Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (23 page)

Oh no
.

“I’m not keeping it,” he says. “Just show me how to delete the photos.”

“Absolutely. Oh, man, I can’t thank you enough.”

“I hope we didn’t mess up your Utah trip too much,” the staff sergeant says, scrolling through my recent photographs one last time to make sure all the Deseret pictures are gone. He also advises me against going to Dugway because the boss has already alerted them to my intentions.

“I have a whole other Utah site near Provo I can pursue about a skyjacking that turned out to be pretty historic,” I say. I almost add that the skyjacker himself was once part of the Utah National Guard but decide against it.

“All right,” he says, handing me back my driver’s license. “Take it easy.”

“You, too, and thanks again.”

Free to go, I drive off in the direction of Provo, about three hours away. My elation is tempered by the fact that I don’t exactly know where I’m going, which is the reason I had nixed the skyjacking story in the first place. I have old photos of a relevant site in Springville, just south of Provo, but the area has changed drastically since the 1970s. When I called around before coming to Utah, no one I spoke with from this area—librarians, town officials, real estate agents—knew the specifics. Granted, the crime took place about forty years ago, but it’s not often that someone carrying half a million dollars jumps out of a plane over one’s town.

The incident began at 2:00
P.M.
on April 7, 1972, when a man identified as James Johnson approached the United Airlines counter at Denver’s Stapleton Airport and paid $59 for a one-way ticket on Flight 855 to Los Angeles. Holding his ticket daintily between the tips of his first finger and thumb so as not to leave any prints, Johnson boarded the Boeing 727 and sat in the last row, close to the aft stairwell.

Before takeoff, Johnson was in the bathroom altering his appearance with a wig and makeup when an announcement blared over the plane’s loudspeakers, asking if any passenger had dropped a manila envelope. Johnson’s heart almost stopped; the sealed envelope contained a series of threatening notes he intended to give to the crew throughout the flight.

Gambling that the flight attendants hadn’t read the contents, Johnson opened the door, caught the attention of the stewardess holding the envelope, and, after quickly taking it from her hands, ducked back into the lavatory to continue adjusting his disguise.

Twenty minutes or so into the flight, Johnson handed stewardess Diane Surdam a white envelope with the words
GRENADE—PIN PULLED PISTOL LOADED
typed on the outside. His demands for the half a million dollars and four parachutes were listed inside, and to emphasize his seriousness he included a grenade pin and a live .45-caliber cartridge. He also claimed to have C-4 explosives.

Surdam carried the envelope to Captain Gerald Hearn, who radioed the instructions to Federal Aviation Administration executives and then set a course for San Francisco. FBI agents dressed as baggage handlers and maintenance workers waited for the plane but were unable to sneak on board. After the ransom money and parachutes were delivered, Johnson gave another handwritten note to Surdam ordering everyone off the plane except the flight crew. Efforts to stall the process long enough to stage a raid failed, and once all the passengers had disembarked, Johnson told the captain he was feeling “twitchy” and to get a move on. At approximately 7:45
P.M.
San Francisco time, Flight 855 was airborne again.

About two and a half hours later, Johnson lowered the rear-exit stairwell and cautiously manueuvered his way down the steps with the duffel bag stuffed with $500,000 clipped to his flight suit. Captain Hearn had received Johnson’s last note telling him precisely what altitude to maintain, and Johnson had warned the pilot that if he caught sight of any aircraft following them, he’d trigger the bomb after jumping. Two C-130s were already on their tail, but Johnson didn’t see them. He suspected that the FBI would try to bug his parachutes, although he doubted they could have done so during the relatively short period the plane was in San Francisco. They had.

Johnson soon recognized Interstate 15’s lights flickering into view. As freezing air whipped around him and turbulence caused the stairwell to shake, Johnson knew the time had come to jump, even though he wasn’t as close to his home in Provo as he’d planned. With the highway now below him, he stood up, took one last look for any aircraft that might be trailing behind, and went feet first into the night. Seconds later he blacked out.

“Do any of these photos look familiar?” I ask a clerk at the first convenience store I come to on Interstate 15 in Springville. The pictures are from 1972 and show areas of Springville the way it looked back then.

She shakes her head.

“Is there someone around here who might know? Any old-timers?”

“I’ve only been here a few months, so I wouldn’t even know who to tell you.”

