Ground and Air Search
Here's my take, from the latest edition of DB Cooper and the FBI:
"As for the ground search, it is unclear when it actually began.
Even though LZ-A had been tentatively established on the night of the skyjacking, a disturbing gaff had occurred—no road-blocks or check-points in LZ-A had been established. There is no record of them, apparently, nor any mention of who manned them. However, Tosaw reports that the “main roads” between Woodland and Vancouver did have road blocks, but that is outside the main landing zone.
As a result, DB Cooper had at least an eleven-hour head start on his pursers, and probably much more, as the exact start of the ground search and its extent are in doubt.
In his book, Himmelsbach claims the landing zone was not determined until the afternoon of Thanksgiving Day, and that the aerial and ground searches commenced on the following day, Friday, November 26 at 7:30 am, which would have given DB Cooper a 36-hour head start.
But it may have been at least 40 hours, according to Clark County Under-Sheriff Tom McDowell, the man who was actually leading the ground search in LZ-A.
Here's how that happened:
After the skyjacking, the FBI scrambled to interview cabbies, bus drivers and other witnesses at PDX, and to ascertain how DB Cooper got to the airport. The FBI also maintained a command and communication presence at the Woodland City Hall center, which meant the ground search had to be out-sourced to local County Sheriff's deputies and volunteers.
The responsibility for searching for Cooper in LZ-A fell to the Clark County Sheriff's Department, while deputies from Cowlitz County searched north of the Lewis River, and deputies from Lewis and Wahkiakum Counties searched south and east of LZ-A.
As the primary official looking for DB Cooper, I spoke with Tom McDowell in 2012, and again in 2015.
He told me that he had two or three teams of sheriff deputies and volunteers, with each group numbering about five-ten individuals.
As a result, a total of about 25-30 men went looking for a skyjacker.
“The FBI were not part of any actual team on the ground,” he told me in 2012, adding that the feds were on standby in case the locals found something.
In 2015, McDowell expanded his account and said that his team started searching for Cooper no earlier than Friday, or possibly Saturday.
“I forget the exact day, but I remember it was in the afternoon,” McDowell told me.
Since Cooper had been on the ground since 8:30 pm on Wednesday, the skyjacker had at least a 40-hour head start on the primary group looking for him.
McDowell and his teams focused their search along Cedar Creek Road, the main road west of Amboy and just south of Ariel, and the instructions from the head of the operation, FBI agent Tom Manning, were simple.
“Look for either a parachute or a hole in the ground,” McDowell recounted.
However, the search teams found neither.
McDowell and his teams covered only a small area in LZ-A, perhaps a square mile or so, leaving about 20 square-miles untouched before the FBI shut down the local operations on the Monday after Thanksgiving. Why is unclear, but poor weather may have played a role.
That means McDowell's small team of searchers only covered about 5-10% of LZ-A before they went home.
Supporting this account, Himmelsbach writes in his book that the search in the Ariel-Amboy area was terminated after four days.
Media coverage of the initial search further confirms it was light. Pictures in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer show Manning addressing a roomful of about 20-30 deputies and volunteers at the Bureau’s command post in the Woodland City Hall on Friday, November 26.
But Richard Tosaw writes that the search was much more robust. In his DB Cooper Dead or Alive? he claims that the ground and air search began in earnest at daybreak on Thanksgiving Day. He also says that searchers hiked on foot from Woodland to Lake Merwin, a distance of 13 miles, but, he offers no substantive details on who performed that task.
For his part, Ralph Himmelsbach writes that he climbed into his personal airplane on Thanksgiving morning and surveyed LZ-A for 2.5 hours. The next day, Friday, Himmelsbach writes that the weather was too inclement to continue any reconnaissance.
Nevertheless, the FBI readied six helicopters from local logging companies and two from the Oregon National Guard for their aerial surveillance.
However, the aerial search was severely hampered by rain, fog, and low clouds throughout the weekend. Himmelsbach reported that Saturday had “partial clearing,” which allowed for a resumption of the air search, but the rains came back and stayed throughout Sunday.
