Local man follows D.B. Cooper case with a particular interest

By Jayson Jacoby

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A Baker County man has been watching with particular interest, and insight, the prodigious publicity this week regarding the famous case of skyjacker D.B. Cooper.

Jerry Thomas, who has lived on a rural property near Baker City for four years, has been searching for evidence of Cooper’s fate for more than 20 years.

Thomas has devoted considerable time since 1988 — “thousands of hours, at least,” he said — to tramping through hundreds of square miles of the dense forests of Southwestern Washington, the area where Cooper jumped from a 727 airliner on the night of Nov. 24, 1971, with $200,000 in $20 bills.

“It would have taken more than a miracle” for Cooper to have survived, Thomas contends.

Which explains why he doubts the source of this week’s attention — the FBI investigating what it calls a “credible” lead — will solve the Cooper case.

That lead involves a suspect who died more than a decade ago.

FBI officials are testing items that belonged to the suspect to see if they can match either fingerprints or DNA to samples that Cooper left.

Police found DNA on a clip-on tie that Cooper left in the plane, and fingerprints on one of the parachutes that Cooper didn’t take with him.

Thomas, 59,  said the FBI already has Wilson’s fingerprints because he had served time in prison.

He doesn’t know whether the agency has compared Wilson’s prints with Cooper’s.

Nor is Thomas sure why Wilson didn’t surface as a suspect early in the Cooper investigation.

“He served in the Navy and fit the Cooper profile to a T,” Thomas said.

Thomas said he has discussed Wilson with retired FBI agent Ralph Himmelsbach, who led the Cooper investigation for many years.

Himmelsbach serves as a second connection, albeit a tenuous one, between the Cooper case and Baker County.

Himmelsbach’s brother, Jesse Himmelsbach, served as Baker County district attorney from 1956 through 1980, and was a longtime community leader. Jesse Himmelsbach died on Feb. 11, 1995.

Thomas, who retired from the U.S. Army after serving in the infantry, including a tour in Vietnam, and as a drill sergeant and survival instructor, is convinced that, other than a DNA or fingerprint match, the only way to advance the Cooper investigation is to find physical evidence in the Washington woods.

To that end, he has waded streams, climbed mountains and poked around in abandoned mine tunnels searching for a scrap of parachute, some of the ransom money, perhaps even Cooper’s body or bones.

In 1980 a boy playing along the Columbia River near Portland found several dozen of the $20 bills that Cooper had in a bag when he jumped. But that discovery only added to the mystery.