On the afternoon before Thanksgiving 1971, a man in a dark suit and clip-on tie bought a one-way ticket to Seattle at the Northwest Orient Airlines counter in Portland, Oregon, paying cash and giving the name Dan Cooper. Five and a half hours later he stepped off the rear stairs of a Boeing 727 into a dark, rainy sky over southwest Washington with $200,000 strapped to him. He has not been identified since.
What happened
Flight 305 left Portland at 2:50 pm on November 24 with 36 passengers and six crew. Soon after takeoff Cooper handed a note to the flight attendant Florence Schaffner. Taking it for a passenger’s phone number, she put it in her purse unread, until he leaned over and told her he had a bomb. He showed her what looked like explosives in his briefcase and set out his terms: $200,000 in twenty-dollar bills and four parachutes, to be waiting in Seattle.
The airline’s president, Donald Nyrop, authorized the payment. The jet circled Puget Sound for about two hours while the FBI and Seattle police gathered the money, recording the serial numbers of all 10,000 notes. The plane landed at Seattle-Tacoma at 5:46 pm, the cash and parachutes came aboard, the passengers were let off, and the tanks were refilled. Cooper kept the pilots, the flight engineer and flight attendant Tina Mucklow, and asked for a southbound course to Mexico City with a fuel stop in Reno, flying at about 10,000 feet with the landing gear down.
The jet took off again around 7:40 pm. Cooper sent Mucklow forward to the cockpit and was alone in the cabin. At about 8:13 pm the crew felt the tail pitch up, which matched the rear airstair being lowered in flight. When the plane landed in Reno the cabin was empty. Agents found his black clip-on tie and tie clip, two of the four parachutes and dozens of latent fingerprints. A slip in an early news report turned Dan Cooper into D. B. Cooper, and that name stuck.
The investigation
The first estimates put the jump near Ariel and Lake Merwin, on the Lewis River north of Portland. Later analysis moved the likely landing zone toward the Washougal River and La Center, and searches on the ground and from the air turned up nothing. Ralph Himmelsbach, the FBI agent who led the case for years, later named his 1986 book after the Bureau’s file title, NORJAK, short for Northwest hijacking. In its first five years the FBI looked at more than 800 suspects. Richard McCoy, arrested five months after the hijacking for a nearly identical one, did not fit the descriptions the Flight 305 crew gave.
The only physical trace of the money came to light on February 10, 1980. Brian Ingram, a boy on a family outing at Tena Bar (also spelled Tina Bar), on the Columbia River about nine miles downstream from Vancouver, Washington, was raking the sand to make a campfire. He dug up three rotting packets of twenties. Their serial numbers matched the ransom, and together they came to about $5,800. A geologist found that the bills lay above a layer of clay that a 1974 Army Corps of Engineers dredging job had spread on the bank. That suggests they reached the beach years after the hijacking, but nobody has explained how.
The FBI built a partial DNA profile from the tie in 2001. Since then private researchers have studied particles collected from it. Neither line of work has produced a name. In July 2016 the Bureau said it would no longer actively investigate the case. It called NORJAK one of its longest and most exhaustive investigations and said the evidence would be kept at its Washington headquarters for history.
The explanations
The FBI has generally held that Cooper probably died in the jump. He went out at night, in rain, over thick forest, wearing loafers and a trench coat. One of the parachutes he was given turned out to be a training reserve that had been sewn shut. Nothing about his choices suggested an expert skydiver, and the rest of the ransom has never been spent. All of that fits a death in the woods or in the river.
Others think he made it. He knew the 727’s rear stairs could be opened in flight, he named a speed and altitude that suited a jump, and he left no clear trail. In forty-five years no body, harness or money bag has been found in the drop zone, and an empty search area is as consistent with an escape as with a death. Writers and relatives have named dozens of candidates, among them Robert Rackstraw, Kenneth Christiansen and Duane Weber. None has been proven.
Where it stands
The crew, the passengers and the recovered bills document the hijacking itself beyond doubt. What happened after the airstair opened is unknown. The FBI has closed its active file without solving the case, and amateur researchers are still working on it. Whether Cooper got away with it can’t be answered, so the case is unproven.