered one of society's most stressful jobs. Until he got to Missoula, Schwarz said he never knew a controller who retired for reasons other than medical. “Ulcers,” he said.
We don't really want D.B. Cooper found, any more than we want Bigfoot caged or UFOs debunked. It's too much fun imagining.
The man who identified himself as D. Cooper - a wire service mistakenly reported it as D.B. - was almost instantly romanticized, if not immortalized.
Within weeks of the heist, a Portland shop was selling T-shirts that read “D.B. Cooper, Where Are You?” A Seattle bowling alley was advertising a D.B. Cooper sweepstakes with cash prizes.
Later came “The Ballad of D.B. Cooper,” the movies, the books and the “verbing.” Just the other week, a blogging columnist with the Arizona Republic bemoaned that the local NFL's running game “has gone D.B. Cooper.”
“We all like adventure stories,” a University of Washington sociology professor explained to the New York Times in December 1971. “(Cooper) took the greatest ultimate risk. He showed real heroic features - mystery, drama, romanticism, a high degree of skill and all the necessities for the perfect crime.
“This man was neither political nor neurotic. His motive was simply $200,000, and people can understand that much better.”
Cooper's crime is the only unsolved skyjacking. Federal investigators have long believed he died before or soon after he hit the ground.
Schwarz doesn't want to think so.
“In my heart of hearts, I think he pulled off a hell of a stunt,” he said. “To jump out of that airplane doing 200 knots on top of overcast ... and he had no idea where he was coming down. Hell, he could have come down in the lake on Mount St. Helens.”
If Lyle Christiansen of Morris, Minn., is to be believed, his brother lived to spend the cash. As Gray wrote in the New York magazine article, Christiansen started suspecting Ken a few years after he died of cancer in 1994.
Kenny Christiansen had a background as an Army paratrooper and later worked for Northwest Orient, which relocated him from Minnesota to Washington state in the 1950s. He bought a “modest ranch” in Bonney Lake, near Tacoma, 11 months after the skyjacking and lived there the rest of his life.
Christiansen never married, liked to travel overseas, and opened his home to troubled boys and runaways. Gray talked to one of them, who lived with Ken off and on for 20 years, and said Christiansen was never short of cash.
Florence Schaffner was the attendant on Flight 305 who took Cooper's note in the back seat that night. At first, according to Gray's report, she thought Cooper was hitting on her and dropped the note in her purse. But he insisted she read it.
“Miss, I have a bomb in my briefcase. I want you to sit by me,” it said.
Schaffner provided the FBI with a description of Cooper, from which emerged a composite sketch that exists today as the best likeness. She called a photo of Ken Christiansen the closest match of the dozens she'd seen.
But the Seattle office of the FBI dismissed the Christiansen theory. The agency had already heard of it several years before.
Besides the discrepancy in size, “the witness (Schaffner) was very clear on the eye color,” an FBI spokesman told reporters in late October. “She very distinctly remembers looking into his brown eyes. This person had hazel eyes. He's not considered a viable suspect.”
Larry Carr is the FBI's latest lead agent on the Cooper case. A couple of weeks ago, he released evidence theretofore held in confidence - the necktie Cooper left behind on the plane, and the notes Cooper and Schaffner scribbled on the Portland-to-Seattle flight. Carr hopes that by releasing such items, memories will be jogged and new leads will be generated.
That, in turn, will inevitably add new fuel for the D.B. Cooper myth-making machine.
When Schwarz stopped by the Missoulian to drop off the magazine article, he told a receptionist he wished to speak to an editor or reporter about D.B. Cooper.
“Her eyebrows raised, and she said, ‘Oh, I remember him,' ” Schwarz said with a chuckle. “He isn't completely lost. But I think there are a lot of generations that don't know much about him.”
Reporter Kim Briggeman can be reached at 523-5266 or at kbriggeman@missoulian.com.
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