Last Year's Lesson: D.B. Cooper Disappeared with Ransom Money - Nov. 24, 1971

A man known as D.B. Cooper parachuted out of an airplane and was never seen again on this day in 1971. You can learn more in the October 3, 2011 episode of Stuff You Missed in History Class.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, history fans, if you want a double dose of history,
here's a rerun for today, brought to you by Tracy V. Wilson.
We hope it makes previous episodes for this date easier
to find in the feed. Welcome to this Day in
History Class from how Stuff Works dot com and from
the desk of Stuff you missed in History Class. It's
the show where we explore the past one day at

(00:20):
a time with a quick look at what happened today
in history. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson,
and it's November twenty four. On this day in one
a man known as D. B. Cooper parachuted out of
a hijacked plane with a bag of ransom money and

(00:40):
was never seen again. So, on that day, this man
had gone to the airport in Portland, Oregon, and he
bought a ticket to fly to Seattle on Northwest Orient
Airlines flight three oh five. He gave his name as
Dan Cooper. It's not totally clear how that morphed into
D B. Cooper when he originally used the lea stand,

(01:00):
but he's definitely more known as D B. Cooper today.
He was described as looking like a typical traveler, dressed
in a business suit, six ft tall and a hundred
and seventy five pounds and in his mid forties. This
wasn't a full flight. There were only thirty six passengers
on a Boeing seven seven that had a capacity of
ninety four. Shortly after the plane took off, he handed

(01:23):
flight attendant Florence Schaffner a note. She assumed that he
was trying to give her his phone number or something
that had happened before with other passengers, so she just
tried to ignore it. But he said, miss you'd better
look at that note. In all caps. The note said
I have a bomb in my briefcase. I want you
to sit beside me, so she did. He showed her

(01:47):
this briefcase and she could see six red sticks and
a battery and some wires, and then he dictated his
terms to her. He wanted two hundred thousand dollars and
used twenty dollar bills, y'all, so wanted two parachutes, one
for the front, one for the back, and two backup shoots.
And he wanted a fuel truck to be ready to
refuel the plane after it landed. He told her no

(02:10):
funny stuff or i'll do the job. So the plane
had to circle for a while while these demands could
be met, and then it did land. Cooper let all
the passengers go along with Shaffner, and they took off
again at seven forty six pm. He told the pilot
he wanted to go to Mexico, but he had some
pretty specific conditions for how he wanted them to get there.

(02:33):
He wanted the plane to stay below ten thousand feet
and to go no faster than a hundred and fifty
miles an hour. The pilot let them know that they
could only do that if they stopped and refueled and Reno,
and he agreed to that, and then Cooper ordered the
one remaining flight attendant who had not been allowed to leave,
to go into the cockpit, which left him alone in

(02:53):
the cabin. At about eight PM, the crew noticed a
slight shift in their altitude, and then when they landed
in Reno, Cooper was gone. Based on when they had
noticed that dip, they estimated that he had parachuted out
of the plane near the Lewis River north of Portland, Oregon.
That area was calmbed thoroughly, but no sign of him

(03:15):
was ever found. The FBI opened an investigation code named
nor Jack, and on July seen they announced they were
redirecting the funds to other investigations and that this was
no longer an active open case. They called it quote
one of the longest and most exhaustive investigations in our history.

(03:36):
But then in June of a team of investigators, some
of them former FBI, said they had identified dB Cooper
as a man named Robert reck Straw that was based
on the text of a purportedly coded letter. Although the
FBI had cleared reck Straw back in nineteen seventy two,
he had also previously been the subject of an entire

(03:58):
TV special. All the he has denied any involvement. Strangely,
the dB Cooper hijacking inspired multiple other copycat hijackers. The
nine seventies were a time when it was a lot
easier to get onto an airplane with weapons. There was
virtually no screening in US airports, and airlines also had

(04:20):
policies that in cases of hijacking, the crew were basically
to do whatever the hijacker asked. So other people also
hijacked planes to try to get money and then parachute away.
You can learn more about this on the October three
episode of Stuff You Miss In History Class called Who
Is dB Cooper that predates the closing of the case

(04:41):
and the renewed focus on Robert Rextraw. Thanks to KC. P.
Graham and Chandler Mayze for their audio work on this show.
And you can subscribe to the Stay in History Class
on Apple podcasts, Google Podcasts, and whoever else you get
your podcasts, and you can tune in tomorrow for the
assassination of three sisters the doom of the pop