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A comparison picture of the famous FBI sketch and a photo of Christiansen taken in 1970.
A good example on how eyewitness descriptions do not always come up with an accurate sketch. These are the police sketches created for Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer. Ridgway's picture on the right is close to his age at the time of most of the killings. The picture on the left is his arrest photo from November 30, 2001.
When Christiansen died in 1994, he left his house to this man (Robin Powell) and his wife, Carolyn Powell. (A man named Brian McWilliams, Christiansen's caretaker while he was dying, was left the lot out back.) Robin and Carolyn sold the house not long afterward and moved out of Washington State. Carolyn ended up divorcing Robin and told the authors that her ex had once tried to kill his own mother. Carolyn Powell is now Carolyn Tyner, a much happier wife of a Boulder, CO police officer. She verified the story given by the present owner of Christiansen's old house - Dan Rattenbury - that a large sum of money was found on the hill behind Kenny's house after his death.
The sister of the alleged accomplice Bernie Geestman, 'Dawn J' identified the tie tack from the FBI picture of the tie left behind by the hijacker as belonging to Christiansen. She made the ID before she knew why Kenny was being investigated. After she was told Christiansen was a suspect, she said, 'I thought he was the hijacker from the beginning," and 'so that's where he got all the money...' She also admitted to receiving a $5,000 cash loan from Kenny to put a down payment on a house in Buckley, WA. 'He gave me five years to pay it back,' she said, 'but I did it in two.' When asked WHY no one ever said anything to Christiansen about possibly being Cooper, she replied: 'He was a nice guy and he said he made a lot of money from the airline. It would have been bad manners...' In fact, Christiansen made very little from the airline, and went through at least four times his yearly income within nine months after the hijacking.
Margaret Ann Geestman (now Miller), the ex-wife of the alleged accomplice. In six separate interviews between January and August of 2010, she consistently pointed to her ex-husband as being involved in the hijacking. However, she tried to distance Christiansen, her good friend for thirty years, from being the actual person who hijacked the plane. She suggested other people she knew, but none of them panned out. When Margaret finally read a copy of 'Into The Blast,' she responded with a letter to Adventure Books of Seattle. A quote from the letter: 'Even if Kenny was aboard the plane that day, he wasn't hijacking it. He was just doing his job as the purser...' Margaret spends much of her time today creating custom picture frames from horseshoes, and owns a small ranch in Twisp, WA.
Now a print shop in Bonney Lake, WA owned by Dan Rattenbury, this was once the house Christiansen bought for cash shortly after the hijacking. Rattenbury claimed that a plastic bag of twenty-dollar bills was found out back by a previous owner, after the trees were logged off and sold. In December of 2010, this story was confirmed by Carolyn Tyner (formerly Carolyn Powell), who along with her ex-husband Robin Powell, were left the house after Christiansen died in 1994. Her testimony seems solid enough. She's now the wife of a Boulder, CO police officer.
Kenny Christiansen, his mother, and his nephew Lynn Christiansen in 1954.
Part of the Bremerton Sun article from 1972. The FBI refused to say what led them to believe the hijacker was bald, but they investigated several wig and toupee shops and questioned several people.
When this picture (without the caption on it) was shown to the sister of the alleged accomplice, she did NOT recognize the tie. However, she immediately identified the tie-tac on it as one she had seen Kenny Christiansen wear many times. In addition, 'Dawn J,' also said the same thing as Kenny's brother had claimed previously: That Kenny owned a toupee, but that he only wore it socially, and not on the job. A 1972 article in the Bremerton Sun newspaper says that for a short time the FBI thought Cooper was bald, and they actually investigated a few wig shops. When the lead went nowhere, they forgot about it.
In a famous article from 2007, Northwest Airlines stewardess Florence Schaffner told New York Magazine writer Geoff Gray that Christiansen's picture was 'the closest to the hijacker I've ever seen.'
