The bulk of the hundreds of airline hijackings occurring in the 1960s and ‘70s were associated with international terrorists or political dissidents, but arguably the most famous skyjacking was committed solely for money.

Shortly after 2:00 p.m. on November 24, 1971, a man at the Portland, Oregon, International Airport purchased a one-way coach ticket to Seattle, Washington. Having given the name of Dan Cooper, he was the last of the thirty-six passengers to board the plane, a Boeing 727, at 2:45. Approximately five-and-a-half hours later, he was the last passenger to exit the aircraft, having done so in dramatic fashion.

The man who had given a single $20 bill to board Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 had parachuted out while strapped with ten thousand $20 bills (i.e. $200,000.) His leap of faith resulted in one of the greatest mysteries of the twentieth century as what became of him, as well as his identity, are still unknown.

Because of a newspaper error, the skyjacker who committed the only unsolved air piracy in commercial aviation history is etched in lore as D.B. Cooper.

“D.B. Cooper”

D.B. could have stood for dressed (in) black or brown as those were, with the exception of his white shirt, the colors of the skyjacker’s entire attire; his raincoat, suit, necktie, and mirrored sunglasses were all ebony and his shoes were either black or dark brown. He carried only an attaché case, also black, and a brown paper bag.

Upon sitting in seat 18E in the airplane’s rear, he ordered a bourbon and 7-Up.

The Man In Black

Having come from Washington, D.C., Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 had made intermediate stops in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Great Falls and Missoula, Montana, before its scheduled thirty minute “milk run” from Portland to the Seattle-Tacoma (Sea-Tac) International Airport.

The Flight 305 crew consisted of (second picture, from left to right) Flight Engineer Harold Anderson, First Officer Bill Rataczak, Captain and Pilot Bill Scott, and Flight Attendants Tina Mucklow, Florence Schaffner, and Alice Hancock.

In an effort to combat the surges in airline hijackings, the number of sky marshals on commercial flights had recently been greatly increased to 1,500-1,800, but no such officers were aboard Northwest Flight 305, and there were no security or identity checks for domestic flights at the time.

   

The Flight 305 Airplane And Crew

Soon after Flight 305’s takeoff at 2:50, the passenger in the back seat handed a note to Florence Schaffner. The twenty-three-year-old rolled her eyes and put it in her pocket believing he was another lonely older man slipping her his phone number. After he insisted she read it, Florence’s demeanor went from annoyance to fear. The man was not trying to pick her up; he was instead threatening to blow-up the plane.

Neatly handwritten with a felt tip pen in all capital letters, the note read something to the effect of “Miss– I have a bomb in my briefcase here and would like you to sit by me” or “Miss—I have a bomb in my briefcase and want you to sit by me.” One account holds it read “I have a bomb in my briefcase. I will use it if necessary. I want you to sit next to me. You are being hijacked.”

The man then opened his briefcase to display, by Florence’s count, eight red sticks of apparent dynamite attached to wires and a large cylindrical battery. He held up a gadget and a wire, saying connecting them would cause a detonation.

After taking back his note, the man ordered Florence to write down his verbally dictated demands: $200,000 in twenty dollar bills in a knapsack along with four parachutes, two safety front pack and two main back pack. The plane was to remain airborne until the items were delivered and the other passengers were not be told of the hijacking. Upon the plane’s landing in Seattle, it was to immediately be re-fueled on the runway and not be taxied to the terminal. Once these criteria were met, the passengers would be released.

Florence was instructed to deliver these demands to the flight crew. Captain Scott informed air traffic control and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) of the skyjacking, and Northwest Orient President Donald Nyrop authorized the ransom payment.

As most dynamite sticks are brown or beige colored, the FBI believed the red sticks Florence saw in the man’s briefcase were instead likely highway or railroad flares, but they did not call his bluff because they could not be certain.

Florence Is The First To Learn

As the money and parachutes were being assembled, Captain Scott circled Puget Sound in a holding pattern over the following two hours. Flight 305’s passengers were told the delay was due to minor mechanical difficulties.

The hijacker, meanwhile, ordered a second bourbon, smoked several cigarettes, and chatted with Tina Muckow, who he insisted remain at his side. She said he was polite and calm and appeared familiar with Seattle and the surrounding communities as he had accurately noted Tacoma and the nearby McChord Air Force Base.

Tina Talks To The Skyjacker

At 5:46, with the items collected, the plane was permitted to land on a remote partially-lit Sea-Tac runway. As the fuel was being pumped, the parachutes and money, with every serial number of the 10,000 $20 bills having been recorded, were brought to the aircraft by Northwest Orient Seattle Operations Manager Al Lee and loaded aboard by Tina via the plane’s rear.

The skyjacker complained of the money being delivered in a standard canvas cloth bank bag instead of his ordered knapsack. Tina observed him using a pocket knife to cut the canopy from one of the parachutes and stuff some of the money into the empty parachute bag in an apparent improvised effort to transport his pilfered loot.

Appearing to be familiar with the 727’s typical refueling time and procedures, the skyjacker expressed frustration upon learning of a problem requiring two additional trucks to fill the aircraft. Once the plane was fueled, the passengers were allowed to depart, as were flight attendants Florence Schaffner and Alice Hancock. The rest of the flight crew were kept aboard.

An FAA official’s request for a meeting with the skyjacker aboard the aircraft was rejected.

The Plane Is Loaded And Refueled

Now having the cash and chutes he had demanded, the skyjacker ordered Captain Scott to resume flying to a specified locale under very specific conditions: to Mexico City at a maximum altitude of 10,000 feet, and a slow airspeed of two-hundred miles-per-hour with the wing flaps lowered to 15°. To make that over 2,800 mile trip, the Captain conveyed the craft would again need to refuel; he suggested doing so in either Phoenix, Arizona, or Reno, Nevada.

The man in black agreed to a pit stop at the Reno-Tahoe International Airport, seven-hundred miles south of Seattle.

The Plane’s New Course

The skyjacker had also ordered that the plane be flown with its landing gear and rear stairwell down, but he relented after Captain Scott was adamant that the craft could not fly with any doors even slightly ajar.

At roughly 7:40 p.m., with the autopilot implemented for low altitude flying, the Boeing 727 was again airborne, now heading south in deteriorating weather of clouds, showers, and winds directly in its flight path. The pilots of two jet fighters from McChord Air Force Base and another of a Lockheed T-33 trainer diverted from an Air National Guard mission followed behind in an “S” (slow) flight pattern to stay out of view.

Flight 305 Is Again Airborne

Shortly thereafter, Tina was ordered to go to the cockpit, close the curtain between the coach and first class sections, and to remain there with the rest of the crew. As she made her way, she caught a quick glimpse of the man tying what appeared to be a piece of rope to his waist over what she thought was the concocted bag holding the money she had seen earlier.

Just after 8:00, while flying over far south Washington at the skyjacker’s ordered elevation and velocity, the plane began experiencing barometric fluctuations and rapid changes in air pressure. The flashing light on the controls indicated why: the rear exit door and stairs were being opened.

