Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper

by Geoffrey Gray Narrated by Geoffrey Gray

Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ¿ The true, unsolved story of D. B. Cooper's 1971 airplane hijacking, one of the greatest cold cases of the twentieth century, by*an author*featured in D.B. Cooper: Where Are You?!, now streaming on Netflix

“Here is writing and storytelling that is vivid and fresh-a delectable adventure.”-Gay Talese

“I have a bomb here and I would like you to sit by me.”
*
That was the note handed to flight attendant Florence Schaffner by a mild-mannered passenger now known as D. B. Cooper*on a Northwest Orient flight in 1971.*It was also*the start of one of the most astonishing aviation whodunits in the history of American true crime: how one man extorted $200,000 from an airline before parachuting into the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, never to be seen again.

The case of D. B. Cooper is a modern legend that has obsessed and cursed his pursuers for generations with everything from bankruptcy to suicidal despair. Now, with Skyjack, Geoffrey Gray obtains a first-ever look at the FBI's confidential Cooper file, uncovering new leads in the infamous case.*
*
Starting with a crack tip from a private investigator, Gray plunges into the murky depths of the decades-old mystery to chase down new clues and explore secrets of the case's most prominent suspects, including Ralph Himmelsbach, the most dogged of FBI agents, who watched with horror as a criminal became a counter-culture folk hero; Karl Fleming, a respected reporter whose career was destroyed by a D. B. Cooper scoop that was a scam; and Barbara Dayton, a transgender pilot who insisted she was Cooper herself. With explosive new information, Skyjack reopens one of the great cold cases of the twentieth century.

Editorial Reviews

NOVEMBER 2011 - AudioFile

In 1971, the elusive and mysterious D.B. Cooper hijacked a commercial airplane, demanded $200,000 and parachutes, and jumped out somewhere near the border of Washington and Oregon. The mystery remains unsolved to this day. As narrator, Geoffrey Gray uses a tone of intrigue, which the production’s brooding background music complements. His succinct sentences give the story forward momentum. As he reconstructs events, he focuses on several possible culprits and jumps from story line to story line, a style that requires close attention on the part of the listener. In teasing apart the mystery, Gray delves deeper and deeper into his quest for answers, ultimately entering the world of conspiracy theorists and developing a growing sense of paranoia himself. S.E.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

In 1971, hijacker D.B. Cooper vanished after he parachuted from a Northwest Orient Airlines jet with ,000 in extorted cash. He became a legendary figure, the subject of, among others, a feature film (starring Treat Williams) and at least a dozen books. Since the Cooper case is unsolved, what more is there to say? In October 2007, Gray wrote an article for New York magazine speculating that Cooper had been Kenneth Christiansen, a Northwest Airlines purser and former paratrooper who died in 1994. Now, in this full-scale probe of Christiansen and other suspects, Gray reconstructs the hijacking, the jump, investigations, and aftermath, interviewing retired FBI agents, Northwest officials, passengers, and one of the only living eyewitnesses, stewardess Florence Schaffner, who had direct contact with Cooper on the plane. The solid journalistic approach of the New York article is replaced by an annoying present tense and a fast-paced style with occasional padding, such as this description of Schaffner: "She is a specimen of red. Red lipstick. Red nail polish. Red uniform... the coral red you find on a necklace." But by introducing intriguing theories, curious clues, and a parade of characters who claim a Cooper connection, Gray successfully milks the mystery and generates suspense while adding fuel to Cooper's folk-hero reputation. (Aug. 9)

From the Publisher

Gray dives into the world of online sleuths, speculators, and zealots as if he were Hunter S. Thompson hitting the road with the Hell’s Angels. . . . One thing Skyjack makes entertainingly clear is that it’s a weird, weird world.”—Washington Post

“Skyjack will take you on an engaging discovery.”—Chicago Sun-Times

“Gray organizes this, his first book, like a Tarantino film, cutting chronology into strips, then reassembling them in a sequence that readers may consider (pick one) eccentric, confusing, artistic, random, maddening, fun, revelatory. It’s all of the above.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Fascinating. . . . [A] rollicking reading experience.”—Oregonian

“Out of the wild blue yonder comes this pleasing tale of obsession and mystery. Geoffrey Gray has essentially parachuted into the early 1970s and found a nearly forgotten episode that elucidates a swath of our cultural history. The result is a clean, smart whodunit full of quirky characters, imaginative sleuthing, and thrilling surprises.”—Hampton Sides, author of Hellhound on His Trail

“With verve and assurance worthy of his protagonist, Geoffrey Gray pulls readers along on a kaleidoscopic chase through the cult of Cooper. Both a masterful re-creation of the paranoid 1970s, and an exhilarating firsthand account of an erosive obsession, Skyjack takes us down the rabbit hole with Gray—and what a journey it is.”—James  Swanson, author of Manhunt and Bloody Crimes

“Who was D.B. Cooper? In Skyjack, Geoffrey Gray lures in the reader with this iconic unsolved mystery, and for the next 290 pages explores a story as attention-grabbing as a bag of hot money. D.B. Cooper emerges as the great McGuffin of 1970s America, a prism through which Gray exploits to the fullest with his propulsive writing style, mad commitment to detail, and explores everything from the early years of gender reassignment surgery to the birth of airline security culture to the ghostly legends of the Pacific Northwest's Dark Divide.”—Evan Wright, New York Times bestselling author of Generation Kill

“Skyjack tells the legendary story of D.B. Cooper in a way that’s as inventive and as engaging as the subject itself. Only a writer as talented as Geoffrey Gray could knit together the many strands of this mystery and the extraordinary characters who have dedicated, and in some cases destroyed, their lives in pursuit of the truth. Just as Gray finds himself sucked into the tale, readers will leap into the void alongside him, landing on their feet and smiling at the shared adventure.”—Mitchell Zuckoff, author of Lost in Shangri-La: A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II

“Easily one of the most delightful books I’ve read in a long, long time. In his obsessive search for answers in the legendary case, Gray becomes a little unhinged himself as well as encountering an array of characters I haven’t seen the likes of since Mark Twain sent Huck down the Mississippi. His style fits the case, and Gray can be compared with Tom Wolfe and Evelyn Waugh in his talent for unearthing the eccentrics of the world and the bizarreness of life.”—John Bowers, Associate Professor of Writing, Columbia University, author of The Colony and Love in Tennessee

Library Journal

The only skyjacker never to be apprehended, D.B. Cooper commandeered a Northwest Orient airliner in 1971, demanded $200,000 and a parachute, leapt from the plane, and has never been seen again despite a massive manhunt. Granted access to the FBI files, Gray wrote a 2007 New York story that has reopened the case. Since Cooper has become something of a legend, there should be interest.

NOVEMBER 2011 - AudioFile

In 1971, the elusive and mysterious D.B. Cooper hijacked a commercial airplane, demanded $200,000 and parachutes, and jumped out somewhere near the border of Washington and Oregon. The mystery remains unsolved to this day. As narrator, Geoffrey Gray uses a tone of intrigue, which the production’s brooding background music complements. His succinct sentences give the story forward momentum. As he reconstructs events, he focuses on several possible culprits and jumps from story line to story line, a style that requires close attention on the part of the listener. In teasing apart the mystery, Gray delves deeper and deeper into his quest for answers, ultimately entering the world of conspiracy theorists and developing a growing sense of paranoia himself. S.E.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172075353
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	08/09/2011
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

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.

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