SYSK Live: The DB Cooper Heist

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everybody. Chuck here with another call for guests for
Movie Crush, my new show debuting November three, where I
sit down with famous people to talk about their all
time favorite movie. So if you are a secret celebrity listener,
get in touch with me at movie Crush at how
stuff Works dot com, especially if you happen to be

(00:21):
filming in Atlanta, where our studios are, because in person
is always best, but we can always do it remotely
with partner studios. All right, Thanks a lot, and look
out for Movie Crush November three. Hey, friends, this is Chuck.
Just wanted to intro this show really quickly because it

(00:41):
is from the archive. It's a live show that we
did on our tour last year, all about the mysterious
disappearance of sky jacker d B. Cooper. And this was
recorded live in Seattle, Washington at the Neptune Theater and
it was one of the best shows on the tour
and we hope you enjoy it. And keep in mind
this is recorded before we found out more recent news

(01:02):
about the dB Cooper case, so that stuff has happened
since then. But please to enjoy, Welcome to stuff you
should know from How Stuff Works dot com hey, and
welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W.

(01:23):
Chuck Bryant, and we are here live at the Beautiful
Neptune Theater and beautiful Seattle and beautiful Washington. Thank you guys, phenomenal.

(02:00):
I'm already a sweaty mess, so that must mean we're
on stage. We're off to a great start. That must
mean I'm awake or yeah, I sweat my sleep too,
big time gross, I'm always wiping his brows. What movie
we're gonna watch tonight in the hotel? Is a spy

(02:21):
out yet? And we can leave the seat up on
the toilet? I don't. I don't do that. I don't
either because I pee sitting down because I'm forty five
years old. Do you really well, yeah, I might as
well get into it. Um, what do you do too?

(02:43):
Why we never talked about this? I started being sitting
down during the middle of the night, Get up because
if it just makes sense, because you don't want to
wake up too much and you don't want to like
make a mess. And then I think I just hit
a certain an age where I was like, it's just
nicer to sit down. I don't need to prove anything

(03:05):
to anyone. Huh, you landed your lady, You're all set.
I stand when I pee off my deck at night,
I don't do that. I live in a condo complex.
They it's not good man. I feel like an enormous weight.
It's just been lifted off. I can't believe that you're

(03:27):
not even forty years old yet and you pee sitting down.
Let's let's start the podcast. Are there other guys out
there that peace sitting down? All right? We're starting a movement, baby,
it's right. Your ladies will appreciate it. Oddly, I pooped

(03:51):
standing up. This is so off. The rails are like
like in in conversation. Let's be sitting there talking to him.
You're like, you're pooping right now, aren't you. It's like
it's more efficient this way. I get more done. We
should probably start over. We should. We're gonna get off

(04:12):
stage and come back out. I can't believe what we've
been talking about here this evening already. Okay, let's I'll
just take it down the notch all right. Uh so
we're podcasting. We're about to start podcasting. I think I
already started the podcast. Oh god, which means that's gonna

(04:33):
be on like the thing we That's why I said
we should start over. The stays here everybody, it's all
our secret, right, Okay, Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. We are

(04:54):
live here at the beautiful Neptune Theater in Seattle, Washington.
M hmm, man, times two's better. It's an in joke.

(05:20):
People will be like even better than what h really m.
There's a lot of there's more crossover between our fans
and Howard Stern than our fans and Mariners fans. I think, boy,
there's a venn diagram out there that's uh confusing me already. Okay,

(05:42):
so Chuck, yes, this is a little bit of history.
So we're gonna go back in the way back machine.
That's right, Dud's if you listen to the PR Live podcast,
you know that, like the way back Machine is a
mad scenario stif settled down. They heard that live. Yeah

(06:05):
that was a good one too. There are PR professionals
here because they emailed me today. Yeah, I can tell
the PR professional So we're going back to a cold, stormy, rainy,
pretty nasty Thanksgiving Eve in and the story begins at

(06:32):
p d X Portland Airport and a man walked into
pd X, took a picture of his shoe on the carpet,
and then walked along to the Northwest Orient Airlines ticket
desk and he walked up and he said, Hi, I
am really interested in finding more about flight three oh five,

(06:53):
the flight to Seattle. Would that happen to be a
Boeing seven seven Dash one hundred airplane that you guys
are gonna fly on that route? And the ticket agment, Yes,
as a matter of fact, it is. And the man
said that it's fantastic. Here's my twenty dollars one ticket

(07:14):
please for a one way ticket between Portland's and Seattle
aboard flight three oh five. And she was like, that's
a weird question, but I guess he's very specific about
what kind of plane he likes to fly on. Plus
it's one and I'm in no position to publicly question
a man, so I'll just go along with this. It's

(07:34):
very true, and it was twenty dollars for that flight.
This is a very seventies podcast, so uh. They handed
him as little ticket voucher and said, just filled this out, sir. Uh.
Don't need the C I D because it's nineteen seventy one.
All right, just tell us who you are or whoever
you want us to think you are. And he wrote
down in big block letters in a red ink pin,

(07:56):
Dan Cooper, if you know where we're going with this song.
So the Bowing seven Dash one hundred is every single
person in this room knows is a smallish plane. It's
not the biggest planet in the Bowing fleet's not the
smallest either, but it's the only one that had an
aft staircase. Right, And this particular flight flying aboard this

(08:20):
Bowing seven seven Dash one flight three oh five had
a crew of five aboard it. There was Captain William Scott,
not Sewan William Scott. We figured out later on that
would have made zero sense had he had a former
life in the seventies as an airline pilot. UH CO
pilot Robert Radazak. There's a se in there for those

(08:43):
of you who like that kind of thing. Um and uh.
There were three flight attendants. There's a head flight attendant
who was named Alice Hancock, right, and then too, I
guess regular flight attendants. Tina mcclough, who's a hero of
ours and Florence Shafterer, I think they called him stewarts
Is back then, to be fair. But we're forward thinking guys,

(09:04):
so we're gonna go ahead and say flight AT's ended.
We don't use the sport you just make well, never mind,
never mind, We've done quite enough extraneous stuff, right, No,
So Dan Cooper gets on the plane. There's thirty seven
other passengers because again it was the seventies, they didn't
overbook flights back then, and say I'm sorry you bought

(09:25):
a ticket, but you really can't fly on this flight.
Thirty seven passengers, pretty empty, and Dan Cooper seats sits
in seat eighteen. C uh. They for him up a
bourbon and seven up and he lights up a cigarettette
because this ninety one you can smoke on planes. And uh,
he looked to be about in his mid forties. He was,

(09:46):
you know, kind of look like the men of the time,
which is to say, you either looked by seventy one,
either looked a little more like Don Draper kind of
holding on to that fifties look, or you look like
Charles Manson. He looked a little more like Don Draper.
Had the suit, had the skinny tie, and then we
should talk a little bit about the suit. The suit
was a russet colored suit, which was like that weird

(10:09):
burgundy brown color that's potato colored it right, And it
just so happened that he was wearing this suit during
the one six month period in history where you could
wear that color suit out in public, So he was okay.
And then his skinny tie was a clip on from J. C. Penny.
That's right. He had a imitation Mother of Pearl type in.

(10:31):
He had an overcoat, he had a hat, he had
a bag like a briefcase, and he had these black
corn rim sunglasses. Um, dark kind of olive skin. Would
you say? They call him swarthy, which I think is
like stewardess that's been phased out, you know what I mean?
I thought swarthy. I thought that was like a sea captain.

