UNSOLVED: Discovering the Truth Behind the Disappearance of DB Cooper

In 1971, Dan “D.B.” Cooper walked onto a plane carrying a bomb. After collecting a $200,000 ransom, he parachuted out of the back of the plane and was never heard from again. So who was D.B. Cooper, and what happened to the only successful skyjacker in American history?

What Happened to D.B. Cooper?

By Kevin Jennings

When people think of comic books, they generally think of superheroes running around in brightly coloured costumes, possibly while wearing their underwear over their pants. However, comics have served as the inspiration for all sorts of movies and TV shows that people don’t tend to associate with the medium. From shows like iZombie and Human Target to movies like Road to Perdition and the grossly underappreciated Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, stories ripped from the pages of comics have entertained people for decades.

But comics have provided inspiration for more than just lighthearted entertainment. When a 2,000 ton cargo ship sank into Kuwait City’s harbor, which was coincidentally also the source of their drinking water, salvage teams had to act quickly. The ship had been carrying 6,000 live sheep whose now rotting carcasses threatened to poison the water supply. An international call for help went out across the globe, and that help would come from a Danish engineer and inventor, Karl Kroyer.

Karl realized he had read about a similar situation in a 1949 comic book by Scrooge McDuck creator Carl Barks. In the story, Donald Duck and his nephews realized that they could raise a sunken yacht by filling it with ping pong balls, and that’s exactly what Karl did. The operation was a success, and it was even recreated by the Mythbusters who were able to raise a sunken ship using less than half the number of ping pong balls than they expected.

It was an incredible example of out of the box thinking. But as cool as it may be that the ping pong ball plan actually worked, there is an even less likely story that may have gotten its inspiration from comic books. It is the story of one of the FBI’s oldest unsolved crimes, America’s only successful skyjacking, and of one very confused reporter.

The Hijacking

‘Twas the night before Thanksgiving, 1971. A relatively nondescript, middle-aged man walked into Portland International Airport and purchased a one way ticket to Seattle for $20 via Northwest Orient Airlines. He paid in cash, and gave the name Dan Cooper for the ticket. It was three decades before 9/11, so the employees weren’t going to waste their time doing something silly like check the man’s ID to see if that actually was his name. Needless to say they also weren’t going to bother to search his belongings.

Despite being the busiest travel day of the year, the flight was only about a third full. This is probably because it was only a 30 minute flight, which once you account for all the time at the airports is barely faster than the 3 hour drive between the two cities. The plane took off on schedule at 2:50 pm for what should have been a short flight, with Cooper occupying seat 18-E in the very back row of the plane. Once the plane was in the air, Cooper lit up a cigarette and ordered a bourbon whiskey from the stewardess.

He handed her a $20 bill for the $2 drink and told her to keep the change. Cooper was very polite and courteous the entire time, but shortly after his first drink he handed a note to flight attended Florence Schaffner.

The 23 year old flight attendant was used to single businessmen giving her their phone numbers, so she tossed the note into her purse without looking at it. Cooper then leaned in to her and said, “Miss, you’d better look at that note. I have a bomb.” The note said that he had a bomb and wanted her to sit next to him. I’d like to think this goes without saying, but for all you single guys out there: this is not an appropriate way to request a first date.

Florence sat down and asked to see it, so Cooper popped open his briefcase and let her peek inside. She saw eight red cylinders, which she assumed to be dynamite. The dynamite was wrapped in wires and connected to a large battery. That’s right, there was once a time when you could carry a Looney Tunes style time bomb into an airport and board a plane without any hassle.

Once Florence was thoroughly terrified for her life, she wrote down Cooper’s list of demands. He wanted $200,000 in US currency, roughly $1.4 million dollars today, along with two primary parachutes and two reserve parachutes.

As a side note, has anyone else ever wondered why people always feel the need to specific US currency in their ransom requests? Was there a big trend in the early 1900s where criminals would escape with their bags of ransom money only to open them up and see $200,000 worth of Chilean pesos with a note that said “Gotcha!” on top of it? Some people believe that specifying US currency points to Cooper being Canadian.

Anyway, Florence went to the cockpit to relay the demands to the pilots. The captain contacted air traffic control who alerted local and federal authorities. Even though every movie and television show ever has insisted that the US doesn’t negotiate with terrorists, apparently they do because they quickly got to work meeting Cooper’s demands.

A new flight attendant, 22 year old Tina Mucklow took over dealing with Cooper. She was to sit next to him at all times except when delivering messages to and from the cockpit. Once it became clear that they were actually going to pay the ransom, he began making more demands.

Once they landed, he wanted the plane to be refueled before anyone was allowed to leave. At this point, none of the other 35 passengers on the plane had any idea what was going on. Their 30 minute flight was going on two hours, but as far as everyone else knew they were just flying in a holding pattern before landing due to a “minor technical malfunction”, a phrase that would become synonymous in the public consciousness with “there’s a bomb on the plane” for decades to come. But since it was the day before Thanksgiving, they may all have been too preoccupied with getting drunk in preparation for having to deal with their God awful families the next day to realize how long it had been.

After the plane was refueled, Cooper wanted the money to be delivered to him on the plane by Tina. However, the money was not to be delivered until the shade on every window was closed. That way, a sniper couldn’t see who the money was being delivered to on the plane full of people and try to take him out. Upon delivery of the money, he would let everybody off the plane and Tina could fetch him the four parachutes.

As the people on the ground got prepared meeting the demands, Cooper and Tina got to know each other better. He would look out of the window and showed a familiarity with the area, indicating cities on the ground from the aerial view. He also mentioned McChord Air Force Base was only a 20 minute drive from Seattle Tacoma Airport. Some people took this to mean that he was former military, but I disagree that it’s indicative of such.

I’m sure every civilian north of Boston can tell you where Hanscom Air Force Base is; these locations aren’t really secret. When Cooper was informed they had acquired the money as well as four military parachutes, he rejected the offer and instead demanded civilian parachutes.

