Yahoo Movies DB Cooper and the $200,000 plane hijacking still unsolved 50 years later
This article is part of Yahoo's 'On This Day' series
Eight-year-old Brian Ingram was just trying to build a campfire.
But while combing through the sand at Tena Bar, along the Columbia River in the US state of Washington, he unearthed the biggest clue in a mystery that has baffled investigators for half a century.
While raking along the river bank on a family holiday in February 1980, he found three packets, bundled by rubber bands.
Inside was $5,800 in $20 bills, a small slice of a ransom from one of the most daring heists in history.
Nine years previously, before Ingram had been born, that money had been in the hands of an elusive figure at the heart of the only plane hijacking that has never been solved.
On 24 November 1971, 50 years ago today, a man who came to be known as DB Cooper did the unthinkable, executing an air heist by making his escape from a moving plane at 10,000ft, with $200,000 and a parachute for company.
But did he actually escape?
That question has been left open for five decades. Cooper’s remains were never found, nor the remainder of the cash, bar the chunk Brian Ingram pulled out of the sand nine years after the hijacking. Cooper was never identified, although the FBI — and conspiracy theorists — came up with a long list of candidates.
In the middle of the mystery is a mistake.
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The man who carried out the hijacking had used the alias “Dan Cooper” when purchasing his $20 airline ticket for Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305, from Portland International Airport in Oregon to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, a 30-minute trip on a Boeing 727.
When police and the FBI tried to track him down in the days after the heist, they found an Oregon man named DB Cooper, but quickly ruled him out as a suspect. However, a reporter mistakenly reported that 'DB Cooper' was the alias used by the hijacker and the name stuck.
Cooper, carrying a black attaché case and wearing a business suit with a black tie and white shirt, boarded his flight the day before Thanksgiving, settling down into seat 18C and ordering a bourbon and soda. He did not look like the stereotypical plane hijacker.
And he didn’t act like one either.
Just after take-off at 2.50pm, Cooper handed a note to flight attendant Florence Schaffner. It was the early 1970s, so she assumed he had simply given her his phone number, and dropped it unopened into her purse.
At this point, Cooper leaned over and whispered: “Miss, you’d better look at that note. I have a bomb.”
The exact content of the note is unknown, as Cooper took it back later, but the contents of his briefcase made its own statement: when Schaffner looked inside, she saw eight red cylinders attached to wires and a large cylindrical battery.
Cooper demanded that after the plane touched down in Seattle, he be given $200,000 in cash and four parachutes. He also asked for a fuel truck to be standing by on arrival.
Schaffner relayed the demands to the cockpit — when she returned, Cooper was wearing dark sunglasses.
Northwest Orient’s president, Donald Nyrop, ordered that the ransom be paid, and the aircraft circled for two hours to allow the police and FBI to come up with the cash and parachutes.
Later, Schaffner would describe the hijacker as calm and polite, while another flight attendant, Tina Mucklow, said: “He wasn’t nervous. He seemed rather nice. He was never cruel or nasty. He was thoughtful and calm all the time.”
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Cooper ordered a second bourbon and soda and paid his drinks bill, and even tried to give Mucklow the change. When she asked him his motives, he replied: “I don’t have a grudge against your airline, Miss, I just have a grudge.”
In Seattle, Cooper took possession of 10,000 unmarked $20 bills and civilian parachutes with manually operated ripcords, procured at short notice from a local skydiving school.
After the handover, he allowed all of the other 35 passengers, as well as Schaffner and a senior flight attendant, to get off the plane.
Cooper demanded that the plane be flown towards Mexico City at the minimum speed possible at a maximum of 10,000 ft altitude, with Reno, Nevada, agreed as a refuelling stop.
The plane took off from Seattle at 7.40pm, and was accompanied by two US fighter jets, one behind the commercial plane and one above, out of view.
After takeoff, Cooper lifted his briefcase and told Mucklow to show him how to open the door to the staircase at the back of the plane. She saw him tying something, possibly the bag of money, around his waist.
At about 8pm, a warning light came on in the cockpit to indicate the rear airstair had been activated. The pilots asked Cooper over the intercom if he needed assistance. His simple reply of “No” was the last they heard of him. It is believed he jumped out of the plane.
Investigators would later calculate that Cooper had jumped into darkness in the middle of a heavy rainstorm somewhere over Washington state.
A huge search operation got underway on foot and by helicopter. Cooper was never found, nor was any of the equipment he used to leap from the aircraft.
The only evidence he left on the plane was a black clip-on tie, a tie clip and eight cigarette butts.
Seven years later, in November 1978, a deer hunter found a printed instruction card for lowering the rear stairs of a Boeing 727 near Castle Rock, Washington, under what would have been Flight 305’s flight path.
Two years later, Brian Ingram's inadvertent find while building a campfire made him a national celebrity. He was eventually allowed to hold on to some of the money, and sold 15 of his bills at auction in 2008 for about $37,000, 120 times their face value.
As for Cooper’s true identity, the FBI processed more than 1,000 potential suspects.
Of those, there were a few standouts.
In an almost identical heist, Richard McCoy Jr, an army veteran who served in Vietnam, hijacked a United Airlines 727 on 7 April 1972 after it left Denver, Colorado, jumping out and escaping with $500,000 in cash.
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He was arrested two days later and killed two years later in an FBI shootout following a prison escape.
McCoy didn’t match Cooper’s description, however, and was in Las Vegas on the day of the 1971 hijacking.
Sheridan Peterson, who died earlier this year, was another name linked to DB Cooper. He served in the US Marine Corps and worked for Boeing in Seattle.
Although he liked to hint in the media that he was Cooper, Peterson told the FBI he was in Nepal at the time of the hijacking.
In July 2016, the FBI announced it was suspending its active investigation of the DB Cooper case.
His fate, and his identity, remain a mystery.