This is one of two account statements from Kenny's bank, the West One Bank in Sumner, WA. These were the funds released to Kenny's brother Lyle after Kenny's death in 1994. There were also stamps and gold coins valued in six figures. In the years following the hijacking, Christiansen's income only averaged about $20,000 a year.
Kenny Christiansen and Bernie Geestman in 1951, working for Northwest Airlines on Shemya Island, Alaska. Geestman later tried to tell the History Channel and the producers of the show 'Brad Meltzer's Decoded' that he hardly knew Kenny and thought he was a dishwasher. They didn't believe him. Then he tried to get his own sister to change her testimony about Christiansen. When production executives confronted him on this, he agreed to appear on the show. He called Robert Blevins 'a liar,' and the book 'a work of fiction'. When the cast of 'Brad Meltzer's Decoded' asked him where he was on the day of the hijacking, he refused to answer.
Seventeen years after they met on Shemya and became friends, Kenny is shown here at Bernie Geestman's wedding in 1968. When asked why she divorced Geestman later, Margaret Geestman claimed her ex was a crook and kept a lot of secrets. When History Channel execs first contacted Geestman, he claimed he hardly knew Christiansen and thought he was a dishwasher. Then they caught him trying to get his sister, 'Dawn J,' to retract her statements for the book 'Into The Blast'. When he was confronted on these things, he admitted he not only was friends with Christiansen, but that he had visited Kenny Christiansen on his deathbed in 1994.
Adventure Books of Seattle staff call this simply 'The Picture'. It shows Christiansen walking into his apartment in Sumner, Washington about three weeks after the crime. Notice he's dressed similarly to the hijacker and carrying the same items as the hijacker carried on Flight 305: A briefcase and a paper bag. The authors do NOT think these are the actual items used in the crime. They believe this picture is more of a staged mememto, and probably snapped by the alleged accomplice. It was found behind another picture in one of Kenny's photo albums after he died.
Since many of the witnesses lived in remote, or hard-to-reach locations in the Northwest, co-author Robert Blevins used an old four-wheel-drive Subaru in his travels.
Submitted by the staff of Adventure Books of Seattle:
Who has time to read the book, right? The recent release, Into The Blast - The True Story of D.B. Cooper, alleges that Ken Christiansen, a former paratrooper and an actual employee of the hijacked airline was probably the infamous 'D.B. Cooper'. Boarding the Boeing 727 in Portland, Oregon for a quick flight to Seattle, he quietly made his demands known to flight attendant Florence Schaffner. Airline execs, fearing a major disaster from Cooper's threat to blow up the plane, quickly gave in to his demands for $200,000 in cash and four parachutes. He also had meals brought on board for the crew while they were refueling on the ground. After the plane took off again from Seattle, Cooper parachuted from the rear airstairs with the money and was never seen again. It was November 24, 1971. Since then, the FBI has investigated more than a thousand suspects without pinning the crime on anybody - yet.
In 2007, writer and journalist Geoffrey Gray was the first to break the story on Christiansen in his famous article from the New York Magazine. Some information for the article was provided by New York City P.I. Skipp Porteous, the founder of Sherlock Investigations . Gray's new book, Skyjack, is an overview of the crime, an exploration of all the main suspects, and with a particular focus on Christiansen. But back in 2007, the book was still a work in progress. Meanwhile, the investigation into Christiansen's life moved forward. Skipp Porteous approached Robert Blevins at Adventure Books of Seattle and asked him to attempt interviews with people Kenny Christiansen had known. Skeptical at first, Blevins finally agreed and spent the next 18 months traveling around the Northwest doing cold-call interviews. None of the people he interviewed had ever been approached before regarding the hijacking, and the results were surprising.
