Eight Cigarette Butts

The book takes no position on who he was, because none is available. The man who left Northwest Orient Flight 305 on the night of 24 November 1971 has no established name; he bought his ticket as Dan Cooper, and a reporter's deadline error made him D.B., which every outlet in America copied. Eight Raleigh cigarette butts came out of the ashtray at seat 18-E, the only material from that cabin that six professional witnesses watched him produce. They went to the FBI Laboratory, came back to Las Vegas, and at some point were destroyed. The Bureau found out in 1998, when it went looking for them to attempt DNA.

The density of the evidence and the density of the belief run in opposite directions. Six of the twenty-one chapters stay with that one evening, the only stretch where the evidence is good: the note Florence Schaffner put in her purse assuming it was a phone number, ten thousand twenty-dollar bills microfilmed while the aircraft held over Puget Sound, and the demand set, the best evidence of what he knew — airstair deployable in flight, gear down, cabin unpressurized, below ten thousand feet, the slowest airspeed short of a stall. The record ends at about 8:13 p.m., when the crew felt the tail pitch.

What filled the empty part was fifteen named suspects, a four-decade party at a general store in Ariel, Washington, and families who have gone on the record to name their own dead father or brother as a federal felon. The claiming is the subject, and it is sorted here into seven routes, almost all sincere and none evidentiary. It is the first general account written entirely after the FBI suspended NORJAK in 2016, working from pages Thomas Colbert's FOIA litigation forced into view. The last of it belongs to the six who worked the flight — among them Tina Mucklow, twenty-two, sent to sit beside a man who had shown her a bomb — and to the thirty-six passengers who walked off at Sea-Tac without being told why.