(10:55):
I'm sure there were swarthy sea captains because yeah, because
they're out in the sun, so they ended up getting
olive skinned. That's uh rugged, Okay, you're thinking of the
Gordon's fisherman. Oh right, Oh, he was swarthy. He swarthy
as h so uh he had h he had this

(11:15):
kind of dark wavy hair, um and other than that,
he was just sort of an unremarkable dude. He wanted
to blend in right. Well, yeah, okay, so this guy's
sitting in a teen C. He's being unremarkable aside from
wearing the sunglasses. He's smoking with his left hand. She
has nothing to do with anything, but we just kind
of wanted to show off how much research we've done
on this. And uh, when Florence Shaffner, the flight attendant

(11:41):
working his area, comes over, um and gives him his
bourbon and I think seven up right, yeah, Um, he
hands her a note and to Florence Shaffner, she was
twenty three, she was very pretty. She was at the
time a stewardess, and um, this happened to her all
the time, like businessmen drinking sevens and sevens like pastor

(12:02):
notes and hit on her all the time. So when
this guy in a ten C, Dan Cooper handed her
a note, she took the note and just put it
in her flight apron without looking at it, and turned
and walked away with all the other notes. Yeah from
all the men who wanted to rescue her from her
life come away with swarthy and so Dan Cooper sees

(12:27):
us and he goes, miss, uh, you may want to
have a look at that note. I have a bomb.
I think you know where we're going with this, TB. Cooper.
You know, we when we were coming here today, we're like,
how we're really rolling the dice. It's entirely possible that
everyone here had the dB Cooper case drilled into them

(12:49):
from like third grade on. That's not the cases didn't
study in classes. I told that to you, me and you.
He was like, that's so dumb. She's like, the do
you know everything about the burning of Atlanta? And I
said no, And she's like, no, no, you don't, And
they don't know everything about dB Cooper. And I went
back to sleep. So this was um not the first

(13:14):
commercial airplane hijacking. It actually the first one was in
and remarkably um between nineteen, just three years earlier. In
the time dB Cooper hijacked this plane, there were one
hundred commercial hijackings in three years. Yeah, so this is
not new. It was not new, but I remember, like

(13:36):
if anyone here grew up in like the seventies and stuff,
it was a thing like planes got hijacked all the
time because you could bring guns and bombs on planes
and you didn't need I D. No one cared, and
we were like, hmm, this is weird. Yeah, that's pretty
much where the FBI was at the time. And by
nineteen seventy one they were just starting to like get
hip to the idea of hijackings being a problem. And

(13:59):
so their first idea was, well, we'll put an air
marshal on every flight. And then they looked at the
schedule of flights in the United States and they're like, oh,
this may have been a bad idea, but it was
a fine idea. If everyone, if like a third of
the population of the United States where air marshals, and yeah,
it was a good idea. It's a good idea. One

(14:20):
of every like three hundred flights with a right right
and the other two open for hijacking. Right. So this
was they figured out after a few years, like the
logistics of American air trap. Hoover's idea. By the way,
he was still in charge of the FBI. Yeah, so
he'd been there for about fifty years, right, So his

(14:40):
idea was airon Marshall's didn't work, um, but they were
still trying it. There was no air marshal on flight
three oh, five, the dB Cooper hijacking flight. Yeah, they're
like Portland to Seattle. Maybe we should put like three
air marshals on that one, right, And I mean it
made sense that there would not be an air marshal
on that flight because most high jackings were crazed lone

(15:02):
gunman with a handgun who wanted to be taken to
Cuba for political reasons. Basically, no one flying from PDX
to c Tech wanted to be taken to Cuba, so
there was no reason for an air marshal to be
on the flight. It was a pretty good bet to
not have an air marshal on. They just didn't expect B. B.
Cooper because he was a pretty novel person. The idea

(15:24):
of a single guy taking control of a flight for
money with a bomb that was new and like our
whole conception of mad bomber hijacking a flight comes from D. B.
Cooper and sunny bonus character and airplane too. This is
actually I did a little more research between nine and
seventy nine. It's literally referred to as the Golden age

(15:46):
of sky chacking. I was talking to Josh, It's like,
I didn't know that you could have I thought a
golden age was about something good. I didn't know you
could have the golden age of dysentery the good old days.
It was good for the hijackers because they could get
away with it no problem. Maybe that's who wrote that,
the Golden age of skuyjacking man. Alright, so, uh, Floren Schaffner,

(16:09):
I'm sorry. Shaffer reads the note and she says, uh,
you know what, give me our Cooper says, you know what,
give me that note back, which is a very key
thing because that means they won't have a sample of
his handwriting. So he asked for the note back, and
from that point on he uh did not converse like
everything else. He had them right down to take to

(16:29):
the captain so they would have no more like physical
evidence of his handwriting. Yeah. The only handwriting sample he
had was that ticket duplicate and it was in block letters,
which he went like this. So she sits down and
she says, uh, you know, I want to know that
this is legit, this is for real. Can I can
I like get a look at that bomb that you're

(16:50):
talking about? Makes sense? And he shows her, right, Yeah,
he gives her look. Peak he opened her his bag
just enough and she went to put her fingers in
any stamped shot and she went just like pretty woman. Yeah,
and uh, but she sees what you know, she sees
red sticks of dynamite and a battery and and I

(17:11):
guess presumably like an alarm clock with two two bells
on it. Right, it's got like a skull and cross boones.
It's like he says, you die or something. Electrical tape
is all around it. Because he watched a lot of cartoons.
He knows how to make a bomb. Well, she I
mean she bought it clearly. Um, she saw the bomb
and she uh took down a note. He said, take

(17:32):
this down. I have a ransom demand. He said, I
want two hundred thousand dollars by five pm in cash.
Put it in a knapsack. I want two back parachutes
and two front parachutes when we land. I want a
fuel truck ready to refuel. No funny stuff. We're all
do the job, which is that was tough talk. In again,

(17:54):
he watched a lot of cartoons. And that's what you
say when you mean business. Uh, that roughly is about
one point two million dollars today. Um, I think it's
a little low. If you're gonna go through a skyjacking.
It's a lot of work for a million. Yeah, I
would have said, like, if you're gonna ask for two
d grand asked for three hundred or four hundred, that's
just me. I'm no skyjacker. So this is it turns

(18:18):
out to be the only threat that Dan Cooper makes
during the entire ordeal. He he is this very first
note that he gave up. So from that point on,
like I said, he dictated everything else, so they could
just pass notes back and forth. And aside from a
couple of conversations with the pilots on the cockpit phone
from the rear of the plane to the cockpit, uh,

(18:40):
they didn't have any interaction the pilots whatsoever with Dan Cooper.
So they were like almost no help whatsoever during the investigation. Right,
and then the fact that he asked for two parachutes
was a stroke of brilliant because it did show his
hand to the FBI that he was going to jump
out of the plane with the ransom money. But it
also said FBI, I'm probably going to make a hostage

(19:03):
jump with me, so don't tamper with any of these parachutes,
which if the FBI had would have been murder. But
we're talking about Jagre Hoover's FBI, so they may have
they may have tried just that. So it's pretty smart
that he asked for two pair because they didn't know
what he was gonna do, That's right. So Shaffner takes
that ransom note, gives it to Alice Hancock. She takes

(19:25):
it over to the pilot and the co pilot and uh,
well what did they do? Josh? You do a great pilot?
They called c Tech Airport and staid, uh, seat Tech,
we just wanna advise you. In a bit of a
fiddlesticks we got going on, Sonny Bono was taken control

(19:46):
of the planets dollars in negotiable American currency PM negotiable
American currency. Yeah, it's a very weird thing to ask
for it, it was. And so set Act was like,
we should probably call the cops, and the cops said
we should probably call the FBI. Well yeah, this was
the Seattle Police Department. In one They're like no, no, no, no, no,

(20:10):
we we don't deal with things like this. They're like, wait, wait,
this guy doesn't want to go to Cuba. We don't understand,
Like we're literally waiting for John Rambo to wander through town, right,
so we can harass them just ten more years. Wait,
that was Oregon, though, wasn't it? Okay? Pretty close? That
joke will kill tomorrow night. Yeah, man, Rambo joke, remember it. So, um,

(20:37):
all of a sudden, like there's all this crazy energy
going on down on the ground, right, So the FBI
comes in and um, they're they're trying to get the
money together. Um, They're like, you, we have an hour.
You gotta give us more time. It's like, now you
can't have more time. They're like, Okay, that's fine, we'll
get all this stuff together. You guys are gonna have

(20:57):
to stay up there until we get everything ready for you.
So the plane is circling Sea Tack, and they told
the passengers that, um, the plane was experiencing mechanical problems,
which I would have had a problem hearing, you know,
it wouldn't have Like I think they could have thought
that through a little more. It's it's coxperiencing mechanical problems.

(21:18):
So we're just gonna keep flying and to stay aloft.
See what happens. Captain Scott as a gambling man so
everyone was drinking and smoking cigarettes, so they didn't care.
They were hooking up in the bathroom. If it had
been Chuck, you would have been like, I told you,
we should have driven. It's nothing. Could have been to Portland.

(21:43):
So they had to circle for an hour, and they
ended up telling the passengers, we just need to burn
off some gas and everything will be fine. Right, and
the passengers apparently we're totally unaware that they've been hijacked.
That's how cool Cooper was, right, But one passenger later said,
I had a pretty good feeling we've been hijacked. And
the press ball was like, shut up, get off the

(22:05):
day it was that next person. Um, so I was
at that game. Yeah, I was at that game seven.
It was all right, he's that dude, you know any
remarkable event. Yeah, I was there. It was it was
I knew it was a hijacking. You really had me
stumped there for a second. I'm role playing games seven.