It’s a Sunday, most of the town is closed, and I’d already called the old standbys, with no luck. This might actually be a bust.

With nothing to lose, I just start driving around Springville. As I’m going down South Main Street I pass the police station and decide to stop in.

The parking lot is almost empty, and the building looks deserted. I hit the intercom button near the front door.

“Can I help you?” a woman’s voice asks.

I explain that it’s not urgent but I’m trying to find a local landmark and was hoping one of the officers who’s lived in Springville for a while could help me. I expect a curt reply, but she says: “I’m on dispatch duty, so let me get someone to cover for me and I’ll come down there as soon as I can.”

“Thanks,” I say, “and again, no rush.”

Jolted awake in midair, Johnson regained his equilibrium and determined that he was still thousands of feet above ground. He almost opened his chute but suddenly noticed the two C-130s prowling overhead, their massive spotlights hunting for him in the darkness.

Feeling weak and like he might pass out again, Johnson realized that at the risk of revealing his position he had to pull the rip cord. With as much energy as he could muster, he yanked the handle.

Nothing.

He jerked it harder, then tugged with both hands, but it was stuck. Finally his backup chute popped open, and Johnson scanned the ground for a soft patch of earth. He was descending fast, and he’d have to favor his left leg when he touched down to protect his sprained right ankle (from a recent ski injury), but he found a cow pasture and the landing went off without a hitch. He stashed the duffel bag and his parachute in a drainage ditch and, with military planes circling above and law enforcement agents and dogs on the ground, he strolled over to the Hi-Spot Drive-in as if nothing had happened. Using a crisp $20 bill, he bought a Coke and paid a young man for a ride into Provo.

When he walked into his house around 1:00
A.M.
, his sister-in-law Denise greeted him practically shrieking, “Have you heard the news? Some guy jumped over Provo with half a million dollars!”

“No,” he said, “I haven’t.”

The next day he went back to the landing spot, retrieved the loot, and buried it in his backyard.

·  ·  ·

I’m arranging the black-and-white pictures I have of Springville when the police department’s dispatcher, Ruth Bybee, enters the lobby, and after we exchange hellos I ask her how long she’s lived in the area.

“My whole life,” she says.

I hand her a series of photos that show the culvert where Johnson hid the money. “I know this was before your time, but do you remember anyone talking about where it all happened?”

She gives me a
That’s sweet, but we both know you’re fibbing
look (I really wasn’t) and says, “I’m old enough to remember it myself. Here’s what you need to do. Take a left out of the station lot and go up to Airport Road. Go right onto 1750 West, and then you’ll come up to a construction site across from a bunch of restaurants, and the big empty field is it.”

“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this,” I say. “This morning started out a little rough, but you made my trip to Utah.”

Ruth tells me to “stay out of trouble,” and I promise her I’ll try.

By the time I get to the site, which is now a construction zone just off I-15, dusk has settled. I don’t mean to trivialize James Johnson’s crime or the trauma he must have caused the flight crew, but as I stand here looking up at the star-dotted sky I’m a little in awe of his gutsiness. The logistics alone are staggering, and he did all of this, it was later revealed, despite having a fear of heights.

Only hours after Johnson hit the ground, Utah National Guard members were gathering in Provo to assist local and federal authorities in their search. One of the troops who arrived early that morning was pilot Richard Floyd McCoy, a twenty-nine-year-old Sunday-school teacher and decorated war hero who’d served two tours flying C-13 combat helicopters in Vietnam, earning the Army Commendation Medal, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and a Purple Heart. He’d lived in Utah off and on for ten years, seven of them with his wife, Karen. The two had met at Brigham Young University, where McCoy studied law enforcement.

McCoy had told friends he aspired to work for the CIA or the FBI, and the prospect of hunting Johnson would have been an exhilarating one to a man like McCoy—except that McCoy knew James Johnson would never be found. Or, at least, no one with that name would. The man who had boarded Flight 855 and jumped from the plane at thirty thousand feet was, in fact, Richard Floyd McCoy. When McCoy checked in that morning with his National Guard unit, he had slept only a few hours after his late-night adventures. But he figured that not making an appearance would have only raised suspicions, so he shuffled in, bleary-eyed and still nursing a sprained ankle.