When Tina peeked into the cabin approximately two minutes later, she found the aft airstair completely open and the man no longer on board, having apparently parachuted out of the aircraft.

Hindered by the inclement weather and unable to maintain such a low speed for long, the F-106 and T-33 pilots had had to circle around the hijacked plane. They had not seen the man jump, nor had their radar detected a deployed parachute.

With its aft stairwell ajar, the plane landed safely in Reno at 11:02 p.m. After a thirty minute search, an FBI bomb squad declared the cabin safe. Subsequent examinations of the plane found sixty-six latent fingerprints which were ultimately unidentified. The ransom notes, the bomb, and the money were gone.

 

The Plane And Flight Crew Land Safely In Reno

The only personal items the skyjacker left on the plane were his black clip-on necktie with a gold tie-clip having a circular mother-of-pearl setting in its center. Its non-retrieval was perplexing as he had been careful to avoid leaving other evidence, such as taking back his ransom note and ordering Tina to return his empty matchbook after he had used his last match to light a cigarette.

The FBI determined the tie had been sold exclusively at JCPenney department stores before being discontinued in 1968.

The Skyjacker Had Taken Off His Necktie

And Had Taken Off Without It

A single strand of limb hair and another of brown head hair were retrieved from the headrest of seat 18E, as were the filter tip butts of eight Raleigh Cigarettes from the armrest ashtray.

The glass from which the hijacker had drunk his bourbon, however, had been mixed with others before it could be procured.

Northwest Orient Flight 305 Seat 18E

Where The Skyjacker Sat

Two of the four parachutes ordered by the skyjacker were found on board the plane: an unopened main chute and an opened reserve safety chute having three shroud lines cut from the canopy.

Also left behind was the canvas courier bag in which the money had been delivered. Because it could not be securely closed, the aerial descender had likely ad-libbed by cutting the thirty feet of cord from the abandoned reserve parachutes and removing some of the suspension lines to serve as a makeshift handle to hold his fashioned bank bag while he was literally in the air. This is likely what Tina had last seen him tying around his waist.

   

The Unused Parachutes And Canvas Bags

The man had jumped with the other main and reserve parachutes. It was later learned the latter’s panels had been sewn shut as it was intended for classroom demonstrations only; it was probably discarded by the airborne skyjacker, thus leaving him reliant on the other parachute, a smaller twenty-foot military-type nylon Navy Backpack Six 6 (NB 6), for landing.

No photos were taken of any of the parachutes before they were loaded onto the plane.

A Navy Backpack Six 6 (NB 6) Parachute

The skyjacker appeared to have known that the Boeing 727 was one of the few commercial planes of the time having rear stairs and that there was nothing to prevent them from being deployed during a flight. Such aircraft are usually flown between five-hundred-thirty-five and five-hundred-ninety-three miles-per-hour, but he also appeared aware that they were one of the few planes that could fly “slow and low” without stalling.

With the plane’s wing flaps set at 15°, the jet speed was reduced to no more than two-hundred-miles-per-hour, making for a safer jump, and any height over the specified 10,000° altitude would have pressurized the cabin, making it more difficult to open the stairs.

Investigators theorized the skyjacker had obtained his Boeing 727 basic flight knowledge from having served in the armed forces (probably the Air Force) during the Vietnam War, when such planes were extensively used for transporting personnel and supplies and sometimes also used in emergency evacuation flights.

The skyjacker had said he would not need the instructions that came with the parachutes. Because he had chosen the military-style parachute for his solo aerial flight and had put it on as if it were, in Tina Mucklow’s words, “second nature,” it was also speculated he had been a military paratrooper as opposed to a civilian skydiver.

Civilian parachutists generally jump out of planes at around ninety miles-per-hour, but military paratroopers leap at one-hundred-twenty to one-hundred-fifty miles-per-hour. Although the Boeing 727 was traveling at nearly two-hundred-miles-per-hour, many aerial descenders say the jump was doable, though they acknowledge the harsh conditions of rain, swirling winds, -7°air temperature, and -69° wind chill at that height would have made the opening of the parachute and grabbing of the ripcord more difficult and that cold weather often causes a parachutist to panic.

Paratroopers often jump with equipment strapped to them; most in combat carry between seventy to one-hundred-fifty pounds of additional gear. They do not believe the extra twenty-two pounds of money would have hindered a skilled jumper.

Some investigators and paratroopers and parachutists alike, however, believe that while the skyjacker likely had a military background and some familiarity with parachutes, he was not a paratrooper or an experienced skydiver, because such trained people would have recognized a defective parachute and not used it. In addition, the NB-8 parachute he chose was more uncomfortable and harder to open than the others.

This has led to speculation that the individual may have been an Air Force aircraft cargo loader, a job which would have provided him with aviation knowledge, experience in basic jump training and use of emergency parachutes, but not the skills to have made a jump in less than ideal weather conditions.

Perhaps A Little Of Both

The implementing of the autopilot enabled the tracking of the plane’s precise flight path. Based on the assumption that the skyjacker had likely leaped out when the pressure change was initially reported at 8:10 p.m., Boeing aviation experts calculated his probable “Drop Zone” to a four-by-six mile area between the Lewis River and Lake Merwin, a section encompassing twenty to forty-five miles north of Portland, Oregon, in southwest Washington’s Cowlitz County, near the southernmost outreach of Mount St. Helens.

The Believed “Drop Zone”

The artificial Lake Merwin’s three-hundred-thirteen-feet high and 1,250-feet wide Merwin Dam was laced with bogs and thickets but was beset with bright lights that could have provided a landmark even in the low cloud cover.

In the days afterward, a large white object was reported floating in the lake, but it was not retrieved and search parties were unable to locate it later. A fisherman was also purported to have pulled a parachute shroud line out of the lake only to have lost it as well.

Further analysis of the strong westerly winds created an expanded search area of between twenty-four to twenty-eight square miles to the east.

This photo is from an Army National Guard helicopter involved in the search. Lake Merwin and Merwin Dam are in the upper right.

Aerial View Of Lake Merwin And Surrounding Areas

Reporter James Long of the now-defunct Oregon Daily Journal mistakenly identified the Flight 305 skyjacker as D.B. Cooper, and the name was used in stories picked up by UPI (United Press International). Although the error was quickly corrected, the name D.B. Cooper stuck.

A man named Daniel Boile Cooper, who went by D. B. Cooper, lived in The Dalles, eighty miles east of Portland. He had previously been arrested for public indecency and loitering, but he was soon cleared as a suspect.

Most of the Flight 305 passengers could not recall the man calling himself Dan Cooper, nor could Dennis Lysne, the ticket agent who had sold him his fare. The skyjacker’s physical description was based primarily on the recollections of Florence Schaffner and Tina Mucklow and, to a lesser degree, the few passengers who had briefly glimpsed him.

Initial Composite Of “D. B. Cooper”

Cooper had taken off his sunglasses during the flight. Appearing to be in his mid-forties, he was generally described as between five-feet-ten-inches and six-feet-tall, weighing between one-hundred-seventy and one-hundred-eighty pounds, and having a thin but athletic build. He was Caucasian with an olive complexion, brown eyes, dark conventionally styled hair and a receding hairline. He spoke with what sounded like a Midwest accent, though Northwest passenger Robert Gregory believed he may have had Native American or Mexican American features.

