Shutter, can you put some background info on the money find in the opening post? Who, when, where (maybe a link to a map) money was found. I know all of you all know this.... but I'm thinking it would be good if any people new to the case wander onto the board. Thanks.
Here's what I know about the money find, Buck. It's a chapter in my book:
Chapter 9
The Money Find
The only definitive physical piece of evidence discovered in the DB Cooper case has been a three-bundle stack of twenty-dollar bills found in 1980 and totaling $5,800. They were discovered on a Columbia River beach by an eight-year old boy named Brian Ingram while he scraped a flat spot in the sand for a fire to roast hot dogs during a family picnic.
Brian discussed his money find with me at the 2011 DB Cooper Symposium in Portland.
He said that the money was divvied into three bundles, with each one placed slightly askew on top of the other. Each bundle was also wrapped with a rubber band, which were intact when he found them.
The bills were worn around the edges and looked weathered, as if they had been buried in the sand for awhile.
After discovering the bills, Brian said that he and his family: his parents Dwayne and Patricia, and his five-year old cousin Denise, scoured the rest of the beach looking for more bills.
“Of course we went looking,” he told me. “We wanted to find more money!”
But, Brian told me that they found nothing else.
“Georger” of the Citizen Sleuths told me the next phase of the story. Georger has talked at length with Brian Ingram and says that the Ingrams brought the money back to their apartment and attempted to separate the stuck layers of bills.
In fact, they seemed to be compressed together, and when any attempt was made to pull them apart the bills broke into chunks.
Brian’s mother tried soaking the money in the kitchen sink but they wouldn’t separate. She added dish soap and even Clorox in her attempt, as her family hoped to take the money to a bank and redeem it.
Discussing their remarkable find at work the next day, one of Dwayne’s fellow employees mentioned the DB Cooper hijacking and suggested to Dwayne, who was from Oklahoma and unaware of DB Cooper, that he contact law enforcement.
Dwayne called the Sheriff’s office and they put him in touch with the FBI in Portland, who checked some of the serial numbers Ingram provided and discovered a match. An appointment was arranged with Himmelsbach for the following morning at the Portland FBI office.
After meeting with the family, Himmelsbach assembled a retrieval team and headed out to the beach, known as Tina Bar, as in sand bar. By late Tuesday, February 14, 1980, dozens of FBI agents, newspaper reporters and camera crews had descended upon Tina Bar.
The beach is owned by the Fazio family and is part of a large and varied ranch operation that includes a cattle business and a sand and gravel outfit. In 1980, the Fazios let people use the beach at Tina Bar, and a jar was placed at the beach gate for 25 cent donations. The beach was popular with fisherman and renowned for steelhead. It is about one mile downstream from the popular Clark County Park called “Frenchman’s Bar.”
Al Fazio told me he was not at home when the FBI arrived. In fact, he first encountered the feds as he was returning from a cattle auction and was stopped by agents on Lower River Road, about five miles west of Vancouver, WA. He was not allowed to proceed onto his property even though he was pulling a cattle trailer and showed proper identification. Eventually, however, he was allowed access.
Once on the property he headed to the beach and joined his brother, Richard Fazio. Al says that they were soon hired by the FBI to bring their back-hoes onto the strand and participate in the excavation.
In 1980 Tina Bar looked much differently than it does today. Then, the beach was gently tapered from the edge of the pasture lands down to the water’s edge. Nowadays, the beach slope is much steeper as the dredged channel muck is deposited inland for environmental considerations rather than thrown back on the beach. Currently, the slope at Tina Bar has a 2-3 foot cliff at the upper edge of the riverbank and then drops sharply to the water’s edge.
At present, the Fazio’s lands possess one of the dredge spoil deposition sites and it is huge. The inland piling of sandy gravel is a hundred feet high and at least a few hundred feet in diameter.
This channel maintenance program changed in 1974, and FBI records reveal that the Portland State University hydrologist who inspected Tina Bar, Leonard Palmer, declared the money came from soil layers above the last on-shore depositions in 1974, proving that the money arrived at Tina Bar after that date. Because of that analysis, it would appear that the money was never deposited at Tina Bar by any dredging operation.
