Marla and Uncle LD
There is one element in the LD story that has yet to be told - who the original investigators were, what they found, and how they worked. One of them, Arden Dorney, was identified at the 2011 Portland Symposium, and if you weren't there and chatting with Marla after the show, you wouldn't have heard it directly from her.
Of course, I talked about Arden a lot at the DZ, the MN, and in my book, but that exposure only goes so far. Perhaps a brief recap might be in order due to the passage of the years.
Arden was a detective in the Elk City PD, in Oklahoma. This city is about 50 miles west of OK City. He did all the heavy lifting, and not only does he speak authoritatively about his findings, he is adamant that LD in DB Cooper. His belief is unshakable, as is his confidence in his police work.
Unfortunately, Arden may have been the sharpest tool in the Elk City PD, but he was astonishingly unfamiliar from hard questioning by an investigative journalist who knew Norjak well. After two rounds of interviews, Arden clammed up. He wouldn't even come to the phone when his wife was calling out to him.
In the course of his investigation of LD, he enlisted the help of a fellow LE buddy, an unnamed undercover FBI agent out of the Central Division, based in Chicago. Apparently the two buddies had worked drug cases together in Oklahoma.
Arden refused to tell me the FBI agent's name. Surprisingly, he never told Marla, either. Worse, she apparently never asked. At this point, I don't know anyone who does know the name of the undercover agent. GG might, because his relationship with Marla and Uncle LD is very strong, although I doubt that it is sexual or even remotely romantic.
But Arden did tell me that the FBI guy's involvement is what got Eng's attention. Arden's words were, "The FBI trusts only their own." Before the intervention of the UC fed, Dorwin told me threatening Eng with media exposure was unsuccessful, saying, "I told him I was going to go to CNN with the dossier if he didn't act on it, and I'd tell them that he (Eng) was sabotaging the case."
Once the UC got involved, Eng and Seattle got busy. The general feeling was that if the FBI UC agent said it was a solid case against LD, then it was gold. It took awhile for Seattle and FBI HQ to realize that there wasn't too much to their findings.
I asked the History Channel's FBI guy, former Assistant Director Tom Fuentes, about this incident, and if he followed up that is unknown to me. Even though he was the former director of the Central Division, too, he had never heard of the Central Div-UC-LD connection before.
So, lots was going on within the FBI in terms of their politics and decision-making.