(22:32):
So C Tech is circling right there, circling, circling an hour,
killing time, but just burning off gas, and um Florence
Shaffner is has gone away to take the note to
Alice Handcocky takes notes to the cockpit. She's on the
relay team basically now, um and um dB Cooper says, well,

(22:54):
Dan Cooper says, hey, Tina McLoud, why don't you sit
beside me for a while. And she did, and she
ended up kind of taking a bit of a seat
in history, if you will feel allow us that terrible analogy. Um.
And she sat down and she got She spent a
lot of time with Dan Cooper and they ended up chatting,
and she said Dan Cooper kept a level head during
a very tense situation, like the whole time. And they

(23:16):
chatted about things like Tina muck claus home state, which
was Minnesota. They talked about a nearby Air Force base
and how long it took to drive to Sea Tach.
It was like twenty minutes or something. You guys can
actually probably guess the air force base. We don't know,
uh that one. And then um they also at one
point he looked out the window and he said, it

(23:39):
looks like we're over Tacoma. So all this would indicate
a lot to the FBI later on, right that this
guy was maybe a local. Yeah, I'm kind of curious,
could anyone here recognize Tacoma from an airplane from an
airplane airplane? Do they have a huge like field cut
out of grass that says Tacoma corn. What are they saying?

(24:05):
I think they're saying coin. Yeah, the smell. Oh boy,
I knew that. I knew this would go over well. Here.
By the way, we didn't mention they diverted all the
other flights away from from Sea Tech at the time

(24:26):
because they wanted that to be the only plane in
the area. And to me, the most remarkable part of
this whole story is one of the other planes in
the air. The dude, the pilot, gets on and tells
everyone else on that plane what's going on. Well, he
like he patched into the calm link between flight three
oh five and Sea Tech for the listening enjoyment of

(24:49):
the passengers on his flight. It's insane. It's like, I'm sorry,
we're delayed, but here's what's going on on another flight nearby.
All right, just sit back and listen to the Tulsa
tones of a sky jacking again. It was the seventies.
Everyone's drinking. They're like, this is remarkable, thank you, thank god,

(25:12):
it's not us. Everything's better when you're drinking, all right,
So he recognizes Tacoma, which apparently everyone in this room
could do. Right. We were impressed by that, but it's
nothing occasionally, went I suppose like Tacoma. Uh so all

(25:35):
of these are sort of clues. Though. If you recognized Tacoma,
he knew about the air Force space, that clearly maybe
the guy's kind of from the area might be a clue.
Later on, so uh much law at this point asked
Dan Cooper. She said, do you have a grudge against
our airline, sir? And he said, no, ma'am, I don't
have a grudge against your airline. I just have a
grudge critic right. She was like, yeah, like they did.

(25:59):
So back on the ground, the FBI is like going crazy,
The local cops are going crazy. Everybody's going crazy trying
to get two grand and cash together. It turns out
that was the easiest part of this whole thing. So
Northwest orients UM president at the time, Donald Nyrop Any
Nye Rops in the house. He would have been in Minnesota.

(26:21):
Oh okay, yeah, but I'm convinced that someone in here
is going to be related to someone in this story.
Oh I am too, Yeah, I am waiting for somebody's
saying and be like that's a lie, or for someone
to stand up and say I am DVI Cooper, that
would be amazing. We'd have to come up with a
different show tomorrow or just bring him along and here

(26:43):
he is everybody. So Donald ny rop Um, the president
of Northwest Orient, He's like, yeah, sure, we'll totally pay that.
We have a huge um insurance policy on this kind
of thing. Um Apparently Northwest had to pay like twenty
grand and their insurance company hit out a hundred eight
Graham and they tapped c First Bank, which had a

(27:04):
downtown branch, And in this downtown branch they had a
really great idea. They had stacks of twenty dollar bills
in varying amounts so that it looked like a nervous
teller ran into the back and like put some twenties
together in the event of a bank robbery, right, and
then would come out and be like, here you go,
a bank robber. You're getting off scott free. But it

(27:26):
turns out that every serial number on every one of
those twenties have been recorded. So it worked for bank robberies,
worked just as well for sky jackings as well, so
they had the money. No problems. The parachutes were just
very difficulty. That was actually the harder part. Uh. Back
in the big recreational sky diving craze had not yet

(27:47):
taken hold. That happened here and there. But the manager
at s tax said, I got a guy, don't you worry. Um,
he's got an operation called Seattle Sky Sports and its aqua.
Anybody from missuah shout out, why do you call it
Seattle sky Sports? That did they mooch off of Seattle? Yeah,

(28:10):
off of the teet of Seattle. He's like, I got
a guy. His name is Earl Cossi, and uh he
agreed to help. Um. Little side note, Earl Cossi uh
was actually murdered three years ago. Yeah, apparently has room down.
We're all having too much fun. Uh. He got killed

(28:32):
by a blow to the head in his garage. But
apparently you know some cooperists that are still active today
on the internet. You know these conspiracy dudes that his
everyone did it. I love that. Everybody. See, you can
all be conspiracy there, get out your hat, um, although
women can't be because they're too smart. It's always guys.

(28:55):
Did you know so? Earl coss He was killed, but
they think it has nothing to do with it, even
though coopers are like, are you sure they're trying to
silence a man exactly? So Toss was pretty great, very

(29:15):
well timed. So Cassie called his his operation into the
to the dude working there and said, hey, can you
get together these parachutes and need two fronts and two backs?
The guy said, sure, bro, and h in his haste,
he packs three regular shoots, well, not three regular he

(29:36):
packs one military shoot, two regular shoots, and one thing
that I still don't understand called a dummy shoot that
doesn't open. So, like, if you were working at Seattle
Sky Sports and um, you get really really sick of
having to fold up the whole parachute every time somebody

(29:59):
was training the throwing out the pilot shoot, which is
just the little shoot that comes out first and pulls
the bigger shoot out. Right, if all you're trying to
do is throw that part out, you don't need the
bigger shoot. So if you're an employee at Seattle Sky
Sports in ISQua, you may have the idea they should
just so the bigger part shut. There should be no

(30:19):
parachute that has like the most important part sown shut. Right,
I think we can. But this is the thing, and
they're called dummy shoots. The thing is everybody's like, oh,
we gotta covered. Let's just put a big X on
it and everybody will know it's a dummy shoot. So
that one of these dummy shoots made it into the

(30:40):
four shoots that were delivered to D. B. Cooper. So
the money and the shoots go in a cop car
and the does a donuts getting out like in front
of the plane and gets out and stands outside and
um waits for the plane to land, I should say.
So when they get everything together, they let flight three
oh five no that they've come and get it basically,

(31:02):
and um they prepare to land and dB Cooper does
something very smart. Yeah he uh, he said, you know what,
I bet you there's gonna be snipers on the ground
because I've seen a movie or two. I've seen Black
Sunday anyone. No, didn't they come out like five or
six years later? Maybe Actually I have to look that up,

(31:25):
and I think there was seventy. You know this all right?
He said, I have a dream about a movie one
day that would be called Black Sunday, and there's gonna
be snipers at that airport. So, um, have everybody put
the shades down on the windows. They're all drunk, they
don't care, they won't ask any questions. And so they

(31:47):
did so, which turned out to be a pretty good
move because there were in fact snipers exactly. So the
plane lands and um, no one's allowed to get off yet. Uh.
Cooper says, hey, Tina, give me a solid go out
and get the money and the shoots and come back
with them. Okay, then we can let the passengers off,
and Mucloud leaves the plane. And at this point, and
this is one of the first reasons why Tina Mukloud

(32:09):
was one of our heroes. Um, once she's off the plane,
she could have been like so long jumps seeing hell, um,
which may have been a little harsh. Had she said
that with an earshot of somebody in this hostage situation,
she could have thought it. Her actions could have said
as much. She didn't. She got the shoots, she got

(32:29):
the money, and she essentially traded herself for the hostages
and went back on the plane. That's metal. Chuck would
have said out loud, see you in hell flight three
oh five. I would have walked straight to baggage claim
and or the ground transportation and said take me to
cousin I because I need some loose leaf tea. Good

(32:51):
good luck with the skuy jacking. Yeah, but she came back,
come back, So she traded herself for these hostages and UM.
The hostages were allowed to leave, and so too were
Alice Hancock and Florence Shaffner. Um. They the rest of
the crew is basically like, there's no reason for you
to stay here, so go. So it was down to Um,

