Cold Cases by Cheyna Roth

Author:Cheyna Roth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ulysses Press
Published: 2020-07-13T16:00:00+00:00

Hubris will get you every time. That’s basically what it boiled down to. Fleming thought his questions were so brilliant and expertly crafted that no one, especially not some twerpy guy in a funny hat and sunglasses, could fool him. He was wrong. Apparently Fleming didn’t realize the xeroxed copies of twenty dollar bills, his other form of “hard proof,” could be faked pretty easily, even back then.

The thing about the Fleming hoax is it showed how anyone can be conned by the allure of a good story. Fleming wasn’t some young, naïve reporter. He also wasn’t just a caricature of ineptitude you’d find in a run-down, illegitimate operation. The man had a New York Times obituary when he died in August of 2012, for crying out loud. The obituary doesn’t have so much as a whisper of the Cooper scandal. Instead, it focuses on his storied career as a civil rights reporter with the opening line, “Karl Fleming, a former Newsweek reporter who dodged bullets and choked on tear gas while covering some of the most momentous events of the civil rights era, died on Saturday at his home in Los Angeles.”330 We should all be so lucky to have our gravest mistakes forgotten in death.

The man who claimed to be the agent of D. B. Cooper and the fake Cooper were eventually indicted on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States and transportation of money obtained by fraud. William John Lewis, a.k.a. Jack Lewis, played the role of the agent. Donald Sylvester Murphy played the role of fake Cooper, decked out in a wig and sunglasses.331 And those tricky questions Fleming was so sure of? The two later admitted to getting all of their answers just by reading everything they could find on the subject from their local public library. Remember that the next time you question another millage to keep your local library open—it could have all the information you need in the event you turn to a life of crime.

But members of the press weren’t the only ones struggling with this mysterious case. In the early months after the D. B. Cooper heist, things must have been rough for the FBI. The highest ranking national investigative unit in the United States couldn’t find any trace of a guy who jumped out of an airplane after being given $200,000 and a parachute. Yes, the main concern was for the safety of the passengers, but the nation wasn’t thinking in those terms, and the FBI could not have been happy with how the collective understanding of Cooper was shaping up.

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