Blevins told the staff at Adventure Books that there was a possibility some of the people he was interviewing had actually been involved in the crime, or certainly knew the hijacker's identity. Some of these witnesses, he said, instead of throwing him off their property, began pointing fingers at each other immediately. Others seemed relieved and willingly provided key details that led to Christiansen as being the hijacker - and the identity of a possible accomplice on the ground. After gathering a great deal of circumstantial evidence, documents, and witness testimony, Blevins and Porteous concluded that Kenneth Christiansen had motive, opportunity, and just the right amount of parachute experience to make him a solid suspect, no matter what the F.B.I. said. They also knew Kenny had never been officially investigated by the Bureau. Along the way, they also identified Christiansen's alleged accomplice. This man later agreed to appear on the History Channel show Brad Meltzer's Decoded.
Blevins has said on internet forums such as Dropzone that the F.B.I. has dropped the ball occasionally on the Cooper case. He cites the time the Bureau was sure it was a man named Richard Floyd McCoy. This was later proven wrong, since McCoy was having Thanksgiving dinner in Utah at the time of the crime. They could be wrong about Christiansen as well, he says. Blevins also points out that the more-recent claim regarding 'L.D. Cooper' by Marla Cooper was another example of this problem, since Marla Cooper had claimed her 'Uncle L.D.' was obsessed with the famous Dan Cooper comic. This comic link was only made public in 2008 by the F.B.I. on their website, and that Lynn Doyle Cooper died in 1999, before anyone had made the connection. The comic was a limited run publication, printed in French, and not normally available on bookstands in the United States.
This article is a condensed version of the most important evidence against Christiansen. For the book, the witnesses' names were disguised. After it was released, their true names and addresses were given to the Seattle F.B.I. along with a PDF copy of the book. However, to this date they have not investigated Christiansen as a suspect. They dismissed him as not quite fitting the description of the hijacker. In his just-released book Hijack - The Hunt for D.B. Cooper, Geoff Gray relates the truth about the witness descriptions, which were different depending on who was doing the telling. The F.B.I. questioned everyone on the flight and people who had seen the hijacker said he was anywhere from thirty-five to fifty. He had a square jaw. Others said he had a sagging chin. Stewardesses Tina Mucklow and Flo Schaffner agreed he had brown eyes, although only Schaffner saw him without his sunglasses. Flo said he was six feet tall, Tina said maybe five-ten to six feet. Robert Gregory, a passenger on the flight, said no...he was shorter, no taller than five foot nine. None of them agree on the exact color of the hijacker's suit, or the hairstyle he wore, although they did agree he had very dark hair. Gregory thought it might have been dyed. He had an olive complexion, or was well-tanned. Eventually a few different sketches were created from the witness descriptions. Those sketches have taken on a life of their own, to the point where some Cooper investigators consider them photographs, when of course they are not.
Quick background: Ken Christiansen was a U.S. Army paratrooper at the tail end of World War 2. After the war, he went to work for Northwest Airlines, first on the remote Alaskan island of Shemya (where he met the alleged accomplice who helped him) and then later out of the Seattle division serving as a purser on the Orient route. However, after twenty years with the company, he was still only making about $500 a month and living in a rather sleazy apartment in Sumner, Washington. The allegation is that he got tired of this, and was talked into putting the screws to the airline by his good friend, whom we called 'Mike Watson' in the book. (His real name, revealed by the History Channel in January 2011, is Bernie Geestman.)
1) The House - Although his tax records show Kenny made an average of $6,000 a year or less prior to the hijacking, he paid $16,500 in cash for a house in Bonney Lake, Washington within eight months of the crime. He bought this house from Joe Grimes, who was a friend of the alleged accomplice. A year later he got the adjoining lot for an additional ten dollars.
2) The Loan - The sister of the alleged accomplice admitted both to the authors and to the History Channel that she received a $5,000 cash loan from Kenny five months after the hijacking to put a down payment on her own house. By the time Christiansen bought his own house for cash a few months later, he had already spent more than four times his annual income within nine months of the crime - while his records show he had little or nothing in the bank.