(33:11):
Shaffner and Cooper, and then in the UM cockpit Red
AzaC and h Scott, right and Scott and Dzac repaid
Tina muckloud by staying themselves there. There was a rope
ladder actually that they could have climbed out of. They
had almost no interaction whatsoever with dB Cooper. They could
have at their leisure, they could have put on bathing

(33:31):
suits and climbed out this rope ladder and laid on
the tarmac for a while and then gone to the
safety of like the FBI barricade. And they didn't. They
stuck around and they like, we're like, we're gonna see
this hijacking through. Yeah, in my uh like in my
comedic mind's eye, I see them getting out on the
rope swing. Rope ladder. That's different. Rope swing. That would

(33:55):
be amazing. They may have like like a tire swing
on brother, they get up on the rope ladder. Tina
muck Law never comes back in DV. Cooper's just sitting
on the plane by himself. He's like, Oh, it happened again?
Is he typing? Oh No, that's sorry. I didn't know

(34:16):
they had a rope ladder. That's crazy. Sure, every airplane
has a rope ladder in the car. Wake up, old cheats.
So the f a A actually had a their chief
psychiatrist on the ground and this dude does a quick analysis,

(34:38):
you know, like let me do one of those movie
readings of who this guy is and what's gonna happen.
And he says, you know what's gonna happen is you're
gonna give this guy the money in the parachutes. You're
gonna go up there in the plane. He's gonna jump
out and blow up the plane. Uh, and just let
everyone know that, right, he's gonna force pilot and co

(35:01):
pilot that this is what's coming. Right, He's gonna force
Muckloud to jump with him and then blow up the
plane afterward. Right, but yeah, make sure that, make sure
the cockpit knows. And then he added, and he probably
has some sort of fixation on longer than usual nipples,
So make sure he's not exposed to those, because he
has some sort of fetish based on his experience with
his mother. Because the ones psychoanalysts for the f A, Hey,

(35:36):
if I had done that in a German accident, it
would have sunk in even faster. Yeah, did you tell
them that? Make sure you tell him that. Guys said,
all right, I'm gonna go ahead and say now what
I'm gonna say in like an hour backstage? That was amazing,

(35:57):
Thank you. I thought that's not where you're gonna say. Actually,
I didn't didn't see that one coming. You got me
m when you Yeah, I had no idea where you
were going. Literally you said longer than usual nipples, and

(36:20):
I went in my head, I went, am, I is
this happening like Josh Josh am I stole in Atlanta
that it is the trip in my sleep? Yeah, pure gold, buddy,
thank you? To where are we? I am so throwing own?

(37:00):
So we said Cooper was cool, right head he was.
He was so cool he ordered food for the crew
during the refueling process. Yeah, it's a nice, nice guy.
You want to know who else is cool is Tina Mucklaw.
Because once they released the passengers and they got the
money on board, she sat back down and he offered

(37:21):
her a couple of the stacks of money and she said, well,
you go ahead and say it, no tipping aloud, smooth again.
Had it been me, well, first of all, I would
have been an uncle likes by then. But if I
was dumb enough to get back on I would be like, yeah,
get pay it for just two stacks of bills. Yeah,

(37:44):
what gives jerk? I want half? She's she's amazing. So
the planes being refueled, he passed along a request, very
specific request for what's to happen when they go to
take off. He said, I want to take off with
that f staircase that I know is back there down
in the jump off the plane position. And they said

(38:05):
you can't take off with the plane. Uh, you can't
take off with the door down. And he said, well
can you check on that? Are you sure? And they said, no,
you can't do that, and he said, are you super
sure and they said, no, you can't do that. He said,
all right, and they said, oh, but once you're up there,
you can totally lower it and jump out. And he said, well,
why didn't we just start there? Because that's really the
only thing that mattered. He's like, fine, fine, And then

(38:28):
the pilot's like, well, where do you want to go?
And Dan Cooper says, Mexico City, let's say. And the
pilot goes, well, that's that's kind of far. We're gonna
have to refuel is Reno, okay, And Dan Cooper goes,
I don't know how I can get this across anymore. Clearly,
I'm jumping out of the plane the next time we
go up find wherever you want? Just fine southward. Yeah,

(38:53):
So they refuel the plane. And the only time Dan
Cooper gets a little a little ruffled is when it
takes a little long for his liking, and he says,
it shouldn't take this long. Let's get the show on
the road, right. He picked up for one of the
few times he picked up the cockpit or the cabin
and cockpit phone and said, let's get the show on
the road. I would have screamed it and like ship

(39:16):
the phone and then hit myself in the head with
it and then just started crying and been like it's
never gonna work. This is never gonna work. I think
as well established we'd be the worst guy and hostages. Yeah,
just getting no, I don't want any part of it.
He also gives some instructions on how to fly the plane,
which is getting really specific. He said, don't go any
higher than ten thou fet uh. Set your wing flaps

(39:39):
at fifteen degrees, which apparently we learned as an angle
that only the seven to seven one could position those
wing flaps, which everyone in this room knows because it's
a bowing And he said, don't go any faster than
a hundred ninety miles per hour two knots uh. So
that means they're gonna be flying slow and low, like

(40:01):
you're cooking ribs or jumping off a plane, because that
means the cabin is at pressurized and that means when
you open that door, you're not just gonna suck everything out.
It's still skydivable mm hmm. Yeah, oh that's the terminology. Okay,
So Cooper had some problems right. He had specifically asked

(40:22):
for a knapsack, and the FEDS had given him the
two in a bank bag, which, as we all know,
is a very unwieldy, clumsy bag. Right, it's like a
canvas bag. There's nothing to it. What do you like
tuck it under your arm? What are you supposed to
do with that? Right? So he's like, well, I need
to make a handle for this thing. All harvest one
of these parachutes for its rigging, and he chose the

(40:46):
pink one, which the pink one was actually the best
one of all of them, yeah, because it was the
dummy shoot, the military shoot, and then is that we're
gonna call it the medium shoot. And then the pink one,
which was like Josh, is the best one. So he
cuts the stuff loose, he makes a handle for it.
Things are happening. At this point. They moved to the

(41:06):
rear of the plane hen Tina muck Law, and he says,
you know, I think I need help lowering the staircase.
So she goes back there with him. She's a little
freaked out at this point. She was common cool, but
like it's go time, and she thinks she's gonna get
sucked out rightfully, So because she didn't understand the physics
of you know, the plane being that low and that slow.

(41:29):
She did another physics. I am still freaked out a staircase.
Why don't I mention physics exactly? So she gets back
there and he said, she said, can I at least
have some of that rope so I can tie myself
to the interior of this plane? Like that's how helpful
she was. She's like, just let me lash myself to

(41:51):
the plane. Let me help myself, right, I just spit
like all the way across it. I spit earlier. It's okay, good.
You should learn to say throws up like in Vegas.
That's what I was just talking. Yeah, man, weird instinct.
Oh my god. Except well, never mind. So she asked

(42:15):
for some rope to lash herself in, and he goes,
at this point, you know what, never mind, He literally
like this is the quote. He goes, never mind, never mind.
He said, you know what, you just go back up
to the cockpit and you see that first class curtain.
Just don't come any further back. I got it from there.
He turns back around and looks, and then he turns
back around to where she was, and he just sees

(42:35):
like a pile of dust to where she was just standing.
She was like in the cockpit all of a sudden,
and so it's go time in the cockpit. Two pm.
The little light comes on that says a door ajar,
I guess and uh. They said that. The pilots are

(42:58):
like Tina, like mus A call back one more time.
He's like, no, you can't call him, and they're like, no, really,
we should call. We can totally call him, like the
f A shrink said like he might blow us up.
He said some other weird stuff too, but he said,
like he's gonna blow us up. We should really butter
this guy up. And we could have left on that
rope swing and we stayed because of you rope ladder. Ye,

(43:24):
So they call, they do call, and the pilots like
ring ring ring, Ring Ring Ring, Yes, ring ring, you
let her ring a couple of times, ring ring ring U.
Dan Cooper, hijacker, Mr Cooper, we want to make sure
your play is as comfortable as possible. There anything we

(43:44):
can do to help you back there to make your
hijacking more successful, sir, no, click, I know it's kind
of rude, he said, no, hung up, And then at
twelve pm the crew felt the plane kind of jiggle
a little bit, as if someone had jumped off the
rear of it, and they said, Tina, go check, we're

(44:10):
flying the plane. She's like, wait a minute. Only one
of you was flying, you know. It takes both of us,
you don't know. And that's it. So from the moment
that Tina muck Law left shut that first class curtain, nobody,
to anyone's knowledge, ever saw Dan Cooper again. But that's
not the end of the show. No, it's not. So
there was a man hunt, right, so Dan Cooper had

(44:34):
pretty clearly signaled his intentions that he was going to
jump off the back of the seven. The FBI was like,
we need to scramble some jets. Let's get some fighter
jets that are in the area. We're gonna scramble them
to go follow the seven. What is the scrambling? I
never get that. It's like like go I know, but
that it just sounds it sounds chaotic like they're scrambling.