Created by FBI artists, these images, called Composite A, were the first sketches made flowing questioning of the flight crew and passengers. All agreed they did not resemble the hijacker.

Composite A

Composite B was created in an effort to more accurately depict Cooper’s age, skin tone, and face shape. The witnesses agreed these sketches were more accurate, but that they showed an older man with a lighter complexion than the hijacker.

Composite B

Tina Mucklow and the passengers who had seen Cooper believed these revised images bore a close resemblance.

Revised Composite B Sketches

Florence Schaffner however, believes these composites made by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department forensic artist Mahlon Coleman are more accurate.

Another Artist’s Renderings Of D.B. Cooper

FBI profilers concluded “D. B. Cooper” was most likely not a common criminal nor was he an alcoholic, as he had only drunk two glasses of bourbon aboard the plane; a habitual drinker, under such strenuous conditions, would probably have had the need to consume more. They believe Cooper        was educated as he spoke well and because the typical Raleigh cigarette smokers of the time were upscale and bourbon and 7-Up were a popular drink amongst the chic crowds.

It was also believed the individual was in a desperate financial state and had committed the skyjacking solely for the money without any political motive.

No recent reported missing persons from the area fit D.B. Cooper’s description or bore a resemblance to any of the composites.

   

Created Images Of The FBI’s Combined Renderings

Many investigators believe no matter who D.B. Cooper was or what his background was, he would have been gravely injured no matter where he had landed, and that he had either drowned in the frigid waters or perished in the rugged and heavily wooded terrain. Like many of the parachutists however, survivalists also believe he could have conquered the elements if he had been properly prepared.

What Cooper wore under his business suit and what he had in his pockets were paramount to his survival. If he had landed in the water, his parachute could have been used for flotation, but, as it was late fall, the water was very cold and he would have needed to get to shore within a few minutes. He should have been dressed warmly, probably in a wetsuit to slow down heat loss, or, at the least, wearing long underwear.

He also should have been carrying a few small but vital items to serve as survival gear, such as a knife of other cutting tool and some form of combustion device such as a cigarette lighter to provide further warmth. These may have been inside the brown paper bag he had carried onto the plane along with other beneficial items such as gloves or goggles, but it appeared too small to hold jump boots, which would have reduced his chances of serious injury upon landing.

In the months following the skyjacking, six letters signed D. B. Cooper were mailed to multiple major newspapers.

The first letter, received by the Reno Gazette on November 29, five days after the skyjacking, was a cut-and–paste note reading, “Attention! Thanks for the hospitality. Was in a rut.”

Having been addressed in faintly hand-written pencil to “Reno Newspaper, Reno, Nev” the letter was mailed from Oakdale, California, approximately seventy-five miles southeast of Sacramento.

First Letter

The following day, a letter handwritten in ink and sent to the Vancouver Province stated “I enjoyed the Grey Cup game. Am leaving Vancouver,” and asserted the FBI’s composite drawing was inaccurate.  It had been mailed from Vancouver.

Second Letter

Letter #3, postmarked from northern Oregon, was mailed to the Portland Oregonian on December 1. Comprised using letters cut from Playboy, it read, “Am alive and doing well in hometown P.O. The system that beat the system.”

Third Letter

A fourth letter, mailed from Sacramento on December 1 to the Reno Gazette, had text pasted from newspaper clippings reading, “Plan ahead for retirement income.”

Fourth Letter

The fifth letter, typewritten and postmarked from Seattle, was a multiple-copy mailing sent to the The Seattle Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. It was typewritten and contained what some have deemed supposed codes.

Fifth Letter

Mailed from Jacksonville, Florida, on March 28, 1972, thirteen weeks after the skyjacking, the sixth and final letter was sent to The Oregonian. The self-proclaimed skyjacker said he was alive and had just returned from the Bahamas. Some claim this letter may also contain a hidden code.

Sixth Letter

The FBI deemed all of the letters hoaxes written by multiple attention-seekers.

Authenticity Dismissed

All of the aerial and ground searches involving the FBI, Army, Air Force, and National Guard conducted into April 1972 failed to uncover any evidence relating to the skyjacking of Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305.

Thousands of former pilots, paratroopers, and cargo loaders were investigated, but no clear suspect emerged.

No clues to the Flight 305 skyjacking surfaced until November 1978, seven years after the fact, when a plastic placard printed with instructions for lowering a Boeing 727’s aft stairs was found by deer hunter Carroll Hicks near a logging road approximately thirteen miles east of Castle Rock, Washington, twenty to twenty-five miles north of the Lake Merwin area where Cooper was believed to have landed, but within Flight 305’s basic flight path. The sign was confirmed to have been from the skyjacked plane’s lower stairwell.

Fifteen months later, an even bigger clue relating to the skyjacking was found.

The Sign From The Aircraft

The money delivered aboard the Boeing 727 had been assembled in one-hundred rubber banded straps of one-hundred $20 bills totaling $2,000 per strap. With the aid of Seattle’s Seafirst Bank, the FBI and local police had recorded the serial numbers of the 10,000 bills on a Recordak, the first commercial microfilm system.

On February 10, 1980, the Ingram family of Vancouver, Washington, was vacationing at the Tena Bar Beachfront along the Columbia River, approximately ten miles northwest of the city. As they were preparing a barbecue and digging a fire pit on the river’s shore, eight-year-old Brian found three wads of water logged and greatly deteriorated money dredged in the mud. The rubber band-bound cash was in two bundles of one-hundred twenty-dollar bills, and a third packet of ninety such bills, comprising two-hundred-ninety-four bills totaling $ 5,800.

Some of the bills were too degraded to identify, but most in the middle were legible. Their serial numbers confirmed they were among those that had been delivered aboard Flight 305, and they were also still compiled in the same order as when packed.

Brian Ingram And Some Of The Found Money

The locale was one-hundred-sixty-five miles south of Seattle, twenty miles southwest of Cooper’s supposed jumping point, and in the opposite direction of where the wind was blowing. Geologists determined the bundles were sitting above an area that had been dredged by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1974, meaning the loot had arrived on shore at least two-and-a-half to three years after the skyjacking.

Some theorized Cooper had returned to the area and had buried the bundled bills to taunt authorities, but an Army Corps of Engineers hydrologist determined they had floated freely into the Columbia River from one of its many connecting tributaries before drifting downstream and ultimately landing onshore.

Extensive digs in the area found no more money.

The finding supported an alternate theory of Cooper’s having landed father southeast near the Washougal River, which merges with the Columbia River upstream from the discovery site, and not in or near Lake Merwin, the Lewis River, or any downstream tributaries from Tena Bar.

The Washougal Valley and the surrounding areas were subsequently searched but produced nothing relating to the Cooper case. The FBI believes any possible physical clues were probably destroyed in the May 18, 1980, eruption of Mount St. Helens.

A New Suspected Drop Zone

In 2009, a team of analysts led by paleontologist Tom Kaye of Seattle’s Burke Museum of National History and Culture concluded Cooper had not landed near the Washougal River, but instead approximately twenty miles southwest of the original drop zone.

