Tuesday, July 13, 2004

Striking Out at Ground Zero

A 9/11 PHONY"” Part three in a four-day series
Earlier this year, Doug Copp was awarded $649,000, tax free, from the fund set up to compensate victims of 9/11. He says it's not enough. But it's doubtful he deserves anything. A Journal investigation found no evidence Copp did real rescue work in New York. And rescue officials say Copp's claims to having a unique body locator are highly suspect.

By Leslie Linthicum
Journal Staff Writer

Doug Copp says his small orange plastic box, which he calls the Copp Casualty Locator, can locate bodies within minutes of arriving at a disaster scene.

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Doug Copp
Click image for story photographs

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Over and over again, Copp has said he invented the machine and that there is only one like it in the world.
Copp has used the machine, he said, to pinpoint mass graves in Kosovo, to find people in collapsed buildings in Turkey, El Salvador, Taiwan and to locate many of the victims of the Swissair crash off the coast of Nova Scotia.
He said in his claim to the 9/11 victim compensation fund that he used the machine to find 40 bodies at the World Trade Center, although in an interview with the Journal he modified that to say he found parts of 40 bodies.
The machine he had in New York was a Crowcon Triple Plus off-the-shelf gas detector, according to Eric Wade, a member of the team Copp assembled to go to ground zero.
Crowcon's machines are generally used in mines, sewer pipes and other places to alert workers to combustible or toxic gases.
Tom Mandich, the company's operations manager, said the Ohio firm fits the machine with up to four sensors at a customer's request.
No one from the company could say which sensors were ordered on Copp's machine, but Mandich said buying a Crowcon Triple Plus with certain sensors does not amount to an invention.
"If all he did was use our machine, he certainly didn't invent it," Mandich said.
The machine is not designed to find human bodies, Mandich said, and would have a hard time separating out the unique components of rotting flesh from other examples of organics, which would include fuel and decomposing plant matter.
Copp has said that he has 35 patents. Records of the U.S. Patent Office show he has filed three patent applications"” for a basic casualty location sensing device and for a "detector arm" that would mount a gas sensor, a video camera and microphone"” but show no patents issued to Copp or his companies.
In New York, though, Copp did not use his detector arm. He had a Crowcon Triple Plus with his own sticker pasted over the Crowcon label.
Copp began trying to demonstrate the machine in his first minutes at the World Trade Center site, waving its wand around the debris pile and instructing firefighters to dig with their shovels in certain areas when the machine's alarm went off.
When the machine signaled that it had a hit and no body was found, Copp explained that the machine had detected tissue and blood that was imperceptible to the rescue workers in the dirt and dust.
"I was with the New York police using my machine and finding like pieces of brain and stuff like that and then we'd just put it in these white five-gallon buckets and they'd take it off," Copp said in an interview later.

Promotion video
About two months after the Sept. 11 disaster, Copp made a video to market the Copp Casualty Locator. He included footage of its use at an earthquake in Taiwan and a testimonial from his patent attorney, Pat Kelly of St. Louis, that it found a body in Taiwan.
Copp also featured its use at ground zero as proof that it worked and said his price for the machine was $19,000. Crowcon sold its machines for about $2,500.
The New York Fire Department chief in charge of recovery at the site said he had heard of the machine but it was never used in recovery efforts.
"We would have used anything that aided us in rescue or recovery if it actually worked," said Chief John Norman.
A Madison, Wis., firefighter who used Copp's machine and several of the people who traveled with Copp to New York said the machine didn't work when they tried to use it.
Rob Verhelst of Madison said he didn't find any remains with the help of the machine.
Wade, a former stockbroker and writer, had known Copp for a short time when the World Trade Center towers were struck. The former stockbroker had made a good deal of money selling an Internet domain name and was interested in investing in Copp's casualty locating machine"” if it worked.
Copp's team also included videographer John Grace, film producer Mike Miller and archaeologist Stephen Lentz.
On the second day the team was in New York, Wade and Grace went with Copp to the fire department's strategic command center on Roosevelt Island to demonstrate the machine for firefighters there. Copp wanted to show the fire department's top brass the machine worked, so he would have official access to the site, Wade said.
They demonstrated the machine on rotting meat and it did not work.
Later in the day, Wade and Grace went to ground zero to try to make the machine work.
They found a semi truck containing body bags that had been parked at the site. The back doors were open and they stuck the wand into a body bag, Grace said. The machine did not go off.
Copp said he wouldn't have expected the machine to work because the machine detects decomposition and decomposition would have been stopped when the body was chilled in a morgue truck.
Grace and Wade said they can't remember whether the truck was refrigerated, but both remember that the smell was overwhelming.
Copp said in a Web site pitch marketing the machine that it had found 19 clusters of bodies of victims of the Swissair crash off the coast of Nova Scotia in September 1998. He said it located those bodies, at depths of between 150 and 180 feet with winds up to 40 knots by him holding the wand above the water.
The machine, he said, picked up whiffs as the boat he was in slowly drifted over the crash site. Copp said his machine also located the plane's fuselage.
In a video message to the 9/11 fund, Copp said the machine located 18 bodies in 598 feet of water.
A spokesman for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which was one of the investigating agencies in the Swissair crash, said Copp showed up at the site and went out on a boat with a mountie. But he said Copp played no role in locating or recovering bodies.
"Many agencies played significant roles," Mounted Police spokesman Wayne Noonan said. "Not him."