(44:58):
I think that's I think that's the point. Like people
are suposed to run around and bump into each other
and fall out and then get up and get in
their jets and fly off scrambling. That's classics renamed. It
would be like, activate the jets. That's not bad, that's
not bad at all. Scramble the jets. It sounds desperate.

(45:18):
You're right, the jets. So either However, the jets were
brought into this picture. Um, there was a problem with them,
and that they were way too fast for the seven,
which is putzing along and a d Then all of
a sudden there's a jet that yeah, and then the

(45:39):
next one comes and they're like, what are we gonna do, Well,
we'll stick a helicopter on them. This is like Goldilocks.
The helicopter was too slow. Seven twenty seven just puts
in along. People are going and trying to catch up,
nothing happening. They should have scrambled the seventh when he's

(46:00):
oven and just followed right behind. It makes sense. Alights
on Ryant, so they're scrambling. The point is nobody saw
Dan Cooper jump when he jumped, So they used the
eight twelve pm oscillation to kind of figure out where

(46:22):
they should start looking, and they zeroed in on a
place called Ariel, Washington near the Lewis River. Anybody from
Ariel good because we got jokes. Nobody from Ariel. Anyone
ever heard of the Lewis River. Okay, so they get them,
they get this man hunt going. They're combing, they're they're
scrambling and combing. Those are the two things you do. Yeah,

(46:44):
it was here in the FBI. It was a massive
man hunt too. There's like a thousand troops and cops
combing this area. Yeah, no one from Seattle p D.
Of course, they were just sitting around Stone, hanging out
in Nissequa, waiting for Rambo. Here's another fun fact. There
was a millionaire, a local millionaire who we don't know.

(47:07):
Do you know the name? No, I've looked. If anybody knows,
just stand up and say it with dignity. It was
on It was on the news. So this local millionaire says,
you know what, that's near Lake Merwin, and I'm going
to rent a submarine because I'm a millionaire and that's

(47:28):
you know where. Yeah, I don't work, I'm a millionaire.
He got a submarine and he trolled the depths of
Lake Merwin. He said he rented a small submarine because
he's not an extravagant local million now seems ostentatious. The
hydraulics on it who needs that in a submarine? Does

(47:49):
it have a metal detector, which would not have helped
because it was cash bills. So you'd make a great
local millionaire. I would if only. Uh. The other weird
thing that happened was the UM the c I A
got involved, which is a little bit strange, and they
scrambled the SR seventy one Blackbird, right, They scrambled it

(48:15):
several times. Yeah, that it was almost over easy. Terrible.
It doesn't even make sense because once you scramble it, it
it can't be over easy. Terrible joke, Chuck, that's what
I says. Rebound, rebound, Is this really happening? Did you

(48:38):
talk about long nipples? All? Right? The SR seventy one
Blackbird was at the time super secret. We all know
about it now, but at the time it was very secret,
and it was kind of a big deal to get
this thing up in the air. So especially multiple times,

(48:59):
like one time, it's like, your dad is the head
of c I A and you're the head of Seattle
p D, so you can make it happen maybe once, right,
multiple times. That's weird that the SR seventy one was scrambled. Right.
The FBI is very studious and likes to do a
lot of obvious stuff. So they interviewed everybody in the

(49:20):
area with the last name of Cooper, which there's like
a square one. This is like square negative five. Yeah, yeah,
sure you no, it's negative five. I looked it out,
so you look up all the Coopers in the area.
And at this point they have a press conference. And
if you've noticed, we've been calling this dude Dan Cooper

(49:41):
the whole time, because up until this time he was
just Dan Cooper. So they have a press conference and
there's sort of I don't think we know who messed
it up, right, okay, either a file clerk or a
cop talking in front of a reporter, either you, P
I or AP, depending on who you ask, And they

(50:03):
were saying like, what Cooper could could have done something
like this, And somebody said, well, there's a Dane Cooper
who's a cat burglar in the area. That's that's a
terrible suggestion. Cat burglar does not go to hijacker, you know,
And um, this reporter was like, what a scoop and
hit the wire with cops looking for dB Cooper. Yeah,

(50:25):
he said, d B Cooper. Did I say Dan Cooper?
A little part of my brain was like, you just said, Dan,
let's start over. So a cop was talking in front
of an AP reporter and they said, what Cooper do
you know could have done this? And the cops said, well,
there's this d D B Cooper. What did you just say.

(50:48):
Did you say a D. Cooper? I said, there's a
dB Cooper I got at that time. He's a cat burglar.
And the reporter said, this is hitting the wire, and
he reported that the cops were looking for a dB
and it just changed from that point on. Yeah, I mean,
he was never DV. Cooper. It was literally a mistake.

(51:11):
So that's why we all know him as DV. Cooper today.
And the FBI actually a little smart, believe it or not,
and they said, you know what, let's keep it that way.
That way we'll know if any tips come in on
a Dan Cooper will know it's a hot lead. So
it actually ended up kind of working in their favor,
and anytime a tip like that came in, like the
office prankster would come in with the facts of me,
like hot lead, hot lead. It was like a joker

(51:34):
around the Portland office. Everybody loves Richard h and this
will This will come up later too, when it comes
time to solve the crime that they Later on, the
FBI learned that there was a comic book in the
nineteen fifties about a Dan Cooper who was a Canadian

(51:56):
jet pilot. And it was a Belgian comment which is
a little weird, but it was you know, that was
literally a Dan Cooper who jumped out of planes and
comic book form exactly could be a clue. And that's
a niche comic, right, So it would printed in Belgium
in the French about a Canadian fighter pilot. All they

(52:16):
had to do was find like the ten people who
knew of that comic, be like, what'd you do? We
know it was one of you. And so the FBI
had a pretty clear belief, very openly stated belief that B. B.
Cooper died in the jump. It was just the line
that they took right off the bat there, like there's
no way this guy survived, and um, the he wasn't

(52:39):
the lead agent on the case, but he became the
most famous agent. Ralph Himmel's Bach Any Himmel's box in
the house. Now you're a liar, liar, So Himmel's Boch.
Like I said, he wasn't the lead agent, but he
was out of the Seattle office, and he became the
most famous agent associated with it. And um, he actually
gave the case. It's the official name nor Jack, which

(53:02):
is stupid any Northwest Jack sky Jack right, but removed
the sea. It's just called the dB Cooper case, you know,
or Hi Steven better. So he self published a book
in six about the case. And Himmel's Box said he
thinks that dB Cooper didn't even get a shoot open,
that he plunged to his death and hit the forest

(53:26):
floor with such impact that he basically was buried immediately
with the parachute still attached, and maybe even the money.
And uh, that was Himmel's Box. Take that. Excuse me?
Are you gonna get that? I would realized it wasn't
its twist off, and then I realized I had my
lighter from the loose leaf tea place nice going. You

(53:53):
just saw the some of Chuck's college education. So Cooper
had jumped from the plane. Did he live? Did he not?
The odds are against him in a lot of ways. Outside.
The temperature that night was twenty degrees fahrenheit. Um, hey,

(54:16):
we're in America, man, Yeah, you're right, twenty degrees USA.
At ten thousand feet it was negative seven degrees uh,
and he was going a hundred and ninety miles an hour.
There was freezing rain. It was there was like a

(54:37):
quarter crescent or not a quarter crescent, a crescent moon.
Those are two different things, crescent moon and the sky.
But it was cloudy and rainy, so there's probably was
zero light. It's freezing. He's ten thousand feet. He's not
dressed for the occasion. No, he's wearing loafers. He's wearing
an overcoat. He's got this he doesn't have this knapsack,
so he's fashioned this weird kind of knapsack with his
pink rope. Plus plus the area's jumping out into. He's

(55:00):
playing at ten thousand feet over the cascades. Some of
the cascades, as you guys know, are higher than ten
thousand feet, very dangerous jump. And there's a lot of
pointy trees. I mean, the point is in my rights
yet and all the point is trees around Plus Despite

(55:21):
what the f A A guy said, the f A psychiatrist,
he did not leave the bomb to be detonated after
he jumped off. He took it with him. Bank bag bomb,
overcoat loafers. Parachute was my dB. And by the way,

