January 28, 2013 • 18 mins
In 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper hijacked Northwest Orient Airlines flight 305. He received a ransom of $200,000 -- and then jumped out in midair. Over the years, the FBI has searched for Cooper with little luck. Tune in to learn more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from housetof
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
to bring the Choko reateboarding and I'm fair Dowdy And
it has been a great couple of months for history news, hasn't. Yeah,
there's been this new theory about Butch Cassidy's demise. Blackbeard's
(00:24):
ship was positively identified, which was really cool, and there
was a new lead in the subject we're going to
talk about today, the dB Cooper mystery. And if you've
never heard of DV Cooper, we're referring to the nineteen
seventy one hijacking of the Northwest Orient Airlines flight, which
is to this day, as of this podcast, still unsolved.
(00:44):
The man who did it was never caught or positively identified,
and we're not even sure if he lived past the
day that the crime was committed. A mystery indeed, but
over the years this has become one of America's favorite mysteries.
People love to just obsess over the clue than the suspects,
and there are even informal groups of amateur investigators who
(01:05):
have essentially devoted their lives to trying to solve this case. Yeah,
there's a recent CNN story about that. But if you're
a long time listener of this podcast, you're probably thinking
when you saw the title dB Cooper, hey, that looks
pretty familiar. And it's true. Candice and Josh touched on
this topic back in the Factor Fiction days. The format
(01:25):
of the show then wasn't much shorter, so it only
got three minutes and forty nine seconds, And we've gotten
requests over the years to address some of these topics
in our longer format, and dB Cooper was just one
that we thought definitely deserved more attention. People want more
from dB Cooper, they want answers. So here we want
to take a closer look at the case and some
(01:45):
of the theories surrounding it and the leads that have
come up over the years, including a very recent lead.
You've probably seen dB Cooper's name in the news in
the past weeks even, but we're gonna start by talking
about what actually happened the day of the hijacking, sort
to go blow by blow with it. So just to
set it all up, on November nineteen seventy one, which
(02:08):
was the day before Thanksgiving, a man who gave the
name Dan Cooper, showed up at the airport in Portland,
Oregon and paid cash for a one way ticket on
the Northwest Orient Airlines flight three oh five to Seattle.
So those are the That's how it started, and nothing
about Cooper's appearance that day really raised any red flags
(02:30):
for everyone. He just looked like this, a regular guy.
He was wearing a dark business suit and a narrow
dark tie with a pearl tie tack. He also had
a homburg hat on and carried a dark raincoat and
a briefcase. According to witnesses, he was about six ft
tall and one seventy five pounds, and he was probably
in his mid forties. He had short brown hair, a
(02:51):
receding hairline, brown eyes, and he was clean shaven, very
average sounding. Yeah, absolutely, and he was assigned to aisle
seat eighteen C on the light The plane itself was
a Boeing seven seven, so not like a super tiny
prop plane or something like that. Even though it was
a very short, around thirty minute flight to Seattle. The
plane could actually seat around ninety four passengers, but there
(03:13):
were only thirty six on board, which comes into play later.
It does so while Cooper was waiting for the plane,
he lit up a cigarette, ordered a bourbon and soda,
and just hung out in the afternoon waiting for the
flight to take off. Then shortly after the plane was airborne,
he handed the flight attendant, Florence Schaffner, a note. Yeah,
(03:34):
and Shaefer was twenty three and pretty, and according to
an article by Jeffrey Gray and New York Magazine, she
was used to passengers hitting on her, and so that's
basically what she thought was happening when she got the note,
she said, she tried to kind of shrug it off, like, oh, yeah,
it's just another note from a guy. I'm gonna put
it away. But Cooper said to her, miss you better
take a look at that note. The note was written
(03:54):
in felt pen in all caps, and it said quote,
I have a bomb in my briefcase. I want you
to sit beside me. So she did as she was told,
and Cooper gave her a glimpse inside his briefcase. And
when he opened it up, she saw this massive wires,
a battery, six red sticks, so it looked like it
could be about It looked like it could be a bomb.
