Commentary on YouTube Live (Max Gunther)
Some commentary on the YouTube live the other night regarding the section on Max Gunther. There were a number of comments that were not factual.
There is nowhere that I know of where Clara says anything about mailing letters from somewhere else. Not in the book. Not in the Gunther notes. The letters were mailed from New York. Because Himmelsbach was on the west coast, his letter would have been routed through other places after New York.
William Smith’s Navy records show he was right handed. Why Pat is pushing that he was left handed is unknown. We have no way to know at this point if Cooper was right or left handed. The odds point to right. No one can be ruled in or out based off their dominant hand.
She claims some sort of inside information that she has on Smith. What? That he was supposedly left handed and was a nice guy? If you have info that exonerates Smith then why do you let his daughter suffer under this supposed hell she’s living in?
There was commentary that the real hijacker would not contact Gunther. Why not? He couldn’t brag to his buddies. Plenty of criminals poke the bear. Deangelo did it. Zodiac. Why not Cooper? He beat the man. He didn’t tell Max anything too revealing. Even 40 years later we are arguing over whether the info is enough to find the caller.
She mentions that William Smith’s wife would not know who Max Gunther was. My theory is that the male in the Clara saga was the one who knew who Gunther was from reading True, and that it was the man who penned the first letter. What is interesting is that Smith’s wife Dolores grew up in Bloomfield, NJ. That’s about 9 miles from where Max lived in Maplewood, NJ. Bloomfield High and Maplewood High were rivals in sports. Same school district. Her brothers played baseball against Maplewood. Also, Paul Cotton lived less than 2 miles from the Kislowski family. Max was a local guy. It’s not unusual to think that maybe they crossed paths at some point.
Pat claims no one’s mother licked stamps. This is just absurd. The Clara stamp had DNA on it. Someone licked it. It was not from being touched.
In terms of finding Max’s articles and how there was no internet back then and therefore it was hard to find info. Pat seems to forget about the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature. Libraries had this info. I have printouts of some pages from that guide that show Max’s articles. I used it extensively in grade school, high school, and college.
Pat says something about only the Oregonian and Seattle Times having articles on DB Cooper and that a housewife would not know about Cooper. For real? The whole country knew. By 1982 there were plenty of articles from many newspapers. besides, the background info on the hijacking likely came from Gunther.
Clara said that Dan tried to contact Max in the 60s. Did Max remember the article in True? Maybe. He probably had to look up the exact title again. My guess is the Ladies Home Journal article in 1971 triggered something with Dan and Clara. Men read that magazine too if it was around. I remember reading it as a kid when it was at my house. That’s where you’d get info on how women lived back then. But the reality is that it was probably in Dan and Clara’s house at some point or someone else’s. Or at a hair salon. The woman in the article was named Carol something, and changed her name to Carol Smith. Smith had a daughter named Carol. Maybe a coincidence, but you never know. The first letter reads like a man wrote it, the letter to Himmelsbach has a female ring to it. Two people. A male and female.
Pat tries to make it look like Dan would not have known who the other publishers were to contact. False. Max suggested he contact Ed Kuhn of Playboy. The other person contacted was Mark Penzer, who was the editor in chief of True Magazine. The common theme here is True Magazine.
If you listen to Pat, Max was some very vain person who was stupid enough to fall for a hoax. He had money and a good education. He had published many books. He didn’t need any of this.
From the comments section we have Mary J. claiming that William Smith’s scar would have been visible. How? It was on the palm of his right hand, face down, and in the briefcase most of the time.
There is a conversation about Clara knowing all these details of Dan’s life. Pat tries to make it sound like no wife would know that info. Of course they would know basic info, especially if she was reading off notes that Dan wanted her to convey to Gunther. There really is not a whole lot of info on Dan in a book that long. There is a lot of filler and a lot about the hijacking.
Pat says the DNA was destroyed and therefore can not be verified. It’s a raw DNA profile obtained just like any other crime. You can’t fake a raw DNA profile to point to someone and to get all sorts of matches. She is just not educated on the process.
There is a lot more to unpack about Pat’s evaluation of the Gunther story. I might have to do a blog post on it.
