DB Cooper strapped $200,000 to himself and jumped into history
What happened to DB Cooper, the skydiving hijacker who, 50 years ago today, grabbed his $200,000 ransom and jumped into the night sky, never to be seen again?
America is a culture festooned with heroes, real and imagined. They have George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King and Muhammad Ali, Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, as well as Yogi Bear and Popeye.
But the strangest is surely DB Cooper. That’s how he is celebrated today. There never was a DB Cooper. That was an early mistake by a reporter, but folklore rules. His “real” name was Dan Cooper, and he was a lot smarter than the average bear. Perhaps.
These days he has a fan club and annual events mark his astonishing and brazen hijacking of a jet headed for Seattle in 1971. Citizen sleuths still hunt forests and rivers for clues. T-shirts present various takes on him with snappy phrases beneath his FBI Photofit image: “Missing: Have you seen this man?” and “I Jumped With DB Cooper”, to “I am Dan Cooper”, and “DB Cooper – Hide and Seek Champion”, or more recently four bold letters “WWDD” (What Would DB Cooper Do?)
Fifty years ago today, a man signing off as Dan Cooper paid $20 cash for an early afternoon flight from Portland in Oregon to Seattle in Washington state. On board he threatened to blow up the plane unless a ransom was paid and parachutes brought to him.
He later jumped from the passenger jet. What happened next sparked off a 45-year police hunt and record-long FBI investigation that stretches to 60 volumes – but it remains a remarkable mystery that is as unknown now as it was on that freezing Wednesday in 1971.
There are many theories about Cooper, and at least two men have, in deathbed confessions, claimed to be him. But none quite gets over the line. Cooper remains a riddle. And there are many who believe he almost certainly died on that eve of Thanksgiving Day in 1971. Logic suggests he would at least have been injured in the jump, making it difficult to survive in a freezing forest below.
Booking his flight at the counter of Northwest Orient Airlines in Portland he wrote his name in capitals on the top left side of the ticket, a copy of which the airline desk kept – the only evidence of his writing. In any case, given he planned to hijack Flight 305 in a few minutes, it is unlikely to have been his real name. He might have come up with the name inspired by a French comic series about a Canadian flying ace, The Adventures of Dan Cooper.
Back then Northwest served free pre-flight drinks, and the man settled into a seat in row 18 and ordered a bourbon while lighting up a Raleigh brand cigarette (smoking on aircraft was banned starting in 1987). A storm brewed up ahead, typical weather for that time of year in America’s Pacific northwest. The routines of early 1970s flights unfolded as the pilots readied the Boeing 727 for takeoff and “galley girl” Tina Mucklow, 22, the newest recruit to Northwest, strapped herself into the jump seat next to where her senior colleague, Florence Schaffner, 23, would sit.
Shortly before the aircraft pushed off, the man in row 18 passed a folded note to Schaffner. It was so common for solo businessmen to write their telephone numbers on slips of paper and hand them to female flight crew members that Schaffner automatically folded it in to her purse without reading it and forgot about it. Just before takeoff, the man beckoned Schaffner over: “Miss, you’d better look at that note. I have a bomb.”
Schaffner opened the note, which was written in a felt pen, again all in capitals. Her recollection was that it stated: “Miss I have a bomb here and I would like you to sit by me.”
It certainly ended with “No funny stuff, or I’ll do the job.”
Instead of taking the jump seat next to Mucklow, Schaffner sat next to the man we know as DB Cooper. He opened his briefcase to show Schaffner its contents – a battery, eight red canisters and a tangle of wires. It was the era of hijacking and she needed no further confirmation that there was a bomb on board.
While she engaged the man in brief conversation, Schaffner dropped the note and surreptitiously made Mucklow aware of it. Mucklow picked it up, read it and then called the flight deck to tell them what little she knew.
As the plane ascended, Cooper, who had now consumed his bourbon and donned horn-rimmed sunglasses, spoke while Schaffner took notes of his demands: $US200,000 in used $US20 notes to be delivered to Seattle airport by 5pm, a truck ready to refuel the aircraft, along with two main and two safety parachutes. Presumably Cooper thought this would indicate he planned to parachute out with a hostage. It was strategic thinking: had he asked for only one the authorities might have sabotaged it. If the risk was that he might take someone with him that had to be ruled out.
It is safe to assume Cooper had some parachuting experience. He certainly knew his planes: he had asked at the booking desk if the plane would be a 727; it had an unusual ventral staircase that could be lowered during a flight. His plan was to bundle up the cash and drop out of the back of the Boeing and to freedom.
Both women noted his clothing. He wore a dark russet-coloured business suit with a white shirt, a clip-on black tie bought from JC Penney, a mid-market department store much like Myer. He had step-in shoes and a trench coat. All far from suitable for a parachute drop during a building storm.
He spoke in a low “accentless” voice, sounded intelligent with a broad vocabulary, and stood about “five foot 10” (about 180cm) or a little more. They estimated he weighed “170 to 180 pounds” (about 80kg). They thought he was in his mid-40s with tanned or olive skin.
The captain had contacted Seattle police with details of their situation and the hijacker’s demands. The aircraft was put in a holding pattern over Puget Sound, a large body of water to the west of Seattle, a safety measure in case Cooper did blow it up; they didn’t want the debris raining over Seattle’s streets. The 35 other passengers were told there was a minor mechanical issue.
While in this pattern, Cooper spoke to Mucklow, who had replaced Schaffner alongside him – she was on the flight deck dealing with Cooper’s demands – and pointed out to her the city of Tacoma below. McChord Air Force Base was nearby, he added, obviously familiar with the region.
