October 3, 2011 • 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.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm to bling a chalk reboarding and I'm fair douty.
And it has been a great couple of months for
history news, hasn't it. Yeah, there's been this new theory
(00:21):
about Butch Cassidy's demise. Blackbeard's 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 D B.
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
(00:42):
of this podcast, still unsolved. 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, in the suspects, and there
are even informal groups of amateur investigators who have essentially
(01:06):
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
of the show then wasn't much shorter, so it only
(01:27):
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
of the theories surrounding it and the leads that have
(01:48):
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 going to start by
talking about what actually happened the day of the hijacking,
sort of go blow by blow with it. So just
to set it all up, on November nineteen seventy one,
which was the day before Thanksgiving, a man who gave
(02:11):
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 that's how it started, and nothing about
Cooper's appearance that day really raised any red flags for everyone.
He just looked like this, a regular guy. He was
(02:32):
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 receding hairline,
brown eyes, and he was clean shaven, very average sounding. Yeah, absolutely,
(02:57):
and he was assigned to aisle seat eighteen C on
the The plane itself was a Boeing seven twenty 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 were only thirty six
on board, which comes into play later. Does so well.
(03:17):
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, and Schaefer was twenty three
and pretty, and according to an article by Jeffrey Gray
(03:37):
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, 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 in felt
pen in all caps, and it said quote, I have
(03:57):
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 mass of wires,
a battery, six red sticks, so it looked like it
could be It looked like it could be a bomb.
And he made her write down some instructions what he wanted,
which included two d thousand dollars and used twenties two
(04:20):
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
and parked on this remote part of the airfield, Cooper
(04:43):
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
Tacoma Airport at about seven forty six PM, which was
(05:06):
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
to actually check up on that too, and ordered him
(05:27):
to fly no faster than one fifty miles per hour
with the flap 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,
so he was alone in the cabin. Then around eight pm,
(05:49):
a light on the instrument panel indicated that the door
to the f 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 aft stairs are lowered.
So when the plane landed in Reno, Cooper was gone.
So now let's look at the time frame a little judging.
(06:10):
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
connected to him, but absolutely nothing came up, and the FBI,
(06:34):
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 seems
like maybe they were getting somewhere. And the thing is, though,
(06:56):
suspects and leads continue 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
that there were at least two flight attendants who gave
pretty much the same exact description, and a composite drawing
(07:17):
was made from that, and that's been published everywhere by now,
so geting 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
has investigated some people with the last name Cooper over
the years, and that's how the dB thing came into
(07:40):
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
from the hijackers, behave to try to figure out what
(08:02):
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 plan, 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
aft door, many assumed that Cooper had some sort of
(08:23):
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
website quote, no experienced parachutist would have jumped in the
(08:46):
pitch black night, in the rain with a two d
mile an hour wind in his face, wearing loafers and
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,
and one of them was actually a training shoot that
had been sown and he took with them. Yeah, so
(09:07):
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. And we've got to look at hard clues
though not just this background information profile business. So the
(09:28):
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 to suspects prints and it. You know, they
were prints that didn't match any of the known passengers,
(09:50):
any of the known crew, and were therefore assumed to
be those of dB 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, a boy playing on the bank of the
Columbia River also found five thousand, eight hundred dollars of
(10:10):
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 it wasn't related to the case. There
was one other false alarm, kind of like that skull.
(10:31):
A parachute matching the shoots given to Cooper was found
in two thousand 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, regarding Cooper's name that the FBI has
shown an interest in in recent years, with some of
(10:52):
these more dramatic clues or possible leads drying up. There's
a French comic book series about a Royal cannyd 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. And in one episode, which
was published near the date of the hijacking, the cover
(11:15):
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 that influenced the hijacker
to pick that shas that name. So though the FBI
(11:36):
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 dB Cooper hijacked Flight three oh five,
and McCoy's was just one of them. He hijacked a
(11:56):
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 an ex Green Beret helicopter pilot,
which is why some people thought that there was a
(12:17):
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 he was killed in a shootout
with the FBI. So just a side note on that
(12:39):
lead there. But then there 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 of the whole Dan
Cooper DV. Cooper confusion. But once she figured out that
(13:00):
Dan Cooper was in fact d B. 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 faking the story fit,
making the story fit. And he's also spent time in
the Army and he matched the physical description, so it
(13:21):
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, Dob 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, and
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 estranged 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. So 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 they 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. And when 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 said, there's always more theories,
there's always more to find out about this case. See
why people get obsessed with it. But I mean that
Robin hood angle aside. 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
(16:50):
air travel and airport security is or I 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
(17:12):
some damage certainly, And I mean what he 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
(17:33):
because they're such fascinating characters of the events surrounding them
are so interesting. But um, you know, we never lose
sight of the fact that they remember what's really at state. Yeah,
so the dB Cooper mystery continues. As Sarah said, please
right in with your favorite DV Cooper theories if we
missed them, or your favorite leads if we didn't cover them. Wait, sorry,
we don't have time to cover everything here, but we
(17:55):
would love to hear about them at History podcast at
how stuff works dot com or you can look us
up on Facebook or we're on Twitter at Nston 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 dot how stuff works dot com. Be sure
(18:22):
to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.
Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most
promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The house Stuff Works
iPhone app has a rise. Download it today on iTunes.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm to bling a chalk reboarding and I'm fair douty.