3) The Lost Weekend - In October of 2010, Helen Jones of Sumner, Washington testified that both Kenny and Mike were supposed to come to Thanksgiving dinner at her house the year of the hijacking, along with Mike's wife Katy. (Real name revealed by the History Channel: Margaret Geestman) But only Katy showed up, and she was highly pissed at her missing husband. When Mike returned a few days later, he said he'd been out camping, but wouldn't say who he was with. Helen Jones found out later that he was with Kenny Christiansen. When the History Channel interviewed 'Mike Watson' they asked him where he was that weekend. He refused to answer.
4) The Tie-Tac - Witness 'Dawn J,' the recipient of the five thousand dollar loan from Christiansen, identified a tie-tac from an FBI picture as one she had seen Christiansen wear sometimes. The picture shows the famous J.C. Penney clip-on tie and tie tac left behind on the plane by the hijacker. And she identified it before she was told that Kenny was being investigated, or before anything regarding D.B. Cooper or the hijacking was discussed. In addition, when the tie was found by the F.B.I. they noticed the tie tac had been slipped across the tie from the left side, indicating the wearer was probably left-handed. Christiansen was left-handed.
5) Chute Selection - Just before the hijacker jumped from the plane he made a choice. There was a newer sport chute available to him, and an older, military-type chute packed in an NB-6 ('Navy Backpack 6') container. He chose the NB-6, which points more to a man who hadn't jumped in a very long time, and who was probably ex-military.
6) The Picture - After Kenny's death, a strange picture was discovered in one of his old photo albums, hidden behind another picture. It shows Kenny walking in through the front door of his apartment in Sumner dressed similarly to the hijacker, and carrying a briefcase and a paper bag, the same type of items carried on board the flight by the hijacker. A time stamp on the front by the developer reads 'February 1972'. The wreath on the door indicates it was probably snapped around Christmas 1971 - or about three weeks after the crime. We believe it is a sort of staged mememto.
7) The Clippings Folder - One of the things the Christiansen family found after Kenny's death in 1994 was a folder full of newspaper clippings about Northwest Airlines. The first one is from his early days on Shemya Island. The last is an article from the summer of 1971, about five months before the hijacking. Although the Cooper hijacking was the biggest thing to ever happen to the airline, Kenny clipped nothing about it.
8) Dear Mom and Dad - Kenny's letters home to Minnesota were examined. Many contain the same theme. He was unhappy with the airline. He was broke all the time. He was out on strike again. He was digging ditches or picking apples to make ends meet. Literally.
9) Smoking Is Bad For You - The book itself was the subject of an episode on the History Channel show Brad Meltzer's Decoded. It was during the filming in Bonney Lake that Robert Blevins did two interviews with Helen Jones, a woman who had known Kenny very well. She said she remembered he smoked Raleigh cigarettes. 'I know because he saved the coupons...' Although Jones didn't realize it, this was the same brand of cigarettes smoked by the hijacker. The F.B.I. saved the butts from the ashtray he used.
10) Easy Money - A lot of people have asked how come the ransom money hasn't turned up except for the $5,800 found in 1980 on the banks of the Columbia River near Tena Bar. Easy answer: No one was actually looking for it. In a radio interview from 2008, Special Agent Larry Carr admitted that most banks found it overwhelming to compare their incoming twenties from the 34-page list of 10,000 non-sequential numbers. The majority of them abandoned this effort within three-to-six months after the hijacking. This means the money was more-or-less cold, and would be easy to launder after that time.
11) Don't Piss Off Your Ex - Part 1 - We alleged that 'Mike Watson' was Christiansen's accomplice, and at the time of the crime he was married to 'Katy Watson'. Katy is a veteran of the Iditarod and was the first woman to ever drive four draft horses abreast by herself. In five interviews between January and August of 2010, she consistently pointed to Mike as an accomplice in the hijacking. However, she was very good friends with Ken Christiansen, and denied that he could have been involved. But after Robert Blevins presented her with a photo collage that contained famous pictures of the hijacking combined with pictures of Christiansen, she hung it in her kitchen.