(55:41):
the FBI later on they interte interviewed monk lock Or
who was the one who saw Yeah, Schaffter saw the
bomb like you just didn't. And she said, yeah, you
know these red sticks taped together and they went, huh,
that wasn't dynamite. Dynamite isn't red. You've seen too many cartoons.
Dynamite is tan. Road flares are red. So it was
more than likely a fake bomb with an alarm clock

(56:03):
and road flayers. Plus D B. Cooper did not help
his cause by his choice of parachutes, right he um,
he's so. He chose a military shoot as his main shoot.
It was not a great shoot. The rip cord wasn't
as easily accessed as the recreational shoots, and once it
deployed you can't steer it very well. It was not

(56:24):
the best choice. Even worse was his choice of the
dummy shoot for his front reserve shoot. He took the
best shoot and gutted it to make a handle for
the bank bag, left the second best shoot, and chose
the two worst shoots to jump out with right, So
I didn't know you couldn't steer a military shoot, but
it makes sense. Yeah, they're just like, go for it, Pale,

(56:46):
because if I was in the military, I would steer.
I would be like, well, how do we go over here? Instead,
let's see a lot of guns down there, Let's take
it this way. So they just drop you, apparently, Yeah,
and I guess you know what they're doing. Though, So
some other theories, because it's Washington, believe it or not,

(57:10):
some people actually posited that he was eaten by sasquatch
with a straight face. I mean, let's be honest, how
many of you in here we're thinking the same thing. Uh.
Some other people say, well, he was clearly burned up
by the jet exhaust, because when you come down the
stairs of a seven seven, the rear jet engines right

(57:33):
in front of you, and it would have been seven
eight hundred degrees right there. Um. But the FBI conducted
a test right afterward where they took a seven seven
up and they took a two hundred pounds sled a
two hundred pound prison victim. Right, he was condemned. Don't
worry about it, it's fine, And uh, they said and

(57:58):
threw it off, and they found that the two pound
sled uh that's the euphemism, I guess now went straight down,
so it didn't come in contact in any way with
the jet exhaust. So it kind of did away with
this idea that he burned up. Well, it was kind
of good news bad news though, because what it did do,
at least was it mimic that same oscillation. So they're like, oh,

(58:20):
you know what, it was the exact same thing happened
when we were in the air, So that twelve pm
jump time, like it was probably right on the money,
so we know probably where he might have ended. Right,
So there's a lot of questions remaining, right, and um,
there were some clues left behind. The thing that that
really kind of confounded the FBI at first was that

(58:41):
they combed the area where they were looking for him,
with like a thousand people just combing this area, the
SR seventy one blackbirds circling around looking. They didn't find anything.
He had left a couple of things on board the plane, right,
He left his clip on tie, which was the second
biggest secret that night. Uh. Hell, that's what you do

(59:04):
before you jump out, you know, you you take it
off and there was a clip on all along. You
unbuttoned that button. Then you're like, I'm out of here.
All right? He left the eight cigarette butts of his
Rawley brand cigarettes. He smoked eight over five hours, and
all eight butts have since been lost. Right, Um, they
found a hair on the headrest. Um. They The thing

(59:27):
is the FBI traded in fingerprints. That was their big
thing at the time, and Dan Cooper had been very
smart to not leave a single print on any of
the cigarette butts. Yeah. True, but there was fingerprints on
the in flight guess sky Mall magazine? Yeah, r I
p s guy mall. What do you mean it's not around,

(59:49):
it's gone. Yeah, it's sky Malls gone. Did you guys
not know this? No way, it's yeah, that's why I
said I know, But I just, uh, I don't know
where am I going to get my putting green that
doubles as a cat feeder? My friend, you can just

(01:00:11):
go to front Gate because front has everything everyone needs.
What's that funk they advertised in Skymall, But they have
stores too. I don't even know where I am right now.
That's uncle, Like, what year is it? No? So it
would be seven years before any trace of the hijacking,

(01:00:34):
any real clue turned up, and it was in there
were some hunters in Oregon hunting animals. I guess, right,
unless it was the most dangerous game. You don't know.
It's Oregon, you never know. There are less civilized people

(01:00:56):
than we have here. Uh. They found a plastic and
strung action placard showing how to lower the f staircase
in the woods. So this is like a really good clue.
It was, but it didn't. It didn't lead to anything new. Well,
it was from flight three oh five, which was I
guess I'm saying it was cool. It was cool, like
if you were the hunter, you'd be like, I'm keeping this,

(01:01:18):
but um, it was on the flight path. So it
didn't generate any new leads, but it generated a lot
of renewed interest in the case because, believe it or not,
the dB Cooper case it kind of fall into the
wayside in the last like seven years. People just didn't
think much about it anymore, right exactly, So it was
like a dime a dozen't But all of a sudden,
everybody's like, we got to make a movie. Who's the

(01:01:40):
biggest movie star We've got Tree Williams make him as
dB Cooper and that's what they did. Has anyone ever
seen in the pursuit of DV Cooper? No, that's right, everybody,
God bless you, seatt all smart town chunk. I figured
here like somebody, but as it was a local thing,

(01:02:03):
very very bad movie was made several starring Treat Williams
and Robert duval Right, whose mom needed surgery at the
time the layoff. So here's what well, First of all,
if you want to know how big a piece of
garbage this movie is, it had three directors, And if

(01:02:24):
you know anything about filmmaking, if you have more than
one director, it's probably a really bad movie for one
reason or another. But has three, then it's guaranteed to
be bad. But all you need to do is go
home tonight when you get back to your to your
house boats a qua. Does anyone here live on a
houseboat now? Because I was gonna ask if I could

(01:02:47):
come stay over because those things are awesome. That was
just sleepless in Seattle. You've seen that too many times?
Oh no, they exist, uh, Because I tried to stay
in an AIRB and B actually before I came here
on the house yeah, I totally did, and I ended
up in some stupid hotel downtown. Go home to your

(01:03:08):
YouTube's type in Pursuit of dB Cooper and watch the
first three minutes, because this movie literally starts with the
point from where DV Cooper jumps out of the back
of the plane. It starts from the point where we
know nothing else that happened is literally fictional from that

(01:03:30):
point slogan on the movie posters fact sch Max. So
it starts with the pursuit of dB Cooper and has
Robert Duvald the names all come up and all that,
and it's got a juice heart plane. It's like wang
wang wang wang wang wang wang wog and uh treat Williams.
It's a terrible voice voiceover recording. You just hear. Yeah,

(01:03:55):
And he jumps off the thing because that's what you do.
And he jumped off a plane and your sky jagging.
He parachutes down in the night and the night and
he catches through some trees and lands and then just
this really little sad yeah, who everything was sad about
that and tree Williams gets on the on the ground
and he and he takes out a cigar and he

(01:04:18):
takes out a lighter, because that's what you do to
when you successfully landed after Scott jacking. He doesn't like
the lighter though. He rips open the money bag. He
takes out a hundred dollar bill and he lights that
and then he uses that to light a cigar. And
that is how that movie opens. And it goes downhill
from there. And Robert daval Is, he's just you can

(01:04:40):
tell when he starts every scene. Let's do it. It's
so bad, but I do encourage you. It was mean
when I was a kid and it came out. It
was like we got HBO on my street, and it
was a really big deal when we got Cable and HBO.
So I would literally watch any movie that came out.
It was like Crull, that's a hey, Cull was okay,

(01:05:03):
great movie, Pursuit of D. B. Cooper. Why not? I
was not exposed to that. I think my mother shielded
me from that movie. Good for you, mom. Watch the
first two minutes on your chuck. So, um, we're still

(01:05:41):
talking about the placard, weren't we? No, no, no, All right,
well we'll go to nineteen eighty was the first real
good clue turns up in Night Right this is a
big clue, big clue. So there's a young lad named
Brian Ingram, he was eight, I think at the time,
and his family was camping on Tina Bar. Are you
guys familiar with Tina Bar? Do you guys know what
that is? The Columbia Columbia River. We're so are we

(01:06:03):
correct and understanding that you would just call it an
island not a bar? Okay? All right? So Tina Island
everywhere else. The Ingram family was camping, and Brian Ingram
was fashioning a fire pit for his family. Oh, father
is going to love this fire pit. He'll be proud
of me. Yet, Oh father, why don't you love me?

