3A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, JULY 17, 2018
Washington
researcher
safe after wolf
encounter
By COURTNEY FLATT
Northwest Public
Broadcasting
Colin Murphey/The Daily Astorian
Lylah Huff watches fireworks on the Fourth of July.
Astoria hears concerns about fireworks
One resident
calls for a ban
By KATIE
FRANKOWICZ
The Daily Astorian
Astoria city council-
ors briefly discussed a possi-
ble ban on fireworks Monday
after Mayor Arline LaMear
received a letter from a resi-
dent worried about how the
celebratory explosives impact
the city.
The writer asked for a ban
on the sale of fireworks in
Astoria, LaMear told coun-
cilors. LaMear asked if there
was anything the City Council
could do to give the police and
fire departments “a little more
clout” in dealing with fire-
works complaints.
But the majority of the
council didn’t support moving
ahead with any kind of discus-
sion to institute a ban.
City Councilor Bruce Jones
and Police Chief Geoff Spald-
ing pointed out that legal fire-
works aren’t the main prob-
lem. It’s the illegal fireworks
that people continue to buy
and light off despite the restric-
tions in place. Police and fire
personnel already have trouble
enforcing the rules for these
explosives, a problem many
communities large and small
share, Spalding said.
A ban would just be a way
to make a statement, City
Councilor Tom Brownson said.
“If we want to make a state-
ment, I think we could have
that discussion, but I don’t
think we’re going to be able to
effectively stop this as much as
I agree to a certain extent.”
Though, he added, “I don’t
want to ban sparklers.”
The city already has so
many issues to prioritize, City
Councilor Zetty Nemlowill
said, but the letter writer is not
the only one concerned about
fireworks.
“Perhaps you bringing this
up here will bring some other
citizens out of the woodwork,”
Nemlowill told LaMear, add-
ing, “If there’s going to be any
kind of movement here, and I
think there’s some merit to it,
we need to hear from the cit-
izens if they want a change.”
Thanks to quick think-
ing, a tree and a helicop-
ter, a salmon researcher in
Washington state was able
to evade two wolves she
couldn’t scare off.
Biologists who visited the
spot Friday to investigate the
incident attributed the rare
wolf-human interaction to
the presence of wolf pups
nearby.
Authorities
haven’t
released the name of the stu-
dent researcher involved.
She could not be reached for
comment. However, authori-
ties have reconstructed what
happened.
It started out as a nor-
mal morning of survey-
ing streams in the Okano-
gan-Wenatchee
National
Forest. Then the seasonal
Forest Service employee
started to notice wolf tracks
and heard yipping and
barking.
A little while later, two
wolves from the Loup Loup
pack appeared. The student
yelled and tried to wave
them away. She sprayed bear
spray, but nothing worked.
That’s when she climbed
30 feet up a tree to escape.
She climbed back down
when she thought it was
safe, only to encounter the
wolves again. She called for
help on a satellite phone and
was rescued by a Washing-
ton Department of Natural
Resources helicopter.
The helicopter was able
to scare the wolves away and
fly the researcher to safety. It
was an unusual situation for
the pilots — typically they’re
used in wildland firefight-
ing and have been deployed
all over the state for that
purpose.
“To my knowledge this
is the first time that we have
rescued a biologist from a
tree with wolves at the base,”
said Hilary Franz, Washing-
ton’s commissioner of pub-
lic lands.
Franz said the Depart-
ment of Natural Resources,
which she oversees, has
helped respond to other res-
cues and accidents when
pilots are able to.
Officials say the salmon
researcher did everything
right — and they’re not sure
what went wrong.
Okanogan County Sher-
iff Frank Rogers says peo-
ple need to be aware of their
surroundings.
“I’ve tried to tell people,
it’s not like the movies. The
wolves aren’t running around
in packs hunting humans.
But if you see a pack, don’t
antagonize it. If it’s feeding,
for God’s sake, stay away
from it. If you run upon a
den, stay away from it,” Rog-
ers said.
New documentary hopes to unravel Cooper mystery
Another theory
into the famous
skyjacking
By TOM BANSE
Northwest News Network
The legend and theoriz-
ing about Northwest skyjacker
D.B. Cooper just won’t die.
A new documentary about
the unsolved 1971 hijacking
introduces a new twist to the
tale: It suggests we might have
been looking for D.B. Cooper
and his loot in the wrong place
for all these years.
The makers of the four-
part video literally rolled
out a red carpet for the sold-
out premiere of “D.B. Coo-
per: The Real Story.” It hap-
pened at a community center
in Cle Elum, Washington, on
Saturday.
The town in the eastern
foothills of the Cascades was
chosen deliberately because
Cle Elum is the closest town
to where former Army para-
trooper Walter Reca said he
landed after he jumped out of
a hijacked Boeing 727 with a
$200,000 ransom tied to his
chest.
Decades later, Reca con-
fessed to a close friend and to
a niece that he committed the
hijacking under the pseudonym
Cooper and made a clean get-
away. He allowed himself to
be recorded by the friend, Carl
Laurin, with the understanding
that the secret not be revealed
until after Reca’s death, which
came in 2014.
The written and recorded
confessions are at the heart of
the new documentary and a
book released in May that cov-
ers the same ground, both from
Michigan-based
publisher
Principia Media.
If you remember your Coo-
per lore, you’ll know the jump
zone has always been assumed
to be over southwest Wash-
ington, close to Portland.
The airline, the FBI and ama-
teur sleuths have analyzed the
flight path many times. No one
else has placed the jump over
central Washington.