FBI agents suspected that James Johnson was an alias, and the first name on their minds when news of Flight 855 lit up the wires was D. B. Cooper. Less than five months earlier, a passenger named Dan Cooper (somehow this got garbled in the media and became D. B.) got on board a Northwest Orient Boeing 727, which also had an aft exit, and handed the flight attendant a note saying he had a bomb in his briefcase. He demanded $200,000 in unmarked bills and four parachutes, all of which he received when the plane made an emergency landing in Washington State’s Sea-Tac Airport. Once the other passengers were unloaded, the plane took off, and Cooper told the flight attendant to go into the cockpit. With the main cabin now empty, he lowered the rear stairwell and jumped, literally and figuratively, into thin air. He was never found.

Legend has it that Richard McCoy, after reporting for Guard duty the morning of April 7, flew a helicopter over Provo as part of the search team looking for, well, himself. It’s a great story but, alas, not true. Based on tips from both the young man who’d given him a lift home from the Hi-Spot and a supposedly close friend who claimed McCoy had been plotting something suspicious, FBI agents began analyzing McCoy’s Army records to compare handwriting samples with one of the hijacking notes. When agents raided McCoy’s house they discovered a fairly incriminating $499,970 in cash, and McCoy was arrested before he had a chance to participate in any manhunt.

McCoy was tried and convicted, and he began his forty-five-year
sentence in July 1973 at the U.S. Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. From prison he attempted to have his case overturned on grounds that his Fourth Amendment rights had been violated; according to McCoy, the FBI’s search warrant, which enabled agents to find the ransom money, was improperly obtained. The courts tossed out the appeal, and McCoy would have to serve his full time. Up until that point, however, he’d been a model prisoner who worked quietly in the prison’s dentistry. With no hope of an early release, he began to plot his escape. Wielding a dummy handgun composed of dental plaster, McCoy hijacked a garbage truck and crashed through the front gate on August 10, 1974. For three months he was a free man. On November 9, the FBI tracked him down in Virginia Beach (purportedly on a tip from his estranged wife, who was dating an FBI man). Surrounded, McCoy fired at one of the agents, missed, and was cut down in a hail of shotgun blasts.

Since the time of McCoy’s death, strong evidence has emerged that McCoy was, in fact, D. B. Cooper. Technically, Cooper’s FBI file remains active, and every few years someone makes a deathbed confession that he was the real D. B. Cooper. But a criminologist and former Utah parole officer named Bernie Rhodes teamed up with Russell Calame, the former bureau chief for the FBI’s Salt Lake office, and together they’ve made a convincing case that McCoy and Cooper were the same man. There was speculation from the start based on the fact that the two men
looked
almost identical (granted, there’s no known photo of Cooper, but his police sketch bears an uncanny resemblance to McCoy), and Cooper was described as about five-feet-ten, 160 to 170 pounds. McCoy was five feet ten, 170 pounds. What Rhodes and Calame have done so meticulously is compare how the hijackings were conducted, showing an almost identical modus operandi. Cooper had many copycats, but only McCoy’s tactics matched Cooper’s with such specificity—and many of these details weren’t known until Rhodes and Calame used the Freedom of Information Act to access the case files.

Even if it turns out that McCoy wasn’t Cooper, McCoy remains a
significant figure. His midair robbery was one of several high-profile skyjackings that prompted the FAA to begin implementing vast improvements in airline security. Air marshals had already been placed on select flights following a spate of hijackings to Cuba, but starting in 1972 the government began cracking down in ways that seem obvious today. All carry-on bags had to be inspected. Passengers would be required to pass through a long, almost corridor-like machine modeled after what loggers used to detect nails and other pieces of metal embedded in timber. And planes with rear stairwells were equipped with devices that prevented them from being opened midflight.

Because of these and other systemwide measures, hijackings of major passenger airliners became increasingly rare in the United States—until September 1976, when Croatian separatists ordered Chicago-bound TWA Flight 355 out of New York’s LaGuardia Airport to land in Paris. After commandeering the plane, they announced that, as proof of their seriousness, they had stashed explosives in a subway locker under Grand Central Terminal. Although their claim of having smuggled weapons aboard Flight 355 turned out to be a bluff, the Manhattan bomb was real; on Saturday, September 11, a police officer named Brian Murray died while trying to deactivate the explosives. There were no other hijacking-related fatalities within the United States for another twenty-five years. To the day.