Schaffner’s mind was reeling. She imagined her parents back in Arkansas watching the evening news. She imagined the plane exploding. She imagined this man taking her hard by the wrist and raping her right there. She took deep breaths. Inhale, exhale, repeat.Surprisingly, the man was able to calm her down. He was not a so-called sky pirate, which she’d read about in the papers, or a hardened criminal. He was not a political dissident with a wish to reroute the plane to Cuba, like many of the hijackers until then. He was polite. Well spoken. A gentlemen. At one point, he offered to pay for his drinks with a $20 bill and insisted the stewardess keep the rest ($18) as change. He also seemed like a local, glancing out the window and saying, “Looks like Tacoma down there.”
The plane landed on the Sea-Tac tarmac, greased up by the squalls of the rainstorm. It was late, two hours late, because FBI agents needed time to collect Cooper’s ransom and to station their sharpshooters. Inside the cabin, Cooper ordered all passengers be released. The airline staff then carried his ransom—$200,000 in $20 bills (the bundle weighed 21 pounds) and parachutes—onto the plane as it refueled. The gentleman hijacker was getting anxious. “It shouldn’t take this long,” he said, and told the captain to get the plane back in the air. Where to?
“Mexico City,” he said, and delivered more specific flight instructions: Keep the plane under 10,000 feet, with wing flaps at fifteen degrees, which would put the plane’s speed under 200 knots. He strapped the loads of cash to himself and slipped on two chutes—one in front, one in back—and moved deeper into the vessel, toward the aft stairs, which were used to let passengers disembark from the rear of the plane. The 727 was the only model equipped with such stairs. He lowered them. The seal of the cabin broke, and there was engine noise in his ears and the cold, black, wet windy night outside. He climbed down the stairs and hovered on a plank over southwest Washington. The plane was too high to see anything below. The cloud ceiling that night was 5,000 feet, and some of the most rugged terrain in this country was beneath it: forests of pine and hemlock and spruce, canyons with cougars and bears and lakes and white-water rapids, all spilling out into the Pacific.
Out a little service doorway in the rear of the plane cooper jumped into the darkness into the freezing rain. They say that with the wind-chill it was 69 below not much chance that he’d survive but if he did where did he go?
NEXT:Investigation and leads of FBI
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