Brad Meltzer's Decoded (2010) s01e06 Episode Script
D.B. Cooper
What if I were to tell you that of all of America's skyjackings, only one remains unsolved? [ Camera shutter clicking .]
On November 24, 1971, a passenger using the name Dan Cooper hijacked northwest orient airlines flight 305 headed from Portland to Seattle.
After threatening to blow up the plane with a bomb, Cooper demanded four parachutes and $200,000.
Fearing the worst, northwest airlines agreed.
Once on the ground in Seattle, Cooper let the other passengers and some of the flight crew off the plane and had both the money and parachutes brought on board.
The plane refueled, took off again, and, at 10,000 feet, Cooper jumped from the backstairs of the boeing 727 into the Pacific northwest night.
He was never seen again.
[ Camera shutter clicking .]
The press began calling the skyjacker d.
B.
Cooper, and the FBI investigated thousands of leads.
Suspects included a mass murderer, a college professor, a career criminal, and a World War II veteran.
But they were all ruled out as the culprit.
In the last 40 years, new suspects have emerged, and now we have an unexamined lead that may point to an inside job.
We need to decode who he was and how he may have managed to pull off this unbelievable stunt without ever getting caught.
Whatever the case, I can tell you one thing -- when someone commits the perfect crime, I want to know who he is.
I'm Brad Meltzer.
I've spent my life collecting stories.
The best include signs, symbols, and codes, secret meanings that are hidden in plain sight.
Some have become the basis for my novels, but I've only scratched the surface of what's out there.
And now history has given me the resources to investigate the rest.
This is "decoded.
" You guys, just think about this for a minute.
There's many, many suspects over the years, and this is like the oldest cold case -- the only unsolved skyjacking in aviation history.
The problem is, there's been, like, hundreds of people that have either claimed to be this guy or they know this guy or they're related to this guy, so I'm a little skeptical whether this is gonna be the one.
Buddy, Mac, and Scott are chasing down leads that point to Kenny Christiansen, a former northwest airlines employee, being d.
B.
Cooper.
Kenny was never really a suspect in the 1970s, but the book "into the blast" uncovered new evidence that points to Christiansen.
And I was able to get the co-author, Robert blevins, to agree to talk.
You believe that Kenny Christiansen was d.
B.
Cooper.
Is that right? I would say 90% to 95% certain that he was.
He worked for the airline.
He had paratrooper training.
He had the opportunity.
He had a lot of unexplained spending within a few months after the hijacking.
He lent his best friend's sister $5,000 in cash to buy a house.
Then he used another $16,000 to buy another house for himself.
As far as we can tell, Kenny Christiansen had one life before the hijacking and a completely different one afterwards.
Christiansen was making $512 a month -- that's a month -- working for northwest, so for him to suddenly have money to throw around was definitely suspicious.
The FBI, though, ruled Christiansen out as a suspect for three reasons -- one, he didn't match eyewitness descriptions, two, he wasn't a career criminal, and, three, they don't believe that the hijacker had military training.
The parachute rig that the hijacker chose The parachute that d.
B.
Cooper actually jumped with is called a Navy backpack 6, and it's a smaller parachute, more of a military type, but a guy like Kenny Christiansen might pick that one over a big, newer sport parachute, especially a person who hadn't jumped in a while.
Because he would be familiar with how it worked? That's right.
The fact that Kenny Christiansen was a paratrooper -- and, obviously, d.
B.
Cooper jumped out of a plane -- what helps match that up? I mean, was there something specific about the training? The skyjacker was a pretty tough guy and so was Kenny, and Kenny went through paratrooper training where they started out with 262 men and ended up with 80 that actually finished, and he was one of them.
So, you think Kenny did this and he survived the jump? Yes, I think he jumped out of the back of that 727 and hit the ground, popped off his parachute, disconnected the harness and the container from it, buried the silk part, and put his briefcase and the money bag into the container for the parachute, put it on his back, and walked out of the woods.
[ Chuckles .]
Another kind of crazy coincidence is this comic book here made into a hardback book, but the, uh [ laughs .]
"Dan Cooper.
" Dan Cooper is the name he used boarding the plane.
Yeah, it's the name he put on his boarding pass.
The FBI has that picture on their website and lists it as an official clue.
One, I love comic books.
Two, I love comic books.
And, three, you know what I love more than comic books? The possibility that the alias "Dan Cooper" actually comes from one.
It's a way better alias than "Clark Kent.
" Of course, I want to understand more about why the FBI ruled Christiansen out so quickly, but first, buddy, Mac, and Scott are headed to see Kenny's brother Lyle.
Lyle cooperated with Robert blevins when he was writing his book and provided him with access to some of his brother's personal effects, and now we're gonna get to see them, too.
We'd like to know more about your brother Kenny.
How did you start putting this together? Before he passed away, he told me on his deathbed, "there's something you should know, but I cannot tell you.
" So, you kept that secret to yourself? Yes, I kept it secret.
I didn't want to know anything bad about him.
You know how they say don't believe everything you hear? There's only one exception to that -- a deathbed confession.
It is the only reason I'm so obsessed with this case.
After his almost confession, Lyle decided he needed to examine his brother's possessions way more carefully.
I can start from the beginning.
This is Kenny when he's about the age of the skyjacking.
What kind of upbringing did you guys have? Were you wealthy? Were you middle class? Middle class growing up on the farm.
Kenny joined the army right after high school, and he decided to go into the paratroopers because the pay was better and you make extra pay for jumps and everything else.
They had to train him to land in trees, water, anything.
They could land in anything.
He was in the military for two years.
Then he applied for a job with northwest airlines, and they shipped him to semya, aleutian islands.
The islands in Alaska? Yeah.
Americans had a northwest airlines base there.
He spent five years up there in that lonesome place, and then he applied to be a flight attendant.
He took training for that.
Then he got to be a flight attendant.
It was a northwest airlines flight that was hijacked.
Yes, and the skyjacker came on the airline with an attaché case.
And I found this very same attaché case in Kenny's final effects.
This is your brother's? That's my brother Kenneth's attaché case.
This could be the briefcase of d.
B.
Cooper.
It could be.
The descriptions of d.
B.
Cooper when he boarded the flight were all the same.
He was wearing a black suit with a tie and carrying a briefcase.
He was described as tall and dark-haired.
This is a composite sketch from the eyewitnesses on the airplane, and this is -- and this is your brother.
That's my brother.
All right, look at this.
Oh, man.
That's bizarre.
Look at that.
I found this picture in his photo book.
I must have looked at the photo book many times and never caught it, and one day I said, "wait a minute.
" Oh, my God.
Carrying a bag, looks like a bag of money, and he's got the attaché case.
Based on what I read, that's exactly what d.
B.
Cooper had with him on the airplane.
The evidence needs to be looked at more closely, and Lyle has actually agreed to lend the briefcase to us for our investigation.
All right, let's see what we got in this thing.
Passport photo, the overlay.
Oh, yeah.
Still fascinated by that.
Ahh.
Look at that.
So, this is basically the FBI "wanted" poster.
"No particular accent.
Possibly from the midwest.
" "This man is described as followed" -- it's a bulletin from the FBI -- "in 40s, 5'10" to 6' tall.
" Kenny Christiansen stood 5'8" tall and was almost completely bald, so the physical description doesn't match.
But we all know that eyewitness accounts are fairly unreliable.
They're dubious at best.
And the other thing we know -- Lyle said that Kenny used to wear a toupee prior to the skyjacking, but he never wore it again after the skyjacking.
Great circumstantial evidence, for sure, but we need something that is far more concrete.
This is a mortgage.
A mortgage, yeah.
"June 26, 1972.
" "'72.
" So, about six months, seven months after the hijacking, he's buying a house.
That's what's going on here.
We could just be looking at a very eccentric person who made some money on land Yes, we could.
We absolutely could.
Who happens to have a northwest airlines briefcase.
Who happened to be a parachutist, who happened to know the terrain that he was jumping out of a plane.
I look at all this stuff, and I think, "we got a jumper.
" Here's the thing I still can't shake.
If all this is true, what was his motive? Why would someone with a good job be angry enough to steal from his employer? Here's one darn tasty reason.
According to Kenny's own letters, he was never able to earn a stable living at northwest because of constant protracted labor disputes at his job.
There were eight strikes at northwest airlines between 1954 and 1971, and those strikes severely cut into Kenny's earning power.
He was constantly having to take odd jobs like working in a hotel or digging ditches for friends just to make ends meet.
That is not a euphemism.
He was actually digging ditches.
In the meantime, the $8 million jets that Kenny worked on sat unused on the ground, and make no mistake -- he resented it.
If we believe that Kenny was d.
B.
Cooper, then by 1971, he had simply had enough, and he decided to strike out at the airline and make them pay for making him struggle, and that is evidence that can't be ignored.
All right, what have we got here? Whoa.