(01:06:27):
And as he's as he's like, is he's going like
this to the sand, poor a little eight year old.
He turns up a stack of bills, several stacks of
bills actually um three and these stacks of bills total
eighty dollars, and he's like, father, Father, Father takes those

(01:06:49):
and uh starts looking at him and he's like, we
should probably call the police. So they go and call
the police. And again they call the Seattle Police, which
evidently all they do is forward calls to the FBI.
They're like, Seattle p D. Please hold. So the FBI
is like, read a serial number, and he reads one

(01:07:11):
and they're like me, just another, reads another, and they're
like that's dB Cooper money. And Ingram's father's like what
did you say? And they're like nothing. So the FBI
gets their hands on it, and actually we should say
it turns out they they let little Brian Ingram, um
take some of the money. Three thousand dollars of this money.

(01:07:33):
Actually later on they returned a little not bad, right, uh?
And you want to know what's even better? In two
thousand and eight, little Brian Ingram sold that money on
eBay for thirty seven grand right, yeah, take that, father.
So the thing is this money showed up in a
place where it should not have been. Um, it showed

(01:07:56):
up twenty miles south of Aerial Wash Shington, in another river.
So they were looking here in the Lewis River, right,
everybody knows Lewis River, Ariel Washington. Here, Tina Bars down
here just a little south of Vancouver. Is my geography,
my air geography, right a Vancouver, Washington. Everybody Vancouver Washington?

(01:08:18):
Is that is it like this? That's even more amazing
this is what I suspected, and I looked it up
on Google maps and they're like, what do you mean,
Tina bar Josh. So I wasn't able to conclusively find it,
but I did have this idea that it somehow ended
up above it and the an FBI hydrologists looked at

(01:08:38):
this money said, FBI has a hydrologist. I'm retainer. Himmel's
Bach got ahold of him. And um. The guy was like,
so this stuff has only been exposed to the elements
for a year, even though it was found what nine
years after the robbery, right, and it got here one
of two ways, the guy said, So the Columbia River

(01:08:59):
flooded in uh and it was also dredged in like
ninety seven, So one of those two probably got this here,
but no one's ever said conclusively how it ended up
where it was. So, yeah, there you go, I got it.
It would be another twenty eight years before any more
clues turned up, So that's a very long wait. In

(01:09:20):
two thousand and eight, just eight short years ago, some
kids we're playing on there was it their own land
in Amboy, little south of Ariel. Anyone from Amboy, No,
I suspected not are we in Washington? Okay, yeah, but
nobody's from am Boy. We got more response in Birmingham.

(01:09:40):
No about Amboy. Yeah, they're like, we're like the sound
of that. So these kids were playing in the woods
on their property and they said, oh, look at there,
there's a parachute and they start pulling out this parachute
for like an hour. It's like a magic trick. And
they finally get to the end of the parachute and

(01:10:02):
they run and show Pa and then they say, Paw,
I found a parachute in the woods. What should we do? Right?
And Paul recognize that this is the most exciting thing
that ever happened in Amboy. Washington called the cops, who
called the Seattle police, who called the FBI, and the

(01:10:25):
FBI did something smart. They're like, well, you know who
would know if this was dB Cooper's parachute. Good old
Earl Costi, it's right, he's not dead yet, not dead yet.
M oh too soon. That's a good he's not dead yet.
That's the celebratory None of us are dead yet, right,

(01:10:49):
that's a good, good way of looking at it, Chuck,
good way to find the silver lining. So Earl Cossie
looked at this thing and he was like yeah, he said,
I'm sorry. He said, uh, Poper, shoot was nylon. That's
clearly silk. Good try, Yeah, he said, this is I
know who shoot this is. Actually it turns out that
back in a jet pilot named Floyd Walling bailed out

(01:11:14):
of his course air jet that was going down and
parachuted out in the woods around Amboy Washington, right, which
isn't too far from Arial And it wasn't Cooper's shoot.
You guys all remember when they found that parachute right
like two thousand and eight. It wasn't that long ago.
It was a big deal, um, and it wasn't his shoot,

(01:11:34):
but it did suggest that possibly he could have made
it because Floyd Walling had and he walked out of
the woods and terrible weather, just like debe Cooper would
have had to. So it kind of um shined a
light on the whole thing again. Yeah, it kind of
kicks some interest up. So um. Over the years, there
have been many, many, many, many suspects, like we're talking

(01:11:56):
over a thousand. The FBI won't even say how many
suspects they've had, or weirdly, people confessing to be dB Cooper.
It's one of those strange things that people do where
they claim to be something that will send you to prison. Well,
a lot of them are already in prison, but they're
in worse prison and hoping to go to a good prison. No,
it's true. Apparently state prisoners will try to confess to

(01:12:16):
federal crimes because the cinnamon buns are better in federal prison.
I was thinking, cinnamon bun. That's because there's cinnamon buns
in our green room. Well, now we've mentioned that in
the prisons. That's like a commodity in prison, right, cinnamon buns. Yeah,
it's like currency. Yeah, yeah, alright, cinnamon buns and cigarettes.

(01:12:38):
We know. So there's a very famous sketch. If you
go home, before you get on YouTube and look at
the first three minutes of that terrible movie, which you
definitely need to do, just Google, get on the Google's
and and type in dB Cooper sketch. There's a very

(01:12:59):
singular amos sketch of DV Cooper. It looks like n Spacey,
It looks a lot like Kevin Spacey, yeah, or Don
Draper as Kevin Spacey. It would be Kevin Spacey is
Don Draper, Yeah, yeah, sure. So if you go home
and look at that, it's like, you know, I got
this kind of shortier guy, looks like he's sort of
from the fifties or sixties. It's got the hair, he's

(01:13:21):
got the sunglasses on, and the tie, the skinny tie.
And that's the only sketch that they have of dB
Cooper that they got from the flight attendants, specifically Tina
muck Law, because she spent like five hours right next
to the dude. Um. She incidentally was really messed up
after this, understandably, and she went to be a nun
in Oregon in the nineteen eighties, which is a little weird.

(01:13:44):
I didn't know they had convinced in Oregon. There's a
convent right over in the app there's a comment behind
us right now. But even worse than that, the mother superior,
in an article I read at the convent, said she'd
never really fit in here. I'm not. If you're a
mother superior, that's a mother inferior. If you ask me,

(01:14:05):
you know, good one. So sorry, you go ahead, you
all right, If you look at some of the behavior
that Cooper displayed, you're gonna turn up some clues. And
that's what that fbida, is it kind of examine what happened. Um,
he chose a military shoot, which could mean one of

(01:14:26):
two things. Either he was former military, which you could
narrow it down, or it could mean he has no
idea what he's doing when it comes to jumping out
of a plane, right, And the choice of that dummy
shoot would definitely suggest that, because even recreational skydivers say, like,
even if you're just a military parachutist, you're gonna see
a huge X on a parachute and instinctively shy away

(01:14:47):
from that parachute. You know, I thought it stood for
extreme right. So there's a lot of people say, I
think he probably is ex military, had some like parachuting experience,
probably a paratrooper or something like that. Yeah, A lot
of people point to the idea that, um, he knew

(01:15:08):
a lot about the plane. He knew about the wing
flap degree that it could go to, he knew about altitude.
A lot of the witnesses later on said that, um,
he clearly was very much aware of what was going
on in the cabin. He just knew the plane very much.
So a lot of other people say this guy was
probably an airline employee, maybe even a pilot actually based

(01:15:30):
on the altitude and stuff that he gave him to fly. Yeah,
and one of the weird things that he knew was
that had an F staircase that you could lower and
jump out of. Because this wasn't common knowledge at the time,
Apparently a small group of people knew this. You were
either an employee of Boeing or you may have been
in the c I A. Because in the Vietnam War

(01:15:52):
we actually used the seven over Cambodia, which is where
we were not supposed to be, and they lowered that
F staircase of seven seven to drop supplies. You can't
steer but go well. And then there's the whole thing
with the s R. Seventy one Blackbird. So a lot
of cooper is still say that he might have been

(01:16:13):
secretly a member of the CIA, and he knew about
the A staircase, he knew about the or the blackbird
was scrambled, so they had like some skin in the game.
So a lot of suspects have come and gone and
come back and stayed over the years. Um the FBI
says about it, well, they won't say, but a lot
of people say about a thousand like Chuck said, But

(01:16:34):
one of the first ones to emerge was a dude
named Richard McCoy and um in February of nineteen seventy two,
I think, four months after the dB Cooper heist, Richard
McCoy hijacked uh sight and he asked for five hundred
thousand dollars in cash and he parachuted successfully out the
back over Utah. Right. Yeah, so a lot of people

(01:16:56):
say that's pretty similar. Maybe that was Stevie Cooper. Well
in five grand, that to me, that makes sense, like
worked out fine. I should have asked for more to
begin with, So let me try it again again. It
turns out that he was a Green Beret in Vietnam,
so that sort of fits with the whole profile. Uh.
He looked a little bit like the sketch of Dan

