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QuickTake:
Nine years after the hijacking, a boy picnicking on the Columbia riverbank downstream of Vancouver discovered three bundles of $20 bills in the sand. Serial numbers proved this was part of the Cooper ransom.
How could a terrorist hijacker have become a folk hero?
The case of D.B. Cooper remains the only unsolved commercial airplane hijacking in history. Cooper is one of the reasons we have to go through TSA scanning before getting on a flight. He stole $200,000 and threatened to blow up a plane with 36 passengers on board. And yet to this day, public sympathy is mostly on Cooper’s side. Why?
Let’s begin with the facts of the strange case. What we know is that an average-sized man in a business suit walked into the Portland airport on the day before Thanksgiving in 1971. He bought a Northwest Orient airplane ticket from Portland to Seattle for $18.52 in cash under the name Dan Cooper. He also asked to make sure the plane was a 727 with a staircase that could be lowered from the tail. This was an odd request.
There were no security checks in those days, so getting on a plane was like getting on a bus. Cooper walked on board with a black attaché case and a paper bag, sat in the back row, ordered a bourbon with 7-Up, and handed a note to the flight attendant in the jump seat behind him. She dropped it unopened into her purse, thinking that he was trying to give her his telephone number. But he leaned over and said, “Miss, you’d better read that note. I have a bomb.”
The note, written in block letters with a felt pen, asked her to sit beside him. When she did, he opened a briefcase, revealing what appeared to be eight sticks of dynamite connected to a cylindrical battery with wires. He spelled out his demands. When they landed in Seattle, he wanted to be given $200,000 in cash and four parachutes — two main chutes and two reserve chutes. He also asked that the plane be refueled for a longer flight, although he didn’t yet give a destination. The flight attendant asked if Cooper had a grudge against the airlines. He laughed and replied that he had chosen that flight merely because it suited his purposes, but he did have a different grudge he wouldn’t discuss.
Northwest Orient officials in Seattle quickly withdrew a hundred bundles of $20 bills from a bank. The FBI photographed the money on microfilm to record the serial numbers. Because Cooper had asked for two sets of parachutes, it seemed that he might take a hostage, so the FBI decided to give him parachutes that actually worked. Although one of the reserve chutes they got from a skydiving school turned out to be a demonstration dummy, the others were functional. The fact that Cooper had a bomb, and not some other weapon, made the FBI decide it would be too dangerous to attempt to overpower him.
The plane circled over Puget Sound for two hours while the money and parachutes were being readied. On the ground, refueling lasted longer than Cooper liked, into the evening. Once his demands were met, Cooper let the plane’s passengers go but told the crew to stay aboard. Their instructions were to fly toward Mexico as slowly as possible, below 10,000 feet of elevation, with the cabin unpressurized, the wing flaps lowered, and the landing gear down. These seemed very strange requests.
The flight attendant later said he was polite and didn’t seem nervous at all. He chatted knowledgeably with the staff about the landscape and the plane. When one asked jokingly if she could have some of the money, he handed her a bundle of a 100 $20 bills. She quickly declined the tip, saying that the airline had a rule against accepting gratuities.
Once in the air, the flight engineer informed Cooper that their peculiar, slow flight would limit their range to 1,000 miles. They would need to refuel before getting to Mexico. After some discussion, Cooper agreed to stop at Reno on the way. He also asked that one of the flight attendants stay in the cabin with him to open the rear stairs.
In those days, the Boeing 727 had an aft staircase that lowered down from the tail to allow passengers to disembark at small airports. Cooper obviously knew that the staircase could be lowered in flight so he could bail without hitting anything or being fried by an engine.
The flight attendant worried that she would be sucked outside if she opened the back door during flight. Should she tie herself to a chair with a rope? Finally Cooper ordered her into the cockpit, saying that he would open the door himself. She last saw him cutting the cords out of one of the reserve chutes so that he could fashion a pack to carry the money.
About 20 minutes into the flight, somewhere over Mount St. Helens, a warning light alerted the crew that the aft staircase had been lowered. The pilot asked over the intercom if Cooper needed help. He responded, “No.” Three minutes later the tail rose slightly as a weight fell off the plane. When the crew landed in Reno for another refueling stop, the aft staircase was still lowered, scraping sparks across the runway. Cooper, two of the parachutes and the money were gone.
Despite many searches, no trace of Cooper or his parachute has ever been found. The U.S. Army sent hundreds of soldiers to comb the woods between Mount St. Helens and the Columbia River. The FBI collected fingerprints from the plane. They also recovered DNA from saliva on the clip-on tie he left behind. This evidence has never matched anyone in the criminal files. The FBI concluded that Cooper probably died, jumping out in a cold rainstorm at night over rough terrain. But if that’s so, where’s the body? Where’s the parachute?
Nine years after the hijacking, a boy picnicking on the Columbia riverbank downstream of Vancouver discovered three bundles of $20 bills in the sand. Serial numbers proved this was part of the Cooper ransom, but it amounted to just $5,800. One of the bundles, mysteriously, was missing 10 bills. Does this mean Cooper died in the fall, or that he survived and hid? To this day, opinions are divided.
The interesting thing about D.B. Cooper is that most people wanted him to get away. Today we would call him a terrorist. But in 1971 his sin was refreshingly original. He didn’t hurt anyone. He stole money from an airline company everyone hated. He fooled everyone and vanished into thin air.
In later years the FBI age-progressed the composite sketch of the hijacker. Thousands of people have claimed to know who Cooper is, or to be Cooper. The FBI has disproven them all. Perhaps the best known of these hoaxes is the Oklahoma woman who sold a story to the London Telegraph in 2011. She claimed that her uncle Lynn Cooper was in fact D.B. Cooper. But the woman had been only 8 years old at the time of the hijacking, living in Sisters. When her uncle Lynn returned from a Thanksgiving elk hunting trip with disheveled clothes, a confused story and no elk, the girl leapt to the conclusion that her uncle must have spent the weekend hijacking an airplane.
In fact, a lot of elk hunters come home with disheveled clothes, a confused story and no elk. This doesn’t mean they’ve been with D.B. Cooper, but more likely, with Jack Daniels. And just how clever did she think her uncle could be if he changed his first name for a hijacking, but not his last?
More recently, the children of Richard McCoy claimed that their father was Cooper. McCoy was a copycat who hijacked a plane from Denver a year after Cooper’s jump, demanded $500,000, and bailed out over Utah. He was caught with the money two days later and sentenced to 45 years in prison. The following year he broke out of the penitentiary by driving a garbage truck through the wall and was killed in a shootout with police.
More than 50 years later, McCoy’s children announced that their father had hidden the original Cooper parachute at their home in North Carolina. The parachute was of the correct style, but nothing else matched — not the physical description of the hijacker, the DNA or the fingerprints. McCoy was obviously not the real McCoy. And besides, if you were Cooper, would you gather up your parachute and save it as a memento for your children in North Carolina? No, you’d bury it.
So where were you in 1971? Do you have an alibi for the night before Thanksgiving? The original police sketch was so generic that almost anyone could have been Dan Cooper. I think that’s part of the reason he’s become a folk legend. There’s a bit of the rebel in all of us. Yes, we believe in authority, but once in a while, we want the swashbuckling outlaw to escape.
William L. Sullivan’s mystery, “The Case of D.B. Cooper’s Parachute,” is available in print, eBook and audio formats.
