No, that wasn't an obit for D.B. Cooper that ran this week in the Vashon-Maury Island Beachcomber.
It was just in keeping with a slogan you see on bumper stickers around the island: "Keep Vashon Weird."
When Alex Layhon walked into the offices of the weekly newspaper and said he wanted to buy a 3-by-7-inch funeral notice about his recently deceased brother, Michael Layhon, there wasn't anything unusual about the request.
"I said, 'Would you like to include a photograph?" remembers Nance Scott, marketing designer at the 3,700-circulation paper.
"He gave me a sly grin and said, 'Well ... ,' and pulled out this picture from his shirt pocket. 'My brother would have loved this. He had such a great sense of humor.' "
The picture is the by-now iconic FBI sketch of D.B. Cooper, who on "a dark and stormy night" of Nov. 24, 1971, hijacked a Northwest Airlines 727 after it took off from Portland for Seattle.
On that Thanksgiving eve, the man who bought a ticket as Dan Cooper collected four parachutes and $200,000 in ransom money after the jet landed in Seattle and then ordered it to fly to Mexico, leaping out the back stairwell as the plane flew over southwest Washington.
Searches for Cooper came up empty. He gained folk-hero status. In the sketch, he's wearing wraparound sunglasses, a suit jacket, white shirt and skinny tie popular in the era.
For more on this story, visit The Seattle Times.
Copyright: The Seattle Times
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