Bank-account statements.
In '94.
Look at how much money he's got in the bank.
$186,000.
$186,000.
Almost $200,000.
At the end of the day, what we have here is a ton of circumstantial evidence.
None of Kenny's papers or effects point directly to him being d.
B.
Cooper, but when you stack them all together, you have to wonder, "could it all be coincidence?" But if we're looking at this and thinking, "okay, this is so obvious this guy's d.
B.
Cooper," why isn't the FBI thinking the same thing? That's exactly what I was thinking.
In fact, I think we need to talk to the FBI.
But would the FBI talk to us? The FBI declined to appear on-camera despite our request.
They told us that the d.
B.
Cooper case was never solved, and, as a result, it's still an open investigation.
We did, however, get something even better.
We managed to track down the original lead FBI agent in the case, and he's agreed to meet with buddy, Mac, and Scott.
So far, we know that Kenny Christiansen had the access and the motive and that shortly after the skyjacking, he came into a pile of money.
I can feel it.
We're getting closer.
The case of d.
B.
Cooper has captured our imagination for four decades, but after investigating thousands of leads, the case remains unsolved and open.
Many now believe it was an inside job that was pulled off by an airline employee who had motive, access, and suddenly started throwing money around after the crime.
His name is Kenny Christiansen, and buddy, Mac, and Scott are headed to talk to Ralph himmelsbach, a retired FBI agent who was actually in charge of the Cooper investigation from 1971 to 1980.
So, Ralph, we understand that you were the lead FBI agent investigating the d.
B.
Cooper case.
That's right.
What was it like on the ground when you guys started working? It was storming with cloudbursts and gusty wind changing direction and so forth.
So, you guys are running around on the tarmac, yelling at each other? And we're getting soaked wet all the time you're outside.
Just excellent jumping weather.
Not very good for jumping.
Probably a pretty miserable night to fly anything.
Yes, it was.
There's an airliner here of the same kind, a boeing 727.
We can go aboard if you'd like.
The boeing 727 was the most widely used aircraft for domestic air travel at the time of the skyjacking.
They stopped being mass-produced in 1984, but with more than 1,800 made, they're now the staple of every air museum in the country.
Now, does this bring back memories of that day? It does, indeed.
And I've thought about it a hundred times, and, uh, it's still a mystery.
What seat was d.
B.
Cooper in around? 18c -- this one right here.
The boarding had taken place, and the doors were secured.
This particular stewardess who was closest by approached the hijacker, and he handed her a note.
He said to her, "you better read this, miss.
I have a bomb.
" He told her to take that note up to the cockpit, and his instruction to them was to stay in the air until they got to Seattle.
While the money and the parachutes were obtained, if they did anything wrong, he would set off the bomb.
You have to remember that airline security in the 1970s was nothing like it is today.
No one even checked your I.
D.
Before you boarded a plane.
You could smoke on the plane.
It was like studio 54 up there.
But after the d.
B.
Cooper skyjacking, everything changed.
Boeing installed something called the Cooper vane on the rear doors of all 727s that made it impossible to lower the aft stairs from inside the airplane.
The f.
A.
A.
Also started putting metal detectors in American airports in order to screen passengers and their carry-ons before they were able to board their plane.
So, next time you're waiting for an hour, now you know who to blame it on.
When, uh, the FBI approached the head of the airline and asked him how they wanted to handle it, they said right away they didn't want anything to happen, any property damage or any people injured, and they'd pay the money.
Was Kenny Christiansen ever a suspect in this case? He never came to my attention at all.
Mm-hmm.
You think Dan Cooper had any military experience? I kind of doubt it.
You think that jump was survivable and he survived it? I can't say that it wasn't survivable, but it's unlikely.
That airliner was going 170 knots at 10,000 feet.
Outside air temperature is 7 degrees below zero.
Ooh.
Chill factor of about 69 degrees below zero.
Oh, brutal.
Why do you think his body has never been found if he died in the jump? The best explanation I can give you of that is just go look at those woods.
D.
B.
Cooper was a smart guy.
He made very specific demands of the flight crew.
First, Cooper asked the pilot to stay below 10,000 feet because any higher, they'd have to pressurize the cabin, making it harder for d.
B.
To open the stairs and escape.
Next, he wanted the flaps -- you know those things on the wings that go up and down at takeoff and landing? -- He wanted those set at 15 degrees exactly.
At that angle, the 727 couldn't fly any faster than 200 miles per hour, making it safer for d.
B.
To jump out.
However you slice it, this guy knew what he was doing.
He knew about planes and he knew how they worked, and he certainly used that knowledge to his advantage.
If you come down here, I'll show you the door and where he was last seen.
Oh! Huge door.
Can you imagine the air come flying through that? If you were right about here, you're gonna start seeing, and then you'd have to go, like, "ugh, waah!" When he did that, it even bounced.
He's below zero.
Oh, my God.
I can't even fathom.
This is like standing at the top of the high dive.
This thing's bouncing around.
It's amazing to think of that guy on these steps at 200 miles per hour.
The guy's gonna be up here, and there's not gonna be quite as much vacuum pressure, and, also, the door wouldn't have been this far down.
It kept coming back up, apparently, and then with his weight, it would have been tighter, like that, you know? I think this guy has -- had been out of a plane before.
Maybe military experience, but I don't know if he had experience with this plane, opening this door.
Whoever it was, by sitting in that seat where he sat, by having all of the directions for where to put the flaps and the speed, the guy knew what the hell he was doing.
The question of whether d.
B.
Cooper could have survived this jump is essential.
In April of 1972, a guy named Richard McCoy skyjacked a united airlines flight and demanded as a ransom half a million dollars.
Like d.
B.
Cooper, McCoy chose a 727 as his target.
McCoy jumped at 16,000 feet while the plane was hurtling along at 200 miles an hour.
And he survived.
The similarities were such that, for a while, the authorities thought that McCoy was d.
B.
Cooper.
But upon further investigation, they decided that McCoy didn't match the physical description of d.
B.
Cooper, and it was later revealed that McCoy was at home with his family in Utah having Thanksgiving dinner when the d.
B.
Cooper event took place.
I think if Richard McCoy could make the same jump from 6,000 feet higher, I have to believe that Cooper could have survived, too.
But, obviously, we've got conflicting opinions here.
The FBI thinks that Cooper did not survive, and Robert blevins thinks that he did, so where do we go from here? Well, and the FBI further doesn't think that it was a northwest employee.
He thinks that he would have been recognized if he was.
I actually have a lead on this paratrooper I want to talk to about what actually happened inside that airplane and if d.
B.
Cooper could have survived the jump.
Okay.
That sounds like a good idea.
You know, we should talk to a northwest historian if we can find one.
Or just someone who used to work for northwest who just can tell us how big a company it was, whether someone would be recognized by his employees.
Sounds like a good idea.
I started jumping in 1987 when I joined the army.
Over my 22-year career on jump status, I've accumulated over 200 jumps And I've accumulated 4,000 civilian skydives.
[ Chuckles .]
4,000 jumps? In your experience, have you ever jumped out of an airplane at 200 miles an hour? Not at 200 miles an hour.
Okay.
Well, what's a normal speed? In civilian operations, we're jumping out of airplanes somewhere around 90 miles per hour.
Oh.
Military operations, we're jumping anywhere from 120 to 150 miles per hour.
Yeah.
When he leapt, he had a bag of money weighing 22 pounds tied with cording from another chute to his waist.
Does that seem like common practice? For military jumping, we jump with equipment all the time.
I've even jumped with up to 150 pounds of equipment, counting the machine gun, all the ammunition and everything.
Wow.
That's like jumping with another human Essentially, yes.
Depending on his size.
Yeah.
22 pounds -- it's almost inconsequential.
If I told you that you could get in a 727 right now and go up in the air at 200 miles an hour and at 10,000 feet and jump out of the aft stairwell, would you do it? I'd have a shot at it, yeah.
[ Laughs .]
You would? Yeah.
There are actually, uh, 727s in, uh, private fleets that are used for commercial skydiving.
People pay extra money to go do the jump d.
B.
Cooper did.
Really? We've been looking over some real interesting materials from a northwest employee named Kenny Christiansen.
He had worked for northwest airlines, and it looks like it started in the '50s on "shenny" island in Alaska.
Semya.
Yes, in Alaska.
Semya was a major refueling station for not just northwest but for many commercial airlines that were doing the north american/asian routes.
They called it the black pearl of the Northern Pacific.
So, what would Kenny Christiansen have done? He was a non-skilled, so he would have been a Jack-of-all-trades, an extra pair of hands.
Bruce, we were looking over some letters that Kenny had written back to his family, and he definitely seemed to be upset with northwest airlines about pay, about strikes.
There were a lot of strikes back then.
It was sometimes referred to as cobra airlines.
They strike at anything.