Tina said that, the entire time they were in the air, Cooper didn’t seem nervous at all. He was friendly and kind, a perfect gentleman. He ordered another bourbon and again paid with a $20 bill, telling her to keep the change. Unfortunately for both Tina and Florence, it was against company policy to accept the tips he had offered them. Given the circumstances, I’d like to think the airline would have turned a blind eye to such impropriety.

As they continued making small talk, he asked where Tina was from. She said she was from Pennsylvania, but was originally from Minneapolis. Cooper responded to that by saying that Minnesota, the state where Minneapolis is located, was a very nice country. To some people, this is further evidence that he wasn’t from America and possibly that English was his second language. To others, it was an obvious red herring.

When Tina asked where he was from, he got upset and refused to answer. At some point during the flight, she asked why he had decided to hijack a Northwest Airlines plane. His response was simply, “It’s not because I have a grudge against your airlines, it’s just because I have a grudge.” That’s a pretty weird answer, and it makes me wonder why these people were paying for his grudge against someone else.

Even it was some vague grudge against the US government, whom he probably expected to pay the ransom, the airline was actually the one that was on the hook for the money. They would eventually received $180,000 of it back from their insurance, but only after a judge ordered the insurance company to pay up.

A little before 5:30 pm, the plane had finally landed, the money was delivered, and the passengers were released. Most, if not all of them, still had no idea why they had really been held in the air for so long or what was going on in the back of the plane. As Cooper counted the money, Tina attempted to ease the tension by asking if she could have some of it to too. That’s a pretty ballsy move, even as a joke, but he handed her a stack of money without a second thought.

Unfortunately, she gave it back citing the same anti-tipping policy that hadn’t let her keep the extra $18 for the bourbon. She also probably didn’t want the FBI to see the money and view her as an accomplice.

Speaking of the FBI, it took trips to several different banks in the Seattle area, but the agents were able to assemble 10,000 unmarked, non-sequential $20 bills. That may seem like every criminal’s dream: a large ransom in unmarked, non-sequential bills in an era before they could hide a GPS tracking device inside the bag of money? Surely they’d have no way of ever tracking the money down again.

That would be true were it not for the fact that, despite apparently paying ransoms, the FBI generally doesn’t fuck around. Before delivering the money to Cooper, they took pictures of every single bill that was included in the ransom so that they would have a record of all of the serial numbers. This would allow them to track where they were spent, assuming the money ever made it into a bank.

At this point, the plane was now empty except for the three flight crew and the three flight attendants. Only Tina was allowed to exit or enter the plane, and she had to go retrieve the four parachutes for Cooper. Florence asked if she could get her purse which was stored behind him, and he agreed. She then asked if she and the third flight attendant could leave, to which he replied “whatever you girls like”.

Let this be a lesson to any would-be criminals out there. If you want to go down in history as a folk hero instead of a dangerous criminal, you need to be super chill about your crimes. If your hostages ask for some of the ransom money or for their freedom, just let them have it. Either you’re going to get away with the crime or you’re not, so it doesn’t cost you anything to be kind. Also, please don’t commit crimes.

All that was left was to wait for the plane to finish refueling. The refueling was delayed and required three fuel trucks, which annoyed Cooper. He was also annoyed that the ransom money was delivered to him in a cloth bag instead of the knapsack he had requested. He pulled out a pocketknife, cause you could carry those on planes back then, and tried to fashion a bag out of one of the spare parachutes.

He tied the bag up with the parachute cords then tied it to his waist. The FBI noted that Tina’s account of what happened here was pretty vague, but seeing as Cooper had no idea what the fuck he was doing I’m not sure how Tina was expected to.

The Escape

It wouldn’t take long before Cooper’s patience with the refueling would run out. He commented that it was taking far longer than it should have, so he outlined his flight plan to the crew. They were going to fly him to Mexico, but with some rather unusual specifications. The plane was to fly as slow as it possibly could without stalling (115 mph), the landing gear would remain down, it would only climb to an altitude of 10,000 feet, the wing flaps would be pointed down at a 15 degree angle, and the cabin was to remain unpressurized.

These were bizarre and unsafe requests, but the pilot agreed. However, he did say that under those conditions the plane could only go about 1,000 miles so they would need to refuel again before Cooper’s final destination of Mexico City. They agreed on Reno-Tahoe International Airport as the refueling destination, and then it was time to finally take off again.

The plane took off at around 7:40 pm, over two hours after it had landed. That’s two hours that Cooper sat on the nearly empty plane without any attempt by the FBI to do anything about it. Sure he had a bomb and a few hostages left, but I say roll them bones! And that is why I’m not a hostage negotiator.

But like I said, the FBI doesn’t mess around. They may have let Cooper get this far, but there were two F-106 fighter jets and Lockheed T-33 trainer following the hijacked 727, just far enough back to be out of Cooper’s view.

Once they were in the air, he asked Tina to open the door and lower the aft staircase. Unsurprisingly, she was not a fan of this idea as she was terrified of being sucked out of the plane. However, the fact that Cooper even knew about this staircase is fairly important.

It was highly classified knowledge at the time, but the 727 had a rear door and staircase with controls in the back of the plane that could not be overridden by the cockpit. These commercial airliners had actually been used by the military to drop soldiers behind enemy lines in Vietnam, so many speculate that Cooper was either ex-military or an ex-Boeing employee since he knew about this feature.

Tina called the flight crew with her concerns about opening the door, and they suggested that she come to the cockpit and get an emergency rope so she could tie herself to one of the seats before opening the door. Cooper wasn’t going to let her leave then come back, so she asked if she could use some of the cord from the cut up parachute to tie herself to a chair.

He didn’t have time for any of that malarkey, so he told her that he would do it himself. He instructed her to instead go to the cockpit, closing the curtain between coach and first class behind her as she went. Tina begged him to take the bomb with him, and he said he would either disarm it or take it with him. Only four or five minutes after the plane had taken off and reached altitude, Tina was already in the cockpit where she would remain for the rest of the flight.

