Year 15, Day 114 - 4/24/23 - Movie #4,415
BEFORE: Walter Cronkite carries over from "What Happened, Miss Simone?" So this is a good time to tell you my Walter Cronkite story. My first got a job working on a documentary about Walter Cronkite, which was being made by a production company run by Walter's son. As such, she was tasked with retrieving certain collectible items from the Cronkite summer house on Martha's Vineyard, so her bosses suggested she drive up there, make a road trip out of it, and so we went on a little mini-vacation and stayed at Walter's place, though he wasn't there at the time. (I did meet him later, at a company party once the documentary was complete.)
Those collectible items that we were sent to pick up from the house included the helmet that Walter wore while reporting from World War II front lines and the little scale model of the Apollo 11 spacecraft that he showed to TV viewers during his broadcast of the moon landing. Also a bunch of framed portraits that famous artists and fans had made of his likeness over the years. This must have been in 1994, because I remember we watched a Cleveland Indians baseball game on Walter's TV, and that was the year the World Series ended up getting cancelled due to a strike.
Walter had been retired since 1981, and he lived until 2009 - I think the documentary series was called "Cronkite Remembers", and it came out in 1997.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Pursuit of D.B. Cooper" (Movie #3,868)
THE PLOT: A documentary that looks at the well-known case, which is largely regarded as the greatest unsolved heist in American history.
AFTER: This documentary might have tried to do TOO much - without, in the end, really accomplishing anything at all. First off, it had to tell the story of what happened in 1971, when a man who said his name was D.B. Cooper hijacked a plane flying from Oregon to Seattle, told a flight attendant he had a bomb, and demanded $200,000 in cash, plus four parachutes, upon landing in Seattle. He got his money, allowed the passengers to deplane, and then made the flight crew take off again, heading to Mexico City. But a half-hour into that flight, he opened the plane's rear door and disappeared somewhere over Washington state. To date, he has never been found or identified.
So, the doc has to tell this story, but it does so in pieces, and in between those pieces, it presents us with four different people who MIGHT have been D.B. Cooper. I mean, if you can't have one for sure, you might as well have four maybes, right? But, then, how do we know if any of those people (or, more often, their friends and famiy) are telling the truth? People might have CLAIMED to be the hijacker just to pad their resumé or impress their friends.
Look, it's not like the FBI is ever going to have success with this case - it happened over 51 years ago, and they stopped actively investigating it 6 years ago, so I guess their limit is 45 years, if they haven't solved something by then, they just give up? It's also possible that NONE of the five people who claimed to be D.B. Cooper were that guy - the guy made a blind jump into a heavily wooded area at night, during bad weather, with no knowledge of the area and a parachute that hadn't been checked out. So he may have not even survived the jump, which might explain why the ransom money was never spent. Some of the money turned up in a trench that was dug by the Columbia River, but there's no explanation for how that happened. Eventually the kid who found the money in 1980 got to keep some of it, and sold some of the bills in an auction.
When I finish writing this, I'm going to read up on the D.B. Cooper case on Wikipedia - but the film suggests that the following people COULD have pulled off the hijacking:
1) Duane Weber, who made a deathbed confession to his wife, Jo Weber, that his name was really "Dan Cooper", and she later learned about the hijacking, found a book on D.B. Cooper in the local library that her husband had written notes in. Weber also told his wife that he'd buried a bucket, but had forgotten where he buried it. The case against this one seems to be that Weber might have only WISHED he were Dan Cooper, his memory seemed to be shot, and for that matter, so is his wife's. They're both unreliable witnesses, and the guy who helps Jo Weber with household chores and her memory seems to know more about the case than anybody else - he might have fed them all this information. However, the FBI ruled out Duane Weber as a suspect in 1978 because his fingerprints didn't match any in the plane, and his DNA didn't match samples recovered from Cooper's tie. But his wife did claim she saw him throw a bag of "trash" into the Columbia River in 1979, just upstream from where that money was found in 1980.
2) Barbara Dayton - OK, this one takes a bit of free thinking, but this couple, Ron and Pat Forman, started hanging out with this woman who was a college librarian and recreational pilot, and they found out that Ms. Dayton had been born a man, Robert Dayton, and was one of the earliest people to undergo gender reassignment surgery. The Formans got suspicious that Barbara would change the subject any time conversation turned to the D.B. Cooper case, and now they swear that one night when Barbara was wearing dark glasses, she looked exactly like the sketch of D.B. Cooper. Look, I get it, if you lived in rural Washington in the 1970's there wasn't much to do but go over to your neighbor's houses and drink, then divulge your innermost secrets, or at least your fantasies - but that doesn't mean your transgender neighbor is D.B. Cooper, just because she claimed to be.