There were roughly eight strikes between 1954 and 1978.
Some of them were very short.
Some of them were very protracted.
So, was the employment, then, fairly unstable? Choppy.
So, what are truly the chances, if it is Kenny Christiansen, of getting on a plane and not being recognized by two of your fellow flight attendants? Well if he flew strictly international routes uh-huh? There wasn't much intermingling, necessarily.
But, yeah, there could have been some degree of anonymity.
So, not only did he have this inside knowledge as a purser, but Kenny almost certainly would not have been recognized by any crew flying within the United States.
But if Kenny was d.
B.
Cooper, he was still playing a dangerous game.
And right now, it looks like he might have won that game.
The case of d.
B.
Cooper has fascinated America for decades.
He was mentioned in tv shows like "twin peaks.
" The movie "in pursuit" fictionalized his story, and kid rock even mentioned d.
B.
In one of his songs.
He has definitely turned into a folk hero.
But 40 years after he jumped out of that plane, nobody knows who he really is.
Buddy, Mac, and Scott are chasing down leads that now point to former northwest airlines employee Kenny Christiansen as the most likely culprit.
The guy I talked to, Larry yount -- he's a former paratrooper.
He's a skydiving instructor.
When I said, "if you were gonna jump out of a 727, how would you do it?" And he said, "the way this guy d.
B.
Cooper did it -- absolutely dangerous but absolutely survivable.
" I buy that someone could have survived the jump, but Lyle says that Kenny continued to work for northwest airlines for 20 years after the heist.
That's a lot harder for me to believe.
He hangs out basically at the scene of the crime for years afterwards.
That makes it hard for me to believe it's Kenny Christiansen.
In addition to that, we also have his brother telling us that he drank bourbon.
The guy ordered bourbon on the plane.
Right.
The demeanor of the hijacker was strikingly similar to his brother.
There was a strong physical resemblance.
Darker skin, he had a receding hairline.
The other thing is he didn't have very much money prior to the hijacking, and he began to spend a great deal of money in the months following the hijacking.
So far, more pros than cons.
I think we should follow this money trail.
I mean, we do know that he paid cash for a house.
He had been giving money away.
This is a picture of the house that he paid cash for.
If anything was left here, how would we go about finding hidden money? That's a good question.
If it's buried in the walls Use infrared to find, like, leaks around doors and windows, so maybe that would help.
You could tell temperature differences.
There seems to be a lot of evidence piling up against Kenny Christiansen.
But the next logical place to look has got to be the house he bought in Washington state after the skyjacking.
The residence has been converted to a print shop, but the structure remains the same.
Looks like there's probably a lot more stuff here now than there was back then.
So, let's see it.
We want to see where Kenny lived, so we're headed to his old house in bonney lake.
It looks like you got a business going here now, but it was a house until when? Uh, well, the business was probably 10, 12 years ago When it was sold to somebody else, and it's been a commercial location ever since.
The story is, obviously, d.
B.
Cooper left the plane with a lot of $20 bills.
Have you found any? I-I haven't, but people have found money on the property when the owner I bought it from bulldozed all the trees around here, unknowingly unearthed some kind of a clear plastic bag, they said, that was ripped open from being dragged through the stumps, probably, and the kids were playing in the stumps, playing fort, and they found a bag, and it had money in it.
When d.
B.
Cooper made his ransom request, he asked for $200,000 in unmarked $20 bills.
The ransom was divided into 100 bundles worth $2,000 each.
Altogether, it weighed about 21 pounds.
But before the FBI had the ransom delivered, they ran the bills, all 10,000 of them, through a machine called a recordak that created a microfilm photograph of each bill and a record of all the serial numbers.
In December 1971, just a few weeks after the skyjacking, the FBI published the serial numbers of the d.
B.
Cooper ransom money -- 34 pages of serial numbers, but nothing ever turned up until February 1980, when an 8-year-old boy, the luckiest kid in the world, found a bundle of decomposing $20 bills on the banks of the Columbia river near Vancouver, Washington, some 40 miles from the alleged d.
B.
Cooper drop zone.
The $5,800 matched the FBI serial numbers.
As far as we know, this is the one and only time that any of the d.
B.
Cooper money has been found.
In 2008, the 8-year-old, now a grown man in his 30s, put some of the d.
B.
Cooper money up for auction in a Dallas auction house.
And here's the kicker -- the bidding for the most complete bill started at $750, but here's where it ended up -- $6,572.
50.
And that is how you put a price on a piece of American history.
Are there any areas you haven't searched that he could use this? We're bringing in an infrared specialist to scan the house, and the first place we're gonna check is the back of the shop, where Kenny's bedroom used to be.
So, Kevin, what exactly is this thing doing? Thermal imaging of the walls and the ceilings and the temperature differences.
So, anything is more insulation -- as you can see in that one corner, it's redder.
There's more insulation.
So, if there's an empty pocket in the wall or something different -- like money -- than insulation, you'll see it? Right.
I'd like to shoot the ceiling.
I don't know if I can or not.
I kind of have to go down here.
Go for it.
Yeah.
You know, you can see that was real hot there -- that's where the conduit is -- and then back over in this neck of the woods.
And then there's a spot right up here.
See the blue change right there? Oh, yeah.
Is it less insulating? Could that be an empty pocket? It could be an empty pocket.
There could be something up there that's pushing down and the insulation's not as thick.
There's something different in this little area right here than there is there or over here or over there.
And you thought we were crazy for devoting a whole episode to d.
B.
Cooper.
Let me tell you how this played out.
When we were filming, I was on the phone, and the show's director tells me, "we probably won't find anything.
" And I think to myself, "we probably won't find anything," and then he calls back and says, "Brad, I think we found something.
" We're in Washington state investigating Kenny Christiansen, a former northwest airlines employee who may have actually pulled off the infamous d.
B.
Cooper skyjacking in November 1971.
So, go with me on this.
If Kenny was d.
B.
Cooper, he had to be really careful about when and how he spent his ransom money.
So, it makes perfect sense to me that he might have stashed some of the money in his house or in the woods behind the house.
He wasn't gonna deposit it all in a bank without attracting unwanted attention.
So the question is, where did he put it? So this is the spot.
That's where I'm going.
That's the spot we saw on the infrared? Yeah, it was.
Remember, if you find money, there's no holding out on us.
I'm not telling anybody if I find money in here.
All right, there's a lot of insulation and, um, in the area where we saw the infrared definitely is some stuff pushed aside.
Let me try to get closer.
Hang on.
[ Laughs .]
Good for him.
Okay.
Up.
How's it going? It's good.
Right where we saw the infrared, it looks like something was there.
I'm gonna try to move some of it around a little more.
I don't see any money, but, uh, let me try to get in here further.
Whoa.
Hey, guys? Both: Yeah? This is interesting.
I want to get up there and see.
It's hard to describe, but it's, um It's like you can lift up the flooring yet -- oh, my God.
Wow.
Holy [Chuckling.]
Cow.
There is a, uh -- I just lifted up a piece of the floor, and there is a little space down here where something absolutely could have been.
It's almost like it's a little hiding space, and it's actually right above the bedroom where Kenny Christiansen slept.
Yeah, this is the bedroom.
[ Chuckling .]
Oh, my God.
Yes, even though there's nothing here now, it would have been an excellent hiding place for money.
[ Laughs .]
Wow.
Kenny, you sneak.
People make alterations to their homes for all sorts of reasons.
It seems strange that Kenny would have built this unless he was trying to hide something.
That's a hiding spot.
We found a hiding spot, and unless you have secret trapdoors above your bedroom, there certainly doesn't seem to be anything accidental about this.
So far we've determined that Kenny had both the motive and the means to commit the crime.
And in checking out the house he used to live in, we found a suspicious hiding place, a hinged cubbyhole in the ceiling above his bedroom.
There's also a local legend about money being found in a plastic bag in the woods behind his house, too.
It is all coming together.
But I still feel like we're missing out on something.
So I asked buddy, Mac, and Scott to take another look at Kenny's personal letters to see if anything jumps out at them.
All right, let's see what we got.
Anything that we haven't seen? "Mom, it was Bernie's girlfriend, Margie, who called crew scheduling.
" Anything about, uh, his -- I don't know -- condition? "I'm living in a house on Bernie's land, and I've been helping him and Margie dig a septic-tank hole.
" Wait a second.
Bernie's land and Margie? "Bernie is doing only so much as there is money.
I pay him $50 a month rent.
" There's a lot about Bernie.
Um, "Christmas, Bernie's sister and her four children are staying here.
" Looks like -- it's like they're a family.
The three of them are a family.
Everyone knows a guy named Bernie, right? But this guy Bernie was all over the letters that Kenny wrote home, so I think it's pretty safe to assume he played an important part in Kenny's life.
The question is, did Bernie also play a part in Kenny's crime? Could Bernie have been Kenny's accomplice in the skyjacking? If anyone was gonna know the answer to that question, it was Robert blevins.