On Monday, however, five days after the skyjacking, the FBI mounted a large flotilla of fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters to search Victor-23 in its entirety—from Seattle to Reno, but nothing was found from the skyjacking.
Participating in the effort, Himmelsbach flew the right flank of V-23 from the Washington-Oregon border to the Oregon-California border, while three helicopters and another fixed-winged craft covered the center and right flank of V-23.
According to Himmelsbach's account in NORJAK, the FBI's primary goal was to spot a parachute snagged on a tree top, but found were none.
With this much uncertainty on who, how and when the search for DB Cooper was conducted, especially in the Ariel-Amboy area, it begs for clarification from Cooper case agent Charlie Farrell. Sadly, though, his 300-page account of his actions in Norjak has never been made public, nor is his family willing to share it, apparently, despite numerous request.
Officially, the FBI discontinued the search at the local level after seven days, and I have been unable to ascertain what, if any, searching was done in the twenty square-miles not examined by McDowell’s team.
Strangely, the FBI suspended their operation in LZ-A due to excessive snow, according to federal records presented by Geoffrey Gray at the 2011 Symposium. However, local residents and Sheriff McDowell say there was no snow in LZ-A over the Thanksgiving weekend, although they've confirmed that snow was present at the higher elevations to the east.
Oddly, the FBI continued looking in snow country after it suspended its official search in the rainy lowlands of LZ-A, according to a former FBI agent and audience member of the 2011 Cooper symposium, Gary Tallis.
Tallis said he flew as a spotter in a one of the FBI's commandeered helicopters for nearly two weeks after the hijacking—one week past the time the ground and aerial search in Amboy was terminated.
Tallis said he coursed over the snow-covered highlands of the Cascadian foothills in the general area of the Washougal River drainage, and his primary objective was to spot a parachute. None was found.
Further, Tallis, who is a former collegiate skydiver, also told me that he volunteered to recapitulate the Cooper jump over Ariel but his offer was rebuffed by J. Edgar Hoover.
“I felt really disappointed,” Tallis said.
This suggests that the FBI believed that Cooper jumped east of Amboy and into the Washougal River drainage. Perhaps they concentrated their search efforts there while sending the local cops, looky-loo’s, and the press on a wild-goose chase in LZ-A.
Nevertheless, a second ground search was conducted four months later, beginning in March 1972 and stretching into April, and employing over two-hundred soldiers from Fort Lewis to search the Ariel-Amboy area.
But Amboy resident Margaret Culp told me this second ground search appeared haphazard, as it began with a helicopter full of FBI agents landing in her pasture and asking for directions, apparently not knowing where they were. They also interrogated her son as a suspect because he had the temerity to photograph the agents tromping through the neighborhood.
Despite all this searching nothing has been found, and this is the quintessential fact of the DB Cooper case.
“We didn’t even find so much as a belt-buckle,” one FBI agent allegedly muttered.
Nevertheless, some items from Flight 305 were retrieved eventually.
A Boeing placard on how to deploy a 727’s aft stairs was found several years after the skyjacking in the woods east of Castle Rock, Washington, about thirty miles north of Ariel. It is believed to have been from Flight 305, as Boeing acknowledged that when they repaired the aft stairs on Cooper’s plane it was missing its instructional laminate from a protective sleeve mounted on the doorway.
Also, Cooper left his clip-on tie lying on a seat, along with eight cigarette butts in the ash tray and an array of partial fingerprints—all of which were recovered in Reno.
Then in February 1980, an eight-year old boy found three bundles of Cooper's twenties at Tina Bar on the Columbia River, five miles northwest of Vancouver, Washington and twenty miles southwest of Ariel.
But that’s it. No body, no parachutes, no bomb, no briefcase, and no paper sack. Not a single twenty scattered in the woods was ever found despite the thousands of seekers who combed the woods looking for a valuable souvenir.
Clearly, we’ve got a mystery."