And he made her write down some instructions what he wanted,
(04:17):
which included two hundred thousand dollars and used twenties two
parachutes and two backup shoots, so two front and two
back shoots, and he wanted a fuel truck ready to
refuel when the plane landed. He told her no funny stuff,
or I'll do the job. So the crew in the
airline did what he wanted. They had to circle the
airport for a little bit while the people on the
ground put the demands together. And after the plan landed
(04:39):
and parked on this remote part of the airfield, Cooper
let all of thirty six passengers plus Schaffner get off
the plane, and that left three flight officers and another
flight attendant on the plane with him, and he requested
that meals be brought to them and asked for his
note back. It seemed like he had all of this
really carefully prepared. Then they took off from the Seattle
(05:03):
Tacoma Airport at about seven forty six PM, which was
two hours approximately after they landed, and at first Cooper
told the pilot that he wanted to go to Mexico,
but he had really specific instructions for him to He
told the pilot to keep the plane below ten thousand
feet and he claimed that he had a risk altimeter
(05:23):
to actually check up on that too, and ordered him
to fly no faster than one fifty miles per hour
with the flaps set at fifteen degrees. Yeah, and so
the pilot told him at that point that they couldn't
make it to Mexico City under those conditions without refueling
and Reno, so Cooper agreed to that. After they were airborne, though,
Cooper ordered the flight attendant to go into the cockpit,
(05:46):
so he was alone in the cabin. Then around eight pm,
a light on the instrument panel indicated that the door
to the ft stairs had been opened, and about twenty
minutes later the crew noticed a slight change in the
plane's altitude. The nose dipped first and then the tail,
which is apparently what happens when the aft stairs are lowered.
So when the plane landed and Reno Cooper was gone.
(06:07):
So now let's look at the time frame a little judging.
By the time they noticed that the aft stairs had
been opened and lowered, they estimated that he had come
down near the Lewis River, which is north of Portland,
and authorities combed that area really thoroughly, bit by bit
over the next few weeks looking for anything, you know,
a scrap of parachute money, just something that could be
(06:29):
connected to him, but absolutely nothing came up, and the FBI,
of course, immediately opened an investigation on this whole thing
and called it nor Jack for the Northwest Hijacking, a
pretty dramatic sounding name. But by the five year anniversary
of the crime, they had considered more than eight hundred
suspects and eliminated all but two dozen, so it seemed
(06:51):
like maybe they were getting somewhere. And the thing is, though,
suspects and leeds continued to come up even to day,
so surely that number has only grown since them. So
what types of suspects are they looking for? Though, let's
break that down a little bit. Well, there's the physical
description we mentioned earlier, and witnesses seemed to agree on
(07:12):
that there were at least two flight attendants who gave
pretty much the same exact description, and a composite drawing
was made from that and that's been published everywhere by now.
So getting hairline man wearing glasses in one picture, no
glasses in the other, and the name also a sort
of an interesting point here. It's very likely that Dan Cooper,
of course, wasn't the hijacker's real name, but the FBI
(07:35):
has investigated some people with the last name Cooper over
the years, and that's how the dB thing came into
the picture. They questioned a man with those initials early on,
but it turned out that he had nothing to do
with it. The press ran with it, though, and it
kind of caught on. And I guess dB Cooper just
sounds way sexier and cooler than Dan Cooper. It's more distinctive,
for sure. So investigators have also tried to gather clues
(07:58):
from the hijackers, behave to try to figure out what
his occupation might have been, what his background might have been.
And at first, because of his detailed instructions to the
crew about how to fly the plane, you know that
the degrees of the flaps and the altitude and all
of that in his very specific parachute request, and and
just the fact that he knew how to open the
(08:20):
aft door, many assumed that Cooper had some sort of
familiarity with aviation, maybe he had been in the Air Force,
or maybe he was an experienced skydiver, But that that
kind of idea about him changed pretty dramatically over the years,
it has now they really don't think that he was
such an experienced skydiver. After all, according to the FBI's
(08:42):
website quote, no experienced parachutist would have jumped in the
pitch black night, in the rain with a two d
mile an hour wind in his face, wearing loafers in
a trench coat. It was simply too risky. Also, that
reserve parachute that Cooper chose to take along with him,
I think, if you'll remember, we mentioned that he took
he had for four, so he took two of those,
(09:02):
and one of them was actually a training shoot that
had been sown he took with them. Yeah, so a
skilled skydiver or so authorities think, probably would have noticed
that that was the case, although you never know in
the heat of the moment. So those are just some
of the details that the FBI has used to try
to put together a profile on who this hijacker really was.