12) 'Kenny Left Us HOW Much?' - When Kenny's estate was settled after his death, he had $186,276 in savings at the West One Bank in Sumner, Washington. He had an additional $24,501 in his checking account. His tax records from after the hijacking show that although he was making more money than before the hijacking, he never filed more than $20,000 a year on his tax returns. The authors don't think these funds were the actual ransom, but more from land investments using the money he extorted from the airline.
13) Don't Piss Off Your Ex - Part 2 - In her second interview up in Twisp, Washington, Katy Watson pulled out a box of tugboat logs that came from a tug her ex-husband had worked on from about 1968 to 1975. The log from 1971 was missing. When Robert Blevins asked her where it was, she said her ex had broken into her home a few weeks after Kenny's death and stolen it, along with some photo books and personal papers. Coincidentally, the log could have shown that Watson was not at work the weekend of the hijacking - and he drove nearly 400 miles each way to get it. Katy Watson still has hasps and padlocks installed on some of the interior doors of the house, even today.
14) Are You Sure This Will Work? - How did the hijacker know that dropping the rear airstairs in flight would not change the flight characteristics and cause the jet to roll, invert, or crash? Because Boeing Aircraft tested this before the 727 was released. The alleged accomplice, Mike Watson, worked at Boeing during this time. Before that, he worked for Northwest Airlines, and later he went to Northwest again for a while. And at the time of the hijacking, he was working for Foss Tugs, but he may have offered Kenny a little advice on how a mid-flight escape could actually succeed.
15) Kenny Who? - Although Mike Watson gave extensive details on the relationship between he and Christiansen to the authors, he tried to change his story after History Channel contacted him. He told them he hardly knew Kenny and thought he was a dishwasher. Then he called up his sister 'Dawn J' and asked her to deny everything she had testified for the book. When the producers of Decoded discovered what he was doing, they presented photographs and other evidence to him. He admitted he was friends with Christiansen for more than thirty years and that Kenny had attended his wedding in 1968 to Katy Watson. He agreed to go on television and was interviewed for Decoded. He called Robert Blevins a liar, the book 'a work of fiction,' and refused to reveal his whereabouts over Thanksgiving 1971.
16) The Lifestyle Change - Before the hijacking, Kenny dressed neatly and conservatively. For the rest of his life after the crime, he mostly dressed in coveralls when he was off-duty at the airline. Most people in Bonney Lake thought he was a farmer.
17) The Silent One - For the next year after the hijacking, everyone at Northwest Airlines was abuzz about the taking of Flight 305. Everyone except Kenny, that is. Interviews done with his co-employees had a common theme: He never said a word about it, and stopped attending the union meetings as well.
18) It's For Camping, Dear - Shortly before the hijacking, Mike Watson purchased a station wagon from a car lot in Elma, Washington and an Airstream trailer at a bank repo sale. He only used it once, and that was when he and Kenny vanished on the Thanksgiving weekend of the hijacking. It sat on his property until a year later, when he lent it to Helen Jones' family to use after they had a house fire. When the Jones' house was repaired, he sold it to a buyer who took it to Arizona.
19) Just Doing His Job - When Katy Watson finally saw the book and realized the extent of the evidence against Christiansen, she sent a strange letter to the office of Adventure Books of Seattle. In one paragraph, she claims that even if Kenny were aboard Flight 305 that day, he wasn't hijacking the plane. He was probably just doing his normal job as the purser. The AB staff had no clue what to make of her statement, but they kept the letter.
20) Coins and Stamps - One of the things Kenny had in his estate was a large collection of stamps and gold coins. It was valued at around $300,000 and left to his family in Minnesota. The authors discovered that most of it was ordered by mail through a P.O. box down in Sumner, although Kenny had moved to Bonney Lake shortly after the hijacking.