Conversely, since the bills were compressed together and did not separate easily, it is possible they had been buried in the sand for a lengthy period of time, perhaps at a great depth, and only discovered once the shoreline eroded enough to reveal the money.
There is other evidence that challenges a long-term burial at Tina Bar. Brian claims that the rubber bands that enclosed each of the three bundles were intact when he found the money, and Tom Kaye of the Citizen Sleuths has declared that the manufacturer of the rubber bands has said that they would only stay pliable for a few months in the wild. However, they could last longer if they were buried in wet sand. Did that happen? At this point long-term placement at Tina Bar seems to be speculative.
Nevertheless, Galen Cook has employed a team of local soil and hydrology scientists to evaluate the Tina Bar environment and review all of Dr. Palmer’s findings. Galen says that Palmer had indicated that the money probably arrived at Tina Bar only 9-12 months before discovery, which would be about mid-1979. This time frame corresponds to a period of flooding following the severe drought of 1978 when water levels on the Columbia were at their fourth-lowest level ever recorded.
In addition, Galen says one of the bundles did not have a rubber band around it and was missing several bills. Galen feels that this bundle may have been the source of the money shards reportedly found strewn about the beach and sighted by many others, including the FBI and the Fazios.
But like most things in the DB Cooper case, there is plenty of controversy about virtually all aspects of the money find.
Even though Brian says that he found nothing else on the beach, Himmelsbach writes in his book that he and his team found fragments of bills on the beach and buried in the sand as deep as three-feet in some instances.
Similarly, Himmelsbach’s PIO, Dorwin Schreuder, told me in 2010 that they had found “thousands of shards” throughout the sand column and that they placed them in plastic baggies. Specifically, Dorwin says they found the shards “evenly placed throughout the top 3-4 feet of sand for a radius of 20 yards” from the spot where Brian had found the three bundles, and that they found them through lots of shovel work before Al Fazio and his brother arrived with their back-hoes. In particular, Dorwin said that they dug at least four holes to that depth and found shards each time.
“No matter how deep we dug we found money – homogeneously mixed to a great depth,” he told me.
Dorwin told me that some of the bill fragments were sizeable, “about two or three inches across,” and had enough of a serial number on them to confirm that they were part of Cooper’s ransom. However, most were small, about the size of a coin from a penny to a quarter.
He also said they worked diligently and methodically. Pictures in newspapers confirm that the beach was sectioned into six grid zones and dozens of FBI agents and volunteers dug at the surface with shovels. They even established a screening pit and passed volumes of sand through a mesh grate.
“We went at it like archeologists,” Schreuder said.
The FBI reportedly continued recovery efforts at Tina Bar for several days, concluding on Saturday.
Dorwin said that once they went past the 20-yard radius the money field diminished, and that was when they brought in the back-hoes.
Later, Schreuder went on to become the DB Cooper case agent in Portland when Ralph Himmelsbach left the FBI seventeen days after the money find due to the Bureau’s mandatory retirement requirements.
Supporting the FBI’s claims, Special Agent Mike McPheter told me that he was on “shovel detail” and was digging with other agents on the tide line, where he found money fragments. McPheter told me that he retrieved about a dozen pieces, either on the surface or buried about a foot or two down into the sand.
“About a shovel blade’s length,” he told me.
Yet, no shards or baggies are in the evidence collection in Seattle, according to the Citizen Sleuths. In addition, there is no documentation in Seattle pertaining to how and where the shards were found. In short, Seattle has no record of what was found by the Portland agents at Tina Bar.
I have asked Ralph Himmelsbach repeatedly to clarify this issue – sending him letters and emailing his trusted associate, Jerry Thomas. As of this writing, I haven’t heard anything definitive other than Jerry’s comment, “Ralph told me that everything was spent up to Seattle.”
If so, where is it?
Worse, I haven’t received any information on this subject from former Cooper case agent Ron Nichols, either. Nichols was the Norjak boss in Seattle at the time of the money find, and if he made any attempt to monitor the money find operation he’s not talking.