3. L.D. Cooper - ah, this one would seem to make sense, if you believe that all you have to do is change one initial in your name if you need to hide from the law. But Marla Cooper swears that she remembers the Thanksgiving where her uncle L.D. and another uncle were planning something at her grandmother's house in Oregon, and then the next day Flight 305 got hijacked, and her uncle showed up in a bloody shirt and claimed to have been in an auto accident. Uncle Lynn Doyle disappeared shortly after that, and Marla's father believed him to be responsibile for the hijacking, and swore her to secrecy - but she broke her silence in 2011, and talked to the FBI about her uncle. Again, not a DNA match, so the FBI didn't spend much time tracking him down.
4. Richard Floyd McCoy - some say that this guy was just a copycat of D.B. Cooper, he hijacked a similar plane (with a rear exit) that took off from Denver in 1972, demanded $500,000 and four parachutes in San Francisco, and bailed out over Provo, Utah, leaving behind his handwritten instructions, plus his fingerprints. He got caught two days later with the ransom money and got a 45-year sentence, but escaped from jail with accomplices two years later. Three months after that, he was tracked down in Virginia Beach and killed in a shootout with FBI agents. Some people wrote a book claiming that McCoy was also Cooper, so they both died at the same time, which would explain why Cooper has never been found - but the FBI didn't consider McCoy to be a suspect in the Flight 305 hijacking because McCoy was in Las Vegas at the time, and had Thanksgiving dinner with his family in Utah the next day. BUT McCoy was an Army veteran, did two tours in Vietnam, was a helicopter pilot with the Green Berets, and later he was in the Utah National Guard and was also a recreational skydiver.
It's maddening, any one of these people could have been D.B. Cooper - or just as likely, none of them. Wikipedia mentions a whole bunch of suspects that the film didn't even bother to mention, like Ted Braden, Kenneth Peter Christiansen, Jack Coffelt, William Gossett, Joe Lakich, John List, Ted Mayfield and Robert Rackstraw - and once you start going down this rabbit hole, you may never come out of it with any more clear answers than you had going in. I'm now going to read the whole Wiki page ONCE and then try to walk away from it.
What's more disturbing is the enormous pile of letters seen in the FBI's case file - all from people either claiming to be D.B. Cooper or suggesting that their father was D.B. Cooper, because he abandoned their family in 1971 and at least if he were D.B. Cooper, then he would have had a reason beyond the fact that his wife and kids were driving him crazy. There's something very sad about this, people grasping for some form of validation in the theory that maybe their father was a hijacker and not just a shitty parent. But since we're never going to have a clear answer about who D.B. Cooper was, I'm afraid that validation is never going to come. So those people are ultimately just as clueless about their relatives as the FBI is about who hijacked that plane.
Also starring Harold Anderson, Ben Anjewierden, Owun Birkett, Peter Caulfield, Tim Collins, Marla Cooper, Billie Dayton, Pat Forman, Ron Forman, Bob Fuhriman, Geoffrey Gray, John Jesper, Tamsyn Kelly, Jefferson King, David Mills (last seen in "Florence Foster Jenkins"), Bill Mitchell, Edwina Mitrica, Frank Montoya Jr., Tina Mucklow, Nick O'Hara, Hannah Pauley, Sharon Power, Amy Pryke, William Rataczak, Bernie Rhodes, Miles Richardson (last seen in "The Courier"), Rena Ruddell, Emma Samms (last seen in "Delirious"), Bruce Smith, Jerry Thomas, Jo Weber, Anne Wittman (last seen in "Proof")
with archive footage of David Brinkley (last seen in "WBCN and the American Revolution"), John Chancellor (last seen in "Summer of Soul"), Savannah Guthrie (last seen in "Now You See Me 2"), L.D. Cooper, Barbara Dayton, Brian Ingram, Richard Floyd McCoy, Duane Weber,
RATING: 6 out of 10 Raleigh filter-tipped cigarette butts (remember when you could smoke on a plane?)
No comments:
Post a Comment