(09:22):
And we've got to look at hard clues though not
just this background information profile business. So the only physical
evidence that was left behind on the plane or eight
Raleigh cigarette butts, a black J. C. Penny tie and
a tie tack, and there were also sixty six unaccounted
fingerprints on flight three or five that they could compare
(09:44):
to suspects prints and it you know, they were prints
that didn't match any of the known passengers, any of
the known crew, and were therefore assumed to be those
of DP Cooper. Later, though, they got something a little
bit better. They were able to actually lift DNA from
the tie in two thousand one, which helped them to
rule out a couple of suspects. In February nine eight,
(10:06):
a boy playing on the bank of the Columbia River
also found five thousand, eight hundred dollars of the payoff money.
The FBI had actually written down the serial numbers, but
even though the authorities secured the area again and kind
of scoured it, they haven't found anymore. During the search.
They did find a human skull, though, but this turned
out to be a woman's and possibly Native American, so
(10:27):
it wasn't related to the case. There was one other
false alarm, kind of like that skull. A parachute matching
the shoots given to Cooper was found in two thousand
and eight by some children who were playing in southwestern Washington.
They dug it up, but the shoot that they found
was silk and Cooper's were nylon, so it was ruled
out as possible evidence. There is an interesting clue, though,
(10:47):
regarding Cooper's name that the FBI has shown an interest
in in recent years, with some of these more dramatic
clues or possible leads drying up. There's a French comic book,
Theories about a Royal Cane, an Air Force test pilot
named Dan Cooper, and Dan Cooper has adventures, sometimes in
outer space, but also sometimes during real events of that era.
(11:10):
And in one episode, which was published near the date
of the hijacking, the cover illustration shows our hero Dan
Cooper parachuting. And I love this clue because to me,
it's just like something out of the show Heroes. You know.
The comic book is illustrated and it predicts the future
and then something happens. Um but that was possibly something
(11:31):
that influenced the hijacker to pick that change that name.
So though the FBI has looked into several leads for
this case over the years, including people who have actually
confessed to this crime, a few really stand out from
the rest. One involved a man named Richard F. McCoy,
and as we get into McCoy's story. We should say
that there were lots of copycat attempts after DV. Cooper
(11:52):
hijacked Flight three oh five, and McCoy's was just one
of them. He hijacked a United flight over Utah in
April nineteen two and got five hundred thousand dollars, but
he made a mistake. He told a buddy about his
plan and that friend turned him in. Everyone was really
shocked about it. To this guy. He was a Sunday
school teacher, a student at b i U, and also
(12:13):
an ex Green Beret helicopter pilot, which is why some
people thought that there was a strong Cooper connection there.
But McCoy was later ruled out because he didn't match
the physical description of Cooper and he had an alibi
for the crime that happened on that the day before
Thanksgiving up that year. Yeah, but McCoy was convicted for
the United hijacking and he was sent to jail for
forty five years. He escaped in nineteen seventy four and
(12:35):
he was killed in a shootout with the FBI. So
just a side note on that lead there. But then
he was also a guy named Dwayne Weber and on
his deathbed, he whispered to his wife of seventeen years,
I'm Dan Cooper. It sounds like a strange thing to say, yeah,
And she didn't know what he was talking about because
(12:55):
of the whole Dan Cooper d V. Cooper confusion. But
once she figured out that Dan Cooper was in fact
dB Cooper, it sent her down this crazy road of
remembering clues that connected her husband to the crime. And
I would say remembering with air quotes, because it seemed
almost like she was sort of putting pieces together after
the story fit, making the story fit. And he's also
(13:18):
spent time in the Army and he matched the physical description,
so it wasn't just her. The FBI got interested in
this too, and the d n A that they got
off that tie in two thousand one, though, actually ruled
Weber out as a suspect, so we have a few more. Though.