21) No, Katy...We're Not - At the end of her second interview in Twisp, Katy Watson ran out to Robert Blevins' car as he was leaving. She stopped him and said: 'You're not going to make Kenny look bad, are you? No matter what he may have done, he was still a nice guy...' We didn't. We considered Christiansen a basically nice guy who had taken enough from the airline, and just decided to stick it to his employer.
22) An Airline Employee? Certainly not! - At the beginning of the Cooper investigation, the F.B.I. arbitrary decided it couldn't have been done by an airline employee, so they never tried looking to see if it could have been an inside job. Back in 1971, airline employees were viewed like the people who worked for Pan Am in the film Catch Me If You Can. It just never occurred to the Bureau that anyone from the airline could have been involved. Even Helen Jones said she was surprised Mike and Kenny were never questioned. This scenario turned out to be a good thing for Christiansen.
23) The Role of the Accomplice - On the Decoded program, we demonstrated how Mike Watson and Kenny may have pulled off the crime. Watson and Christiansen drove the Airstream and the wagon to Portland, where Kenny was dropped off at the airport. Then Watson returned and camped right off the freeway at Paradise Point State Park near Battleground, Washington and waited for Kenny to hike out of the woods. Most of the estimated drop zones are less than twenty miles from the interstate, and there are scores of Forest Service roads, river trails, and paved roads leading back to the freeway. Coincidentally, the place where they found the money in 1980 was just a short distance from Paradise Point.
24) I Have An Alibi - During the first half of his interview with Robert Blevins, the alleged accomplice thought Blevins was only doing a general bio on Christiansen and not investigating the hijacking. When Blevins revealed the true nature of the book, Watson claimed that when he worked for Foss Tugs in 1971 that he was gone 'ten or eleven months' out of the year. However, a senior executive at Foss said most employees were only out for a week or two at a time, and no more than two or three months for the ocean-going tugs. In that case, those employees then received substantial time off after they returned. Watson didn't work on the ocean tugs. His ex-wife testified that within weeks of Christiansen's death in 1994, Watson drove almost 200 miles to her home in Twisp, WA and broke into the house. The only things he took were some photo albums, and his Foss Tugs logbook from 1971, a document that could prove he was NOT at work over the date of the hijacking. He left the other logs behind, even though they were all in the same box.
25) The Description - One of the big knocks on Kenny as a Cooper suspect has been the eyewitness descriptions. Although they varied a bit, most people thought he was five-ten to six feet, and weighed about 180. Kenny was five-eight and weighed about 170 pounds. Also, the hijacker had hair, while Kenny was very thin on top. But in her 2010 interview, witness 'Dawn J' testified that Kenny sometimes wore a toupee. Not on the job, she said. Just socially. She added she never saw him wear it again after the hijacking. A 1972 article from the Bremerton Sun said that the F.B.I. had reason to believe Cooper was bald, although they wouldn't say why. They fanned out around Bremerton questioning people and investigated a local wig and toupee shop. When no good leads surfaced, they abandoned the effort and moved on with the investigation.
Even with all these things, which only cover a portion of the evidence, we cannot say with certainty that Ken Christiansen was D.B. Cooper. When asked to put a number on it, Blevins has said he's ninety percent sure Kenny was the hijacker. He told Seattle KIRO radio that all the evidence is there for the F.B.I. to explore:
"They could pull his Army induction records and compare his full set of prints to the ones they have in evidence. They also have a DNA sample provided to them by Skipp Porteous. Or they could just pay a visit to some of the witnesses. They're still alive..."
Related Links of Interest:
Author Geoff Gray's new book (The man who first broke the Kenny Christiansen story)
Skyjack - The Hunt for D.B. Cooper.
'Into The Blast' - How Secrecy About New Book on Skyjacker D.B. Cooper Drove Us Crazy
Press Release on Upcoming Slideshows in Auburn, Washington (PDF)
Color poster on the Slideshows - August 13-14, 2011. (PDF)
Full Video (without commercials) of the D.B. Cooper episode from Decoded.