I reached out to Robert again and asked him to meet with buddy, Mac, and Scott for a second time.
But this time we wanted to learn as much as we could about the mysterious Bernie.
We're looking for some clarification about some of the things we talked to you about before.
You said that there might have been an accomplice involved in this? We believe Bernie geestman could be the accomplice.
So how would the accomplice have done this? What exactly, do you think, methods did he use? He probably drove Cooper down to the Portland international airport, dropped him off to catch the flight to Seattle, and then drove back up by himself to paradise point state park.
It's right next to the freeway in battle ground, less than 2 miles from where they found the money in 1980, and just waited for Kenny, and Kenny jumped out, hiked back out to the freeway, and they met up.
It's only about a maybe 12-, 13-mile walk, at the most, back to the freeway.
And it's not a big wilderness like everybody thinks down there.
Bernie's name has come up in some of the documents that we've looked at.
He and Kenny were very good friends.
They first met working for northwest airlines on semya island.
It's a remote spot at the end of the aleutian chain.
He said he and Kenny weren't very good friends, but these are some pictures from the geestman's wedding in 1968.
Kenny's with them in those pictures.
Yeah.
These guys were already friends in semya island.
Oh, yes.
This is where they got to know a lot about airplanes.
This is Kenny Christiansen.
This is Bernie geestman here.
This looks like it was taken on semya island when they worked there for the airline.
Okay.
Mm-hmm.
This is a picture of Kenny Christiansen walking into his apartment.
It was taken right around Christmas '71, about three weeks after the hijacking.
He's dressed in the same coat as the hijacker was reported wearing.
He looks like the hijacker.
He's carrying a briefcase like the hijacker carried and a paper bag carried by the hijacker.
Yeah.
[ Chuckling .]
I mean Holding a sackful of money.
It looks like it.
To me, this is the most bizarre thing of all the evidence that I've seen.
That picture was hidden behind another picture in one of Kenny's photo albums.
Bernie geestman almost certainly took that photo.
Blevins is sure that Kenny Christiansen was d.
B.
Cooper, and he's equally convinced that Bernie geestman was his accomplice.
But for now, that's just one man's opinion.
So, how do we get an answer? I want buddy, Mac, and Scott to meet Bernie face-to-face and decide on their own if they believe he was Kenny's accomplice.
Buddy, Mac, and Scott are about to meet with Bernie geestman, a retired engineer who's suspected of having been Kenny Christiansen's accomplice in the d.
B.
Cooper skyjacking.
Bernie and Kenny worked together on semya island.
Kenny worked on Bernie's land and even rented a room from him when money got tight.
Kenny attended Bernie's wedding.
These guys played cards together.
And the bottom line -- Bernie and Kenny were close friends for almost 40 years.
Now, Bernie has a reputation for being tight-lipped.
He's avoided talking about Kenny Christiansen for a long time now.
But now he's agreed to speak with us.
If there's even a chance that Bernie was the accomplice, then the opportunity to meet him may be the turning point in this case.
Meeting Bernie geestman takes us a bit deeper and hopefully one step closer to the truth.
How are gonna handle Bernie? Defensive, maybe.
Well, here's the thing -- first of all, Bernie has nothing to worry about as far as the statute of limitations goes.
The statute of limitations in the federal system has already run, so -- does he know that? If you're gonna ask him questions about his involvement, you have to lead with, "here's what I know as an attorney.
You're off the hook.
You're okay now.
" If they haven't indicted Bernie by now, they can't.
He is completely safe.
He has agreed to talk, so he might have something he wants to get off his chest.
In this room could be the accomplice to the greatest aviation mystery in American history.
We got to find out if it's true.
If he feels attacked, he's not gonna tell us anything.
We're trying to find out as much as we can about Kenny Christiansen, and we understand that you were a good friend of his.
Yes, ma'am.
What can you tell us about him? I was on the flight line Mm-hmm.
Refueling aircraft in semya, and, uh, I drove the truck, and Kenny and I would keep the oil cans filled for the aircraft.
Kenny left prior to me, and pretty soon we heard that he was a purser flying to Tokyo.
Would you characterize Kenny Christiansen as a very, very good friend of yours? Well, we were -- you know, I wouldn't, uh -- he was a friend of mine working together.
From what we saw, you were dear friends prior to this.
He had worked on your property.
He was at your wedding.
He was a good friend you had worked with.
He -- I saw him.
And at one point, you guys were good enough friends for Kenny to rent a room from you.
He paid like 50 bucks a week or a month or something? I never rented Kenny my room.
Strange, because Kenny wrote letters to his family indicating that he was renting from you and paid $50 a month.
He paid it to my wife, Margaret Ann Miller, at the time, and she was supposed to be taking care of the house while I was at sea.
You must know that the reason we are really interested in Kenny Christiansen is that we're wondering if he is d.
B.
Cooper.
You're asking me my opinion? I am, yeah.
Yes.
He looks exactly like the picture the FBI put out.
So, you were suspicious right away, Bernie? That looked like Kenny to you? Yes.
I saw Kenny dying in his house.
Would you say to your friend, "now, Kenny, were you d.
B.
Cooper?" I would.
Yeah, I would, too -- help him get it off his chest yeah.
On his last moments.
I will tell you as an attorney, you cannot be prosecuted for this case.
The statute of limitations is run.
No one's interested in prosecuting you at all, but they are interested in the story.
So, this is just an opportunity for you to let us know what you know, and I got a feeling you know more than you're telling us.
I'm, you know, just like you.
I want to know, also.
You purchased an airstream trailer around the time of the hijacking, disappeared with it for several days around Thanksgiving.
No explanation for where the trailer went -- it suddenly disappeared.
You had knowledge of how these airplanes worked.
You happen to live in the area of the landing zone.
It all looks pretty compelling and convincing to us.
Robert blevins accuses you of being the accomplice.
He's lying.
Why, though? I mean, it seems to make sense to us.
I'm not -- I didn't do it.
I never -- I never, never was an accomplice to Kenny Peter Christiansen or anybody else.
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
I actually believe him.
Good! I'm glad you say that, 'cause I believed him, but I wasn't sure if I was just, like, getting caught up.
No, I'm convinced he was telling the truth.
I really am.
He didn't do any of those little fidgety, you know, eye/feet things that people do when they're lying.
There are some inconsistencies in his story.
He says he wasn't really his friend anymore and he's at his deathbed, but in the main That guy was telling the truth.
I was paying very close attention to his eyes.
Right.
That guy was not the accomplice.
This is the hardest part of playing "Charlie's angels.
" I'm not in the room.
I still have a hard time deciding what I think about Bernie.
There's a part of me that feels like he's hiding something, but buddy, Mac, and Scott seem convinced he's not.
These are my partners.
I have to trust their instinct here.
Well, was Kenny Christiansen d.
B.
Cooper? If I had to bet my own money on it, I'd say yes.
If I was on a jury and was asked to convict him, I'm not sure I would -- I would feel certain enough to convict him.
I'm not sure that I would convict beyond a reasonable doubt in this case, but I'd take it to court.
Given everything I've heard, everything I've read, Kenny Christiansen fits the profile, and he's the best that history has at the moment.
I was looking at it like there's a puzzle, and you start to put pieces into it, and at the end, pieces of the puzzle are missing, but you can still tell what it is, and it was all kind of pointing in his direction.
You add all of this stuff up -- his training, the money trail, his -- what he looks like, a picture of him dressed as d.
B.
Cooper.
Money found behind the house he paid cash for, a hiding place in the house.
I mean, da-da, da-da, da-da.
I mean, if there's a better suspect, I'd love to see him.
I'd be very interested to see what anybody could come up with pointing away from Kenny Christiansen, because I didn't see it in the last three days.
I think it was him.
Mac? Well, he can't go to jail now.
He's dead.
I do think it was him.
Wow, the skeptic has come around.
I really do.
This is probably wrong, but to Kenny.
[ Laughter .]
Whoever helped him pull it off, looking at this, I do think Kenny Christiansen was d.
B.
Cooper.
He had both the motive and the means to pull off the skyjacking, and everyone in this guy's circle seems to think he could have done it, too.
Based on the evidence that we uncovered, we know why Kenny did it, how he did it, even how he spent his ransom money.
It all makes sense to me.
And though most people consider the d.
B.
Cooper skyjacking to have been a victimless crime, it wasn't.
Ask the FBI and northwest airlines.
Some say no one was hurt by what he did, that he's some kind of modern-day Robin hood.
That's why d.
B.
Cooper has become a folk hero.
There were songs written about this guy, movies made about him.
There's even a bar that celebrates the anniversary of the heist with a d.
B.
Cooper look-alike contest.
Let's be clear -- that may make you a celebrity, but that doesn't make you a hero.
