Welcome to Cooperland: An Interview with Geoffrey Gray

by

Mike Yawn

Forty years ago, D. B. Cooper hijacked a plane in the Pacific Northwest, negotiated $200,000 in cash, and parachuted into history. He’s been the subject of a four-decade investigation by the FBI, hundreds of newspaper stories, and at least ten books. The most recent of these books, Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper, was written by Geoffrey Gray and released earlier this year.

Gray was granted full access to FBI files, access that he successfully exploited to recount the crime and its aftermath. His work dispels some long-standing legends—Cooper was not, for example, the urbane criminal depicted in the media—and, more impressively, sheds light on the strange cast of characters that make up “Cooperland.” In Gray’s book, “Cooperland” is inhabited by the suspects in this long-standing drama, as well as the FBI, the police, and the “Cooper sleuths” who have spent years and thousands of their own dollars on the trail of the real D. B. Cooper.

By the end of the story, Gray becomes part of “Cooperland,” traveling the country speaking with sources and suspects, trying to shrug off the nagging thought that the “Cooper Curse” has gotten him, too.

On August 19, 2011, I interviewed Gray by phone about his new book and the phenomenon of D. B. Cooper.

Mike Yawn: This is a first-time book tour for you, right? 

Geoffrey Gray: Oh, yeah.

Mike: Is it tiring?

Geoffrey: I passed the point of exhaustion a week ago. Exhaustion led into running out of fumes, and then once the fumes ran out, there’s the breakthrough. It’s a kind of clarity, your body just doesn’t need sleep, it’s just raw adrenaline pushing you forward. I’m there now. It feels pretty good, actually.

Mike: Well, I’ll try to be concise. Your book seems to be as much about the national fascination with Cooper as it is about his crime and disappearance. Why is this still fascinating to us? 

Geoffrey: As a country, we broke free, and we’re obsessed with breaking free and obsessed with freedom. We leap for joy at exhibitions of freedom.

In a football game, for example, the running back goes into the line, and you can’t even tell where he is, he’s pushing through this scrum of people, and he breaks free and into the end zone. We leap for joy at this sight of breaking through for freedom.

Our lives are so constrained. We’re shackled: “Man is free and everywhere he is in chains.” When we can see a revolt, it appeals to us.

Furthermore, the act of the hijacker was individualistic. It was one man against the system, big and complex. Through courage, through whatever was driving him—no one really knows what his motives really were—he was able to outdo these big systems and prove that individuals could still win.

It’s crucial to understand the context. I think one of the reasons why the Cooper story is striking so many people now is the similar historical eras marked by a bad economy, economic anxiety, paranoia over technology, and complete loss of individualism.

We are also enamored of underdogs, of individuals. We always have been, think of Bonnie and Clyde. But Cooper is different because he escaped while flying. Flying is something very new for humans. We’ve been land animals for tens of thousands of years, walking and running, doing things on our own feet. Our whole existence has been defined by gravity—it pins us down and holds us down all our lives. We’re slaves to gravity.

But Cooper not only breaks free from conventional society, he also breaks free from gravity. He hijacks the plane, which flies in the face of gravity. It’s not only stealing money and getting away, it’s breaking from gravity.

Mike: Pat Quinn, who wrote The Man Who Never Returned, makes a similar argument about Judge Joseph Crater. He argues that Crater’s disappearance, which happened in 1930, was more fascinating because of people’s anxiety. He argues that the idea of going missing is part of the country’s DNA, and combined with the idea of looking ahead to some pretty tough times, the public celebrated the idea that this guy might have beaten the system. 

Geoffrey: I love that theory. You should take that back to the early industrial revolution. I wonder if there’s some correlation between moments of economic disparity and the idolization of outlaws and banditos. It might be there.

Mike: Can you elaborate on Cooper as an anti-hero constructed by the public and the media? 

Geoffrey: The myth of D.B. Cooper strikes a chord. He was someone who prompted the good guys to root for the bad guys. You had FBI agents looking for him but not wanting to find him. And that’s what is unique about the story.

What’s also unique about it is that this isn’t what Dan Cooper planned. This is all sort of accidental. This is all a story we want to make, and that we have made, and that we continue to believe in. D.B. Cooper is our construct. He’s our hijacker; we put him on our t-shirts, and we sing songs to him every year. Dan Cooper the hijacker himself is somebody entirely different, and probably isn’t anything even closely resembling the mythic character that we’ve created.

Even the most recent Cooper news is a story of our construction, this Marla Cooper who says her uncle was D. B. Cooper, there’s not one fact, not one piece of evidence that is being put forward to connect this man to Cooper, and it doesn’t matter. We want to believe it could be him.

Mike: There are a lot of misconceptions and inaccuracies about Cooper. Even his alias, D. B., is an inaccuracy. [The hijacker gave his name as “Dan Cooper,” but a reporter mistakenly sent it over the wires as “D. B. Cooper”] Could you discuss other misconceptions or inaccuracies that you uncovered while researching Cooper? 