There was another suspect named Kenneth Christiansen that New York
Magazine did an article on back in two thousand and seven,
but the FBI felt that he didn't match Cooper's physical
(13:41):
description enough, and they also thought that the fact that
Christiansen was a skilled paratrooper made it unlikely he would
have jumped out under those conditions, and I was pretty
fascinated that that was that had become one of the
qualifications they were looking for, going from uh deep Cooper
probably knew what he was doing to any skilled parachutists
(14:01):
would never have done this or or might not have
done it. And then, of course that brings us to
the most recent lead that just made the headlines. In August,
A woman named Marla Cooper came forward and said that
based on some childhood memories when she was eight years old,
she believes that her uncle, Lynn Doyle Cooper was actually
the hijacker. She remembers seeing her uncle show up that
(14:22):
night that night before Thanksgiving of at a family member's
home with serious injuries. Again here, though DNA testing failed
to connect the new suspect to dB Cooper's tie. In
that case, the tests are still inconclusive, though they're still
looking for better prints from Lynn Doyle Cooper to test.
I think he was eschanged from his family, so they're
(14:44):
having to dig that kind of stuff up. But for
now this lead has gone cold, so so maybe more
to come from that. Maybe not well, and we could
really keep on going with these leads and these theories
and investigations that are going on even now forty years
later to try to get to the bottom of this
mysterious case. They're sorry if we've skipped over your favorite
(15:04):
dB Cooper theory. You can always write in and let
us know at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com.
But people's attitude is really interesting. And you actually blogged
about this, didn't you. Yeah? I did. I kind of
couldn't get it out of my head when I was
reading the news about Linde Oyle Cooper and Marla Cooper
coming forward and the new lead, and then even after
it went cold, I was just fascinated by how most people,
(15:27):
it seems that they don't want this case to be solved.
You've seen a lot of articles probably about that. I mean,
people aren't really upset that the mystery still continues for
some reason, but they also don't want Cooper to be
caught in a sense, even if he's not alive. And
some articles even suggest he's become a Robin Hood style
folk hero and we have people rooting for him. Yeah,
And I never thought about it that way. I always
(15:48):
kind of thought that the reason that people were so
drawn to the story is just because it's a mystery.
You know, you want to find out the answer, you
want to catch the guy. But I never thought that
people would actually sympathize with Cooper. I could, I guess
I can see the argument. You know, he went up
against the big corporation in a way and got away,
and that might be easy to do. I mean, he
(16:08):
didn't kill anyone, and most people who interacted with him
on that day remember him as polite. He's been called
the gentleman hijacker. He even insisted on paying for his
bourbon that day. He paid the flight attendant twenty bucks
and you know, told her to keep the change. And
of course it's just a great story. I mean I
was telling Sarah, I was getting like a research high
from from working on this because there's so much more.
(16:30):
There's always more, like Sarah, So there's always more theories,
there's always more to find out about this case. See
why people would get obsessed with it. But I mean
that Robin hood angle a fide. He's still a criminal,
and what he did was really scary and and probably
did a lot to influence the way we traveled today,
the way air travel and airport security is or I
(16:53):
mean at least that started to change around that period. Yes,
that's true, and it's also interesting to read this interview
with Schaefner in New York Magazine and hear her talk
about how decades later she was still afraid that Cooper
might come after her because she was a witness to
this crime. So even though he didn't kill anyone, he
did do some damage certainly, And I mean what he
(17:15):
did would have been really terrifying for the people involved.
Something to consider for sure, and something to consider whenever
we talk about kind of glamorized criminals like the bush
Rangers and all of those fellows. Yeah, we do that
quite a bit in covering history, I think, and you
know it's not intentional, but people just really get into
the stories because they're such fascinating characters of the events
(17:36):
surrounding them are so interesting. But you know, we never
lose sight of the fact that they never what's really
at stake. So the dB Cooper mystery continues. As Sarah said,
please write in with your favorite dB Cooper theories if
we missed them, or your favorite leads if we didn't
cover them. We're sorry we don't have time to cover
everything here, but we would love to hear about them.
(17:56):
You can look us up on Facebook or we're on
Twitter at Myston History. And if you want to learn
a little bit more about some of the dB Cooper
theories through the ages, we do have an article called
is dB Cooper Still Alive? And you can find it
by looking on our homepage at www. For more on
those thousands of other topics, because it how stuff works.
