Skyjack

The true story of the unsolved 1971 Northwest Orient airplane hijacking, Skyjack reopens one of the greatest cold cases of the 20th century.“I have a bomb here and I would like you to sit by me.”  That was the note handed to a stewardess by a mild-mannered passenger on a Northwest Orient flight in 1971. It was also the start of one of the most astonishing whodunits in the history of American true crime: how one man extorted $200,000 from an airline before parachuting into the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, never to be seen again. Starting with a crack tip from a private investigator, author Geoffrey Gray plunges into the murky depths of the decades-old mystery to chase down new clues and explore the secret lives of the cases's cast of characters and most promising suspects, including Ralph Himmelsbach, the most dogged of FBI agents, who watched with horror as a criminal became a counter-culture folk hero; Karl Fleming, a respected reporter whose career was destroyed by a D.B. Cooper scoop that was a scam; and Barbara (nee Bobby) Dayton, a transgendered pilot who insisted she was Cooper herself. The case of D.B. Cooper is a modern legend that has obsessed and cursed his pursuers for generations. Now with Skyjack, Gray obtians a first-ever look at the FBI's confidential Cooper file, uncovering new leads in the infamous case and providing readers with explosive new information.