When he is believed to have jumped at 8:10 p.m., the flight path showed Cooper would have been directly over the Lewis River, into which Kaye says he would have landed if he had pulled his parachute cord while only a couple of thousand feet or so from the ground. If he had instead pulled the cord immediately or shortly after jumping, he would have had a long drift and likely ended up in Lake Merwin. Either way, the swirling winds, low cloud cover, and his non-maneuverable NB-8 parachute would have given him little if any chance of changing course, leading Kaye to conclude Cooper had landed and perished in the frigid waters, and that his semi-buoyant body floated some twenty miles into the Columbia River where, within a few days, it was either sucked by its currents into the Pacific Ocean or became snagged on a ship’s propeller.

Kaye believes Cooper’s concocted parachute bank bag also became tangled on a ship traveling on the Columbia. As it was carried upstream, he theorizes the bag split open and the money spilled out. Over the course of several months, three of the bundles floated to the Tena Bar sandbar, approximately twenty miles from the confluence of the Lewis and Columbia Rivers, where they were found covered in sand over eight years later and, Kaye’s team determined, one-hundred-fifty feet free from the 1974 dredging.

Diatoms (microscopic star-shaped algae) on some of the bills were shown to be from the spring species, indicating the cash had entered the river several months after the November 1971 hijacking.

As none of the other ninety-seven bundles of money totaling $194,200 has ever been found in circulation, Kaye and his team believe they may have also have drifted or been carried by a ship into the Pacific Ocean.

Where Is The Rest Of The Money?

The cigarette butts Cooper had left aboard the airplane were destroyed while in the possession of the Las Vegas field office sometime before 1998 without having been tested for DNA.

The two single hairs retrieved from the headrest are also no longer available for comparisons. The limb hair was disposed after the FBI Crime Laboratory determined it of no use, while the brown head hair sample was preserved on a microscope slide which was later lost.

In 2001, however, small amounts of three partial DNA profiles were extracted from Cooper’s clip-on necktie. Kaye and his team also identified small particles of Lycopodium pollen spores and unalloyed titanium on the tie along with minute traces of the chemical elements aluminum, antimony, bismuth, cerium, the chemical compound strontium sulfide, and titanium-antimony alloys. The finding of these metals and rare-earth particles suggests Cooper may have worked for Boeing or another aeronautical engineering company, at a chemical manufacturing plant, or at a metal fabrication and production facility.

In the 1970s pure (unalloyed) titanium was used only in aircraft fabrication facilities or at chemical companies combining it with aluminum to store the most corrosive substances. Cerium and strontium sulfide were used by Boeing’s supersonic transport development project and by the Portland factories Tektronix and Teledyne in the manufacturing of cathode ray tubes. Some suggest the titanium-antimony alloys are linked to the joint-venture metals manufacturing company and Boeing contractor Rem-Cru Titanium Inc.

Tests Of The Tie Yield Surprising Findings

While many agree with Tom Kaye’s conclusion that D.B. Cooper died on the evening of the skyjacking, many others, perhaps even more, believe he survived.

Lack of potential suspects has never been a problem in the investigation of America’s most noted act of air piracy.

The goal of investigators, generally, is to get a suspect to confess to a crime. In the skyjacking of Northwest Orient Airline Flight 305, however, upwards of two-hundred people “admitted” (some more accurately boasted) of being D.B. Cooper. Many of these were “deathbed confessions,” none of which could be confirmed.

With several other suspects, there is or was enough evidence to suggest that they could have been the skyjacker, but there is no smoking gun to conclusively determine so. Included amongst this group is a copycat hijacker, a noted con man, a Cooper admirer, a former Green Beret, several paratroopers, an airline employee, a family annihilator, men with personal grudges, pilots with alleged covert connections, and a man who became a woman.

Many Have Boasted Of Being D. B.

At least fifteen acts of a similar nature were committed in the year following the Northwest Orient Flight 305 skyjacking, five of which involved similar parachute escapes from a plane. The most noted of these copycat crimes employing the Cooper Blueprint of commandeer an aircraft, demand a ransom and parachutes, and then take the money and jump, occurred five months later, on April 7, 1972.

Having purchased a ticket under the alias James Johnson, thrity-one-year-old Richard McCoy, Jr. brandished a handgun and what appeared to be a hand grenade upon boarding United Airlines Flight 855 bound from Denver to Los Angeles. Akin to Cooper’s modus operandi, he demanded $500,000 and four parachutes, and released the passengers once the items were boarded.

The former Green Beret and Vietnam War helicopter pilot then ordered the aircraft return to the skies, diverting it to San Francisco International Airport. Shortly thereafter, McCoy, who had also become a skydiver while serving with the Utah National Guard, parachuted out of the plane, also a Boeing 727 with aft stairs, over Provo, Utah, where he was living at the time.

Richard McCoy Jr.

An acquaintance suspected McCoy of the skyjacking as he had boasted of doing a D. B. Cooper. An FBI search of his home two days later found a parachute jump suit and all but $30 of the stolen $500,000 in a duffel bag stuffed into a cupboard. His handwriting was matched to the hijacker’s handwritten instructions and his fingerprints to a magazine both left aboard the plane.

McCoy was convicted of air piracy and sentenced to forty-five years in federal prison. He escaped two years later, in August 1974; after three months on the lam, he was killed in a shootout with the FBI.

McCoy’s Ploy Fails

The skyjacking of United Airlines Flight 855 was a virtual carbon copy of that of Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305, and many investigators felt Richard McCoy bore a resemblance to the D.B. Cooper composites. The Northwest flight attendants, however, were certain he was not their real McCoy. He also, unlike Cooper, spoke with a lisp, was younger than Cooper’s estimated age, and his fingerprints were not matched to any found on Flight 305.

Some accounts say McCoy was confirmed to be having Thanksgiving dinner with his family at his home at the time of the Northwest skyjacking, while others say he was proven to have been in Las Vegas. He was cleared by the FBI of the Northwest skyjacking, but many independent researchers still view him as possibly having been D. B. Cooper in part because his family believed the tie clip left on the plane was his.

A Cooper Copycat

Richard McCoy’s successfully leaping out of a plane at 16,000 feet, 6,000 feet higher than Cooper (albeit in much nice weather), suggests the latter could also have survived.

The other four men who had parachuted out of their respective aircraft had also lived to tell while sustaining only small injuries and minor bruises. Three of those jumps were made in similar adverse weather conditions to Cooper’s and two had been from other Boeing 727s.

All of the copycat hijackers were quickly apprehended. The flight attendants were also certain that none were the Flight 305 skyjacker, and all were also ultimately cleared by the FBI.

Convicted con man Bryant “Jack” Coffelt boasted of being many things, ranging from a government informant, the chauffeur and confidant of Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith, the great-grandson and last undisputed descendant of Abraham Lincoln, and of having been D. B. Cooper.

