Bruce,
Please refresh my memory as to who Calame and Rhodes are and what they have to do with the Cooper hijacking.
Russ Calame was the Special Agent in Charge in Salt Lake City who apprehended and arrested Richard McCoy for his Cooper-esque copycat skyjacking in 1972.
Bernie Rhodes was the federal sentencing officer in SLC who had extensive dealings with McCoy during trial, and then later wrote a book with Calame on McCoy, titled:
DB Cooper - The Real McCoy.
At the time, they believed that Richard McCoy was DB Cooper doing a second skyjacking. SLC FBI agents found compelling information that McCoy was in Las Vegas during the Nov 23-25 period, suggesting that McCoy could have done the skyjacking, using Las Vegas as a go-between city to fly in and out of PDX.
When they were composing and researching their book in the 1980s, Calame and Rhodes interviewed all the principals to the DB Cooper case, in particular the four agents most responsible for evidence retrieval - Stousland, Ricks, Campbell and Somebody-I-Forget at the moment. None of the four claimed to remember the tie, and all denied retrieving the tie from Flight 305.
In addition, Calame and Rhodes say that the four agents acted as if they were under the influence of a "post hypnotic suggestion" when interviewed. Rhodes reported that the memory of other agents that he interviewed that were part of the Reno operation were also impaired for unknown reasons.
Further, all four gave wildly conflicting information on who did what in terms of evidence gathering, at one point claiming that Reno PD did the fingerprint retrieval.
Lastly, Calame interviewed Tina, who stated that she did not remember seeing the tie, as well. She also was so fuzzy in her memory and recall of events that Calame wrote that if DB Cooper was ever apprehended and taken to trial, Tina would never be called as a witness since she was so unreliable.
Lastly lastly, Calame and Rhodes write that the tie only entered the evidentiary collection in Seattle on Monday, November 29, and its whereabouts from Reno to then is unknown, indicating that the chain of custody was broken.
