D.B Cooper

On the 24th November 1971, the day before Thanksgiving, Dan Cooper bought a twenty dollar, one-way ticket from Portland, Oregon to Seattle, Washington with Northwest Orient Airlines. He paid in cash and boarded flight 305. 

Cooper was in his mid-forties, dressed in a business suit with a black overcoat, brown shoes and a white shirt. He was carrying a briefcase and a four-by-twelve-by-fourteen-inch paper bag. 

Before the plane took off, Cooper (who was sat in seat eighteen-C) ordered a bourbon and soda. The plane took off. A little after three pm, Cooper handed the stewardess a note. She placed it in her pocket and went to walk away. He stopped her and said, “Miss,  you better look at that note, I have a bomb.” Cooper proceeded to instruct the stewardess to sit next to him and opened his briefcase to show her what was inside. There were red-coloured sticks surrounded by wires. He then instructed her to write down his demands and take them to the captain.

Cooper asked for two hundred thousand dollars in, exclusively, twenty dollar bills, to be delivered to him in a knapsack by five pm. He also asked for two front parachutes and two back parachutes. Cooper also demanded that when the plane landed in Seattle, he wanted a fuel truck ready to refuel. He concluded his list of demands with the threat “No funny stuff, or I’ll do the job.”

When the flight landed in Seattle, Cooper exchanged the thirty-six passengers for the money and parachutes. Some of the crew were kept on board to help fly him to his next destination. Cooper demanded the pilot fly to Mexico City and requested that the plane stayed below ten thousand feet. During the second half of the flight, Cooper put on a pair of dark wrap-around sunglasses with dark rims. This was featured on one of the police sketches and then became quite a famous image of the hijacker. He also took off his black clip-on J.C.Penny tie.

A little after eight pm, somewhere between Seattle and Veno, Nevada, Cooper jumped out of the rear door of the Boeing 727 and was never seen again. 

The FBI began investigating and called the case the NORJAK case (Northwest Hijacking). They intensely searched the plane and examined the tie. On the tie, they found a DNA sample, but unfortunately, it didn’t lead anywhere. The FBI then released the serial numbers of the twenty-dollar bills that Cooper had stolen.

Nine years later (1980), a young boy and his dad were building a campfire on Tina Bar, when the boy found a rotting package filled with twenty dollar bills that matched the serial numbers. Five thousand eight hundred dollars were recovered. It was then theorised that when Cooper had jumped, the money had fallen into the Washougal River and made its way to Tina Bar. Many people searched the surrounding area for more of the twenty-dollar bills, but nothing more was found and the lead was dropped. 

In 1972, the FBI, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the Seattle Times all received multiple letters regarding D.B. Cooper. Some confessed to the crime, some eulogized a recently deceased D.B. Cooper and others were claiming to be his brother. In November of 1972, Donald Sylvester Murphy and William John Lewis were taken into federal custody on charges of extortion for impersonating Cooper and selling the tell-all story to the tabloids. 

The FBI had no shortage of leads all over the United States. In the first five years, they had over eight hundred suspects, but eventually, all but twenty-four were eliminated. The physical description of Cooper is thought to be very accurate as it was taken from two flight attendants who spent hours with him. They were interviewed separately on the night of the hijacking and give almost identical descriptions. Cooper was described as 5’10” to 6’ and weighing in the range of 170 to 180lbs. He was in his mid-forties and had brown eyes. He had a low voice with no particular accent and an intelligent vocabulary. 

Strangely the FBI, have no idea where the initials D.B. came from as they have no relevance to the case. When buying his plane ticket, the name used was Dan Cooper. The most popular reason for this error is a typo. 

Originally, the charge was for air piracy but that only had a five-year statute of limitations and as they had made no headway in capturing the assailant, a grand jury changed the charge to violating the Hobbs Act which has no statute of limitations. The Hobbs Act was a federal statute designed to prevent extortion. 

The FBI decided that this hijacking was a one-man job. The pilot told officials that he had decided the route the plane took to Mexico City. This ruled out an accomplice as Cooper wouldn’t have been able to coordinate a drop spot.

Suspects

Richard Floyd McCoy

Richard Floyd McCoy was the favourite suspect fo former FBI agent Russell Calame and former probation officer Bernie Rhodes. 

In April 1972, McCoy was arrested following a hijack on an aeroplane. The heist was very similar to Cooper’s heist. Both hijacked the plane and then parachuted off. Both used the rear door of a Boeing 727. Four parachutes were requested and both hijackers remained calm. They both gave notes to the flight attendants about a bomb on board. And, they both used the phrase “no funny stuff”. Both hijacking crimes were committed when Brigham Young University, where McCoy was a student, was on break. 