And it has been a great couple of months for
history news, hasn't it. Yeah, there's been this new theory
(00:21):
about Butch Cassidy's demise. Blackbeard's 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 D B.
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
(00:42):
of this podcast, still unsolved. 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, in the suspects, and there
are even informal groups of amateur investigators who have essentially
(01:06):
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
of the show then wasn't much shorter, so it only
(01:27):
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
of the theories surrounding it and the leads that have
(01:48):
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 going to start by
talking about what actually happened the day of the hijacking,
sort of go blow by blow with it. So just
to set it all up, on November nineteen seventy one,
which was the day before Thanksgiving, a man who gave
(02:11):
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 that's how it started, and nothing about
Cooper's appearance that day really raised any red flags for everyone.
He just looked like this, a regular guy. He was
(02:32):
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 receding hairline,
brown eyes, and he was clean shaven, very average sounding. Yeah, absolutely,
(02:57):
and he was assigned to aisle seat eighteen C on
the The plane itself was a Boeing seven twenty 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 were only thirty six
on board, which comes into play later. Does so well.
(03:17):
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, and Schaefer was twenty three
and pretty, and according to an article by Jeffrey Gray
(03:37):
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, 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 in felt
pen in all caps, and it said quote, I have
(03:57):
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 mass of wires,
a battery, six red sticks, so it looked like it
could be It looked like it could be a bomb.
And he made her write down some instructions what he wanted,
which included two d thousand dollars and used twenties two
(04:20):
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
and parked on this remote part of the airfield, Cooper
(04:43):
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
Tacoma Airport at about seven forty six PM, which was
(05:06):
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
to actually check up on that too, and ordered him
(05:27):
to fly no faster than one fifty miles per hour
with the flap 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,
so he was alone in the cabin. Then around eight pm,
(05:49):
a light on the instrument panel indicated that the door
to the f 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 aft stairs are lowered.
So when the plane landed in Reno, Cooper was gone.
So now let's look at the time frame a little judging.
(06:10):
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
connected to him, but absolutely nothing came up, and the FBI,
(06:34):
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 seems
like maybe they were getting somewhere. And the thing is, though,
(06:56):
suspects and leads continue 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
that there were at least two flight attendants who gave
pretty much the same exact description, and a composite drawing
(07:17):
was made from that, and that's been published everywhere by now,
so geting 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
has investigated some people with the last name Cooper over
the years, and that's how the dB thing came into
(07:40):
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
from the hijackers, behave to try to figure out what
(08:02):
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 plan, 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
aft door, many assumed that Cooper had some sort of
(08:23):
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
website quote, no experienced parachutist would have jumped in the
(08:46):
pitch black night, in the rain with a two d
mile an hour wind in his face, wearing loafers and
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,
and one of them was actually a training shoot that
had been sown and he took with them. Yeah, so
(09:07):
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. And we've got to look at hard clues
though not just this background information profile business. So the
(09:28):
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 to suspects prints and it. You know, they
were prints that didn't match any of the known passengers,
(09:50):
any of the known crew, and were therefore assumed to
be those of dB 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, a boy playing on the bank of the
Columbia River also found five thousand, eight hundred dollars of
(10:10):
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 it wasn't related to the case. There
was one other false alarm, kind of like that skull.
(10:31):
A parachute matching the shoots given to Cooper was found
in two thousand 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, regarding Cooper's name that the FBI has
shown an interest in in recent years, with some of
(10:52):
these more dramatic clues or possible leads drying up. There's
a French comic book series about a Royal cannyd 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. And in one episode, which
was published near the date of the hijacking, the cover
(11:15):
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 that influenced the hijacker
to pick that shas that name. So though the FBI
(11:36):
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 dB Cooper hijacked Flight three oh five,
and McCoy's was just one of them. He hijacked a
(11:56):
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 an ex Green Beret helicopter pilot,
which is why some people thought that there was a
(12:17):
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 he was killed in a shootout
with the FBI. So just a side note on that
(12:39):
lead there. But then there 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 of the whole Dan
Cooper DV. Cooper confusion. But once she figured out that
(13:00):
Dan Cooper was in fact d B. 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 faking the story fit,
making the story fit. And he's also spent time in
the Army and he matched the physical description, so it
(13:21):
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, Dob 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, and
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 estranged 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. So 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 they 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. And when 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 said, there's always more theories,
there's always more to find out about this case. See
why people get obsessed with it. But I mean that
Robin hood angle aside. 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
(16:50):
air travel and airport security is or I 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
(17:12):
some damage certainly, And I mean what he 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
(17:33):
because they're such fascinating characters of the events surrounding them
are so interesting. But um, you know, we never lose
sight of the fact that they remember what's really at state. Yeah,
so the dB Cooper mystery continues. As Sarah said, please
right in with your favorite DV Cooper theories if we
missed them, or your favorite leads if we didn't cover them. Wait, sorry,
we don't have time to cover everything here, but we
(17:55):
would love to hear about them at History podcast at
how stuff works dot com or you can look us
up on Facebook or we're on Twitter at Nston 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 dot how stuff works dot com. Be sure
(18:22):
to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future.
Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most
promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The house Stuff Works
iPhone app has a rise. Download it today on iTunes.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com