(18:17):
Dot com m
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from housetof
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
to bring the Choko reateboarding and I'm fair Dowdy And
it has been a great couple of months for history news, hasn't. Yeah,
there's been this new theory about Butch Cassidy's demise. Blackbeard's
(00:24):
ship was positively identified, which was really cool, and there
was a new lead in the subject we're going to
talk about today, the dB Cooper mystery. And if you've
never heard of DV Cooper, we're referring to the nineteen
seventy one hijacking of the Northwest Orient Airlines flight, which
is to this day, as of this podcast, still unsolved.
(00:44):
The man who did it was never caught or positively identified,
and we're not even sure if he lived past the
day that the crime was committed. A mystery indeed, but
over the years this has become one of America's favorite mysteries.
People love to just obsess over the clue than the suspects,
and there are even informal groups of amateur investigators who
(01:05):
have essentially devoted their lives to trying to solve this case. Yeah,
there's a recent CNN story about that. But if you're
a long time listener of this podcast, you're probably thinking
when you saw the title dB Cooper, hey, that looks
pretty familiar. And it's true. Candice and Josh touched on
this topic back in the Factor Fiction days. The format
(01:25):
of the show then wasn't much shorter, so it only
got three minutes and forty nine seconds, And we've gotten
requests over the years to address some of these topics
in our longer format, and dB Cooper was just one
that we thought definitely deserved more attention. People want more
from dB Cooper, they want answers. So here we want
to take a closer look at the case and some
(01:45):
of the theories surrounding it and the leads that have
come up over the years, including a very recent lead.
You've probably seen dB Cooper's name in the news in
the past weeks even, but we're gonna start by talking
about what actually happened the day of the hijacking, sort
to go blow by blow with it. So just to
set it all up, on November nineteen seventy one, which
(02:08):
was the day before Thanksgiving, a man who gave the
name Dan Cooper, showed up at the airport in Portland,
Oregon and paid cash for a one way ticket on
the Northwest Orient Airlines flight three oh five to Seattle.
So those are the That's how it started, and nothing
about Cooper's appearance that day really raised any red flags
(02:30):
for everyone. He just looked like this, a regular guy.
He was wearing a dark business suit and a narrow
dark tie with a pearl tie tack. He also had
a homburg hat on and carried a dark raincoat and
a briefcase. According to witnesses, he was about six ft
tall and one seventy five pounds, and he was probably
in his mid forties. He had short brown hair, a
(02:51):
receding hairline, brown eyes, and he was clean shaven, very
average sounding. Yeah, absolutely, and he was assigned to aisle
seat eighteen C on the light The plane itself was
a Boeing seven seven, so not like a super tiny
prop plane or something like that. Even though it was
a very short, around thirty minute flight to Seattle. The
plane could actually seat around ninety four passengers, but there
(03:13):
were only thirty six on board, which comes into play later.
It does so while Cooper was waiting for the plane,
he lit up a cigarette, ordered a bourbon and soda,
and just hung out in the afternoon waiting for the
flight to take off. Then shortly after the plane was airborne,
he handed the flight attendant, Florence Schaffner, a note. Yeah,
(03:34):
and Shaefer was twenty three and pretty, and according to
an article by Jeffrey Gray and New York Magazine, she
was used to passengers hitting on her, and so that's
basically what she thought was happening when she got the note,
she said, she tried to kind of shrug it off, like, oh, yeah,
it's just another note from a guy. I'm gonna put
it away. But Cooper said to her, miss you better
take a look at that note. The note was written
(03:54):
in felt pen in all caps, and it said quote,
I have a bomb in my briefcase. I want you
to sit beside me. So she did as she was told,
and Cooper gave her a glimpse inside his briefcase. And
when he opened it up, she saw this massive wires,
a battery, six red sticks, so it looked like it
could be about It looked like it could be a bomb.