Additionally, it was reported that McCoy’s family identified an object that had been left by Cooper as something belonging to Richard Floyd McCoy. This item has never been publicly identified.

The FBI ruled McCoy out as a suspect, claiming that he didn’t look similar enough to the witness descriptions. However, Calame and Rhodes disagree with this. Furthermore, McCoy was home in Utah for Thanksgiving the day after the Cooper heist.

McCoy was sentenced to forty-five years in prison for his heist. He escaped jail and died in a gunfight with FBI agents.

Duane Weber

Jo Weber, Duane Weber’s wife, reported that on his deathbed, her husband had made a confession. She reported his saying “I have a secret to tell you… I’m Dan Cooper.”

After his confession, Jo revisited things that she claimed should’ve been obvious clues. Duane had been having nightmares and would talk in his sleep, often being terrified of things such as leaving fingerprints on a plane. Duane also had a knee ailment which he claimed he had got from jumping out of a plane. Duane’s handwriting was also found in the margins of a library book about D.B. Cooper. Jo recalled that Duane had also taken her to Tina Bar, where the money had been found. She also said that Duane had an old Northwest Airlines ticket for no reason. 

Ralph Himmelsbach, the former lead FBI agent on the Cooper case said of Duane Weber “He does fit the physical description. He does have the criminal background that I have always felt was associated with the case.” Himmelsbach believed that Jo’s story did have some credibility but ultimately did not believe that Duane Weber was D.B. Cooper.

Kenneth Christiansen

Kenneth Christiansen’s brother Lyle watched an episode of Unsolved Mysteries about the hijacking and became convinced that D.B. Cooper was his brother. Lyle also stated a deathbed confession, claiming his brother said “There is something you should know… but I cannot tell you.”

Kenneth was a flight purser (head flight attendant) for Northwest Orient Airlines, the same airline that Cooper hijacked. This gave credibility to the thought that it was an inside job. Lyle also claimed that his brother loved bourbon. Kenneth bought a house not long after the hijacking, however, it was, reportedly, an unassuming house and was dismissed. Lyle also showed a picture of his brother to a flight attendant that had been working that day and she agreed that of all the suspects, Kenneth was the closest. However, she also said, “I can’t say ‘yea’.” The FBI debunked Kenneth on the basis that he didn’t match the witnesses’ description. Additionally, Kenneth was a paratrooper and the FBI believed that D.B. Cooper was not a skilled jumper.

Theories

Dan Cooper did not survive the jump. In 2007, FBI agent Larry Carr took over the D.B. Cooper case. In a statement, Carr said, “We originally thought Cooper was an experienced jumper, perhaps even a paratrooper… we concluded after a few years this was simply not true.” 

Cooper jumped from the Boeing 727 with two parachutes, which only one was a functioning parachute. The other was a training chute that had been sewn shut. The parachute that Cooper used was a military parachute, which meant that it was not steerable. 

“No experienced parachutist would have jumped in the pitch-black night, in the rain, with a two-hundred-mile-an-hour wind in his face wearing loafers and a trench coat.” Agent Carr explained. 

Cooper jumped over a wooded area at night with no ground visibility as there was a cloud cover at five-thousand feet. 

However, no body or parachute was ever found which debunks this theory slightly.

Cooper was a Boeing employee. The case became popular online and the website, Citizen Sleuths picked up the investigating. They used a microscope to discover particles on Cooper’s tie. These particles were Cerium, Strontium Sulfide and pure Titanium. The lead researcher, Tom Kaye said of the discovery “These are what they call rare earth elements. THey’re used in very narrow fields for very specific things.” One place that they were used was at Boeing where they were developing an advanced supersonic transport plane.

This lead to the theory that Cooper was a Boeing employee. “The tie went with him into those manufacturing environments, for sure, so he was not one of the people running these [manufacturing machines]. He was either an engineer or a manager in one of the plants.”

The investigators on CItizen Sleuths believe that the answer to this case is stored in the memory of possibly one person in the pacific northwest who was involved in the aerospace industry at the time.

The mystery of D.B. Cooper has baffled and intrigued many people for many years. The FBI have called the search for Dan Cooper “one of the longest and most exhaustive investigations.” As of 2011, the FBI case file was over forty feet long and covered more than one thousand suspects. The case officially closed in 2016, but the FBI are still willing to listen to possible leads.