In all likelihood, Kenny Christiansen, a humble airline employee, committed the perfect crime.
He got what he wanted, and, most important Important
On November 24, 1971, a passenger using the name Dan Cooper hijacked northwest orient airlines flight 305 headed from Portland to Seattle.
After threatening to blow up the plane with a bomb, Cooper demanded four parachutes and $200,000.
Fearing the worst, northwest airlines agreed.
Once on the ground in Seattle, Cooper let the other passengers and some of the flight crew off the plane and had both the money and parachutes brought on board.
The plane refueled, took off again, and, at 10,000 feet, Cooper jumped from the backstairs of the boeing 727 into the Pacific northwest night.
He was never seen again.
[ Camera shutter clicking .]
The press began calling the skyjacker d.
B.
Cooper, and the FBI investigated thousands of leads.
Suspects included a mass murderer, a college professor, a career criminal, and a World War II veteran.
But they were all ruled out as the culprit.
In the last 40 years, new suspects have emerged, and now we have an unexamined lead that may point to an inside job.
We need to decode who he was and how he may have managed to pull off this unbelievable stunt without ever getting caught.
Whatever the case, I can tell you one thing -- when someone commits the perfect crime, I want to know who he is.
I'm Brad Meltzer.
I've spent my life collecting stories.
The best include signs, symbols, and codes, secret meanings that are hidden in plain sight.
Some have become the basis for my novels, but I've only scratched the surface of what's out there.
And now history has given me the resources to investigate the rest.
This is "decoded.
" You guys, just think about this for a minute.
There's many, many suspects over the years, and this is like the oldest cold case -- the only unsolved skyjacking in aviation history.
The problem is, there's been, like, hundreds of people that have either claimed to be this guy or they know this guy or they're related to this guy, so I'm a little skeptical whether this is gonna be the one.
Buddy, Mac, and Scott are chasing down leads that point to Kenny Christiansen, a former northwest airlines employee, being d.
B.
Cooper.
Kenny was never really a suspect in the 1970s, but the book "into the blast" uncovered new evidence that points to Christiansen.
And I was able to get the co-author, Robert blevins, to agree to talk.
You believe that Kenny Christiansen was d.
B.
Cooper.
Is that right? I would say 90% to 95% certain that he was.
He worked for the airline.
He had paratrooper training.
He had the opportunity.
He had a lot of unexplained spending within a few months after the hijacking.
He lent his best friend's sister $5,000 in cash to buy a house.
Then he used another $16,000 to buy another house for himself.
As far as we can tell, Kenny Christiansen had one life before the hijacking and a completely different one afterwards.
Christiansen was making $512 a month -- that's a month -- working for northwest, so for him to suddenly have money to throw around was definitely suspicious.
The FBI, though, ruled Christiansen out as a suspect for three reasons -- one, he didn't match eyewitness descriptions, two, he wasn't a career criminal, and, three, they don't believe that the hijacker had military training.
The parachute rig that the hijacker chose The parachute that d.
B.
Cooper actually jumped with is called a Navy backpack 6, and it's a smaller parachute, more of a military type, but a guy like Kenny Christiansen might pick that one over a big, newer sport parachute, especially a person who hadn't jumped in a while.
Because he would be familiar with how it worked? That's right.
The fact that Kenny Christiansen was a paratrooper -- and, obviously, d.
B.
Cooper jumped out of a plane -- what helps match that up? I mean, was there something specific about the training? The skyjacker was a pretty tough guy and so was Kenny, and Kenny went through paratrooper training where they started out with 262 men and ended up with 80 that actually finished, and he was one of them.
So, you think Kenny did this and he survived the jump? Yes, I think he jumped out of the back of that 727 and hit the ground, popped off his parachute, disconnected the harness and the container from it, buried the silk part, and put his briefcase and the money bag into the container for the parachute, put it on his back, and walked out of the woods.
[ Chuckles .]
Another kind of crazy coincidence is this comic book here made into a hardback book, but the, uh [ laughs .]
"Dan Cooper.
" Dan Cooper is the name he used boarding the plane.
Yeah, it's the name he put on his boarding pass.
The FBI has that picture on their website and lists it as an official clue.
One, I love comic books.
Two, I love comic books.
And, three, you know what I love more than comic books? The possibility that the alias "Dan Cooper" actually comes from one.
It's a way better alias than "Clark Kent.
" Of course, I want to understand more about why the FBI ruled Christiansen out so quickly, but first, buddy, Mac, and Scott are headed to see Kenny's brother Lyle.
Lyle cooperated with Robert blevins when he was writing his book and provided him with access to some of his brother's personal effects, and now we're gonna get to see them, too.
We'd like to know more about your brother Kenny.
How did you start putting this together? Before he passed away, he told me on his deathbed, "there's something you should know, but I cannot tell you.
" So, you kept that secret to yourself? Yes, I kept it secret.
I didn't want to know anything bad about him.
You know how they say don't believe everything you hear? There's only one exception to that -- a deathbed confession.
It is the only reason I'm so obsessed with this case.
After his almost confession, Lyle decided he needed to examine his brother's possessions way more carefully.
I can start from the beginning.
This is Kenny when he's about the age of the skyjacking.
What kind of upbringing did you guys have? Were you wealthy? Were you middle class? Middle class growing up on the farm.
Kenny joined the army right after high school, and he decided to go into the paratroopers because the pay was better and you make extra pay for jumps and everything else.
They had to train him to land in trees, water, anything.
They could land in anything.
He was in the military for two years.
Then he applied for a job with northwest airlines, and they shipped him to semya, aleutian islands.
The islands in Alaska? Yeah.
Americans had a northwest airlines base there.
He spent five years up there in that lonesome place, and then he applied to be a flight attendant.
He took training for that.
Then he got to be a flight attendant.
It was a northwest airlines flight that was hijacked.
Yes, and the skyjacker came on the airline with an attaché case.
And I found this very same attaché case in Kenny's final effects.
This is your brother's? That's my brother Kenneth's attaché case.
This could be the briefcase of d.
B.
Cooper.
It could be.
The descriptions of d.
B.
Cooper when he boarded the flight were all the same.
He was wearing a black suit with a tie and carrying a briefcase.
He was described as tall and dark-haired.
This is a composite sketch from the eyewitnesses on the airplane, and this is -- and this is your brother.
That's my brother.
All right, look at this.
Oh, man.
That's bizarre.
Look at that.
I found this picture in his photo book.
I must have looked at the photo book many times and never caught it, and one day I said, "wait a minute.
" Oh, my God.
Carrying a bag, looks like a bag of money, and he's got the attaché case.
Based on what I read, that's exactly what d.
B.
Cooper had with him on the airplane.
The evidence needs to be looked at more closely, and Lyle has actually agreed to lend the briefcase to us for our investigation.
All right, let's see what we got in this thing.
Passport photo, the overlay.
Oh, yeah.
Still fascinated by that.
Ahh.
Look at that.
So, this is basically the FBI "wanted" poster.
"No particular accent.
Possibly from the midwest.
" "This man is described as followed" -- it's a bulletin from the FBI -- "in 40s, 5'10" to 6' tall.
" Kenny Christiansen stood 5'8" tall and was almost completely bald, so the physical description doesn't match.
But we all know that eyewitness accounts are fairly unreliable.
They're dubious at best.
And the other thing we know -- Lyle said that Kenny used to wear a toupee prior to the skyjacking, but he never wore it again after the skyjacking.
Great circumstantial evidence, for sure, but we need something that is far more concrete.
This is a mortgage.
A mortgage, yeah.
"June 26, 1972.
" "'72.
" So, about six months, seven months after the hijacking, he's buying a house.
That's what's going on here.
We could just be looking at a very eccentric person who made some money on land Yes, we could.
We absolutely could.
Who happens to have a northwest airlines briefcase.
Who happened to be a parachutist, who happened to know the terrain that he was jumping out of a plane.
I look at all this stuff, and I think, "we got a jumper.
" Here's the thing I still can't shake.
If all this is true, what was his motive? Why would someone with a good job be angry enough to steal from his employer? Here's one darn tasty reason.
According to Kenny's own letters, he was never able to earn a stable living at northwest because of constant protracted labor disputes at his job.
There were eight strikes at northwest airlines between 1954 and 1971, and those strikes severely cut into Kenny's earning power.
He was constantly having to take odd jobs like working in a hotel or digging ditches for friends just to make ends meet.
That is not a euphemism.
He was actually digging ditches.
In the meantime, the $8 million jets that Kenny worked on sat unused on the ground, and make no mistake -- he resented it.
If we believe that Kenny was d.
B.
Cooper, then by 1971, he had simply had enough, and he decided to strike out at the airline and make them pay for making him struggle, and that is evidence that can't be ignored.
All right, what have we got here? Whoa.
Bank-account statements.
In '94.
Look at how much money he's got in the bank.
$186,000.