Worst, though, are the rumors that Himmelsbach retained the shards and kept Nichols in the dark, forcing the Seattle FO to learn of the money find by reading the Seattle newspapers.
Complicating the matter, Schreuder also told me that they found more than just money.
“We found about a half to a third of Cooper’s briefcase,” Schreuder said.
However, he also claimed that the money and briefcase came on shore as part of the channel dredging – that everything got scooped off the bottom of the Colombia and thrown on the rive bank. Dorwin admits that his memory may be faulty as he says he recalls the Army Corps of Engineers (ACE) had their dredge, the “Bedell,” at Tina Bar during their recovery operations, but ACE records show the Bedell was long gone and in California when Dorwin says it was on the Columbia.
Compounding the confusion is Al Fazio, who adamantly claims that the feds didn’t find a single shard anywhere buried in the sand. In addition, the Fazios claim they had never seen any money on their beach before the Ingram find.
“They didn’t find anything buried – that’s just a lot of government crap,” Al told me in 2009. “I should know, I was there, right on top of a back-hoe, doing the digging.”
However, Al and Richard say that they saw money shards along the tide line, and Al is convinced the money washed in via the current and tides. He states that the bundles were covered with only a bit of sand, and he posits that it was all done by natural wave action.
Continuing, he says many of the shards he saw were discolored or black, which confounds the claims of the Citizens Sleuths who say the blackening occurred after the FBI applied a silver nitrate compound to test for fingerprints.
Nevertheless, Al is convinced the shards were actually part of the top bundle of Brian’s three, and says the actions of the tides and floating driftwood tore up a few of the surface bills and deposited them along the tide-line.
Simply, Al Fazio refutes Himmelsbach’s and his agents claims that they found money pieces buried in the sand.
Further, Galen Cook contributes recent findings that add more uncertainty.
Galen says he has spoken to many fishermen along the Columbia, and in 2012 he met two men who claimed to have seen money shards at Tina Bar just prior to Brian’s discovery in February 1980. They said they were teenagers, aged 12 and 14, fishing for steelhead in January 1980, and they found a dozen pieces of twenties buried in a hole in the sand a few feet away from the spot where Brain found the three bundles. Intriguingly, the fishermen said the pieces were the corners of torn-off twenties, with the numeral “20” clearly showing as if someone had deliberately cut them off the bills.
In addition, the fishermen told Galen that a week later they found a few more shards about 100 yards downstream.
They said that they didn’t attach any significance to their find so they didn’t tell anyone.
But it does raise the question of what the FBI did in the days and weeks after the money find in 1980. Did they talk to fishermen along the shoreline? Did they explore other sections of the river front? If not, why not? If they did, what are their findings?
The fishermen’s claim ties into another discovery near Tina Bar. When Galen released the news about the teenagers finding fragments, he was reminded of the 1988 discovery by Richard Tosaw of a “pilot chute” snagged on a wooden river groin in twenty-feet of water, about a mile upstream from Tina Bar.
A pilot chute is a small rectangular parachute about 2-3 feet across and designed to help pull the main canopy from a parachute bag, such as a pilot chute pulling a Steinthal canopy from a Pioneer container.
Combined with the fiery object and the teenaged-fishermen’s testimony, Galen now wonders if DB Cooper concealed a pilot chute in his briefcase and waited until the Columbia River to ditch his bundle of gear. As he passed over the water he ignited the bundle with the sticks of dynamite, which were actually road flares, and attached the pilot chute so that the bundle would slowly float down to the surface and take a long time to burn and possibly give him a long look at his landing zone.
As a result, Galen now wonders if Cooper landed on the southern shore of the Columbia River in Oregon.
“This is why the case is unsolved after 42 years,” he wrote me in 2012. “Everything is out of whack and ripe for a really good conspiracy storyline.”
Supporting this notion are numerous reports that Larry Carr told many sleuths shortly before his left the case that he was convinced Cooper jumped south of the FBI’s original LZ at Ariel. Galen said to me that Carr had told him that Cooper jumped at Battleground, Washington, and others say they’ve heard Larry tout Orchard, Washington. However, I have not found any definitive statements from Larry that move the LZ south of Ariel.