And he made her write down some instructions what he wanted,
(04:17):
which included two hundred thousand dollars and used twenties two
parachutes and two backup shoots, so two front and two
back shoots, and he wanted a fuel truck ready to
refuel when the plane landed. He told her no funny stuff,
or I'll do the job. So the crew in the
airline did what he wanted. They had to circle the
airport for a little bit while the people on the
ground put the demands together. And after the plan landed
(04:39):
and parked on this remote part of the airfield, Cooper
let all of thirty six passengers plus Schaffner get off
the plane, and that left three flight officers and another
flight attendant on the plane with him, and he requested
that meals be brought to them and asked for his
note back. It seemed like he had all of this
really carefully prepared. Then they took off from the Seattle
(05:03):
Tacoma Airport at about seven forty six PM, which was
two hours approximately after they landed, and at first Cooper
told the pilot that he wanted to go to Mexico,
but he had really specific instructions for him to He
told the pilot to keep the plane below ten thousand
feet and he claimed that he had a risk altimeter
(05:23):
to actually check up on that too, and ordered him
to fly no faster than one fifty miles per hour
with the flaps set at fifteen degrees. Yeah, and so
the pilot told him at that point that they couldn't
make it to Mexico City under those conditions without refueling
and Reno, so Cooper agreed to that. After they were airborne, though,
Cooper ordered the flight attendant to go into the cockpit,
(05:46):
so he was alone in the cabin. Then around eight pm,
a light on the instrument panel indicated that the door
to the ft stairs had been opened, and about twenty
minutes later the crew noticed a slight change in the
plane's altitude. The nose dipped first and then the tail,
which is apparently what happens when the aft stairs are lowered.
So when the plane landed and Reno Cooper was gone.
(06:07):
So now let's look at the time frame a little judging.
By the time they noticed that the aft stairs had
been opened and lowered, they estimated that he had come
down near the Lewis River, which is north of Portland,
and authorities combed that area really thoroughly, bit by bit
over the next few weeks looking for anything, you know,
a scrap of parachute money, just something that could be
(06:29):
connected to him, but absolutely nothing came up, and the FBI,
of course, immediately opened an investigation on this whole thing
and called it nor Jack for the Northwest Hijacking, a
pretty dramatic sounding name. But by the five year anniversary
of the crime, they had considered more than eight hundred
suspects and eliminated all but two dozen, so it seemed
(06:51):
like maybe they were getting somewhere. And the thing is, though,
suspects and leeds continued to come up even to day,
so surely that number has only grown since them. So
what types of suspects are they looking for? Though, let's
break that down a little bit. Well, there's the physical
description we mentioned earlier, and witnesses seemed to agree on
(07:12):
that there were at least two flight attendants who gave
pretty much the same exact description, and a composite drawing
was made from that and that's been published everywhere by now.
So getting hairline man wearing glasses in one picture, no
glasses in the other, and the name also a sort
of an interesting point here. It's very likely that Dan Cooper,
of course, wasn't the hijacker's real name, but the FBI
(07:35):
has investigated some people with the last name Cooper over
the years, and that's how the dB thing came into
the picture. They questioned a man with those initials early on,
but it turned out that he had nothing to do
with it. The press ran with it, though, and it
kind of caught on. And I guess dB Cooper just
sounds way sexier and cooler than Dan Cooper. It's more distinctive,
for sure. So investigators have also tried to gather clues
(07:58):
from the hijackers, behave to try to figure out what
his occupation might have been, what his background might have been.
And at first, because of his detailed instructions to the
crew about how to fly the plane, you know that
the degrees of the flaps and the altitude and all
of that in his very specific parachute request, and and
just the fact that he knew how to open the
(08:20):
aft door, many assumed that Cooper had some sort of
familiarity with aviation, maybe he had been in the Air Force,
or maybe he was an experienced skydiver, But that that
kind of idea about him changed pretty dramatically over the years,
it has now they really don't think that he was
such an experienced skydiver. After all, according to the FBI's
(08:42):
website quote, no experienced parachutist would have jumped in the
pitch black night, in the rain with a two d
mile an hour wind in his face, wearing loafers in
a trench coat. It was simply too risky. Also, that
reserve parachute that Cooper chose to take along with him,
I think, if you'll remember, we mentioned that he took
he had for four, so he took two of those,
(09:02):
and one of them was actually a training shoot that
had been sown he took with them. Yeah, so a
skilled skydiver or so authorities think, probably would have noticed
that that was the case, although you never know in
the heat of the moment. So those are just some
of the details that the FBI has used to try
to put together a profile on who this hijacker really was.