Geoffrey: Well, one of them is the idea that Cooper was a genteel thief, smartly dressed in a suit and tie, a classy guy. That’s not true at all. He was a schlub. He smoked cheap cigarettes; he wore a clip-on tie that cost $1.50. And his sports jacket, from what I’ve been able to find, was reddish brown, a russet color. He looked like he stopped at the Goodwill on the way to the airport.

Mike: So this isn’t Raffles. 

Geoffrey: Even his suitcase was imitation leather.

Mike: There are a lot of suspects out there. By the way, congratulations on Marla Cooper fingering her uncle as a suspect a couple of weeks before your book came out, generating loads of publicity… 

Geoffrey: Took us a long time to plan that [laughs].

Mike: Well, after investigating the case, is there one suspect that stands out?

Geoffrey: I don’t think so. The evidence isn’t good enough to rule anyone in, and it’s not good enough to rule anyone out. I do think some suspects are better than others, but it depends on what criteria you use. If you are going to go with witnesses’ descriptions, which witnesses? Are we going to go with what the flight attendants saw? The witness I like is Robert Gregory, who sat next to the hijacker, and he was extraordinarily detailed in his statements, more detailed than the other witnesses.

Mike: Let’s compare Cooper to other famous disappearances. In the cases of Crater and Jimmy Hoffa, they were probably killed. The people who did away with them didn’t want them found. Cooper’s different. Before the hijacking someone had to know him, work with him, or shop in the same stores, people who don’t have a stake in him remaining hidden. How does Cooper just disappear? Doesn’t someone see him and say, “I know that guy. His name is…”

Geoffrey: This is why the case is so interesting. Cooper had a family, you know, a father, a mother, maybe a brother or a sister, someone who knew him. The problem is that there were so many leads that the FBI couldn’t have processed them thoroughly. People would have had to have an extraordinary amount of knowledge of what he did to catch the FBI’s attention. The FBI was bombarded on the case after they released the sketch.

Mike: In the book, you seemed to really enjoy profiling some of the unusual people in “Cooperland.” Is that a skill you learned and refined in the newspaper world? 

Geoffrey: My philosophy is that God is in the details. Getting access to the official Cooper files was an extraordinary honor for a reporter and it allowed me to recreate the hijacking in real time. But the real riches were the people, the suspects, the secret lives of ordinary people. There’s so many of them. There’s Lyle Christiansen’s memory of his brother Kenny [a suspect], and how Kenny would always elude Lyle while they played catch. One day, Lyle started to cry after another futile game of catch, and Kenny said, “If you try to catch me again, you just might catch me.” And, sure enough, he caught him. Or Jerry Thomas, the guy who is looking for Cooper for twenty-two years, and he pays his mother’s cell phone every month so he can call and hear her voice on the voice mail, even though she died years ago. How lucky to be able to share such intimate details about normal people.

Mike: Which of the books that are out there on DB Cooper would you say comes closest to getting it right?

Geoffrey: I think they’re all good. I think they all have merit. They’re all part of it, and they’re all good in their own kind of way.

Mike: You came into this with some knowledge, but what new pieces did you find most interesting or most valuable? 

Geoffrey: One of them was the motivation of the hijacker. When he says, “I don’t have a grudge against your airline. I just have a grudge.” I thought that was unique, that was one quote that led me in the direction that the hijacker himself was potentially suicidal. The other was the evidence that pointed to a Canadian connection.

Mike: Is there anything else you’d like to share? 

Geoffrey: It’s a dangerous story. It’s hard to stop once you begin reading about this case. It’s a good danger, it’s a good obsession. I tried to lay out all of the facts and clues for people so they can, for one, be Cooper sleuths, and help solve the case. In that sense, I hope this book is a field guide for those who would like to get involved.

Also, I am helping plan a 40th anniversary Cooper Symposium on November 26. It’s in Portland, and it’s going to be wild.

Mike: Earlier, you mentioned that it’s your first book tour. It’s also your first book. How is writing a book different for you than writing articles? 

Geoffrey: It’s completely different, like going from, well, I can’t think of analogy….

Mike: From Single A to the Major Leagues? 

Geoffrey: More like going from Single A to the NBA. It’s a different sport. This is my first book, so I learned things the hard way. I thought, it’s a book, I have all this space, I can write all I want. No. The book goes by quickly. You have to pick the characters you want to write about. There are so many damn characters in the book. For my next book, I am going to write about one person, or two people, three max. It’s very hard to write about a lot of people, but I love to focus on the characters, because I think that’s what it comes down to, characters.

Mike: Thank you, and good luck with your book. 

Geoffrey: Thank you, and let’s keep in touch.

Books mentioned in this column:
The Man Who Never Returned by Peter Quinn (Overlook, 2010)
Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper by Geoffrey Gray (Crown Publishing Group, 2011)

Mike Yawn is a professor of political science at Sam Houston State University, where he has published articles in The Journal of Politics, American Politics Quarterly, Social Science Quarterly, American Review of Politics, Political Behavior, and Film and History. For fun, he writes about almost everything but politics. You can learn more about him at his blog, Mike Yawn. Contact Mike.