$186,000.
Almost $200,000.
At the end of the day, what we have here is a ton of circumstantial evidence.
None of Kenny's papers or effects point directly to him being d.
B.
Cooper, but when you stack them all together, you have to wonder, "could it all be coincidence?" But if we're looking at this and thinking, "okay, this is so obvious this guy's d.
B.
Cooper," why isn't the FBI thinking the same thing? That's exactly what I was thinking.
In fact, I think we need to talk to the FBI.
But would the FBI talk to us? The FBI declined to appear on-camera despite our request.
They told us that the d.
B.
Cooper case was never solved, and, as a result, it's still an open investigation.
We did, however, get something even better.
We managed to track down the original lead FBI agent in the case, and he's agreed to meet with buddy, Mac, and Scott.
So far, we know that Kenny Christiansen had the access and the motive and that shortly after the skyjacking, he came into a pile of money.
I can feel it.
We're getting closer.
The case of d.
B.
Cooper has captured our imagination for four decades, but after investigating thousands of leads, the case remains unsolved and open.
Many now believe it was an inside job that was pulled off by an airline employee who had motive, access, and suddenly started throwing money around after the crime.
His name is Kenny Christiansen, and buddy, Mac, and Scott are headed to talk to Ralph himmelsbach, a retired FBI agent who was actually in charge of the Cooper investigation from 1971 to 1980.
So, Ralph, we understand that you were the lead FBI agent investigating the d.
B.
Cooper case.
That's right.
What was it like on the ground when you guys started working? It was storming with cloudbursts and gusty wind changing direction and so forth.
So, you guys are running around on the tarmac, yelling at each other? And we're getting soaked wet all the time you're outside.
Just excellent jumping weather.
Not very good for jumping.
Probably a pretty miserable night to fly anything.
Yes, it was.
There's an airliner here of the same kind, a boeing 727.
We can go aboard if you'd like.
The boeing 727 was the most widely used aircraft for domestic air travel at the time of the skyjacking.
They stopped being mass-produced in 1984, but with more than 1,800 made, they're now the staple of every air museum in the country.
Now, does this bring back memories of that day? It does, indeed.
And I've thought about it a hundred times, and, uh, it's still a mystery.
What seat was d.
B.
Cooper in around? 18c -- this one right here.
The boarding had taken place, and the doors were secured.
This particular stewardess who was closest by approached the hijacker, and he handed her a note.
He said to her, "you better read this, miss.
I have a bomb.
" He told her to take that note up to the cockpit, and his instruction to them was to stay in the air until they got to Seattle.
While the money and the parachutes were obtained, if they did anything wrong, he would set off the bomb.
You have to remember that airline security in the 1970s was nothing like it is today.
No one even checked your I.
D.
Before you boarded a plane.
You could smoke on the plane.
It was like studio 54 up there.
But after the d.
B.
Cooper skyjacking, everything changed.
Boeing installed something called the Cooper vane on the rear doors of all 727s that made it impossible to lower the aft stairs from inside the airplane.
The f.
A.
A.
Also started putting metal detectors in American airports in order to screen passengers and their carry-ons before they were able to board their plane.
So, next time you're waiting for an hour, now you know who to blame it on.
When, uh, the FBI approached the head of the airline and asked him how they wanted to handle it, they said right away they didn't want anything to happen, any property damage or any people injured, and they'd pay the money.
Was Kenny Christiansen ever a suspect in this case? He never came to my attention at all.
Mm-hmm.
You think Dan Cooper had any military experience? I kind of doubt it.
You think that jump was survivable and he survived it? I can't say that it wasn't survivable, but it's unlikely.
That airliner was going 170 knots at 10,000 feet.
Outside air temperature is 7 degrees below zero.
Ooh.
Chill factor of about 69 degrees below zero.
Oh, brutal.
Why do you think his body has never been found if he died in the jump? The best explanation I can give you of that is just go look at those woods.
D.
B.
Cooper was a smart guy.
He made very specific demands of the flight crew.
First, Cooper asked the pilot to stay below 10,000 feet because any higher, they'd have to pressurize the cabin, making it harder for d.
B.
To open the stairs and escape.
Next, he wanted the flaps -- you know those things on the wings that go up and down at takeoff and landing? -- He wanted those set at 15 degrees exactly.
At that angle, the 727 couldn't fly any faster than 200 miles per hour, making it safer for d.
B.
To jump out.
However you slice it, this guy knew what he was doing.
He knew about planes and he knew how they worked, and he certainly used that knowledge to his advantage.
If you come down here, I'll show you the door and where he was last seen.
Oh! Huge door.
Can you imagine the air come flying through that? If you were right about here, you're gonna start seeing, and then you'd have to go, like, "ugh, waah!" When he did that, it even bounced.
He's below zero.
Oh, my God.
I can't even fathom.
This is like standing at the top of the high dive.
This thing's bouncing around.
It's amazing to think of that guy on these steps at 200 miles per hour.
The guy's gonna be up here, and there's not gonna be quite as much vacuum pressure, and, also, the door wouldn't have been this far down.
It kept coming back up, apparently, and then with his weight, it would have been tighter, like that, you know? I think this guy has -- had been out of a plane before.
Maybe military experience, but I don't know if he had experience with this plane, opening this door.
Whoever it was, by sitting in that seat where he sat, by having all of the directions for where to put the flaps and the speed, the guy knew what the hell he was doing.
The question of whether d.
B.
Cooper could have survived this jump is essential.
In April of 1972, a guy named Richard McCoy skyjacked a united airlines flight and demanded as a ransom half a million dollars.
Like d.
B.
Cooper, McCoy chose a 727 as his target.
McCoy jumped at 16,000 feet while the plane was hurtling along at 200 miles an hour.
And he survived.
The similarities were such that, for a while, the authorities thought that McCoy was d.
B.
Cooper.
But upon further investigation, they decided that McCoy didn't match the physical description of d.
B.
Cooper, and it was later revealed that McCoy was at home with his family in Utah having Thanksgiving dinner when the d.
B.
Cooper event took place.
I think if Richard McCoy could make the same jump from 6,000 feet higher, I have to believe that Cooper could have survived, too.
But, obviously, we've got conflicting opinions here.
The FBI thinks that Cooper did not survive, and Robert blevins thinks that he did, so where do we go from here? Well, and the FBI further doesn't think that it was a northwest employee.
He thinks that he would have been recognized if he was.
I actually have a lead on this paratrooper I want to talk to about what actually happened inside that airplane and if d.
B.
Cooper could have survived the jump.
Okay.
That sounds like a good idea.
You know, we should talk to a northwest historian if we can find one.
Or just someone who used to work for northwest who just can tell us how big a company it was, whether someone would be recognized by his employees.
Sounds like a good idea.
I started jumping in 1987 when I joined the army.
Over my 22-year career on jump status, I've accumulated over 200 jumps And I've accumulated 4,000 civilian skydives.
[ Chuckles .]
4,000 jumps? In your experience, have you ever jumped out of an airplane at 200 miles an hour? Not at 200 miles an hour.
Okay.
Well, what's a normal speed? In civilian operations, we're jumping out of airplanes somewhere around 90 miles per hour.
Oh.
Military operations, we're jumping anywhere from 120 to 150 miles per hour.
Yeah.
When he leapt, he had a bag of money weighing 22 pounds tied with cording from another chute to his waist.
Does that seem like common practice? For military jumping, we jump with equipment all the time.
I've even jumped with up to 150 pounds of equipment, counting the machine gun, all the ammunition and everything.
Wow.
That's like jumping with another human Essentially, yes.
Depending on his size.
Yeah.
22 pounds -- it's almost inconsequential.
If I told you that you could get in a 727 right now and go up in the air at 200 miles an hour and at 10,000 feet and jump out of the aft stairwell, would you do it? I'd have a shot at it, yeah.
[ Laughs .]
You would? Yeah.
There are actually, uh, 727s in, uh, private fleets that are used for commercial skydiving.
People pay extra money to go do the jump d.
B.
Cooper did.
Really? We've been looking over some real interesting materials from a northwest employee named Kenny Christiansen.
He had worked for northwest airlines, and it looks like it started in the '50s on "shenny" island in Alaska.
Semya.
Yes, in Alaska.
Semya was a major refueling station for not just northwest but for many commercial airlines that were doing the north american/asian routes.
They called it the black pearl of the Northern Pacific.
So, what would Kenny Christiansen have done? He was a non-skilled, so he would have been a Jack-of-all-trades, an extra pair of hands.
Bruce, we were looking over some letters that Kenny had written back to his family, and he definitely seemed to be upset with northwest airlines about pay, about strikes.
There were a lot of strikes back then.
It was sometimes referred to as cobra airlines.
They strike at anything.
There were roughly eight strikes between 1954 and 1978.
Some of them were very short.
Some of them were very protracted.