(09:22):
And we've got to look at hard clues though not
just this background information profile business. So the only physical
evidence that was left behind on the plane or eight
Raleigh cigarette butts, a black J. C. Penny tie and
a tie tack, and there were also sixty six unaccounted
fingerprints on flight three or five that they could compare
(09:44):
to suspects prints and it you know, they were prints
that didn't match any of the known passengers, any of
the known crew, and were therefore assumed to be those
of DP Cooper. Later, though, they got something a little
bit better. They were able to actually lift DNA from
the tie in two thousand one, which helped them to
rule out a couple of suspects. In February nine eight,
(10:06):
a boy playing on the bank of the Columbia River
also found five thousand, eight hundred dollars of the payoff money.
The FBI had actually written down the serial numbers, but
even though the authorities secured the area again and kind
of scoured it, they haven't found anymore. During the search.
They did find a human skull, though, but this turned
out to be a woman's and possibly Native American, so
(10:27):
it wasn't related to the case. There was one other
false alarm, kind of like that skull. A parachute matching
the shoots given to Cooper was found in two thousand
and eight by some children who were playing in southwestern Washington.
They dug it up, but the shoot that they found
was silk and Cooper's were nylon, so it was ruled
out as possible evidence. There is an interesting clue, though,
(10:47):
regarding Cooper's name that the FBI has shown an interest
in in recent years, with some of these more dramatic
clues or possible leads drying up. There's a French comic book,
Theories about a Royal Cane, an Air Force test pilot
named Dan Cooper, and Dan Cooper has adventures, sometimes in
outer space, but also sometimes during real events of that era.
(11:10):
And in one episode, which was published near the date
of the hijacking, the cover illustration shows our hero Dan
Cooper parachuting. And I love this clue because to me,
it's just like something out of the show Heroes. You know.
The comic book is illustrated and it predicts the future
and then something happens. Um but that was possibly something
(11:31):
that influenced the hijacker to pick that change that name.
So though the FBI has looked into several leads for
this case over the years, including people who have actually
confessed to this crime, a few really stand out from
the rest. One involved a man named Richard F. McCoy,
and as we get into McCoy's story. We should say
that there were lots of copycat attempts after DV. Cooper
(11:52):
hijacked Flight three oh five, and McCoy's was just one
of them. He hijacked a United flight over Utah in
April nineteen two and got five hundred thousand dollars, but
he made a mistake. He told a buddy about his
plan and that friend turned him in. Everyone was really
shocked about it. To this guy. He was a Sunday
school teacher, a student at b i U, and also
(12:13):
an ex Green Beret helicopter pilot, which is why some
people thought that there was a strong Cooper connection there.
But McCoy was later ruled out because he didn't match
the physical description of Cooper and he had an alibi
for the crime that happened on that the day before
Thanksgiving up that year. Yeah, but McCoy was convicted for
the United hijacking and he was sent to jail for
forty five years. He escaped in nineteen seventy four and
(12:35):
he was killed in a shootout with the FBI. So
just a side note on that lead there. But then
he was also a guy named Dwayne Weber and on
his deathbed, he whispered to his wife of seventeen years,
I'm Dan Cooper. It sounds like a strange thing to say, yeah,
And she didn't know what he was talking about because
(12:55):
of the whole Dan Cooper d V. Cooper confusion. But
once she figured out that Dan Cooper was in fact
dB Cooper, it sent her down this crazy road of
remembering clues that connected her husband to the crime. And
I would say remembering with air quotes, because it seemed
almost like she was sort of putting pieces together after
the story fit, making the story fit. And he's also
(13:18):
spent time in the Army and he matched the physical description,
so it wasn't just her. The FBI got interested in
this too, and the d n A that they got
off that tie in two thousand one, though, actually ruled
Weber out as a suspect, so we have a few more. Though.