At about 8 pm, a warning light in the cockpit went off indicating that the rear staircase had been deployed. They asked over the intercom if he needed assistance, and Cooper replied with the final message anyone would ever hear him say: “No”. The crews’ ears all popped as the cabin door flung open, lowering the pressure in the aircraft. They had no idea if Cooper was still on the plane or if he had really jumped.

About three hours later when they approached Reno, Tina hopped on the intercom to tell him they needed the stairs retracted and the door closed so they could safely land for refueling. She kept calling over the intercom, but there was no reply. The crew finally landed the plane with the door open and the staircase deployed. When they landed, they went to search the cabin, but Cooper, the money, and the bomb were all gone.

Evidence

One particularly fun part of this case is that we’ll never know whether or not Cooper actually had a bomb or just something that would look like a bomb at a glance. Like the briefcase with the alleged bomb inside, almost everything that Cooper brought with him went out the plane with him. All that he left behind were the spare parachutes he didn’t use, and his black, clip-on tie and tie clip. That, and lots of fingerprints.

There were 66 unidentified fingerprints found throughout the plane. It is unclear how many belonged to him, but seeing as they’re still unidentified it doesn’t really matter.

It’s curious that Cooper would be meticulous enough to make sure he got his handwritten note back from Florence yet careless enough to leave his tie on one of the seats. In 2001, there was a partial DNA profile pulled from his tie. However, this is mostly meaningless for multiple reasons. The first is that because it’s only a partial profile, it’s not terribly useful in terms of making a conclusive match.

Even more important is the fact that we don’t actually know whose DNA is on the tie. DNA evidence wasn’t a thing in 1971, so God knows if somebody touched the thing at some point without gloves and got their DNA all over it. Even if they hadn’t, there’s still far too many ways the DNA could belong to someone other than Cooper.

Extensive testing of the tie also revealed some particles found on the tie in the 2010s. There were particles of titanium, rare earth metals, and even three tiny particles of an alloy of titanium and antimony. This weakly suggests that Cooper was involved in metal or chemical manufacturing.

One researcher found a patent for a titanium-antimony alloy from 1957, an alloy that was only made at a single company. However, they didn’t work with the material very long so those particles would have to have gotten onto the tie that Cooper was for some reason wearing at a manufacturing plant and remained there for over a decade. It’s possible, but the connection seems a bit tenuous. However, this angle would point more towards him having been ex-Boeing rather than ex-military.

Speaking of tenuous links, there’s the name the man used to buy the plane ticket at the airport. One of the early suspects in the case was a man named D.B. Cooper. A television reporter got confused and used this suspects name as the name of the hijacker. It is the name by which he gained notoriety, but as we previously mentioned he actually purchased the ticket under the name Dan Cooper.

The name has been linked to a French language, Belgian comic book called Dan Cooper about a Canadian flying ace and also rocketship pilot. A least one cover of the comic features Dan skydiving, there’s a hostage ransom in another, and some other very minor parallels. It has been suggested that Cooper stole not only the name but the entire idea from the pages of his favourite comic book, and that’s definitely possible.

Because the comic was never translated to English, this would further point to him being a Canadian, as the book was available there. Alternatively, it could mean he was a military man who had been stationed abroad where he found the comic. The Canadian idea is loosely corroborated by his referring to Minnesota as a country, though I suspect an intelligent, well-spoken man such as Cooper would not have made such a mistake by accident.

I think it would be really fun if the comic book actually was his inspiration, but I’m less than convinced. A quick glance at the white pages shows there are 1,475 Dan Coopers in the United States. That’s only the ones who are 18 years or older and whose phone numbers are listed, so there’s probably more. I even went to school with a guy named Dan Cooper.

If the hijacker had used the name Bruce Wayne or Fin Fang Foom then I’d be a lot less skeptical about the correlation. If accurate, the fairly obscure nature of the book (at least in America) does narrow down the list of suspects quite a bit.

But on the topic of him being a military man who was stationed abroad, there’s debate as to how likely this is. At first it was believed that he was probably an expert with a parachute, likely ex-air force. This was later changed with many in the FBI believing that he was just a Goddamn idiot. To start, he refused the military parachutes, instead wanting civilian ones (though when Tina handed him the instructions on how to use them that she had been provided with, Cooper said he didn’t need them).

There’s also a matter of when he jumped.

He jumped in the dark during freezing cold rain. Because of the altitude, the wind from freefall, and the rain, it should have felt like 69 degrees below zero. The parachute he used also couldn’t be steered, so he’d be crashing down randomly into the woods with no ability to guide his landing. He was also wearing only a suit, black trench coat, and a pair of loafers.

Jumping under these conditions doesn’t seem like a decision someone who knew what they were doing would make, but maybe he believed he was just that damn good and he could handle the death defying stunt effortlessly.

Despite my skepticism about both of these points, the theory from the FBI’s last lead investigator on the case is that Cooper was in fact an air force pilot that had been stationed in Europe where he was exposed to Dan Cooper comics. The investigator’s theory was also that Cooper didn’t survive the fall, and they just never found the body. Or the bomb. Or the money. Or the parachutes.

Unfortunately, the FBI closed their official investigation in 2016. After decades of searching, they declared that the Bureau had better things to do with their time and money than investigate the 45 year old theft of not even that much money, relatively speaking.

Earlier I mentioned that the flight crew was unsure whether or not Cooper was still on the plane. While this was true from their perspective at the time, the answer would later be pinpointed. At 8:13, the plane’s tail section suddenly jerked upward, causing the pilot to need to level out the plane. Later experiments were able to replicate the flight conditions that they were under at the time and push a 200 pound desk out of the rear door of the plane.

It reproduced the tail jerk perfectly, though nothing seems to be said about where or on whom the desk fell.

By determining the exact time that Cooper would have jumped, calculating the flight path should have been able to identify where he would have landed. There was just one problem with that. GPS wasn’t installed on planes until 1994, and the pilot was flying the plane manually rather than using autopilot. They actually needed to calculate the path rather than just being able to look at exact coordinates.

