History Decoded: The 10 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time Read online

  Yount didn’t think so. “Twenty-two pounds—it’s almost inconsequential,” he said, explaining that he’s personally done military jumps with 150 pounds of equipment.

  Taking it a step further, we asked Yount, if we re-created the conditions, would he be willing to jump out of a 727 at 200 mph and at 10,000 feet? Naturally, Yount said yes. But then he added something that floored us: “There are actually 727s in private fleets that are used for commercial skydiving. People pay extra money to go do the jump that DB Cooper did.”

  Read that again.

  Not only are regular thrill-seekers surviving the Cooper jump—but they’re making it a regular practice.

  Gives new light to the FBI’s assertion that Cooper died that night, doesn’t it?

  Even after Christiansen began throwing money around in the wake of the skyjacking, he continued to work for Northwest Airlines—and did so for 20 years. You’ve heard the cliché: The criminal always returns to the scene of the crime. If Kenny Christiansen was DB Cooper, he not only returned to the scene. He collected a paycheck from them for close to two decades.

  Beyond making the assumption that Cooper died, the FBI’s other argument against Christiansen is based on the belief that he would’ve been known to the crew on Flight 305 as a Northwest Airlines employee.

  It’s an interesting hypothesis—until you realize that Flight 305 was a domestic flight—and much of Christiansen’s experience was with international routes. Back then, there was not a lot of intermingling between domestic and overseas crews. So yes, if Kenny Christiansen was DB Cooper, he was certainly taking some risk that he could be recognized as a Northwest employee. But as he did with the plane’s airspeed and altitude, it was a risk that could certainly be minimized.

  At this point, we have plenty of circumstantial evidence that points to Christiansen. But if we really hope to decode the mystery, we need hard evidence.

  And in the case of DB Cooper, hard evidence most likely means money.

  On that night of the hijacking, DB Cooper asked for $200,000 in $20 bills, which he received. In total, that meant he was carrying 10,000 bills, divided into 100 bundles, for a total package that weighed about 22 pounds.

  Yet before the money was delivered, the FBI was smart. They ran the bills through a Recordak machine that took a microfilm photograph of each bill, including the serial numbers. A few months after the skyjacking, the FBI published the serial numbers, a 34-page list that showed people what to be on the alert for when a $20 bill crossed your desk. None of the bills ever showed up. . . .

  That is, until February 1980, when the luckiest eight-year-old boy in the world found a bundle of waterlogged and decomposing $20 bills on the banks of the Columbia River near Vancouver, Washington. And that spot? It’s about 40 miles from what authorities believe would be DB Cooper’s landing zone. There was $5,800 in 20s, and their serial numbers matched the FBI list.

  As far as we know, this is the only confirmed incident of any of the DB Cooper money turning up.

  A Kid and His Money

  In 2008, the lucky eight-year-old boy who found the money was a grown man in his 30s. Forever a capitalist, he put some of the DB 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. Know what it finally sold for: $6,572.50!

  And that’s how you put a price on a piece of American history.

  Still, even if Kenny Christiansen did pull off the skyjacking . . . even if he lost $5,800 of the ransom money during his escape . . . he’d still have had a lot of bills to stash. And because the serial numbers were so well known, he couldn’t exactly take the bundles of cash to the nearest bank.

  So if you had a ton of money sitting around and you wanted to keep it safe, where would you put it? You’d need a good hiding spot.

  Which led us to the house that Christiansen bought in Washington State not long after the skyjacking.

  Digging for Dollars . . .

  FBI agents dig alongside the Columbia River where $5,800 in badly decomposed bills were found in 1980. The serial numbers matched those that Cooper was given.

  . . . And Dredging for DB

  After the discovery of part of Cooper’s cash, boaters dredged the Columbia hoping to find Cooper’s body—to no avail.

  Today, the house Christiansen bought has been converted to a print shop. But according to the current owner, Dan Rattenbury, the printing company isn’t the first commercial business to be located in the converted house, which was sold a dozen or so years ago.

  So had any money been found on the property?

  “I haven’t,” Rattenbury said. “But people have . . .”

  Wait. What?

  “People have found money on the property,” he explained. “When the owner I bought it from bulldozed all the trees around here, they unknowingly unearthed some kind of plastic bag, they said, that was ripped open from being dragged through the stumps, probably. Kids were playing in the stumps, and they found a bag, and it had money in it.”

  Can we stop right there? On the property that used to belong to Kenny Christiansen, when they bulldozed the trees, they unearthed bags with money in it. And yes, I’m thinking what you’re thinking: It’s just local urban myth.

  But it was also enough to make me bring in a modern infrared specialist who can scan the house and tell us if there’s anything else hidden in Christiansen’s old walls.

  And that’s where things got truly interesting.

