It remains the only documented unsolved hijacking in the history of commercial aviation. On the night before Thanksgiving in 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper took over a passenger jet, collected a ransom of $200,000, and parachuted out over the forests of southwest Washington.
The FBI investigated for 45 years. Investigators never found him, a body, or most of the money.
The Man In Seat 18E
On the afternoon of November 24, 1971, a man in a dark suit and tie paid cash at Portland International Airport for a one-way ticket to Seattle. He gave his name as Dan Cooper. A newspaper reporter later recorded the name as “D. B. Cooper,” and that mistake is the name that stuck.
Northwest Orient Flight 305 was a 30-minute trip, with 36 passengers and six crew on a Boeing 727. Shortly after takeoff, Cooper handed a note to flight attendant Florence Schaffner.
She assumed it was a lonely businessman’s phone number and dropped it unopened into her purse. Cooper told her she had better look at it. The note said he had a bomb in his briefcase and wanted her to sit beside him. When she did, he opened the case enough for her to see wires, a battery and red cylinders that she took to be dynamite.
The Demands
Cooper was calm and polite throughout. He asked for $200,000 in cash and four parachutes, to be delivered when the plane landed in Seattle. The plane circled while the FBI and the airline gathered the money: 10,000 twenty-dollar bills, which weighed about 19 pounds. Before handing it over, the FBI photographed the serial numbers.
After the plane landed at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, the cash and parachutes were brought aboard. Cooper let all the passengers and some of the crew leave. Then he ordered the pilots to take off again and head toward Mexico City, flying as slowly as possible, below 10,000 feet, with the landing gear down and the wing flaps lowered.
The Jump
The jet left Seattle at about 7:40 p.m. with Cooper and a small crew on board. He sent flight attendant Tina Mucklow to the cockpit and stayed alone in the back of the cabin.
At about 8:13 p.m., the crew felt a jolt as the rear airstair of the 727 was lowered. Somewhere below them, in darkness and heavy rain, was southwest Washington. When the plane landed in Reno for fuel just after 11 p.m., the cabin was empty.
Cooper left behind a black clip-on tie, a tie clip, several cigarette butts and two of the four parachutes.
The Search
Searchers combed the woods where investigators believed he had landed. They found no body, no parachute and no money. Many investigators came to believe he could not have survived a jump at night, in the rain, over rough terrain, wearing a business suit. No one could prove it either way.
The Money On The Riverbank
On February 10, 1980, eight-year-old Brian Ingram was on a family trip at Tena Bar, a beach along the Columbia River a few miles downstream from Vancouver, Washington. While raking the sand to build a campfire, he uncovered three bundles of rotting twenty-dollar bills.
The serial numbers matched the ransom money. It came to about $5,800, and it remains the only confirmed trace of the ransom ever found. How the money got to that riverbank has never been explained.
Who Was D. B. Cooper?
Over the decades, the FBI looked at more than a thousand serious suspects. Several people have claimed a relative was Cooper, and books and documentaries have made cases for different men. None has been proven.
On July 8, 2016, the FBI announced it was ending its active investigation and would put its resources elsewhere, though it would still accept physical evidence related to the parachutes or the money. The case file runs to 66 volumes.
More than 50 years later, the only certain things about him are the sketches and the money. The man who called himself Dan Cooper walked onto a plane in Portland, jumped into the night with a fortune, and vanished.
After reading about D. B. Cooper, learn about Belle Gunness, the widow whose suitors disappeared on her Indiana farm. Then, read about H. H. Holmes, the con man whose crimes turned into legend.