Coffelt claimed he had landed near Mount Hood, approximately one-hundred miles south-southeast of the Drop Zone sans the $200,000, having lost it in flight. He also said he had hurt his leg during the act, and he was reportedly in Portland in the days afterward having sustained leg injuries consistent with a skydiving mishap.

In the year following the hijacking, Coffelt, though his former cellmate James Brown, unsuccessfully tried to sell his story to a Hollywood production company. The FBI determined his account differed in several details from publicly withheld information and concluded his claims of being D. B. Cooper had no merit.

Brown, nevertheless, continued peddling the story for many years after Coffelt’s death in 1975.

Jack Coffelt

In his many years of military service in the Marine Corps, Army, and Air Force, William “Wolfgang” Gossett was trained in parachute jumping and wilderness survival. A veteran of both the Korean and Vietnam Wars, he was obsessed with the Northwest skyjacking and was rumored to have shown his sons a key to a safe deposit box in Vancouver, British Columbia, which he claimed contained the pilfered money.

Gossett died in 2002. He was cleared of being D. B. Cooper because he was not believed to been in the Pacific Northwest at the time of the skyjacking.

William Gossett

The most unusual and the most humorous D. B. Cooper claim centers around World War II veteran and Merchant Marine Robert Dayton. In 1969, two years before the skyjacking, he had a sex change operation and began going by the name of Barbara.

A paratrooper and amateur pilot, Dayton told friends he, while re-representing himself as a man, committed the skyjacking because of his anger toward the airline industry for denying his repeated attempts to become a commercial pilot. He claimed to have buried the bulk of the money in a cistern near Woodburn, Oregon, seventy to eighty-five miles south of the Drop Zone, and to have planted the three bundles of bills found in 1980 to regenerate interest in the case. After the statute of limitations for the hijacking was extended, however, he recanted his claims.

Dayton, who died in 2002, is dismissed as a credible D. B. Cooper candidate because he did not fit the physical description of the hijacker and the stewardesses were certain he was not the culprit.

Robert Dayton

As a competitive skydiver and local skydiving instructor, Ted Mayfield had intimate knowledge of the precise parachutes used by Cooper. The Special Forces veteran, pilot, and owner of the Pacific Parachute Center in Sheridan, Oregon, emerged as an early suspect in the skyjacking, but he was soon cleared as he had called lead FBI investigator Ralph Himmelsbach two hours after Flight 305 landed in Reno to volunteer advice on standard skydiving practices, possible landing zones, and information on local skydivers. The FBI determined Cooper could not have made it to where Mayfield had called within the timeframe of the hijacking.

Mayfield later had several legal troubles, as he was sentenced to prison in 1994 for negligent homicide after two of his students died when their parachutes failed to open, and he was later found indirectly responsible for thirteen additional skydiving deaths due to faulty equipment and training. In 2010, he was sentenced to three years’ probation for rigging certificates and piloting an airplane twenty-six years after losing his pilot’s license.

In a separate ordeal, Mayfield was arrested and imprisoned for two weeks in May 2004 after the FBI mistakenly flagged his fingerprints as matching those of the Madrid Train Bomber. He filed a lawsuit against the United States over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) searches that led to his unlawful detainment.

Ted Mayfield died in 2015.

Ted Mayfield

A Marine Corps veteran of the Korean War, Jason Langseth was believed to have participated in night skydiving classes in the six months leading up to the skyjacking. He became an early suspect after allegedly boasting of committing the “perfect crime” in the months afterwards.

Langseth, an industrial chemical salesman for the Abco Chemical Corporation, said he was making sales calls in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on the evening of November 24, 1971. His sales reports for that week, however, revealed many of the businesses he had listed were fictitious, and no one at the legitimate businesses had recalled his visiting that day.

For over thirty years, Langseth refused to speak to investigators and declined multiple requests to take a polygraph test. When asked to provide a saliva sample in December 2004 however, he agreed. It did not match the three partial profiles lifted from Cooper’s necktie, and he was officially eliminated as a suspect.

Jason Langseth

World War II Marine Corps veteran and noted smokejumper Sheridan Peterson was another early suspect. He had written sections of the flight manual of the 727 aircraft while previously employed by Boeing as a technical editor and writer. He had also previously worked at the Issaquah (Washington) Skydiving Center, from which the parachutes ordered by Cooper had been procured.

Acquaintances speculated Peterson’s involvement in the Civil Rights Movement and assisting refugees during the Vietnam War radicalized the already renowned risk taker into committing air piracy. Such a theory contradicted the belief that the skyjacker was motivated solely by the money and had no political motive.

Peterson, who died in 2021, had provided the media with veiled teases of having been D. B. Cooper, but he claimed he was in Nepal when questioned by the FBI. He was officially cleared of the caper after the DNA on the necktie showed it did not match a sample submitted from one of his daughters.

Sheridan Peterson

Many of his former fellow Green Berets believed Ted Braden, Jr. to have been D. B. Cooper. During his nearly two years of serving in Vietnam, Braden was a leader of a classified Special Forces commando unit performing secretive warfare operations, and he was recognized as an expert and daredevil skydiver who ignored military safety regulations. The Boeing 727 is believed among the aircraft from which he jumped.

Braden deserted his unit in December 1966 and went to the Congo to serve as a mercenary. Despite committing a potentially capital offense, he  was given an honorable discharge in exchange for prohibition from re-enlisting in the Army and his continued secrecy about his covert missions.

In the early 1970s, Braden was suspected, but never charged with, orchestrating a trucking scam resulting in the theft of $250,000. He was also indicted by a federal grand jury in 1980 for transporting an eighteen-wheeler filled with stolen goods from Arizona to Massachusetts (it is unclear if he was convicted,) and he served time in federal prison in Pennsylvania in the late 1980s for unspecified crimes; he had been arrested there several years earlier for driving a stolen vehicle with stolen plates and for not having a driver’s license.

At the time of the skyjacking, Braden was a truck driver for Consolidated Freightways, headquartered in Vancouver, Washington, just across the Columbia River from Portland and not far from Cooper’s suspected drop zone. He mostly fit the hijacker’s physical description with the exception of being a little shorter.

Ted Braden Jr. died in 2007.

Ted Braden, Jr.

Pilot Robert Rackstraw, another Vietnam War veteran trained in skydiving as well as the use of explosives, was dishonorably discharged from the Army for insubordination five months before the skyjacking. He was arrested multiple times over the following seven years for check forgery and domestic abuse, as well as the murder of his stepfather, for which he was acquitted.

While released on bail for check kiting and illegal possession charges in 1978, Rackstraw attempted to fake his own death by radioing an erroneous mayday call of bailing out of a rented airplane over Monterey Bay, California. After the craft he claimed to have ditched was found repainted in a nearby hangar, he was arrested and given an additional charge of forging federal pilot certificates. He was convicted and served a short prison sentence.

Rackstraw, too, told several friends he was D. B. Cooper but later said he was joking. The flight attendants were certain he was not the skyjacker, and the FBI cleared him as a suspect in 1979.

Authors Tom Colbert and Tom Szollosi ,however, contend a strap and a piece of foam found in 2017 at an undisclosed location in the Pacific Northwest are remnants from Cooper’s parachute backpack and that they can be traced to Rackstraw, who died in 2019.

