Newswise — Carol Abraczinskas has spent most of her career drawing dinosaur bones at the University of Chicago, but her artistic ability and compulsive eye for detail have led to inspections that have taken her from ancient burials in Luxor, Egypt, to FBI archives in Seattle, Washington.
“It’s always been somehow through paleo. You meet somebody, or somebody sees your work and says, ‘Hey, would you do some freelance work?” said Abraczinskas, principal scientific illustrator in organismal biology & anatomy at UChicago.
That freelancing gave Abraczinskas access to some of Egypt’s great archaeological treasures and to FBI files on the unsolved case of hijacker D.B. Cooper, who disappeared 40 years ago.
The visit to Luxor came about as a freelance project she undertook for the Oriental Institute’s Epigraphic Survey Project in 1999. Abraczinskas actually began her career at the Oriental Institute Museum in 1989, doing Egyptology-related illustrations, until dinosaur paleontologist Paul Sereno hired her approximately 18 months later.
The University’s Oriental Institute invited Abraczinskas back to interview for a temporary assignment as a staff artist, which involved recording deteriorating 18th-dynasty wall reliefs at the Medinet Habu temple. For four months, Abraczinskas lived in Luxor, crossing the Nile each day to work at the temple.
“Paul was fantastic. I told him I had this unique opportunity. He was very supportive,” Abraczinskas said. “We basically just closed my office door, and he let me go and learn a new skill set,” drawing cultural artifacts instead of fossil bones.
Detective work
Abraczinskas’ entrée into the investigation of D.B. Cooper came via Tom Kaye, a paleontologist at the University of Washington’s Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. Cooper disappeared 40 years ago this Nov. 24 after hijacking a Boeing 727 aircraft and bailing out somewhere over Washington state with a $200,000 ransom.
Several years ago, FBI Special Agent Larry Carr of the Seattle Field Office recruited Kaye to take a fresh look at the case as a volunteer. When Kaye later ran into Abraczinskas at a meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, he asked if she would like to join a small team he had put together.
“The FBI invited our group to come to Seattle and look in the archive. They gave us total access,” said Abraczinskas, who will speak at the Cooper Symposium on Nov. 26 in Portland. The team returned to Seattle in August 2011 at the invitation of Special Agent Curtis Eng, who inherited the case from Carr, to take and analyze additional samples from the clip-on necktie that Cooper left on the airplane.
Abraczinskas made several important image-related discoveries in the case, one involving the FBI composite sketches of the hijacker, and another regarding the reserve chute Cooper left on the plane. Her acute observational skills helped determine the location of the money found on the present day Tena Bar site — after noticing a particular tree branch shown in multiple views — in 31-year-old photographs in the FBI archive.
Her multiple roles included conducting extensive background research on the case based on FBI archives and other historical sources, determining possible links between a comic book titled Dan Cooper and the case, and assisting with the collection and microanalysis of the tie particles. The team’s findings are available at www.citizensleuths.com.
Although Cooper’s fate remains unknown, his case presented an irresistible opportunity for Abraczinskas. As she said in an FBI video about the project, “Who isn’t interested in D.B. Cooper after hearing a little bit of the story?”
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