On November 24 1971, a middle-aged man carrying a black briefcase purchased a one-way ticket to Seattle from Portland International Airport. He was wearing a black raincoat over a dark suit with a white shirt. He also wore a black clip-on tie with a mother of pearl tie pin.
The man identified himself as Dan Cooper but after a mistake by a newspaper, he would forever be known as D.B. Cooper, the million-dollar hijacker.
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D.B. Cooper Hijacking
Cooper boarded the aeroplane, which was about a third full and sat in the back of the passenger cabin. He lit a cigarette and ordered a bourbon and soda from the flight attendant.
Shortly after takeoff, Cooper handed a flight attendant, Florence Schaffner, a piece of paper. Assuming the man was giving her his phone number, Schaffner put the unopened note into her handbag.
Noticing her actions, Cooper leaned toward her and whispered, “Miss, you’d better look at that note. I have a bomb.”
Schaffner read the note but exactly what Cooper had written on it is unknown as he later reclaimed it. However, she did recall that the note said something about the man having a bomb in his briefcase.
Cooper demanded that the flight attendant sat in the seat beside him and she followed his orders. She then asked if she could see the bomb he was supposedly carrying.
Cooper opened the briefcase allowing Schaffner just enough time to see eight red cylinders. These cylinders were attached to wires coated with red insulation and a large cylindrical battery.
A Northwest Orient Boeing 727-100 similar to the one D.B. Cooper hijacked.
The Demands
D.B. Cooper had three main demands. He wanted $200,000 in “negotiable American currency”, four parachutes and a fuel truck waiting in Seattle to refuel the aircraft when they arrived. The money he demanded is equivalent to around $1,240,000 today.
Schaffner left her seat to relay the message to the plane’s pilot, William Scott. Scott contacted air traffic control in Seattle who passed the information onto the local and federal authorities.
The airline’s president, Donald Nyrop, ordered employees to cooperate with Cooper’s demands. He also organised for the payment of the ransom money. The passengers on the plane had no idea of the situation happening onboard. Instead, they were told there was a minor technical difficulty meaning that landing in Seatle was going to be delayed.
The aircraft circled Puget Sound for around two hours. This allowed police and the FBI time to gather the money and the parachutes Cooper demanded.
The Escape Plan
Once Cooper had been informed that his demands had been met, the plane landed at Seattle-Tacoma Airport. Al Lee, the operations manager for the airline, approached the plane. He handed over a knapsack of cash and the parachutes to one of the flight attendants, Tina Mucklow.
Once the exchange had been made, Cooper allowed all of the passengers, Schaffner and a fellow flight attendant to leave the plane. As per Cooper’s demands, the plane began to be refuelled. Whilst this was happening, the hijacker explained his plan to the cockpit crew.
He wanted to head southeast towards Mexico city but the copilot explained that for them to reach Mexico they would need to refuel again before they reached their destination. Together they decided that they would refuel again in Reno, Nevada.
With their plan finalised Cooper ordered the pilot to take off with the plane’s rear exit door open and the staircase extended. The order was refused on safety grounds. Cooper disagreed but he didn’t push the issue and the rear door was closed and the plane took off.
The Disappearance of D.B. Cooper
There were five people on board the plane; Cooper, pilot Scott and his copilot Rataczak, flight attendant Tina Mucklow and flight engineer H. E. Anderson.
Once in the air, Cooper told the flight attendant to join the rest of the crew in the cockpit. He told her to stay there and to keep the door closed. Mucklow followed his instructions and at around 8 pm she and the rest of the crew noticed a flashing light in the cockpit.
The flashing light was indicating that the aft airstair had been activated. The crew offered assistance through the intercom but their offer was quickly refused. They then noticed a change in the air pressure which indicated that the aft door was open and ten minutes later they felt the tail section of the plane move suddenly upwards. Cooper had jumped.
The plane landed two hours later. Multiple authorities surrounded the plane and an armed search confirmed that Cooper was no longer on board.
The Hunt
When the plane had set off from Seattle with Cooper and the crew on board, the authorities had deployed two fighter planes to follow. These were later joined by another three planes but due to limited visibility, as it was night and dark, none of the planes saw Cooper jump so they couldn’t pinpoint the place he had landed.
It was difficult to define an area to search as there were many factors that could determine where Cooper might have landed. The most important factor would have been when Cooper opened his parachute and that’s if he managed to succeed in opening it at all.
The FBI recreated the flight using the same flight configuration and used this information to set up extrapolations near Mount St. Helens, a few miles southeast of Ariel, Washington.
The search focused mainly on the Clark and Cowlitz counties. The FBI enlisted the help of local sheriff deputies and asked them to search the large areas of mountainous wilderness. They knocked on doors with a composite sketch that was made after talking to witnesses who had spoken to Cooper onboard the plane.
The FBI also orchestrated an aerial search along the entire flight path of the hijacked plane. However, all of the searches, whether on foot or by air, found no trace of Cooper or any evidence relating to him.
The Missing Money
When Cooper jumped out of the plane, he did so with $200,000 strapped to him. The FBI sent out the serial numbers from the stolen notes to businesses that conducted significant cash transactions such as casinos. The hope was that if Cooper spent some of the money, they could pinpoint a location.
In 1972, the serial numbers were finally made public knowledge. The airline, Northwest Orient, offered a reward to anyone that recovered any of the stolen money. They offered 15% of whatever money they found with a maximum of $25,000.
It took eight years before any of the money was found. In 1980, the Ingram family were on vacation on the Columbia River at a stretch of beach named Tina Bar, not far from Vancouver, Washington.
One of the children discovered three packets of the ransom money as he raked the sandy riverbank. The bills were very disintegrated but they were still held together by rubber bands. FBI technicians confirmed that the money was part of Cooper’s ransom money.
Two of the packets each contained a hundred twenty-dollar bills. The third packet contained ninety bills. The money was still arranged in the same order as when it was given to Cooper.
The FBI kept fourteen of the bills as evidence and after negotiations over six years, the rest was split equally between Ingram and Northwest Orient’s insurer.
Suspending The Investigation
In July 2016, the FBI announced that it was suspending the active investigation into the D.B. Cooper case. It had been forty-five years since the hijacking and there was still no evidence as to who Cooper was, where he was or even if he was still alive.
The FBI stated that they should focus their effort and resources on issues that are more important. However, their local field office will still accept any evidence deemed legitimate, especially regarding the ransom money or the parachutes.
The Cooper case has a sixty-volume case file that has been preserved for historical purposes and you can see part of the evidence gathered over the years on the FBI website which is open to the public.