New design
Some team members went to Copp in New York on Sept. 14 and told him the machine did not work.
Copp informed them the machine wasn't working because the filter was clogged. Later, Copp said the machine gave out because of heavy use.
Prior to Sept. 11, Albuquerque engineer Steve Harrington had been working with Copp to design a new casualty locator machine. Harrington, who did not accompany Copp's team on the first trip, ordered three more machines from Crowcon in Ohio and took them to New York aboard the Journal Publishing Co. corporate jet on Sept. 18.
Harrington said he tried to use one of the machines at the site with firefighters without success.
One instance still stands out in his mind.
Firefighters called Harrington over because they believed they had located a body underneath some rubble.
"You could smell something," Harrington said.
He said he brought the machine over and it showed no change from its ambient level.
That meant either the sensors were overwhelmed, the filter was clogged, or the machine didn't work, he said.
Harrington, who was the technician for the machine, said he cleaned the filter and tried again. Still, it did not alert.
"Our gut feeling told us something was there," Harrington said. "The sensor didn't work and we found her and dug her out. I can still see her flowered dress."
Copp maintains that Harrington did not know how to use the machine and shoved the wand in the dirt. "It's not a friggin' vacuum cleaner," he said.
Before terrorists attacked the World Trade Center, Copp, Wade, Grace and Miller had been working with Harrington's company to develop a casualty locator.
After Wade, Grace and Miller concluded Copp's technology did not work, they became involved in a company that is researching and developing a machine they hope will do what Copp said his machine would.
Copp accuses the three men of stealing his technology. They say they did not.
On a Web site describing their work on a new machine, Miller and Wade highlight their experience at ground zero, saying they went there with an "independent rescue team."
Copp's name is not mentioned.
Miller said he initially believed Copp was going to New York to try to save lives, but was disappointed.
"If he thought his machine worked and he told people it worked, then that's a shame," Miller said. "If he knew the machine didn't work and he brought it there, then that's criminal. I'm deeply sorry for any part I had in that."



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Leslie Linthicum can be reached by e-mail at llinthicum@abqjournal.com.