Any tiny adjustment on one of a number of different variables would result in wildly different results. Not like 1,000 miles different, but different enough that it resulted in an absolutely massive search area compared to what could be a pretty contained search in modern times. Later investigation and experiments would also show that the initial search wasn’t even close to where Cooper would have jumped.

Now, I mentioned that they never found a body or parachutes or the money, but that was only mostly true. One of the strangest things about this case is that the vast majority of the money has never been found. The serial numbers were sent to the likes of banks and casinos, and eventually were published publically. One moron had the bright idea to print counterfeit bills with some of those serial numbers so they could try to sell a story to magazines, but it turns out the FBI doesn’t have a hard time telling the difference between real and fake money.

However, in 1980, a portion of the money was found. An eight year old boy was raking the sandy banks of the Columbia River so that he could build a campfire. In doing so, he uncovered $5,800 that had been part of the ransom. The bills were in terrible shape thanks to being exposed to the elements for nearly a decade, but they were still in the rubber bands and stacked in their original order. This actually raised more questions than it answered.

It may seem this was evidence that Cooper died, but if so where was his body and the rest of the money? The bills that were found included two stacks of 100 $20 bills banded together, and another stack of only 90. When he had offered money to Tina, he just handed her one of the stacks rather than pulling some bills out, and he certainly hadn’t stopped between the plane and the ground to spend any money. Why then were ten bills missing from one of the piles?

The wear on the money also indicated that it hadn’t been deliberated buried, but rather was deposited into the river bank by the water itself. If that is the case, why would those three bundles of money have remained together instead of floating away randomly? Other than showing that the previous estimations for where they were when Cooper jumped were wrong, this discovery did little to illuminate the truth.

Oh, there’s just one other tiny bit of evidence, which is Cooper himself. It’s not like he purchased his plane ticket and boarded the plane wearing a balaclava, that’d be more than a little conspicuous. At one point during the flight he did put on a pair of sick shades, but people saw his face. Both flight attendants were required to sit next to him, so both got plenty of time to commit his face to memory. The only problem is that he was extraordinarily generic looking.

The FBI bulletin described him as a white male, mid 40s, 5’10ish, 170-180 lbs, with an olive complexion and Latin appearance. He was also described as having “normal style” hair, because I guess in 1971 there was only one acceptable haircut for a man. He was said to speak intelligently and had no discernible accent, which in America normally means that a person is from the Midwest. Again, it is frequently brought up that Cooper may have been Canadian.

This makes sense because a Canadian can talk to an American aboot anything without ever showing signs of an accent, eh?

The good news about the physical description was that they able to put together what were believed to be several highly accurate sketches of Cooper, based on all the eyewitness testimony. The bad news is that because he was so horrifically bland, basing it solely on appearance left room for a lot of suspects. And there were indeed a lot of suspects. In the over 50 years since the heist, there have been multiple people coming forward to accuse relatives of being Cooper (Goddamn snitches).

There have also been multiple deathbed confessions from people claiming they did it themselves. Then there are all the investigations, both from the FBI and amateur detectives, who have identified several potential candidates.

This just leaves two questions: who was Dan “D.B.” Cooper, and where is he now? I’ll answer that second question for you right now: he’s fucking dead. I don’t know whether or not he even survived the jump, but unless he looked absolutely terrible for his age, he was in his mid 40s in 1971. That’d put him at about 96 years old today. If there’s anything I’ve learned from Queen Elizabeth, it’s that people don’t often live past 96.

It is theoretically possible that he’s still alive, but he was also described as being a pretty intense chainsmoker so I don’t like his odds. But who was he? There’s quite a list of candidates, so let’s take a look together and see who, if any, seems the most plausible.

The Suspects

The FBI investigated over 1,000 suspects in this case, but we’re only going to be looking at some of the more credible or famous ones.

First, there’s Ted Braden. Ted enlisted in the military at the age of 16 during World War II. He was one of the military’s leading parachutists, and he even represented the Army in international skydiving tournaments. Also, apparently international skydiving tournaments exist. According to his military records, he made 911 jumps during his military career. This made him a good early suspect, but in reality it may disqualify him as a possibility.

During Vietnam, Ted was a Special Forces commando. His behaviour there was…interesting, to say the least. He was described as always making shady deals to make money, as well as having a death wish. It was said he would place himself in needlessly dangerous situations, but someone always survived unharmed. In December of 1966, Ted committed the capital offense of desertion, leaving his unit in Vietnam and making it all the way to the Congo to work as a mercenary for hire.

This career change didn’t last long before he was captured by the CIA and brought back to the states to face court martial. Despite desertion in time of war carrying the death penalty, Ted was given an honorary discharge from the military in 1967. His only punishment was that he wasn’t allowed to reenlist.

The details of his life become a bit hazy following this. He seemed to lead a life of crime, though a conviction wouldn’t stick until 1980. What we know for sure is that at the time of the hijacking, Ted was working as a truck driver close to where the hijacking took place. He mostly matched the description of Cooper, but he was only 5’8” according to his military records.

Those measurements would have been taken barefoot, but it’s unlikely that a pair of loafers was going to give him those extra couple inches Cooper was reported as having by witnesses.

Aside from the height, however, Ted was a dead ringer for the police sketch of Cooper. He also had a grudge against the U.S. Government for blacklisting him from flying to other countries after he was arrested for his mercenary work. It’s even possible that he was exposed to Dan Cooper comics while in the Congo, a former Belgian colony with French as its national language.

Though Ted had the skills, the classified knowledge, and the penchant for crime required, he was likely too skilled which we will address later. Given his propensity for money making crimes it also seems unlikely that he would have stolen the money without ever spending any of it, but there’s no guarantee that the makeshift bag tied to Cooper’s waist actually made it to the ground with him rather than being torn off by the high winds.

Next there’s Jack Coffelt. Jack was a conman, who told all sorts of crazy stories. The only reason he gained any credibility as a suspect was because he bore a resemblance to the sketches, was in Portland on the day of the hijacking, and had leg injuries immediately following the hijacking that were consistent with a skydive gone wrong.

