Analysis of Jack Coffelt as a suspect and Byron H. Brown as an investigator
After a few days of reading and consultations with Nat, I have an understanding of the Coffelt story. Here's what I've got, excerpted from the book.
After John List, the second ex-con investigated by the FBI was Bryant “Jack” Coffelt, a long-time criminal who died in 1975, but seemed to have an uncanny knowledge of the Cooper skyjacking. During the late 1940s and early 1950’s, Coffelt served a stint for auto theft in the Atlanta Penitentiary, where he met a former Air Force pilot named James Brown. Coffelt and Brown became best friends and were released in 1952 and 1955, respectively. After their release, Brown followed the straight-and-narrow and became an engineer and started a family. Coffelt in turn, gave up robbery and put his energies towards Big Cons in Las Vegas and Washington, D.C.
In 1974, Coffelt called Brown and enticed him to go on a road trip to Mount Hood, Oregon to look for DB Cooper’s money. Coffelt also insisted that James bring his 19 year-old son, Byron, since Coffelt was 57 years-old and he felt they needed some young blood to search the wilderness. The elder Brown agreed.
In the summer of 1974, James and Byron left their home in Georgia, picked up Coffelt in his old hometown of Joplin, Missouri, and headed to Oregon. Along the way, Coffelt confessed to being DB Cooper. However, he refrained from answering too many questions from the Browns, who were certainly curious, but increasingly felt concerned that they might be arrested for assisting in the skyjacking after-the-fact.
For a few weeks they scoured the eastern slopes of Mount Hood. They found the burnt remnants of a parachute that Coffelt said he had torched with a magnesium mixture upon landing, but they didn’t find the money. Coffelt said he had placed the ransom inside a large plastic bag, then with cords cut from the reserve chute he cinched the top of the container closed and then made a sling, which he looped over his shoulder. However, when his parachute opened violently the green sack slipped off his shoulder and was lost in the forest below.
As they searched, the tensions between Coffelt and James Brown escalated and Coffelt left abruptly, but not before he told the Browns that he had three accomplices who might be also looking for the money. The next day, two pick-up trucks roared into their campsite west of Friend, Oregon, and the Browns quickly left.
However, in 1983 Byron published a lengthy magazine article about their adventure in the Las Vegan Magazine. He also included years-worth of research on Jack Coffelt and Norjak, and in 1977 made another trip back to Oregon to check-out details of Coffelt’s story. Bryon found the huge searchlight that Coffelt said was manned by one of the accomplices that was positioned in a cabin in the Pine Hollow Resort about twenty miles south of Mt. Hood. Coffelt said that he had instructed Flight 305 to head towards the search light, thus putting him on a predictable flight path. Coffelt also said that he had stashed a jeep in the woods with provisions and medical supplies, but Byron was unable to locate it.
Nevertheless, Bryon was able to confirm from the local Sheriff’s Department that unexplained burnings of hay bales had occurred at the edge of the foothills of Mount Hood during the skyjacking period. That aligned with the story Coffelt told that a second accomplice was burning bales to outline the LZ in the westernmost wheat fields west of Friend. Byron also found several residents of Friend, OR and the Pine Hollow area who remember seeing Coffelt in the area during the 1971-1972 period, when Coffelt said that he had begun looking for his lost loot.
In addition, Byron says he interviewed Tina Mucklow, Florence Schaffner, and passenger George Labissoniere. Florence confirmed the 1974 photos of Coffelt that Byron showed her, exclaiming: “Oh my God! Where did you get those? I never thought I would see that face again. It’s him! My God, it’s him.”
George Labissoniere not only confirmed the 1974 pictures of Coffelt to be Cooper, but also an earlier photo from a stint in the Leavenworth Penitentiary. In fact, when Byron showed him the picture, Labissoniere said that the FBI had showed him the same photograph six weeks after the skyjacking. So, the FBI had an eyewitness confirmation to DB Cooper by the end of 1971, but no official records are available to these claims.
Byron also writes that Florence confirmed many of strange details of the skyjacking that Coffelt told the Browns in 1974, but are in stark contrast to the official narrative, such as Cooper wearing white gloves during the skyjacking, and putting on hiking boots before he jumped. Florence also claimed that she, not Tina, spent the majority of time during the skyjacking with DB Cooper. Byron also says that Tina confirmed the Coffelt details when he spoke with her in 1977 in San Diego.
Byron also writes that Coffelt told him in 1974 that he threw out $5,000 worth of bills before he jumped because they didn’t fit into his plastic green bag. Coffelt said that he tossed the bundles out the door somewhere near a dam on the Columbia that he could see by its lights. Byron assumes those are the money bundles that Brian Ingram found eight years later at Tina Bar.
But the whole narrative is too hard to swallow, and suggests that Jack Coffelt was conning the Browns, or that Byron Brown added his own con to Jack’s initial one. Currently Byron Brown is impossible to locate, and Florence and Tina aren’t talking at all.
Additionally, Coffelt was dismissed by the FBI, according to Ralph Himmelsbach. “We were certain that Coffelt was not Cooper, and that an opportunist was trying “to score,’ without any basis in fact,” wrote Himmelsbach in NORJAK, giving early notice to the presence of the Vortex.