Robert Rackstraw

Court records show Rackstraw flew for the CIA’s Air America airline in Laos shortly after the Flight 305 skyjacking and that he may have later been a CIA pilot during the 1980s Iran-Contra affair.  Colbert and Szollosi believe the renegade pilot to have been the Flight 305 skyjacker and that he was protected from prosecution because of his CIA association.

The FBI has not changed its position on Rackstraw, saying he remains cleared of having been D. B. Cooper.

Was Rackstraw Protected By The CIA?

On November 9, 1971, John List bludgeoned to death his wife, three children, and mother, in Westfield, New Jersey. He became a suspect in the skyjacking committed across the country fifteen days later after it was discovered he had recently withdrawn $200,000 from his mother’s bank account– the exact amount D.B. Cooper had demanded delivered to him.

List was not captured until nearly eighteen years later. He was cleared of being Cooper after he was confirmed to have been in Denver, Colorado, to which he had fled and lived for many of his years of the lam, on the day of the hijacking. He died in prison in 2008.

John List

 

Here is the link to my write-up on John List.

The Captured List

Three days before his death in March 1995, World War II Army veteran Duane Weber told his wife Jo “I am Dan Cooper.” At her local library, Jo found written notations in her husband’s handwriting in the margins of Max Gunther’s 1985 book D.B. Cooper: What Really Happened.

From 1945-1968, Weber served time in at least six prisons for burglary and forgery. Like Cooper, he drank bourbon and was a smoker. In addition, he and Jo had traveled to the Seattle area in 1979, during which time she recalled him throwing a trash bag just upstream of Tena Bar, near where the three bundles of money were found the following year.

Weber, however, was eliminated as a suspect in July 1998 when his fingerprints did not match any of those processed from the hijacked plane. His DNA was later found not to match the samples recovered from Cooper’s tie.

Duane Weber

Lynn Doyle “L.D.” Cooper, a Korean War veteran who died in 1999, grew up in Sisters, Oregon, one-hundred-fifty miles southeast of Portland. He was a leather worker, logger, and outdoorsman familiar with the area terrain, though he was not a paratrooper or skydiver.

Cooper’s niece Marla came to suspect that he was D. B. Cooper. On the evening of the hijacking, she recalled him coming to a family gathering wearing a bloody shirt which he claimed resulted from a car accident he incurred after deer hunting, but the day before she had heard him and another uncle talking of doing something “very mischievous.”

L.D. Cooper’s DNA did not match any of the partial profiles obtained from D. B. Cooper’s tie, and the FBI has dismissed the suggestion of him being the skyjacker.

L.D. Cooper Is Not D. B. Cooper

In their 2010 book Into the Blast, Skipp Porteous, a former New York City Private Investigator, and Robert Blevins postulate that the air piracy of Northwest Flight 305 was an inside job, committed by Kenny Christiansen. At the time of the hijacking, he was forty-five-years-old, consistent with the perpetrator’s estimated age, and he often drank bourbon and smoked cigarettes.

During his nearly forty years with Northwest, Christiansen had worked as a laborer, a mechanic, a flight attendant, and, at the time of the skyjacking, as a purser (attendant supervisor) based in Seattle. He was regarded as a good employee, though he had expressed frustrations with his company’s frequent protracted labor disputes.

Between when Christiansen began working at Northwest Orient Airlines in 1954 and the 1971 Flight 305 hijacking, the company had endured eight major union strikes, the most recent having lasted from July to December 1970.  Porteous and Blevins believe Christiansen’s having to take many odd jobs over the years to make ends meet because of the walkouts was his motivation for committing the act, and that his subsequent spending spree is suggestive of his involvement.

The 2011 Brad Meltzer’s Decoded segment on D.B. Cooper stated Christiansen’s bank records show that that the purser pulling in $512 a month had $186,000 in his account shortly after the skyjacking (the exact date was not named), that he had also given his sister’s friend $5,000 to buy a house, and that in October 1972, just under a year after the hijacking, he himself paid $16,000 in cash for a new home in Bonny Lake, Washington, thirty-five miles south of Seattle. A local legend holds that money was soon found in the woods behind his house.

Kenny Christiansen

Christiansen had trained as a paratrooper during his two-year stint in the Army prior to joining Northwest Orient Airlines. Porteus and Blevins believe he chose the smaller Navy Backpack Six 6 (NB 6) parachute because he had used it in his training, and he was unfamiliar with the bigger and newer sport parachutes.

The authors also believe this photo of Kenny Christiansen served as a proud memento of his aerial caper. Taken near Christmas 1971, about one month after the skyjacking, it was found hidden behind another picture in one of his photo albums.

Christiansen is dressed in the same kind of coat D. B. Cooper was reported wearing and he is carrying a similarly described attaché case. The authors believe the paper bag is filled with money from the hijacking, and that the photo was taken by Christiansen’s friend and accomplice in the act.

A Boastful Photo?

Bernie Geetsman and Kenny Christiansen met in the 1950s while they were stationed at the Northwest Orient Airlines refueling base on Shemya Island in the Aleutian Islands. The two became lifelong friends and Christiansen rented a room on Geetsman’s land for a time during one of the company’s strikes.

Bernie Geetsman And Kenny

Porteus and Blevins believe Geestman helped Christiansen plan the aerial heist and picked him up after the parachute jump at Paradise Point State Park, less than two miles from where the money was found in 1980.

Geetsman, while believing his friend may have been Cooper, denies aiding him in any way, and the claim of Cooper’s having an accomplice on the ground waiting for him seems improbable because such an arrangement would have required a predetermined flight path and a precisely timed jump. Cooper had not given a specific aerial course and, moreover, he agreed to an alternate route to Reno. As this was a time well before cell phones, he had no means of informing an accomplice of any changes.

Geetsman: 2011 Photo

As a longtime Northwest Orient Airlines employee, Kenny Christiansen was familiar with the Boeing 727’s layout and how to operate the rear stairs, and his brother Lyle says he had made cryptic allusions to being D.B. Cooper shortly before his death in 1994.

The FBI, however, has never considered Christiansen a solid suspect largely because as a Northwest worker, his chances of being recognized were enhanced and he essentially stayed working at the scene of the crime, remaining with the airline for twenty years after the hijacking. In addition, at five-feet-eight-inches tall and one-hundred-fifty pounds, he was considerably smaller than the physical descriptions of Cooper. He also had hazel eyes and was nearly fully bald, though Lyle says his brother wore a toupee prior to the skyjacking and never again afterwards.

After viewing photos of Christiansen in 2011, Florence Schaffner said he resembled her recollections of Cooper more than any of the photos of potential suspects she has seen, but she could not say with any degree of certainty that it was him.

The FBI Does Not Believe Christensen Is Cooper

Over a six-week period in 2008, Carl “Charlie” Laurin of Deland, Florida, recorded three-hours of phone conservations in which his friend Walter Reca of Oscoda, Michigan, claimed to be D. B. Cooper. A welder, a former Army paratrooper, and later an Air Force Reserves Rescue Survival Specialist, Reca had performed hundreds of parachute jumps in Michigan and Alaska, many of which were at night and in adverse weather conditions.