Jack began claiming he was DB Cooper in 1972 in the hopes of selling his story to a movie company. His story was reviewed by the FBI who decided it was inconsistent with the actual story, based on details that had not yet been made public. But Jack never gave up hope. He kept trying to sell his story until the day he died in 1975, despite it being rejected by both Hollywood and news programs like 60 Minutes.

Though he was absolutely full of shit, you’ve gotta give it up for that dedication, persistence, and failure to realize that if anyone actually did believe his story that he’d go to federal prison. But this was before the Son of Sam laws, so maybe he felt the payoff would be worth it.

Kenneth Christiansen was accused of being Cooper in 2003, nearly a decade after he had already died. His brother, Lyle, had watched a documentary on the case and became convinced that Kenneth was the famous skyjacker. His evidence was flimsy at best.

Lyle argued that his brother had trained as a paratrooper in the military (though was never in active service as such), was a smoker, and enjoyed bourbon whiskey. That’s pretty much all the evidence he had. Florence was shown a picture of Kenneth and said that he looked more like Cooper than any of the other suspects she had been shown, but she couldn’t say it was conclusively him. Seeing as it was over 30 years later, that’s hardly surprising.

Despite the complete lack of physical evidence and pretty shaky circumstantial evidence, Lyle was able to hire a private investigator, Skipp Porteous, who went on to write a book that claimed Kenneth was Cooper’s real identity. It doesn’t seem to have been a best seller, but maybe it at least drove some business to Skipp’s agency, Sherlock Investigations.

The year after the book came out, the History Channel show Brad Meltzer’s Decoded did an episode featuring Kenneth as the prime suspect for Cooper. Unfortunately, this was the History Channel so Decoded was just the Ancient Aliens conspiracy style bullshit for modern day mysteries. Between the book and subsequent TV episode, there are a lot of links drawn between Kenneth and Cooper that simply don’t exist.

For example, they claim that the perpetually broke Kenneth mysteriously purchased a house with cash shortly after the hijacking. In reality this was less of a mysterious cash purchase and more of a standard mortgage that Kenneth wouldn’t finish paying off until 19 years later, something that is a matter of public record. Even though there is a lot of evidence against Kenneth as Cooper, it remains a popular theory.

Lynn Doyle Cooper, or L.D. Cooper, was presented as a suspect in 2011 by his niece, Maria. How credible this story is depends on how much you believe the eyewitness testimony of an 8 year old girl. An eyewitness account she would not actually share until she was 48 years old.

According to Maria, her family was at her grandmother’s house the week of Thanksgiving, 150 miles southeast of Portland. She said that L.D. and another uncle of hers were planning something “very mischievous” involving the use of “expensive walkie-talkies”. The next day, the plane was hijacked while her uncles claimed to be out hunting wild turkeys. When they finally came home, L.D.’s shirt was bloodied, which he claimed was the result of a car accident.

That’s not very convincing yet, but Maria also mentioned that her uncle was obsessed with the comic book Dan Cooper, to the point of having one of the issues hanging on his wall. She also claimed that her parents believed that L.D. was in fact the hijacker.

Considering this is the 40 year old memory of an 8 year old girl, it’s hard to put too much weight on her testimony. However, there is a vague whiff of credibility here. It makes sense that someone with the last name Cooper would learn there was a comic book called Dan Cooper and become obsessed with the character. Also, if L.D. had any parachuting experience, it certainly wasn’t at the level that would disqualify him from suspicion.

I don’t really find this witness compelling, but it is a high level of coincidence. L.D. had been a leatherworker, so when the FBI investigated they tried to pull prints off some of the leather items he had made, but they were not able to find any. They did do a DNA test and found that it did not match the partial profile found on the tie, but as we said there’s no guarantee that what they found even was Cooper’s DNA.

William Gossett was a military man, having served in both the Korean and Vietnam wars. He had both jump training and wilderness survival training, but he was not a paratrooper so he may have been a novice as a skydiver. There’s not much to link William with Cooper, other than the facts that he was completely obsessed with the case and that he admitted having done it to his family…sort of.

He once showed his sons a key which he claimed was to a safe deposit box in Vancouver where the ransom money was stashed. Realistically, it was either a random key he found or an old key he no longer needed, and he just lied to his kids to seem cool. The FBI found that not only was there no evidence linking William to the case, other than his own statements, they couldn’t even definitively place him anywhere near Oregon or Washington at the time of the hijacking.

Joe Lakich didn’t become a suspect until decades later when the analysis of the tie found those tiny specs of rare metals. At the time of the hijacking, Joe was working in Nashville as a production supervisor at an electronics capacitor factory. As a supervisor, he may have been required to wear a tie to work and likely would have been exposed to the metals found on the tie.

But what could a factory worker in the south have to do with a hijacking in the Pacific Northwest? For Joe, the theory is all about motive. He had been a major in the U.S. Army in the Korean War, so he may have had parachuting experience. More importantly, his daughter was killed two months before the hijacking in a failed hostage negotiation.

Joe and his wife would eventually sue the FBI for negligence over their daughter’s death and win their lawsuit. However, this came well after the hijacking. When Cooper told Tina on the plane that he had a grudge, just not one against their airline, it is speculated that his grudge was against the FBI for getting his daughter killed.

This makes some amount of sense, especially as I suspect most people would assume that the FBI, or at least the U.S. Government, would be the ones responsible for the payment. I know I had, and I was really surprised to learn that the airline company was the one that was stuck footing the bill.

But for Joe, it may not have even been about the money; after all, none of the money was ever spent. If he held a grudge against the FBI for the death of his daughter, it could have been more about embarrassing them and showing how incompetent the FBI was rather than about actually collecting the ransom.

Sheridan Peterson served in the Marine Corps in World War II and went on to work in Seattle as a technical editor for Boeing. He was an early suspect because he had experience as a smokejumper, firefighters that parachute into the woods as a first line of defense against wildfires. He was also known for his love of taking physical risks, and bore quite a resemblance to the sketch of Cooper. Then again, based on the photos of all these suspects I feel confident in saying that 100% of middle aged white dudes in 1971 bore a resemblance to the sketch.