  Throughout this book, we’re trying to show you exactly what it was like to participate in our historical investigations. But let me give you one additional detail: On the night when the Decoded team was scanning Kenny Christiansen’s old house with infrared, they were on the West Coast. I was on the phone on the East Coast.

  Seeing it was getting late, the director said to me, “Brad, we don’t need you anymore. We probably won’t find anything.”

  And I think, We probably won’t find anything. So I hang up, intent on enjoying my night.

  Then my phone rang. It was the director. I could hear his voice shaking.

  “Brad . . . I think we found something.”

  Kenny’s House

  In October 1972, about a year after Cooper’s jump, Kenny Christiansen paid $14,000 for a modest ranch in Bonney Lake, a small mountain town in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State.

  We Found Something

  At the back of the copy shop, the team was running a thermal scan on the walls and ceiling of what used to be Kenny Christiansen’s bedroom. In most spots, the thermal image reads red, showing normal insulation. To our surprise, though, the scan suddenly went blue, turning up one interesting spot directly above the bedroom—a spot where the insulation appeared to be far less thick than in the rest of the ceiling.

  Craning his neck upward, Decoded team member Scott Rolle didn’t think much of it. It was probably just a break in the insulation. So he volunteered to go into the attic and investigate.

  What happened next was unique in the Decoded experience. I give you Rolle, in his own words as he was crawling through the attic:

  “All right, there’s a lot of insulation . . . [there] definitely is some stuff pushed aside. Let me try to get closer. Hang on. . . .”

  Rolle starts pushing some of the insulation aside.

  “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 let me try to get in here further. Whoa!

  “It’s hard to describe, but it’s . . . it’s like you can lift up the flooring . . . yet . . . Oh my God. Wow. Holy cow. There is a—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—it’s a
ctually right above the bedroom where Kenny Christiansen slept.

  “Even though there’s nothing here now, it would have been an excellent hiding place for money.”

  OK, let’s hit the pause button here. Look at the photo with the insulation. Now look below it. See that?

  That’s a hiding spot. We found a hiding spot.

  So unless you have secret trapdoors above your bedroom, there certainly doesn’t seem to be anything accidental about it.

  Perfect Hiding Place

  The Decoded team uncovered this trap door, which was hidden beneath insulation, in the attic of Kenny Christiansen’s former house—a perfect cache for cash.

  OK, time to recap. So far, it seems that Christiansen 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 that local legend about money being found in a plastic bag in the woods behind his house.

  It all seems to be coming together—but there’s one more aspect to the case worth pursuing, and it’s a name found frequently in Kenny Christiansen’s letters: Bernie Geestman.

  Everyone knows a guy named Bernie, right?

  But this name—Bernie Geestman—is all over the letters Kenny Christiansen wrote to his family. Obviously, he was somebody important to Christiansen—but was there a chance that Geestman could also have been important to DB Cooper?

  Robert Blevins thinks so. In fact, he goes so far as to accuse Geestman of being Christiansen’s accomplice. What would an accomplice have done? Blevins offers a detailed scenario:

  “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 two miles from where they found the money in 1980,” Blevins insisted.

  So Geestman was the one who helped Christiansen escape?

  According to Blevins, Bernie “just waited for Kenny, and Kenny jumped out, hiked out—back out to the freeway, and they met up. It’s only about a maybe twelve-, thirteen-mile walk, at the most, back to the freeway. And it’s not a big wilderness like everybody thinks down there.”

  Sounds somewhat convincing, don’t you think? But let me make this very clear: However convincing Blevins sounds, his theory is really just one man’s opinion. So how do we find the truth? We went directly to Bernie Geestman and asked for his side of the story.

  Bernie and Kenny

  A Possible Accomplice

  Kenny Christiansen’s friend Bernie Geestman (seen here with Christiansen, right, on Geestman’s 1968 wedding day) is believed by some to have aided and abetted in the hijacking.

  Bernie Geestman and Kenny Christiansen knew each other for a long time. They worked side by side at the airline, refueling planes until Kenny moved to a job as a purser on Northwest’s Tokyo flight. At one point Kenny Christiansen was renting a room from Bernie and his wife. Kenny attended Bernie’s wedding. These guys played cards together. Bernie and Kenny were close friends for almost 40 years. Still, Bernie Geestman has a reputation for being tight-lipped. He’s avoided talking about Kenny Christiansen for a long time now. But to our own surprise, he agreed to speak with us.

  Decoded: Would you characterize Kenny Christiansen as a very, very good friend of yours?

  Geestman: Well, we were . . . You know, I-I wouldn’t, uh . . . He was a friend of mine working together.

  Decoded: 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.

  Geestman: He . . . I saw him.

  Decoded: And at . . . at one point, you guys were good enough friends for Kenny to rent a room from you. He paid like fifty bucks a week or a month or something?