Reca had Laurin sign a notarized letter granting him permission to make the story public only after his death. Laurin did so in 2018, four years after Reca’s passing.

Living in Washington at the time of the skyjacking, Reca claimed to have landed on the ground near Cle Elum, eighty miles southeast of Seattle in the eastern foothills of the Cascade Mountains, and to have bundled and buried his parachute under branches before making his way to a roadside diner where he received assistance from a patron.

 Walter Reca

Laurin located Jeff Osiadacz, a Cle Elum resident and former police officer who recalled a disoriented and soaking-wet stranger entering the Teanaway Junction Café approximately four miles east of town at the intersection of United States Highway 97 and Washington State Highway 10 on the evening of the Flight 305 skyjacking. Osiadacz said the man dialed a phone number and then handed the phone to him to give directions for a friend to pick him up. As thanks, the man paid for Osiadacz’ coffee.

Osiadacz says the man had slicked black hair, was wearing a black suit and pants, white shirt, and black penny loafers; he was not wearing a necktie. At the time, Osiadacz did not connect the encounter with the Flight 305 skyjacking because he says the man looked nothing like the composite and because he was in a different part of Washington, over one-hundred-fifty miles north of where the jump was purported to have occurred.

After hearing Osiadacz’s account, Vern Jones, an author and CEO of Grand Haven-based Principia Media, a custom publishing company and independent media production studio, also came to believe that Walter Reca was D. B. Cooper, noting both men were the same height and had the same build and hair color. In addition, Reca was also a heavy liquor drinker and Raleigh cigarettes smoker, and he was wearing similarly-described clothes when he entered the café.

Reca, Jones says, deposited most of the money into a safe deposit box in a Canadian bank. In the few months after the hijacking, he also purchased a home on a land contract with only a $600 down payment, a car, and furniture.

Reca’s Account Seems Corroborated

Laurin and Jones contend the FBI interviewed nearly every parachutist in the northwest United States with the exception of Walter Reca, because, similar to what is alleged about Robert Rackstraw, they say Reca had worked for a CIA-tied group in which he, rather than being a pilot, specialized in assassinations.

Documents given to Laurin by Reca before his death suggest he had also worked for Israel’s Mossad and the former Soviet Union’s KGB. These include fake passports and covert identity cards from spy agencies including the United Kingdom’s MI-6, and a diary listing of assassination and covert operations.

Another Suspect Having A CIA Angle

Carl Laurin’s assertion of his late friend Walter Reca having been D. B. Cooper is dismissed by the FBI, because he did not resemble the composite and Cle Elum, Washington, is far northeast of Flight 305’s flight path, over one-hundred-fifty miles north of where Cooper is believed to bailed from the airplane, and about two-hundred-thirty-five miles from Tena Bar, where the money bundles were found.

Carl Laurin And Reca

The finding of the traces of the rare metals on the necktie has eliminated some of the aforementioned D. B. Cooper suspects, but it also led to the suggestion of other possible candidates.

Cooper and Tina Mucklow chatted aboard the Boeing 727 as the money and parachutes were being assembled. When she asked him if he was hijacking the plane because he had something against Northwest Orient Airlines, Cooper replied “It’s not because I have a grudge against your airline, it’s just because I have a grudge.”

Some believe the skyjacker with a grudge was retired Army Major and Korean War veteran Joe Lakich, who, at the time, was working as a production supervisor at an electronics capacitor factory in Nashville, Tennessee, where he would have likely been exposed to the rare materials found on Cooper’s tie.

On October 4, 1971, seven weeks before the skyjacking, Lakich’s twenty-five-year-old daughter Susan Giffe was kidnapped at gunpoint by her estranged husband, George. He forced her onto a private plane in Nashville and ordered the pilot, Brent Downs, to fly them to the Bahamas. While stopping to fuel the aircraft at the Jacksonville, Florida, International Airport, FBI agents shot out the plane’s tires after negotiation efforts failed. Giffe then killed Susan, Brent, and himself before the G-men could storm the plane.

Lakich believed America’s top law enforcement agency should have saved his daughter’s life. He and his wife Jewell filed a wrongful death suit against the FBI, and an appeals court ruled the Bureau acted negligently during the hostage negotiation. The incident became a standard study by negotiators as an example of what not to do during such a crisis.

Author and pilot Bill Rollins believes Lakich committed the Northwest Airline skyjacking because of his ire toward the FBI. Investigators generally view the theory as a compelling narrative lacking any substantive facts.

Joe Lakich died in 2017.

Joe Lakich

In 2018, The Oregonian reporter Douglas Perry proposed the recently-deceased World War II Navy veteran William Smith of Bloomfield, New Jersey, as the possible skyjacker.  Perry, through information obtained from an anonymous analyst and researcher, suspects Smith’s motive was similar to that suggested of Kenny Christiansen’s.

At the time of the skyjacking, Smith was a yardmaster for the Lehigh Valley Railroad which, along with the railroad industry in general, had been greatly hurt by the rise in the transporting of goods by air freight and was even more financially hindered by the Penn Central Transportation Company’s 1970 bankruptcy, the largest such filing at the time in American history.

Perry proposes that Smith hijacked Flight 305 because of his need for money and anger toward the airline industry. As a railroad frontline supervisor, Smith often wore a necktie while on the job; the aluminum spiral chips found on Cooper’s tie could have come from a locomotive maintenance facility which Smith inspected.

The FBI believes the purported bomb shown to Florence Schaffner may have been railroad flares which can resemble dynamite when wrapped in wire. Perry and the analyst believe Smith’s railroad background helped him create such believable fakes.

Smith had also been an aerial gunner and photographer while serving in the Navy, where he was also believed to have learned about airplanes and parachutes while volunteering for combat crew air training. Perry believes Smith’s familiarity with railroads helped him hop on a train to escape the area after landing.

An Ira Daniel Cooper found listed in Smith’s high school yearbook as an alumni killed in World War II is suggested as the source for the hijacker’s pseudonym.

William Smith

Akin to Duane Weber, Perry also believes William Smith was familiar with Max Gunther’s D.B. Cooper: What Really Happened.

In his book, Gunther says a woman calling herself “Clara” had phoned him and provided the real identity of D. B. Cooper. Clara, Gunther contended, claimed she found him badly wounded two days after the skyjacking and that she sheltered and nursed him back to health. Gunther says Clara was effectively Cooper’s wife and that they moved to New York where he worked as a technically oriented salesman until his death from natural causes in 1982.

Gunther’s claims received little credence and were dismissed by the FBI as a hoax, either by him or by the alleged caller.

Gunther gives the man he contends was identified as the real D. B. Cooper the pseudonym “Dan LeClair.”

William Smith and a close friend named Dan Clair had worked together at the Conrail Railroad at Newark, New Jersey’s Oak Island Yard. While serving in World War II, Clair was stationed for a time at Fort Lewis, the military reservation upon which McChord Air Force Base is located.

The Oregonian article proffers that Clair, who died in 1990, may have provided Smith with knowledge of the Seattle area and aided him in the Flight 305 skyjacking.