There was another suspect named Kenneth Christiansen that New York
Magazine did an article on back in two thousand and seven,
but the FBI felt that he didn't match Cooper's physical
(13:41):
description enough, and they also thought that the fact that
Christiansen was a skilled paratrooper made it unlikely he would
have jumped out under those conditions, and I was pretty
fascinated that that was that had become one of the
qualifications they were looking for, going from uh deep Cooper
probably knew what he was doing to any skilled parachutists
(14:01):
would never have done this or or might not have
done it. And then, of course that brings us to
the most recent lead that just made the headlines. In August,
A woman named Marla Cooper came forward and said that
based on some childhood memories when she was eight years old,
she believes that her uncle, Lynn Doyle Cooper was actually
the hijacker. She remembers seeing her uncle show up that
(14:22):
night that night before Thanksgiving of at a family member's
home with serious injuries. Again here, though DNA testing failed
to connect the new suspect to dB Cooper's tie. In
that case, the tests are still inconclusive, though they're still
looking for better prints from Lynn Doyle Cooper to test.
I think he was eschanged from his family, so they're
(14:44):
having to dig that kind of stuff up. But for
now this lead has gone cold, so so maybe more
to come from that. Maybe not well, and we could
really keep on going with these leads and these theories
and investigations that are going on even now forty years
later to try to get to the bottom of this
mysterious case. They're sorry if we've skipped over your favorite
(15:04):
dB Cooper theory. You can always write in and let
us know at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com.
But people's attitude is really interesting. And you actually blogged
about this, didn't you. Yeah? I did. I kind of
couldn't get it out of my head when I was
reading the news about Linde Oyle Cooper and Marla Cooper
coming forward and the new lead, and then even after
it went cold, I was just fascinated by how most people,
(15:27):
it seems that they don't want this case to be solved.
You've seen a lot of articles probably about that. I mean,
people aren't really upset that the mystery still continues for
some reason, but they also don't want Cooper to be
caught in a sense, even if he's not alive. And
some articles even suggest he's become a Robin Hood style
folk hero and we have people rooting for him. Yeah,
And I never thought about it that way. I always
(15:48):
kind of thought that the reason that people were so
drawn to the story is just because it's a mystery.
You know, you want to find out the answer, you
want to catch the guy. But I never thought that
people would actually sympathize with Cooper. I could, I guess
I can see the argument. You know, he went up
against the big corporation in a way and got away,
and that might be easy to do. I mean, he
(16:08):
didn't kill anyone, and most people who interacted with him
on that day remember him as polite. He's been called
the gentleman hijacker. He even insisted on paying for his
bourbon that day. He paid the flight attendant twenty bucks
and you know, told her to keep the change. And
of course it's just a great story. I mean I
was telling Sarah, I was getting like a research high
from from working on this because there's so much more.
(16:30):
There's always more, like Sarah, So there's always more theories,
there's always more to find out about this case. See
why people would get obsessed with it. But I mean
that Robin hood angle a fide. He's still a criminal,
and what he did was really scary and and probably
did a lot to influence the way we traveled today,
the way air travel and airport security is or I
(16:53):
mean at least that started to change around that period. Yes,
that's true, and it's also interesting to read this interview
with Schaefner in New York Magazine and hear her talk
about how decades later she was still afraid that Cooper
might come after her because she was a witness to
this crime. So even though he didn't kill anyone, he
did do some damage certainly, And I mean what he
(17:15):
did would have been really terrifying for the people involved.
Something to consider for sure, and something to consider whenever
we talk about kind of glamorized criminals like the bush
Rangers and all of those fellows. Yeah, we do that
quite a bit in covering history, I think, and you
know it's not intentional, but people just really get into
the stories because they're such fascinating characters of the events
(17:36):
surrounding them are so interesting. But you know, we never
lose sight of the fact that they never what's really
at stake. So the dB Cooper mystery continues. As Sarah said,
please write in with your favorite dB Cooper theories if
we missed them, or your favorite leads if we didn't
cover them. We're sorry we don't have time to cover
everything here, but we would love to hear about them.
(17:56):
You can look us up on Facebook or we're on
Twitter at Myston History. And if you want to learn
a little bit more about some of the dB Cooper
theories through the ages, we do have an article called
is dB Cooper Still Alive? And you can find it
by looking on our homepage at www. For more on
those thousands of other topics, because it how stuff works.
(18:17):
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