So, was the employment, then, fairly unstable? Choppy.
So, what are truly the chances, if it is Kenny Christiansen, of getting on a plane and not being recognized by two of your fellow flight attendants? Well if he flew strictly international routes uh-huh? There wasn't much intermingling, necessarily.
But, yeah, there could have been some degree of anonymity.
So, not only did he have this inside knowledge as a purser, but Kenny almost certainly would not have been recognized by any crew flying within the United States.
But if Kenny was d.
B.
Cooper, he was still playing a dangerous game.
And right now, it looks like he might have won that game.
The case of d.
B.
Cooper has fascinated America for decades.
He was mentioned in tv shows like "twin peaks.
" The movie "in pursuit" fictionalized his story, and kid rock even mentioned d.
B.
In one of his songs.
He has definitely turned into a folk hero.
But 40 years after he jumped out of that plane, nobody knows who he really is.
Buddy, Mac, and Scott are chasing down leads that now point to former northwest airlines employee Kenny Christiansen as the most likely culprit.
The guy I talked to, Larry yount -- he's a former paratrooper.
He's a skydiving instructor.
When I said, "if you were gonna jump out of a 727, how would you do it?" And he said, "the way this guy d.
B.
Cooper did it -- absolutely dangerous but absolutely survivable.
" I buy that someone could have survived the jump, but Lyle says that Kenny continued to work for northwest airlines for 20 years after the heist.
That's a lot harder for me to believe.
He hangs out basically at the scene of the crime for years afterwards.
That makes it hard for me to believe it's Kenny Christiansen.
In addition to that, we also have his brother telling us that he drank bourbon.
The guy ordered bourbon on the plane.
Right.
The demeanor of the hijacker was strikingly similar to his brother.
There was a strong physical resemblance.
Darker skin, he had a receding hairline.
The other thing is he didn't have very much money prior to the hijacking, and he began to spend a great deal of money in the months following the hijacking.
So far, more pros than cons.
I think we should follow this money trail.
I mean, we do know that he paid cash for a house.
He had been giving money away.
This is a picture of the house that he paid cash for.
If anything was left here, how would we go about finding hidden money? That's a good question.
If it's buried in the walls Use infrared to find, like, leaks around doors and windows, so maybe that would help.
You could tell temperature differences.
There seems to be a lot of evidence piling up against Kenny Christiansen.
But the next logical place to look has got to be the house he bought in Washington state after the skyjacking.
The residence has been converted to a print shop, but the structure remains the same.
Looks like there's probably a lot more stuff here now than there was back then.
So, let's see it.
We want to see where Kenny lived, so we're headed to his old house in bonney lake.
It looks like you got a business going here now, but it was a house until when? Uh, well, the business was probably 10, 12 years ago When it was sold to somebody else, and it's been a commercial location ever since.
The story is, obviously, d.
B.
Cooper left the plane with a lot of $20 bills.
Have you found any? I-I haven't, but people have found money on the property when the owner I bought it from bulldozed all the trees around here, unknowingly unearthed some kind of a clear plastic bag, they said, that was ripped open from being dragged through the stumps, probably, and the kids were playing in the stumps, playing fort, and they found a bag, and it had money in it.
When d.
B.
Cooper made his ransom request, he asked for $200,000 in unmarked $20 bills.
The ransom was divided into 100 bundles worth $2,000 each.
Altogether, it weighed about 21 pounds.
But before the FBI had the ransom delivered, they ran the bills, all 10,000 of them, through a machine called a recordak that created a microfilm photograph of each bill and a record of all the serial numbers.
In December 1971, just a few weeks after the skyjacking, the FBI published the serial numbers of the d.
B.
Cooper ransom money -- 34 pages of serial numbers, but nothing ever turned up until February 1980, when an 8-year-old boy, the luckiest kid in the world, found a bundle of decomposing $20 bills on the banks of the Columbia river near Vancouver, Washington, some 40 miles from the alleged d.
B.
Cooper drop zone.
The $5,800 matched the FBI serial numbers.
As far as we know, this is the one and only time that any of the d.
B.
Cooper money has been found.
In 2008, the 8-year-old, now a grown man in his 30s, put some of the d.
B.
Cooper money up for auction in a Dallas auction house.
And here's the kicker -- the bidding for the most complete bill started at $750, but here's where it ended up -- $6,572.
50.
And that is how you put a price on a piece of American history.
Are there any areas you haven't searched that he could use this? We're bringing in an infrared specialist to scan the house, and the first place we're gonna check is the back of the shop, where Kenny's bedroom used to be.
So, Kevin, what exactly is this thing doing? Thermal imaging of the walls and the ceilings and the temperature differences.
So, anything is more insulation -- as you can see in that one corner, it's redder.
There's more insulation.
So, if there's an empty pocket in the wall or something different -- like money -- than insulation, you'll see it? Right.
I'd like to shoot the ceiling.
I don't know if I can or not.
I kind of have to go down here.
Go for it.
Yeah.
You know, you can see that was real hot there -- that's where the conduit is -- and then back over in this neck of the woods.
And then there's a spot right up here.
See the blue change right there? Oh, yeah.
Is it less insulating? Could that be an empty pocket? It could be an empty pocket.
There could be something up there that's pushing down and the insulation's not as thick.
There's something different in this little area right here than there is there or over here or over there.
And you thought we were crazy for devoting a whole episode to d.
B.
Cooper.
Let me tell you how this played out.
When we were filming, I was on the phone, and the show's director tells me, "we probably won't find anything.
" And I think to myself, "we probably won't find anything," and then he calls back and says, "Brad, I think we found something.
" We're in Washington state investigating Kenny Christiansen, a former northwest airlines employee who may have actually pulled off the infamous d.
B.
Cooper skyjacking in November 1971.
So, go with me on this.
If Kenny was d.
B.
Cooper, he had to be really careful about when and how he spent his ransom money.
So, it makes perfect sense to me that he might have stashed some of the money in his house or in the woods behind the house.
He wasn't gonna deposit it all in a bank without attracting unwanted attention.
So the question is, where did he put it? So this is the spot.
That's where I'm going.
That's the spot we saw on the infrared? Yeah, it was.
Remember, if you find money, there's no holding out on us.
I'm not telling anybody if I find money in here.
All right, there's a lot of insulation and, um, in the area where we saw the infrared definitely is some stuff pushed aside.
Let me try to get closer.
Hang on.
[ Laughs .]
Good for him.
Okay.
Up.
How's it going? It's good.
Right where we saw the infrared, it looks like something was there.
I'm gonna try to move some of it around a little more.
I don't see any money, but, uh, let me try to get in here further.
Whoa.
Hey, guys? Both: Yeah? This is interesting.
I want to get up there and see.
It's hard to describe, but it's, um It's like you can lift up the flooring yet -- oh, my God.
Wow.
Holy [Chuckling.]
Cow.
There is a, uh -- I just lifted up a piece of the floor, and there is a little space down here where something absolutely could have been.
It's almost like it's a little hiding space, and it's actually right above the bedroom where Kenny Christiansen slept.
Yeah, this is the bedroom.
[ Chuckling .]
Oh, my God.
Yes, even though there's nothing here now, it would have been an excellent hiding place for money.
[ Laughs .]
Wow.
Kenny, you sneak.
People make alterations to their homes for all sorts of reasons.
It seems strange that Kenny would have built this unless he was trying to hide something.
That's a hiding spot.
We found a hiding spot, and unless you have secret trapdoors above your bedroom, there certainly doesn't seem to be anything accidental about this.
So far we've determined that Kenny had both the motive and the means to commit the crime.
And in checking out the house he used to live in, we found a suspicious hiding place, a hinged cubbyhole in the ceiling above his bedroom.
There's also a local legend about money being found in a plastic bag in the woods behind his house, too.
It is all coming together.
But I still feel like we're missing out on something.
So I asked buddy, Mac, and Scott to take another look at Kenny's personal letters to see if anything jumps out at them.
All right, let's see what we got.
Anything that we haven't seen? "Mom, it was Bernie's girlfriend, Margie, who called crew scheduling.
" Anything about, uh, his -- I don't know -- condition? "I'm living in a house on Bernie's land, and I've been helping him and Margie dig a septic-tank hole.
" Wait a second.
Bernie's land and Margie? "Bernie is doing only so much as there is money.
I pay him $50 a month rent.
" There's a lot about Bernie.
Um, "Christmas, Bernie's sister and her four children are staying here.
" Looks like -- it's like they're a family.
The three of them are a family.
Everyone knows a guy named Bernie, right? But this guy Bernie was all over the letters that Kenny wrote home, so I think it's pretty safe to assume he played an important part in Kenny's life.
The question is, did Bernie also play a part in Kenny's crime? Could Bernie have been Kenny's accomplice in the skyjacking? If anyone was gonna know the answer to that question, it was Robert blevins.