Meanwhile police rounded up parachutes and the cash. It was surprisingly easy as banks near big city airports routinely kept large amounts for just such situations. Hijacks of domestic flights were so common then. In 1971 alone, more than a plane a month was hijacked and diverted to Cuba.
After landing, captain William Scott taxied to a remote area of the tarmac. Cooper had the flight attendants draw the window blinds in case of police snipers. Other passengers, Schaffner and another attendant were allowed to leave.
The cash was delivered – 10,000 $US20 notes whose serial numbers had been recorded – along with the parachutes. Cooper ordered another bourbon from Mucklow, for which he paid. He told her he did not have anything against her airline, he just had “a grudge”. Cooper said he wanted to be taken to Mexico, but it was beyond the range of the 727, so a refuelling stop in Reno became part of the most odd of flight plans, mostly devised by Cooper himself.
The plane would take off with the aft stairs extended, the landing gear was to stay down, it would not ascend above 3000m and would travel at its lowest cruising speed with the wing flaps at 15 degrees. Informed that it was too dangerous to take off with the stairs lowered, Cooper contested this but agreed that Mucklow could show him how to lower them in flight.
They set off for Reno at 7.40pm – no route had been set by the hijacker – briefly shadowed by two fighter jets scrambled from the McChord base, as Cooper probably knew they would.
Mucklow showed him how to operate the stairs and Cooper then sent her to the flight deck. She looked back briefly. Moments later a light came on in the cabin. The stairs mechanism had been switched on. Three minutes later the plane’s tail jolted upwards; presumably the stairs had been lowered. Two hours later, landing at Reno, police surrounded the plane and searched it. Cooper was gone.
Assuming he jumped about 8.03pm, about when they felt the upwards movement at the back, Cooper jumped as they flew over heavily wooded forests near Ariel, on the Washington-Oregon border. They were flying through a rainstorm, so factoring in the wind chill and elevation it would have been about minus 21C, with cloud cover blocking most the moonlight. His chute was not steerable.
Richard McCooey, chief executive of the Australian Parachute Federation, believes he could have survived, but the odds are low. McCooey, whose has made more than 5000 jumps, some in dark, cold conditions, and who holds a commercial pilot’s licence, says: “Jumping from a Boeing 727 from 3000m would not be particularly challenging if Cooper was an experienced skydiver.”
It appears he may have been. But McCooey believes landing in those low or no light conditions “would be extremely challenging – particularly with the older-style round parachutes. The odds of landing without injury would be no more than 10 per cent.”
No trace of Cooper, his chutes, his clothes or his briefcase “bomb” has ever been found. More than 1000 soldiers and police were involved in the wide search.
But in February 1980, Brian Ingram, 9, was digging sand to make a fire pit for a family barbecue at a spot called Tena Bar on the Washington side of the Columbia River, and found three bundles of $US20 notes, still with rubber bands around them, to the value of $US5800. The serial numbers confirmed them to be part of Cooper’s ransom.
It was away from the deduced flight plan, but not too far. Had Cooper landed nearby, had the cash floated downstream? Or had someone found part or all of the money and stashed some away? It only deepened the mystery.
There are a few clues to Cooper’s identity: He was educated, probably left-handed (he opened the briefcase using his left hand, and his tie clip was attached from the left), was confident of parachuting and understood the aircraft and at least the rudiments of flying. Perhaps he had been a paratrooper in Vietnam or a disgruntled Northwest employee.
The following year the FBI thought they had their man when Vietnam vet Richard Floyd McCoy carried out an identical hijacking, parachuting away with $500,000. He was quickly caught and jailed, but he didn’t fit the matching, detailed description of Cooper the flight attendants had given. McCoy escaped jail in 1974 and was shot dead in a confrontation with police weeks later.
Lyle Christiansen’s brother Kenneth had been a paratrooper and a Northwest flight attendant, who, as he lay dying in 1994, said: “There is something you should know, but I cannot tell you,” which Lyle took as him confessing to being Cooper.
The following year in Florida, when her husband, Duane Weber, was in his last hours, wife Jo said she heard him whisper: “I am Dan Cooper.” His fingerprints were not found on the aircraft.
Another veteran with parachuting experience was the odd William Gossett, who later became a priest. He certainly looked like the FBI’s drawing of the hijacker. He had a gambling problem, apparently was often in debt, and reportedly admitted to his sons he was Cooper. His DNA – the FBI believes it sourced Cooper’s from that clip-on tie – didn’t match.
Cooper has smoked eight cigarettes during the two flights. Police collected these, but before advances in DNA technology they were misplaced and have not been found. But something else was: when the tie was tested with an electron microscope in 2017 it was found to carry some rare metals including minute flecks of titanium, which is used in the manufacture of the shafts and casing of aircraft engine fans. Perhaps Cooper worked at Boeing, or a supplier, or Northwest.
The Cooper phenomenon gained momentum through the years At least seven novels are based on the story, there are four TV documentaries and two movies, along with songs – The Ballad of DB Cooper and The Final Flight of DB Cooper – and most recently the Disney-Marvel Comics TV series in which the character Loki turns up as Cooper at the back of the plane.
If Cooper survived the jump, and if he was in his mid-40s as the flight staff agreed, he’d now be in his mid-90s. Maybe there is, somewhere in America, an old-timer with an amazing true story he is keeping to himself. Perhaps, over a bourbon, he is known to ramble on about serving his country in Korea or Vietnam. And perhaps, just occasionally, he makes oblique references to something extraordinary that he did in 1971.
He’s not alone.
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