Dan Clair

Smith appears to bear a resemblance to the composites of Cooper and, later in life, an even closer resemblance to a computer-aged rendering of the skyjacker.  Remember, however, that Florence Schaffner says she does not believe the FBI’s composites are the ones bearing the closest likeness of Cooper.

The FBI has not commented on the suggestion of William Smith being D. B. Cooper.

A Resemblance

In communications with Cooper regarding the ransom money, the flight crew noted his use of the words “negotiable American currency” on multiple occasions. Because the phrase is rarely used by Americans but is more common in Canada, and because of the name he used when purchasing his airline ticket, some have speculated he may have had a Canadian background.

Produced from 1954-92, the Belgian comic book series Dan Cooper featured a Royal Canadian Air Force test pilot of that name performing many daredevil deeds including, as shown on one cover, skydiving out of an airplane. Also known as Les Aventures de Dan Cooper (The Adventures of Dan Cooper), the comics were written in French and were never published or sold in the United States, nor were they ever translated into English. They were more popular to the neighbor to the north, particularly in heavily populated French-descended Quebec, where French is the only official language.

This has led to speculation that the man who had purchased his plane ticket under the name of Dan Cooper may have been French Canadian. His cadence had sounded American, but many Quebecers speak English without a discernible accent. Others suggest he could have come across the Dan Cooper comics while serving in the military in France or Belgium.

Of the aforementioned suspects, L.D. Cooper and Kenny Christiansen were known to have been fans of the Dan Cooper comic books. If the skyjacker had survived and was an admirer of the adventure hero, one cannot help but wonder if he was upset that he instead became forever known as D. B. Copper.

 

Dan Cooper Comics

I have not found anything stating if any DNA has ever been tested on Cooper’s purchased plane ticket or if any comparisons have been made to his signature.

The Ticket Bearing “Dan Cooper’s” Signature

In the week preceding the Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 skyjacking, several residents of Ariel and La Center, two towns within the Drop Zone, had on several occasions seen a small low-flying lighted plane intermittingly crisscrossing over farm fields near the two towns and sometimes rendezvousing with a car. The pilot and plane were never identified and it is unknown if they were related to the hijacking.

Approximately three hours before the skyjacking, a grocery store was robbed near Heisson, Washington, within the original Drop Zone. The burglar absconded with beef jerky, cigarettes, gloves, and other survival items. His footprints left at the site showed he had worn military type boots; Cooper was observed in slip-on shoes.

The burglary, like the skyjacking, remains unsolved. Investigators do not believe the crimes are related.

Incidents Connected With Cooper?

Before hijacking Northwest Flight 305, Cooper had attempted to tip the three flight attendants, Tina Mucklow, Florence Schaffner, and Alice Hancock; all declined, citing Northwest Orient Airlines’ policy against accepting gratuities.

As Cooper was inspecting the money after it had been delivered, Tina jokingly asked him if she could have some of it. He handed her a packet of bills, but she returned it, again referencing company policy.

Shortly after the serial numbers of the money given to D. B. Cooper were made public in early 1972, two men used counterfeit $20 bills having two of the serial numbers to swindle $30,000 from Newsweek reporter Karl Fleming in exchange for an interview with a man they falsely named as the skyjacker.

Fearing a repeat of Clifford Irving’s recently published faked autobiography of Howard Hughes, Newsweek pulled its intended D. B. Cooper article at the last minute.

After protracted negotiations, the recovered bills from the Northwest Orient Flight 305 skyjacking were divided equally between Brian Ingram and the company’s insurer, Royal Globe Insurance in 1986; the FBI retained fourteen bills as evidence.

In 2008, Brian, through a Dallas auction house, sold fifteen of his bills for approximately $37,000 with the most intact bill selling for $ 6,572.50.

Brian Ingram Cashes In

On The Degraded Cash He Found

At the time of the 1971 skyjacking of Northwest Orient Flight 305, The Boeing 727 was the only airplane from which a parachute jump could be made from the passenger cabin. All planes were modified afterwards with a “Cooper Vane,” a mechanical aerodynamic wedge preventing the rear airstair from being opened and lowered in flight. The FAA also installed metal detectors in airports to screen passengers and their baggage before boarding.

The “Cooper Vane”

Citing the need for investigative resources and manpower to be used on cases of greater priority, the FBI closed its “D.B. Cooper” investigation in July 2016, leaving the skyjacking of Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 as the only unsolved air piracy in commercial aviation history. The $200,000 with which Cooper airily absconded is equivalent to approximately $1.6 million today.

The first American to hold a plane and its passengers for ransom, The “Gentleman Hijacker” known as D. B. Cooper remains glorified in the eyes of many for his brazen act of daredevilry. To many, he is viewed as the aerial and illegal equivalent of Evel Knievel.

   

Computer-Aged Renderings Of D. B. Cooper

Released in July 1972, eight months after the Flight 305 skyjacking, The Byrds’ song “Bag Full of Money,” centers on D. B. Cooper.

 

The 1979 film, The Pursuit of D. B. Cooper, starring Treat Williams as the skyjacker, is a largely fictionalized story of Cooper’s escape after leaping out of the airplane.

In literature, James M. Cain’s 1975 novel Rainbow’s End was inspired by the Northwest Airline skyjacking.

Stephen King’s 1982 novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption contains a D. B. Cooper reference in which the story’s narrator Red humorously implies that fellow prisoner Sid Nedeau may have been the famed skyjacker. This reference was not included in the 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption.

The many other instances of D. B. Cooper finding his way into popular culture include mentions on the television series’ Quincy M. E., Twin Peaks, NewsRadio, and Prison Break, and in the Kid Rock song “Bawitaba.”

On March 29, 1972, five months after the skyjacking of Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305, a skeleton was found in southwest Washington’s Clark County, within the D. B. Cooper Drop Zone. The remains were those of eighteen-year-old Barbara Derry, who was last seen eight weeks before, on February 11, hitchhiking on Highway 14. She was found to have been raped and stabbed to death.

Had it not been for “D.B. Cooper,” Barbara Derry’s remains may never have been found.

Barbara Derry

Warren Forrest is currently imprisoned in Washington, convicted of abducting, raping, and killing two women, and attempting to kill two others. He is suspected of similar crimes committed against five to seven more women or girls throughout the Pacific Northwest from 1971-74.

Barbara Derry is believed to be one of his victims.

Warren Forrest

Circa 1971 And 2026

D.B. Cooper’s four parachutes had been procured from Earl Cossey, a skydiving instructor with Seattle Sky Sports of Issaquah, Washington. On April 26, 2013, the seventy-one-year-old Cossey was found beaten to death in his suburban Seattle home. It was determined he had been killed three days earlier. His murder remains unsolved.

Investigators say nothing suggests that Cossey’s killing is related to the D.B. Cooper hijacking of over forty-one years earlier.

Earl Cossey

SOURCES:

• Brad Melzer’s Decoded
• FBI
• History’s Greatest Mysteries
• In Search Of . . .
• National Geographic
• Portland Tribune
• Seattle Times
• Unsolved Mysteries