Despite having been a firefighter, Sheridan loved to stoke the flames by teasing reporters, insinuating that he might actually have been Cooper. Once the FBI took a serious interest in him as a suspect, he changed his tune and insisted that he was in Nepal at the time of the hijacking.

Also, while his face looks like a lot like the sketch, personally I think he was far too balding in 1971. The FBI bulletin was extremely descript, indicating the length of his barely existent sideburns and difference in hair colour between those and his head of hair. There’s no way someone could be so far along in their development of horseshoe pattern baldness without it having been mentioned in the official description.

Dick Lepsy is another name that shows up in discussions a lot, so I figured I’d quickly dismiss the idea. Dick is the one person that didn’t really look like the sketch of Cooper, and he had disappeared over two years before the hijacking even took place. He had stolen $2,000 from his work before his lunch break then never came back. His car was found at an airport near Portland and it’s believed he fled to Mexico, but again, this was two years earlier.

It’s among the more foolish of the theories, but it’s popular enough I that know I’d get shit in the comments if I didn’t at least mention it.

Richard McCoy was, wait for it, yet another military veteran. I don’t think Richard was Cooper, but he definitely wanted to be. He was most famous for performing one of the copycat hijackings several months after the Cooper heist. Despite performing the hijacking using a nearly identical method, there were a few key differences.

First, Cooper was cool as shit. He remained calm the entire time and was friendly and generous with his hostages. Richard was a nervous, fidgety mess the entire time, even before he had begun to enact his plan. This would be true of all the copycats. He also left behind the handwritten ransom note, something the real Cooper had been smart enough to take with him. This, along with a magazine that Richard was reading on the plane, gave them plenty of fingerprint evidence.

Still, he was able to collect a $500,000 ransom and skydive out of the plane over Utah. He was arrested 2 days later and sentenced to 45 years in jail. Many were convinced that Richard was in fact Cooper, especially because he refused to either confirm or deny whether or not he was to the media. His family also claimed that the tie and mother-of-pearl tie clip Cooper had left behind belonged to Richard.

This is an unusual thing to claim, because there is very credible evidence that Richard had been in Las Vegas at the time of the hijacking and was back with his family in Utah the next day for Thanksgiving dinner. Maybe they thought the Vegas trip was a cover story. Or, since he was going to be spending the next 45 years in jail anyway, maybe Richard’s family thought that identifying him as Cooper, who was already regarded as a folk hero rather than a criminal, would give him some sort of cachet that would be beneficial while he was behind bars.

Of course, Richard wasn’t going to spend the next 45 years in jail. Two years into his sentence, he and some fellow inmates staged a breakout by driving a garbage truck through the main gate of the prison. He was tracked down three months later and killed in a shootout with the FBI. The agent that killed him was quoted as saying, “When I shot Richard McCoy, I shot D.B. Cooper at the same time.” That’s probably not true, but whatever makes him happy I suppose.

William Smith is the most recent suspect, rudely accused in 2018 shortly after he died and couldn’t defend himself from such allegations. This one feels like a stretch, mainly because William lived about 3,000 miles away from the hijacking. His photos, past and present, bear a striking resemblance to the sketch of Cooper, but I feel like I’ve said that about a dozen different people at this point.

William was a Word War II veteran where he served in the U.S. Navy. In the navy, he underwent combat air training, so he likely had some parachute experience. He was heavily affected by the Penn Central Transportation Company bankruptcy of 1970, the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history at that point. This is theorized to lead to some vague, nondescript grudge that would lead to the hijacking.

William worked at a railroad company where it is believed he could have been exposed to the metals found on Cooper’s tie. His high school yearbook also included a list of alumni that had died during World War II, and among them was Ira Daniel Cooper, who went by Dan Cooper. It is believed that this could have been the inspiration for the name used for the hijacking.

It’s the newest theory, and the FBI’s official statement is that it would be inappropriate for them to comment on tips related to William. Many people have misinterpreted this to mean that the tips are being thoroughly investigated, so the FBI can’t comment and potentially damage the search. In reality, it is probably their polite way of saying, “We closed this case years ago. Kindly please fuck off.”

The only real reason I even included William on this list is to highlight how obsessed people still are with this case, as well as the desire many people have to prove that they’re brilliant and special enough to solve it all on their own. This was a heavily researched theory put forth in 2018, nearly 47 years after the hijacking, and even a surface level reading of it doesn’t make sense.

William lived 3,000 miles away from the hijacking, had a wife and two daughters, and held the same job from 1945 until 1993. His career even put him in the Pennsylvania Railroaders Hall of Fame, yet another thing I am astonished to learn actually exists. In short, he had no clear motive, plenty of reason not to risk his life doing something so foolish, and was almost certainly thousands of miles away when the hijacking took place.

Finally, there was Duane Weber, proposed as a suspect by his widow, Jo. Duane was yet another ringer for the Cooper sketch, and he matched the expected profile of the man the FBI was looking for. He was another World War II veteran, but he also had committed a string of crimes between 1945 and 1968, landing him in jail at least six times.

In 1995, three days before he died, he turned to wife of 17 years from his hospital bed and asked her to come over. He wanted her to lean in as close as possible, then he whispered to her, “I have a secret to tell you. I’m Dan Cooper.” Armed with this new information, there was only one possible course of action Jo could take: do absolutely nothing, because who the Hell was Dan Cooper?

It would be months before anyone finally explained to her that Dan Cooper was the name the famous hijacker D.B. Cooper had actually used.

Suddenly, a lot of things in Jo’s life started making sense. A minor connection to Cooper was that Duane also drank bourbon and chain-smoked Raleigh cigarettes, but those are both pretty small connections. However, after Duane died, she found a hidden wallet with a fake ID under the name John Collins. She had also once seen an old Northwest Airlines ticket lying around, but when she asked about it he refused to answer and the ticket suddenly disappeared.