I reached out to Robert again and asked him to meet with buddy, Mac, and Scott for a second time.
But this time we wanted to learn as much as we could about the mysterious Bernie.
We're looking for some clarification about some of the things we talked to you about before.
You said that there might have been an accomplice involved in this? We believe Bernie geestman could be the accomplice.
So how would the accomplice have done this? What exactly, do you think, methods did he use? He probably drove Cooper down to the Portland international airport, dropped him off to catch the flight to Seattle, and then drove back up by himself to paradise point state park.
It's right next to the freeway in battle ground, less than 2 miles from where they found the money in 1980, and just waited for Kenny, and Kenny jumped out, hiked back out to the freeway, and they met up.
It's only about a maybe 12-, 13-mile walk, at the most, back to the freeway.
And it's not a big wilderness like everybody thinks down there.
Bernie's name has come up in some of the documents that we've looked at.
He and Kenny were very good friends.
They first met working for northwest airlines on semya island.
It's a remote spot at the end of the aleutian chain.
He said he and Kenny weren't very good friends, but these are some pictures from the geestman's wedding in 1968.
Kenny's with them in those pictures.
Yeah.
These guys were already friends in semya island.
Oh, yes.
This is where they got to know a lot about airplanes.
This is Kenny Christiansen.
This is Bernie geestman here.
This looks like it was taken on semya island when they worked there for the airline.
Okay.
Mm-hmm.
This is a picture of Kenny Christiansen walking into his apartment.
It was taken right around Christmas '71, about three weeks after the hijacking.
He's dressed in the same coat as the hijacker was reported wearing.
He looks like the hijacker.
He's carrying a briefcase like the hijacker carried and a paper bag carried by the hijacker.
Yeah.
[ Chuckling .]
I mean Holding a sackful of money.
It looks like it.
To me, this is the most bizarre thing of all the evidence that I've seen.
That picture was hidden behind another picture in one of Kenny's photo albums.
Bernie geestman almost certainly took that photo.
Blevins is sure that Kenny Christiansen was d.
B.
Cooper, and he's equally convinced that Bernie geestman was his accomplice.
But for now, that's just one man's opinion.
So, how do we get an answer? I want buddy, Mac, and Scott to meet Bernie face-to-face and decide on their own if they believe he was Kenny's accomplice.
Buddy, Mac, and Scott are about to meet with Bernie geestman, a retired engineer who's suspected of having been Kenny Christiansen's accomplice in the d.
B.
Cooper skyjacking.
Bernie and Kenny worked together on semya island.
Kenny worked on Bernie's land and even rented a room from him when money got tight.
Kenny attended Bernie's wedding.
These guys played cards together.
And the bottom line -- Bernie and Kenny were close friends for almost 40 years.
Now, Bernie has a reputation for being tight-lipped.
He's avoided talking about Kenny Christiansen for a long time now.
But now he's agreed to speak with us.
If there's even a chance that Bernie was the accomplice, then the opportunity to meet him may be the turning point in this case.
Meeting Bernie geestman takes us a bit deeper and hopefully one step closer to the truth.
How are gonna handle Bernie? Defensive, maybe.
Well, here's the thing -- first of all, Bernie has nothing to worry about as far as the statute of limitations goes.
The statute of limitations in the federal system has already run, so -- does he know that? If you're gonna ask him questions about his involvement, you have to lead with, "here's what I know as an attorney.
You're off the hook.
You're okay now.
" If they haven't indicted Bernie by now, they can't.
He is completely safe.
He has agreed to talk, so he might have something he wants to get off his chest.
In this room could be the accomplice to the greatest aviation mystery in American history.
We got to find out if it's true.
If he feels attacked, he's not gonna tell us anything.
We're trying to find out as much as we can about Kenny Christiansen, and we understand that you were a good friend of his.
Yes, ma'am.
What can you tell us about him? I was on the flight line Mm-hmm.
Refueling aircraft in semya, and, uh, I drove the truck, and Kenny and I would keep the oil cans filled for the aircraft.
Kenny left prior to me, and pretty soon we heard that he was a purser flying to Tokyo.
Would you characterize Kenny Christiansen as a very, very good friend of yours? Well, we were -- you know, I wouldn't, uh -- he was a friend of mine working together.
From what we saw, you were dear friends prior to this.
He had worked on your property.
He was at your wedding.
He was a good friend you had worked with.
He -- I saw him.
And at one point, you guys were good enough friends for Kenny to rent a room from you.
He paid like 50 bucks a week or a month or something? I never rented Kenny my room.
Strange, because Kenny wrote letters to his family indicating that he was renting from you and paid $50 a month.
He paid it to my wife, Margaret Ann Miller, at the time, and she was supposed to be taking care of the house while I was at sea.
You must know that the reason we are really interested in Kenny Christiansen is that we're wondering if he is d.
B.
Cooper.
You're asking me my opinion? I am, yeah.
Yes.
He looks exactly like the picture the FBI put out.
So, you were suspicious right away, Bernie? That looked like Kenny to you? Yes.
I saw Kenny dying in his house.
Would you say to your friend, "now, Kenny, were you d.
B.
Cooper?" I would.
Yeah, I would, too -- help him get it off his chest yeah.
On his last moments.
I will tell you as an attorney, you cannot be prosecuted for this case.
The statute of limitations is run.
No one's interested in prosecuting you at all, but they are interested in the story.
So, this is just an opportunity for you to let us know what you know, and I got a feeling you know more than you're telling us.
I'm, you know, just like you.
I want to know, also.
You purchased an airstream trailer around the time of the hijacking, disappeared with it for several days around Thanksgiving.
No explanation for where the trailer went -- it suddenly disappeared.
You had knowledge of how these airplanes worked.
You happen to live in the area of the landing zone.
It all looks pretty compelling and convincing to us.
Robert blevins accuses you of being the accomplice.
He's lying.
Why, though? I mean, it seems to make sense to us.
I'm not -- I didn't do it.
I never -- I never, never was an accomplice to Kenny Peter Christiansen or anybody else.
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
I actually believe him.
Good! I'm glad you say that, 'cause I believed him, but I wasn't sure if I was just, like, getting caught up.
No, I'm convinced he was telling the truth.
I really am.
He didn't do any of those little fidgety, you know, eye/feet things that people do when they're lying.
There are some inconsistencies in his story.
He says he wasn't really his friend anymore and he's at his deathbed, but in the main That guy was telling the truth.
I was paying very close attention to his eyes.
Right.
That guy was not the accomplice.
This is the hardest part of playing "Charlie's angels.
" I'm not in the room.
I still have a hard time deciding what I think about Bernie.
There's a part of me that feels like he's hiding something, but buddy, Mac, and Scott seem convinced he's not.
These are my partners.
I have to trust their instinct here.
Well, was Kenny Christiansen d.
B.
Cooper? If I had to bet my own money on it, I'd say yes.
If I was on a jury and was asked to convict him, I'm not sure I would -- I would feel certain enough to convict him.
I'm not sure that I would convict beyond a reasonable doubt in this case, but I'd take it to court.
Given everything I've heard, everything I've read, Kenny Christiansen fits the profile, and he's the best that history has at the moment.
I was looking at it like there's a puzzle, and you start to put pieces into it, and at the end, pieces of the puzzle are missing, but you can still tell what it is, and it was all kind of pointing in his direction.
You add all of this stuff up -- his training, the money trail, his -- what he looks like, a picture of him dressed as d.
B.
Cooper.
Money found behind the house he paid cash for, a hiding place in the house.
I mean, da-da, da-da, da-da.
I mean, if there's a better suspect, I'd love to see him.
I'd be very interested to see what anybody could come up with pointing away from Kenny Christiansen, because I didn't see it in the last three days.
I think it was him.
Mac? Well, he can't go to jail now.
He's dead.
I do think it was him.
Wow, the skeptic has come around.
I really do.
This is probably wrong, but to Kenny.
[ Laughter .]
Whoever helped him pull it off, looking at this, I do think Kenny Christiansen was d.
B.
Cooper.
He had both the motive and the means to pull off the skyjacking, and everyone in this guy's circle seems to think he could have done it, too.
Based on the evidence that we uncovered, we know why Kenny did it, how he did it, even how he spent his ransom money.
It all makes sense to me.
And though most people consider the d.
B.
Cooper skyjacking to have been a victimless crime, it wasn't.
Ask the FBI and northwest airlines.
Some say no one was hurt by what he did, that he's some kind of modern-day Robin hood.
That's why d.
B.
Cooper has become a folk hero.
There were songs written about this guy, movies made about him.
There's even a bar that celebrates the anniversary of the heist with a d.
B.
Cooper look-alike contest.
Let's be clear -- that may make you a celebrity, but that doesn't make you a hero.
In all likelihood, Kenny Christiansen, a humble airline employee, committed the perfect crime.
He got what he wanted, and, most important Important