The money find and its associated investigations have one additional twist – the role that Richard Tosaw played in the lives of many of those connected with the case:
To re-cap the basics: after the FBI confiscated the money from the Ingrams in 1980 - claiming they needed it for evidence - the Ingram’s hired Tosaw, who had established himself as legal expert in inheritance recovery cases.
Tosaw needed years to convince a court to grant the Ingram some of the money, and eventually they received about half of the bills in June 1986. The NWO’s insurance company, Global Indemnity, got a similar share, and the FBI was awarded fourteen bills for evidence.
But in the course of helping the Ingrams, Tosaw became immersed in the Cooper saga, writing the first major book on DB Cooper and being the last journalist to interview Tina Mucklow. Further, Tosaw became fixated on the notion that Cooper crash-landed in the Columbia River near Tina Bar, and perished. But he couldn’t prove it conclusively.
As a result, he spent his summers camped out on the shore of the Columbia looking for Cooper, and he hired many locals to help him. At one point he even rented a spot on the Fazio’s property.
Eventually Galen joined him, and in the summers of 2005 and 2008 they spent a considerable time together. Their association continued in a robust fashion until the venerable investigator died of cancer in 2009.
There is one more quirky money mystery:
The ranch lands that contain Tina Bar have been in the Fazio family for generations, and as mentioned before the Fazios graze cattle on their many acres of pasture.
In 1991, more than ten years after the Cooper money find, Al and Richard experienced another extraordinary event: five of their cattle were killed in a bizarre fashion consistent with a national scourge called the “Cattle Mutilation Phenomenon.”
One night in late winter, the cattle were killed in three separate locations with no obvious signs of a struggle. Further, there were no sign of a bullet wound in any of the animals.
“The cattle were just lying on their side,” Al told me.
Tellingly, Al sweated profusely when he told me this story, mopping his brow constantly with a paper towel. He only relaxed when his brother Richard entered the room and joined the conversation.
The brothers told me that each carcass had several parts of their body removed, such as an eye, genitals, or a section of jaw.
Al said that a necropsy was performed by vets at the Oregon State University, and they found the incisions around the excised parts had been performed by a high-temperature electrical instrument. As a result, the remaining tissue at the edge of the wound was cauterized and clean, and did not contain any pooled blood, bodily fluids, or shredded tissue. Many of the incisions were “cookie-cutter” shaped or zippered-looking, with the angles of cutting very precise.
The local Clark County Sheriff’s Department also conducted an investigation but was unable to come to any substantive conclusion. However, some investigators reported that neighbors on Lower River Road said they had heard unusual noises on the night in question, as if they were listening to strange farm machinery operating.
Cattle mutilation stories are widely reported in the paranormal world, such as Coast to Coast radio, and are also investigated by serious journalists, such as the award-winning NBC-TV reporter Linda Moulton Howe.
Howe endeavored to inspect the Fazio incident, but the brothers declined, citing that they had enough of media attention with the Cooper case.
However, my associates at the DZ have discovered that several other mutilation episodes occurred in Oregon prior to the Fazio incident. They report that cattle mutilations occurred near Bend, La Pine and Fort Rock, Oregon in the spring and summer of 1989, and resulted in 35 carcasses.
To this day it is unknown whether there is any connection between the money find at Tina Bar and the deaths of the Fazios’ cattle.
The last investigatory oddity is the fact that the FBI, their hydrologist Leonard Palmer, and many others including members of the DZ, call Tina Bar, “Tena Bar.” Why is unknown, as the signage at the beach clearly states “TINA BAR,” but suspicions run deep that the FBI is trying to obfuscate the association between the location of the money find and Norjak’s primary witness, Tina Mucklow, who lived only a few miles away in Gresham, Oregon when the money was found in 1980.
As for those outside of the FBI who cling to the nomenclature of Tena Bar, one can only wonder how deeply they need to believe in the Federal Bureau of Investigation and its narratives.
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