One night, Jo witnessed Duane having a nightmare, and he began talking in his sleep about leaving fingerprints on a plane. He also had an old knee injury that he claimed was from jumping out of a plane, despite their being no evidence of such an incident occurring.

Then there was the trip that the couple took in 1979 to the area where Cooper would have landed. Duane inexplicably threw a bag into the Tena Bar River that he said was a bag of garbage. This was the same location where the $5,800 would be found roughly one year later. Jo also found a book about Cooper in her local library that was full of Duane’s handwriting in the margins.

There’s a lot of solid circumstantial evidence with this one, and it’s highly suspicious if nothing else. However, the FBI ruled out Duane as a suspect for two reasons. The first was that his fingerprints did not match any of the ones that they found. It’s theoretically possible that he didn’t leave any prints on the plane at all.

Nearly everything he touched came out the plane with him, and though there are no reports of him wiping down his prints, he could have easily done it one of the times he sent Tina to the cockpit or to retrieve the parachutes.

I don’t know if that’s terribly likely, but it remains a possibility. Duane’s sleep-talking was specifically about a fear that he had left fingerprints on the back staircase, so it’s possible he had wiped them down in the plane but was fearful he had not been as careful when making his final escape.

The other reason that the FBI ruled Duane out as a suspect was that he survived. They have remained convinced that Cooper could not have possibly survived the jump. I’ve gone back and forth on it a few times, but there’s one thing that suggests it is highly possible for Cooper to have made it to the ground alive.

The Copycats

There were five copycat hijackings following Cooper’s initial crime. We’re not going to get into the details of all of them because this is long enough, but they’re important to mention for one specific reason: all five men survived their jumps.

I mentioned that originally it was believed that Cooper was a heavily experienced skydiver and possibly a former military paratrooper, but that this was later revised. It was believed no one with any amount of actual experience would attempt such a stupidly dangerous jump. Cooper didn’t have gloves, jump boots, or a helmet, and he hadn’t asked to be given any of these safety items along with the parachutes.

Furthermore, he chose the older of the primary parachutes he was given rather than the newer, technically superior one. The reserve parachutes were even more telling. The one he chose was a “dummy” used for classroom presentations only. The chute had been sewn shut, rendering it completely useless. This was something an experienced jumper would have had the foresight to check and immediately notice.

However, Tina said that he put on the parachute effortlessly, like it was something he did every day. Skydiving instructor Earl Cossey, who supplied the parachutes to the FBI, also claimed that it wouldn’t take an experienced diver to survive, and someone with only six or seven jumps would have been fine. He did admit that jumping at night without protective gear would make it more dangerous, but he indicated this would likely result in leg or ankle injuries while landing rather than actually being fatal.

We also don’t actually know if Cooper had any of the safety equipment with him or not. Along with his briefcase bomb, he had a large, paper bag, like you would get at a grocery store. Its contents weren’t used as part of the hijacking so no one ever saw inside it, and it left the plane with him. It’s possible he had gloves, jump boots, and a helmet inside.

That, or it could have been other useful survival equipment. According to an eight year old girl, it may have contained an expensive walkie-talkie. We’ll never actually know.

Even if he survived the jump, it was believed that Cooper wouldn’t have made it through the entire ordeal. It was believed that he wasn’t working with an accomplice, as he gave no specific flight path, just the destination. Furthermore, when they pilots said they would need to fly to Reno instead of straight to Mexico he allowed them to do so. This would have changed the plane’s trajectory and thus where he would jump, something that he could not communicate to the ground.

They felt this showed that he had absolutely no plan for after he landed on the ground, and that may be true. However $200,000 cash can buy someone a lot of good will. If he could find his way to a road, I’m sure he would’ve been fine. Those ten missing bills might even have been used to purchase safe passage somewhere, though it doesn’t explain why the rest of the money was discarded.

But back to the copycats. Like I said, all five men survived not just their initial jumps, but survived long enough to be arrested. Most of these jumps were in similar conditions to what Cooper did, and combining all of them it was far more intense.

One hijacker jumped over northern Colorado in the middle of winter wearing nothing but slacks, a shirt, and cowboy boots. Another made a nighttime jump into the Honduran jungle.

Finally, there was Martin McNally. Martin jumped at night with no protective gear and only using a reserve parachute. He didn’t even know how to use it, and had to be shown how to put it on. By this point, pilots were probably pretty sick of these assholes holding them hostage, so Martin’s pilot wasn’t too keen on playing ball.

Though he was supposed to hold as slow a speed as possible without stalling, similar to the 115 mph when Cooper jumped, he instead sped the plane up to over 360 mph. This made Martin’s jump extremely dangerous, and the high speeds immediately tore the bag of money off of his body when he jumped. Despite this, Martin survived with nothing more than superficial scratches and bruises.

Based on the survival of the copycats, I’m more inclined to believe that Cooper was actually the one that got away, and not the one that died and was never found.

Wrap Up

There are a lot of questions surrounding this case. The most obvious one is whether or not Cooper even survived the jump. The FBI’s official stance is that he did not. Agents have theorized that he succumbed to hypothermia, and never even got to open his chute. Instead, he landed in the Columbia River and drowned.

I’m less convinced of this. The copycats all seemed to have less of an idea what they were doing than Cooper did, and they survived potentially even more dangerous conditions. Besides, if he did drown in the river, wouldn’t some evidence have been found? The bag of money, the suitcase, his body, something?

Even though the early searches were in the wrong area, there have been a lot of people searching for a long time. It seems unlikely that he could have died from his jump without anything ever being found besides a fraction of the ransom money.

The next question is what was Cooper’s real identity? What do you think, Simon, do you like any of the suspects that have been presented? Personally, I don’t think any of them are terribly good fits. If I could take Joe Lakich’s motive of wanting vengeance on the FBI for getting his daughter killed and give it to career criminal Duane Weber who made the deathbed confession to his wife, I’d think we’d have a pretty good suspect.