Principia Media
Walter Reca during a visit home in 1984.
Laurin asserts the FBI
“bungled” this high profile
case or purposely misdirected
searchers away from the cor-
rect jump zone.
“Do I believe that there
was a cover-up here?” Laurin
asked rhetorically in an inter-
view. “Let me put it this way,
it’s the only honest answer I
can come up with. D.B. Coo-
per jumped over Cle Elum.”
On the afternoon of Nov.
24, 1971, Cooper boarded
a Northwest Orient Airlines
plane in Portland with a one-
way ticket to Seattle. He
passed a note to a stewardess
indicating he had a bomb in
his briefcase. He subsequently
negotiated to exchange the pas-
sengers in Seattle for $200,000
in ransom and four parachutes.
He also got the authorities to
refuel the plane and said he
wanted to be flown to Mexico.
Shortly after takeoff from
Seattle, the remaining flight
crew — which had retreated to
the cockpit — noticed a warn-
ing light indicating deploy-
ment of the jet’s aft stairs. Coo-
per is believed to have jumped
from the stairs a few minutes
later at an altitude of 10,000
feet into a frigid Thanksgiving
Eve storm. He was never seen
again. The plane landed safely
in Reno, Nevada, for a planned
refueling stop a few hours later
without Cooper on board.
The FBI effectively closed
the Cooper case in 2016. The
bureau said it won’t reopen
the cold case unless someone
comes up with relevant phys-
ical evidence such as the para-
chutes the hijacker used or ran-
WANTED
Alder and Maple Saw Logs & Standing Timber
Northwest Hardwoods • Longview, WA
Contact: John Anderson • 360-269-2500
AP Photo
This sketch shows the skyjacker known as D.B. Cooper.
som money.
The makers of the new
documentary found neither
of these things. There are
some other discrepancies in
their story, including Reca’s
age at the time of the hijack-
ing, 38 years old, which is
on the young side of the esti-
mates from passengers and air-
line employees interviewed by
the FBI at the time. They fig-
ured the skyjacker was in his
mid-40s.
“Although the FBI appre-
ciates the immense number of
tips provided by members of
the public, none to date have
resulted in a definitive iden-
tification of the hijacker. The
tips have conveyed plausible
theories, descriptive informa-
tion about individuals poten-
tially matching the hijacker,
and anecdotes — to include
accounts of sudden, unex-
plained wealth,” FBI-Seattle
Division spokesperson Jillian
Voigt wrote in an email Mon-
day. “In order to solve a case,
the FBI must prove culpabil-
ity beyond a reasonable doubt,
and, unfortunately, none of the
well-meaning tips or appli-
cations of new investigative
technology have yielded the
necessary proof.”
Principia Media’s investi-
gators faced a challenge in rec-
onciling the getaway story they
accepted with one of the undis-
puted facts of the Cooper case,
namely, how did a cache of the
ransom money get buried in
a sandbank along the Colum-
bia River north of Portland. In
1980, a boy digging a camp-
fire pit at Tena Bar uncovered
three bundles of decomposing
$20 bills, whose serial num-
bers traced back to the Cooper
ransom money.
Laurin and the documen-
tary makers posit that an appre-
ciative Reca gave his getaway
driver a bundle of bills and that
the accomplice later buried the
loot at Tena Bar to dispose of
evidence that connected the
driver to the hijacking.
Reca is the latest in a line
of at least a dozen previous
suspects publicly accused
by friends and relatives or
self-confessed to be Cooper.
The new documentary
presents other details that
make Reca a plausible suspect.
He had nighttime parachuting
experience, survival training, a
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criminal background (he pre-
viously committed armed rob-
bery) and a motive (tired of
being poor).
Self-appointed investiga-
tor Laurin managed to locate
an eyewitness who, with
some prompting, corroborated
Reca’s getaway. That eyewit-
ness is a Cle Elum musician
and former logging company
truck driver. Jeff Osiadacz
now believes he unwittingly
helped Cooper summon a get-
away driver to the roadside
café where they were the only
customers on Thanksgiving
Eve 1971.
“He come in and the first
thing he said is, ‘Hey kid,
where am I?’” Osiadacz said.
“I said, ‘You’re about 4 miles
east of Cle Elum.’ And he says,
‘If I make a phone call, can you
give a friend directions how to
pick me up?’ I says, ‘Sure, no
problem.’”
At the time, the musician
didn’t suspect the soaking wet,
odd, limping man was any-
thing more than “a French fry
short of a happy meal.”
“Never saw him again,
never know nothing,” Osia-
dacz said. “The next day,
they’re advertising this guy
that jumped out an airplane,
all this on the news media.
They’re showing these com-
posite sketches and every-
thing. Didn’t look nothing like
the man I was sitting with.”
Reca told Laurin he
removed and bundled up his
parachute after he landed out-
side Cle Elum and covered it
up with branches. There are
no accounts of anyone finding
a parachute in that area, which
might have been newsworthy
at the time given the intense
coverage of the hijacking.
Reca said he limped for
about a half an hour in the
direction of the closest lights
he saw during his descent,
which Laurin deduced to be
the Teanaway Junction Café.
At the café, Reca recalled
meeting a musician in a cow-
boy outfit, now believed to be
Osiadacz. The cafe no longer
exists.
After spending two-and-
a-half years investigating the
Cooper case and making his
documentary, filmmaker Dirk
Wierenga said he is confident
they fingered the right guy.
“I’m a 100 percent (con-
fident),” Wierenga said in an
interview Saturday. “I gotta
tell you every other story that
is out there is voodoo. They’re
all voodoo.”