  Geestman: I never rented Kenny my room.

  Decoded: Strange, because Kenny wrote letters to his family indicating that he was renting from you and paid fifty dollars a month.

  Geestman: 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.

  Decoded: You must know that the reason we are really interested in Kenny Christiansen is that we’re wondering if he is DB Cooper.

  Geestman: You’re asking me my opinion?

  Decoded: I am, yeah. Yes.

  Geestman: Yes. He looks exactly like the picture the FBI put out.

  Decoded: So, you were suspicious right away, Bernie? That looked like Kenny to you?

  Geestman: Yes. I saw Kenny dying in his house. Would you say to your friend, “Now, Kenny, were you DB Cooper?”

  BEST BUDS and BFFs

  Kenny Christiansen and Bernie Geestman with an unknown friend at Shemya Island, Alaska, in 1949.

  It’s an amazing question, right? Think about it a moment. Geestman’s watching his friend on his deathbed, still wondering if he’s really DB Cooper. We reminded him that the statute of limitations had run. He couldn’t be prosecuted for this crime.

  We reminded Geestman that he purchased an Airstream trailer around the time of the hijacking, then disappeared with it for several days around Thanksgiving. There was no explanation for where the trailer went. It suddenly just disappeared. We pointed out that he had knowledge of how these airplanes worked. And that Geestman happened to live in the area of the landing zone. And that Robert Blevins insisted that Bernie Geestman was Kenny Christiansen/DB Cooper’s accomplice. But Geestman kept insisting one thing: “He’s lying. . . . I didn’t do it. I never—I never, never was an accomplice to Kenny Peter Christiansen or anybody else.”

  And y’know what? Our Decoded team believed him.

  This is the hardest part of playing Charlie’s Angels. I wasn’t in the room with the team. So 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 my Decoded team—Buddy Levy, Christine McKinley, and Scott Rolle—seem convinced he’s not. These are my partners. I have to trust their instinct here. And yes, since our investigation, dozens of people have written emails asking us to look at Geestman’s wife, Margaret Ann Miller. But in the end, though the team is done with Bernie Geestman, they still believe DB Cooper was Kenny Christiansen.

  Kenny Christiansen

  This photo of Christiansen was taken in 1970, the year before the hijacking. The question remains: Was he already planning his caper?

  DB Cooper

  This is the artist’s sketch based on recollections of passengers and crew of Northwest Orient flight 305.

  Conclusion

  So what happens now? Only time will tell. Just recently, someone stepped forward saying that one of their relatives was DB Cooper. The FBI disagreed, which means, inevitably, someone else will be stepping forward in the near future. Now you can look at the evidence against Kenny Christiansen for yourself.

  No question, Christiansen had both the motive and the means to pull off the skyjacking—and everyone in his circle seems to think he might’ve done it, too. Based on the evidence that we’ve shown you, you can see why Christiansen did it, how he did it, even how he spent his ransom money. But let’s be clear about one thing: Though most people consider the DB 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 DB 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 DB Cooper look-alike contest.

  That may make you a celebrity, but that doesn’t make you a hero.

  The White House: Where Is the Cornerstone of Democracy?

  What if I told
you that the cornerstone of our democracy is actually missing?

  In 1792, stonemasons laid the cornerstone for the White House. It was the first piece in the most important government building in Washington, DC.

  To this day, descriptions of the stone vary, from something small that you can carry . . . to something that’s massive. The men who placed it were brothers in one of the world’s most secretive organizations—of course, the Freemasons. The day after they put it down, the stone vanished. This thing just disappeared.

  Some say it’s been stolen. Others say it’s missing or just misplaced. And the rumors about the stone itself are even wilder. In some descriptions, the stone was inscribed by our Founding Fathers. In others, it’s hollow, containing landmark documents of great, unimagined wisdom. Many believe the stone was stolen by the Masons themselves. But the Masons, of course, deny any involvement.

  Whatever the case, for more than 200 years now, the location of this cornerstone—the very first piece of the White House—has been a mystery. Indeed, everyone from Harry S. Truman to Barbara Bush has gone looking for it. And y’know what they’ve found?

  Nothing.

  So let me tell you right now: I want to know where it is—and I want to know what’s inside.

  A Grand Tradition

  Former New York Governor Alfred E. Smith lays the cornerstone of the Empire State Building, September 9, 1930.

  The word cornerstone itself has come to mean far more than just its purpose in a building.

  By definition, a cornerstone is the very first piece of a building to be set into place. Its placement determines where everything else goes: The foundation is built outward from the cornerstone—the beginning place and the reference point. But when it comes to starting the construction of a building—and especially when constructing a public building—the laying of the cornerstone has also come to serve a symbolic and ceremonial purpose as well.