Unfortunately, I don’t get to invent people for the sake of storytelling. Joe had, by far, the most reasonable motive beyond simple greed. I could be wrong, but I don’t like greed as a motive for this because it’s such a high risk and high profile stunt to pull. Cooper is described as being extremely intelligent, so I’m sure he would have been able to calculate that he could steal or extort a lot more than $200,000 in a much safer and more reliable fashion.

Duane’s criminal history and a lot of the suspicious details make him sound like a believable candidate, but there’s some big question marks there as well. Other than his criminal record from before the hijacking, most of the evidence comes directly from his widow. It’s all either evidence she saw but is gone now or things she says she witnessed but there’s no way to prove. If he really did fill the margins of a book about Cooper with his own notes, it’s possible he was just obsessed with the case and decided to gaslight his wife into thinking that he was the famous criminal.

A lot of people still point to Ted Braden as the most likely culprit. If this was a fiction story, he is the exact character someone would create to fill the role. He seems to fit almost perfectly, except for one problem: the money was never spent. Ted was another career criminal, even while he was in the military, and he seemed to be entirely in it for the money.

Given that the plane was flying at an appropriate speed for him to jump and that he had 911 recorded jumps in the military, I find it utterly unbelievable that Ted would not have tied the bag to his waist in such a way that it was guaranteed to make it with him to the ground. Once that happened, I find it equally unbelievable that he wouldn’t have spent it.

I don’t think we’ll ever know specifically who Cooper was, but we can at least theorize what kind of person he was. This case has been analyzed from every angle, and there are two main psychological profiles for the culprit, though there are variations.

The first idea is that Cooper was a career criminal, likely a psychopath with antisocial personality disorder. He committed the crime entirely for the money, and he was willing to jeopardize the lives of everyone on the plane to get what he wanted. He had fallen onto hard times, and the hijacking was an act of desperation due to his financial situation.

In this scenario, he was polite to the flight attendants because he was manipulative and thought it would help him get away with the crime. He was also most likely a loner by choice, which would make sense given that evidence indicates Cooper did not have an accomplice and would be fending for himself when he got to the ground.

The alternate theory is that Cooper was a thrill seeker who never expected to survive the jump. In this scenario he was likely a skilled worker, someone that may have worked a manufacturing job with the rare metals found on his tie, and he wanted some excitement and to make a name for himself. It wasn’t about the money, it was about committing a crime that would let him live in infamy forever.

This theory proposes that Cooper wasn’t a loner, but he was now alone. He was someone that either had lost his wife or become estranged from his family for some reason, and decided he wanted to go out with a bang. His politeness wasn’t a form of manipulation, but was either his normal temperament or something done to aid with the air of mystique surrounding the crime.

I’m somewhere in between those, but I’m not sure which I’m leaning more towards. I definitely don’t think it was about the money, considering it was never spent. Also, Ted Braden had been investigated by the FBI for stealing $250,000 as part of a trucking scam, yet he never faced charges from that investigation. I think a career criminal would know there are easier ways to steal money than hijacking a plane, and ones with a much higher chance of success.

So while I think it was likely much more of a thrill seeking endeavor, I definitely don’t think that Cooper intended to die. None of the evidence indicates that he thought he wouldn’t survive the jump. If we knew what was in his paper bag or whether or not the bomb he had was actually real, I think it’d be a lot easier to come up with an accurate profile for him.

There’s simply too little evidence, too many possible motivations, and countless millions of generic white dudes from the 1970s who match the police sketch perfectly. Similar to the case of JonBenét Ramsey, when there is virtually no evidence and every theory has glaring holes, it’s really hard to pick a favourite theory.

If there’s anything we’ve learned today, specifically from the ridiculous speculation surrounding railroad worker William Smith, it’s that you can make a case for it being literally anybody who was in their 40s in 1971. There’s still enough interest in this case that you can pick any random dude, no matter how flimsy or full of lies your argument may be, and you can get your book of speculation published and subsequently featured on whatever tripe the History Channel is currently airing. Mainstream historians would argue that this is unethical and immoral, but ancient astronaut theorists believe it doesn’t matter what you say as long as you get paid.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the name of the man who hijacked the plane?

The man who hijacked the plane used the name Dan Cooper to purchase his ticket.

How much money did D.B. Cooper demand?

D.B. Cooper demanded $200,000 in US currency, which is roughly $1.4 million dollars today.

What items did D.B. Cooper request along with the ransom money?

D.B. Cooper requested two primary parachutes and two reserve parachutes along with the ransom money.

What was the flight plan outlined by D.B. Cooper?

D.B. Cooper outlined a flight plan to fly to Mexico at a slow speed of 115 mph, with the landing gear down, an altitude of 10,000 feet, wing flaps at a 15 degree angle, and an unpressurized cabin.

What evidence was left behind by D.B. Cooper on the plane?

D.B. Cooper left behind spare parachutes, a black clip-on tie, a tie clip, and 66 unidentified fingerprints.

What was the significance of the particles found on D.B. Cooper’s tie?

The particles found on D.B. Cooper’s tie included titanium, rare earth metals, and an alloy of titanium and antimony, suggesting possible involvement in metal or chemical manufacturing.

What was the name of the comic book that some believe inspired D.B. Cooper?

Some believe that D.B. Cooper was inspired by a French language, Belgian comic book called Dan Cooper about a Canadian flying ace and rocketship pilot.

What was the FBI’s official stance on whether D.B. Cooper survived the jump?

The FBI’s official stance is that D.B. Cooper did not survive the jump, theorizing that he succumbed to hypothermia and drowned in the Columbia River.

What were the two main psychological profiles proposed for D.B. Cooper?

The two main psychological profiles proposed for D.B. Cooper are that he was either a career criminal committing the crime for money or a thrill seeker who never expected to survive the jump.

What was the significance of the $5,800 found in 1980?

The $5,800 found in 1980 was part of the ransom money, but its discovery raised more questions than it answered, including why only a portion of the money was found and why ten bills were missing from one of the stacks.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: UNSOLVED: Discovering the Truth Behind the Disappearance of DB Cooper
• Hero image source by Brandon Zhang / openverse, cc0.