Thursday, November 22, 2001
By JON HAHN
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST
There's some that say that Jerry Curtis drove around the block one time too many in his 30-some years as a Seattle taxi driver, but he swears one of his drive-around passengers was D.B. Cooper.
And it was about a month before the infamous Cooper's pulling off the only successful American skyjacking, on Thanksgiving Eve, 1971.
"In fact, I was probably the guy who helped him decide to do an airplane," said Jerry, "because I talked him out of robbing a West Seattle supermarket."
Jerry, a Navy veteran who now lives on a meager disability in Granite Falls, said he has "no reason or hope of any gain by telling this now, but it should be told. I didn't put it all together until weeks after the hijacking, and I never told anyone until years later, and then they looked at me as though I said I'd seen Elvis Presley."
Jerry sent his story on tape, then met with me in Arlington, and swears that the unidentified passenger who asked for him by name at Gray Top Cab on that Saturday afternoon in October 1971, was the same guy later identified as Dan Cooper, aka D.B. Cooper.
"I didn't have any action going at the Mayflower Hotel then -- sometimes I'd take care of stuff for drunken seamen in town, or maybe a working lady hiding from her pimp -- but not on that day," he said. The man had used a direct line to call the cab company and asked for Jerry by name.
After a brief back-and-forth, Jerry determined that this was the man his lawyer earlier said had been asking for someone like him. "My lawyer wouldn't say what or why," Jerry recalled. "In fact, he said only that the guy was a client who needed someone like me, but that was all he was gonna say about it."
Long story, short: The swarthy, athletically built fellow, maybe about 6-feet and maybe in his mid-40s and dressed in a light blue leisure suit, shiny white loafers and matching belt, put $5 on the cab seat and said he wanted to ride around and talk ... about his plan for robbing a West Seattle supermarket. "He said he came here every year to do a job, then went back home over the mountains and plowed the money back into his business," Jerry said.
"He said he was a solid citizen, belonging to the Junior Chamber of Commerce and the Lions, and that he had a wife, two kids, a station wagon and a German shepherd. His plan was to put on a pair of white overalls and rob a supermarket and then ditch the overalls so that he'd look like a businessman taking a cab ride.
Even though the stranger offered him half of the take, Jerry nixed the idea, telling the guy that "whenever anything heavy goes down in West Seattle, the cops always block off the five or six main routes in and out of there." They talked some more as Jerry drove him back to the Mayflower Hotel, where the man ended the session by saying that he "was gonna go back home and think about doing something else. He said he had an idea about 'doing something with an airplane,'" Jerry said.
About a month later, Jerry was driving cab again when he heard the skyjacking action on his police scanner and saw the Northwest Airlines Boeing 727 isolated to one side at Sea-Tac Airport while police and airline officials scrambled to fill a duffle bag with more than 20 pounds of used $20 bills.
"But I didn't think any more of it till they released the composite sketch of this Cooper guy a week or so later. That was him. It was the same guy who wanted to rob a West Seattle supermarket!"
Jerry wasn't convinced when I showed him a wire photo of Duane Web, who according to a news story last year confessed on his death bed that he was Dan Cooper. Web, who died of kidney disease in 1995, apparently filled some of the D.B. Cooper profile, including familiarity with the Puget Sound area, Army service and a criminal record that included serving time in a Seattle-area prison. My own searching was unable to link Web to the Cooper profile. And the Seattle lawyer who Jerry said referred the stranger to him has died.
Leaving us with another chapter in Puget Sound's Thanksgiving folklore. We could call this one: "Cabbie Talks Turkey Into Stuffing West Seattle -- Coop Flies & Flees With Big Holiday Score."
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