http://www.abqjournal.com/terror/197273fire07-13-04.htm

Sunday, July 18, 2004

Widow Tells of Copp Ordeal

By Leslie Linthicum
Journal Staff Writer
Pennsylvania widow Joanna House hoped she would never hear Doug Copp's name again.
But then she sat down at the computer in her home outside Philadelphia one night last week to check her e-mail. Her AOL newspage carried a story about the Albuquerque Journal's investigation of Copp's claim to the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund.
House clicked on the headline and said, "Doug Copp! Oh, my God. That's the guy."
What she read in the Journal story"” freeloading, exalted claims to heroism and a dubious body-sniffing machine"” brought back memories of her brief encounter with Copp four years ago.
For House, that encounter was both disturbing and expensive. House contacted the Journal by e-mail after reading the story.
Copp, reached by telephone Friday, declined to comment and referred questions to a California lawyer who did not return a call.
House said she found Copp on the Internet in May 2000 at the lowest point in her life.
Her husband, Fred, and her 14-year-old son, Paul, had drowned in the Perkiomen Creek when their canoe was sucked under the water near a dam.
Paul's body was recovered within a week. But House, her family and volunteers had searched for more than a month for Fred's body.
House was left widowed, with five surviving children and no insurance payment because the body had not been found.
"It was a desperate time for us," House said in a telephone interview. She found Copp touting his body-detecting machine on the Internet and asked for his help.
Copp, a New Mexico resident most recently, was living in California at the time.
House said Copp agreed to travel to Pennsylvania as long as she paid his airfare, hotel, meals and expenses.
House gave this account of what happened after Copp arrived in Pennsylvania:
He attempted to show the grieving family how his body-finder worked by demonstrating it on some rotting meat. It didn't alert.
Copp told the family the machine had located victims of the Swissair crash off the Nova Scotia coast"” a claim Candadian authorities told the Journal wasn't true"” among other accomplishments.
He said the machine would find her husband within a day"” they just had to take it up and down the river in a motor boat and it would alert when it detected the gases given off by the decomposing body.
The machine, Copp said, could sniff out the body from a mile away.
It didn't alert on anything the first day. (Cliff Roach, Fred House's best friend, said in an interview there were dead cats and dogs and other decaying things in the river.)
Copp said the machine needed to be fixed and the family agreed to pay for the repair.
Then Copp told Roach he could take the machine on the river and Copp spent the day in the bar, Roach said.
When it didn't alert on anything after four days, Copp told the family that Fred's body wasn't in the creek, it had washed away.
Copp went back to California and Joanna House was out about $2,500.
House said she was glad to see Copp leave.
"He was just a devastating character to be brought into our lives at that time," House said. "He was so egotistical. He was so all about himself. He had us running around for him instead of doing what we needed to do. There was no sympathy. There was no empathy."
After Copp left, Roach and others kept looking for Fred's body in the river. They found it a few days later.
Copp had left the machine behind, but Roach and House said it played no role in finding the body.
They said that Copp had told them it was the only one in the world and to insure it for $150,000 when they shipped it back to him.
They sent it back "one week mail."
A couple of weeks after Copp left, House said, she started receiving phone calls and e-mails from him.
He demanded money for his time and trouble"” about $2,000.
House said she didn't have the money to pay Copp and wouldn't anyway because he had not found her husband.
"He said my late husband was a good man and would be very disappointed in me for not compensating Doug for his time," House said. "He wrote that my other children were going to think badly of me for not doing the 'right thing.' He did his best to intimidate, shame and harass me."
Copp's parting words to House after she again refused to pay him were, "What goes around comes around."
"I saw the story," House said, "and I thought that maybe that's true. I really hope he pays for what he did this time."
Upshot of Journal report
Publish Doug Copp's name in the newspaper and this is a sampling of what you get:

A phone call from an Albuquerque businessman who says Copp owes him about $2,000 for an unpaid backhoe rental bill.

A call from a Turkish newspaper concerned that Copp was wearing a patch from a Turkish rescue team in the laid-out-on-the-bed-in-the-red-jumpsuit-with-a-rip-down-there photo that ran on the Journal's front page and in the New York Post.

An e-mail from a member of the Fairfax, Va., urban search and rescue team who says he helped to remove Copp from the World Trade Center command center.

An e-mail from a woman in Pennsylvania who says Copp took advantage of her after her husband drowned four years ago.

A call from the Bernalillo County sheriff saying, "I'd like to kick his ass. Seriously, let me have five minutes alone with him."

A call from the man who said he, not Copp, really found JFK Jr.'s body.

A challenge from "the world's most outspoken investigator of the paranormal, the psychic and the just plain weird" to Copp to prove his body-sniffing machine works.

A call from firefighters at a firehouse in Pittsburgh to offer their support"” to the Journal, not to Copp.

Loads of e-mails and phone calls from angry search and rescue professionals and volunteers who said things like "... it makes me sick to read of the fraudulent actions of those like Copp." And, "Thank you for finally exposing Mr. Copp. His antics have frustrated and embarrassed legitimate SAR volunteers for years."

And e-mails from people angry at the newspaper for picking on Copp and wasting newsprint when there are many stories that are more important.

http://www.abqjournal.com/terror/199911fire07-18-04.htm