D.B. Cooper Was A Friend Of Mine
Will the real parachuting hijacker please stand up?
D.B. Cooper leaped from the Boeing 727 he had hijacked on Nov. 24, 1971, with a military parachute and $200,000 in ransom money strapped to his body. He vanished into the mist of a frigid Pacific Northwest night and instantly transformed himself into an American folk legend. “Dan Cooper” has since been the singular target of one of law enforcement’s all-time greatest manhunts. He also might have been the man who was like a second father to my younger brothers.
Ron Freeze served as a paratrooper during the Korean War and was later stationed in Guam instructing Vietnam-bound troops in the fine art of assault parachuting. He became one of the first civilian sport parachutists in the U.S. With thousands of jumps under his belt, he wowed crowds as a stunt pilot and skydiver at air shows. He also opened a skydiving school and was a flight instructor, aircraft salesman and mechanic, accomplished farmer and building contractor.
Then, out of nowhere, he told her, “I buried the money on my property in Saratoga.
In the early 1970s, Ron was flying DC-3s and Cessnas under the radar and across the Mexican border smuggling untold tons of marijuana into the U.S. He ended up serving three years in federal prison after his fingerprints were discovered on an aeronautical map inside a downed aircraft loaded with 1,000 pounds of Columbian Gold. Upon release, he found himself a prime suspect in the D.B. Cooper case — his background and recent stint in the joint fit the FBI profile to a T.
My mom met Ron through mutual friends in the shady underworld of the San Francisco Bay Area before he was hired to fly by the Mexican Mafia. They reconnected shortly after he was released from prison, at a pivotal point in both of their lives when they were attempting to sever entanglements with unsavory characters and former partners in crime. Together, they were able to go straight and stay straight.