(01:17:18):
Cooper and a little bit. Yeah, he was twenty nine
years old, so he was much younger than Cooper, but
he didn't look twenty nine. I'll say that he looked
much older than that. He looked more like uh Don
Draper than Charles Manson. I'll say that. Uh. So this
guy gets caught actually after pulling off this high initially

(01:17:40):
and he goes to prison, and he makes a fake
gun out of dental plaster from the dentist in the prison,
and he takes the truck by force and literally crashes
through the front gate of the prison and escapes and
is later killed in a shootout by cops. Which is
Richard McCoy knew how to live, he did and die

(01:18:04):
uh and his family would later go on to say,
actually he was at home in Thanksgiving. Uh, so it
probably wasn't him, right, good suspect though, Suspect number two
his named Dwayne Webber. This is my guy. I like.
This guy is fine, but I don't like him, you
know what I mean. So, Dwayne Webber was a career criminal,

(01:18:25):
and the definition of a career criminal is one where
you and your alias have both done time in prison,
and he and his alias had done a combined sixteen years. Right. So,
he was on his deathbed and his wife Joe came
around and said, how you doing. It's like, while I'm
still dying, I have a confession for you. I'd like

(01:18:47):
you to hear. Um, I am Dane Cooper. And Joe's like,
I don't know who that is, and Dwayne blows up.
They have a fight on his death, it never speak
of it again, and he dies nine days later. So
Joe starts poking around after that. She's like, who is

(01:19:08):
this Dan Cooper? Which is a legitimate question after experience
like that that she went through, I would say so.
And she finds out via Internet this is that Dan
Cooper was dB Cooper, and she said, you know what,
I think that he was telling the truth. I think
he was dB Cooper because you know what, I remember
in nineteen seventy nine, we were on a vacation. We

(01:19:31):
were on a car trip. We were kind of right
around the area where the hijacking i'm sorry, where the
landing supposedly took place, and my husband stopped the car
and just pointed and said, you know what, that's where D. B.
Cooper walked out of the woods, which is a weird
thing to say on vacation, very weird thing to say.
It's even weirder that she didn't say, what the hell

(01:19:53):
are you talking about? Yeah, agreed, there's another story. Later on,
they were on another vacation. This is the same vacation.
Oh it's the same one. All right. We'll just call
this the communication vacation, the non communication vacation because They
clearly didn't talk to one another because he stopped over
the Columbia River on a bridge, literally stops on a bridge,

(01:20:16):
gets out of the car, goes to the back, opens
the trunk, and it's just gone for like ten minutes,
gets back in the car and they just drive on
and she doesn't say anything. I know you me, you
would have been like, why did you take your foot off?
The guess that would have been family would have had

(01:20:38):
three questions on why we stots on a bridge and
I opened the trunk. Not Joe, Not Joe. So a
lot of people still like Dwayne Webber, but he's actually
the FBI said, no, that's not the guy. We ruled
him out with d n A. Right, Yes, the next
guy is my guy, Kenny Christensen. That's right. He was

(01:21:02):
a pretty well like suspect for a while. He um
keeping with the series of family members outing their family
as d B. Cooper, which actually supports the family motto
that I was brought up with never trust family. It's
a proud Clark tradition. So his brother Lyle Actually this

(01:21:23):
gets a little weird. He outed him as a suspect
and an effort to get the screenwriter Nora Fron Sleepless
in Seattle, right, didn't you see that coming? He tried
to get Nora Ephron to write a movie about dB
Cooper via his brother being the main suspect. And he, weirdly,

(01:21:44):
I guess he didn't have an agent. He hired a
private investigator to get him in touch with Nora Evron.
Very strange. But he championed his own brother as the
main suspect or outed him, that's another way to put it,
for sure. And um, a guy named Jeoffrey Gray. Really
great article in New York Magazine if you guys are
interested about this particular guy. But um, there's a lot

(01:22:07):
of similarities between DBI Cooper and Kenny Christiansen. For one,
he he looks a lot like him right off the bat.
He was a purser for Northwest Orient Airlines. That's a
big deal. Former paratrooper. He was quiet, He smoked cigarettes,
he drank bourbon, lived in the area where the hijacking
took place, which is to say around here. And um,

(01:22:29):
and I think two thousand eleven, Jeffrey Gray, the guy
who wrote that New York Magazine article, got in touch
with Florence Shaffner and said what about this guy? And
Florence Schaffner said, I think he may be onto something here. Yeah,
And like Dwayne Weber, Kenney Christensen on his deathbed tried
to make a confession to his brother Lyle. He he said,

(01:22:51):
I have something really important to tell you, but I'm
not sure if I can if I can say this,
and Lyle said, no, no, no, I don't want to
hear it. Did you guys know that you cannot hear
a deathbed confession? Well, not only that, but I want
nothing more than to hear a deathbed confession. I would
be dying. I would be like, oh my god, Dish, yes,

(01:23:14):
what do you have to say? But he was like, no, no, no,
I don't want to want to hear what you gotta say.
Just go ahead and die and on top of him
until he stopped squirming. Here this pillow will make you comfortable.
You sleep now, brother, What is going on with these people?
Did you just do the Buffalo bill voice? Okay, that

(01:23:37):
was coincidental. Who else do we have? L? D. Cooper
a little on the nose with the name. He lived
in the area too. Yeah, and he was also outed
by a family member. Keeping with the Clark family tradition.
This time it was his niece. Uh. And she said,
you know what I remember. This is in two thousand eleven.
This is not too long ago. She said, you know what,

(01:23:59):
I remember back in Thanksgiving, just like it was yesterday,
and Uncle l. D. Showed up bruised and bleeding for dinner.
But he was euphoric, which was weird. And I'm just
now mentioning this all right. And what she she said,
by the way, she had a book coming out simultaneously.

(01:24:23):
What did she say that she overheard because this is
where she loses Chuck and me. Well, yeah, she said, Uh,
he went to talk to h he was my uncle
and went to talk to my dad, and they were
I overheard them in the hallway, say we did it.
Our money problems are over. We hijacked the plane. The

(01:24:43):
book by Simon and Schuster on sale now and your
local airport. But there were a few things. Uh, it
wasn't totally out of the blue. Um. He was an
engineer at Boeing, was yeah. But they were in on
it together because we hijack the plane. He's a silent partner. Uh.

(01:25:04):
And weirdly, he remember those Dan Cooper comic books. He
was one of the ten people on the planet that
was a fan of the Dan Cooper that's a little weird.
That's pretty good. The weird thing is is he didn't
have any experienced skydiving, which a lot of people say, well,
it's just too insane to think that somebody who never
skydive before did their first sky dive during a heist
out of a seven seven. But the people who knew L. D.

(01:25:27):
Cooper say, no, he was just crazy enough to do
something like that. And you can make a case that
that actually explains the choice of the dummy shoot the truth,
that's right, and the military shoot even Yeah. Alright, so
the legacy of D. B. Cooper to this day, the
heist remains the only unsolved airline hijacking in the history

(01:25:48):
of the world in America. In America, really are there
other ones? Yeah, I'm only standing behind America. Okay, yeah, right.
Every year, if you go to the Aerial Store in
Tavern in Ariel, Washington, you can go to the dB

(01:26:09):
Cooper Days Festival. Yeah. Have you guys, has anyone ever
been to that? We should all let's go right now,
We're gonna meet up this Thanksgiving. You can win a
dB Cooper lookalike contests. If you look like Kevin Spacey, yes,
or Charles Manson or Don Dreber, which none of us do. Well,

(01:26:29):
I'm talking about you and me look like Justin Bieber.
I look like a eight Justin Bieber. I just to
put out my tooth. That's how I lost it. I

(01:26:52):
broke it on Justin Bieber's pliable though. You can go
to that and when the contest. There have been songs
over the years. There was that terrible movie. There've been
countless TV reenactments and dramatizations, unsolved mysteries in my right, Yeah,
everybody see that one. You can watch that on the
YouTube too. Uh. And there are many many cooperist websites,

(01:27:15):
most notably one called drop zone dot com. And drop
Zone actually used to be a recreational skydiving site until
he got mostly taken over by dB Cooper aficionados. They
hijacked the website did as a matter of fact, And
this site is like so hot for Cooper Sluice that
a guy named Secret started posting on it and he

(01:27:36):
seemed to have a lot of information about the dB
Cooper case that people didn't know about. And it turned
out that these Cooper sluice were so good they unmasked
the secret guy as the new agent in charge of
the dB Cooper case, Larry Carr, who was posting secretly
as secret on the drop zone boards. That's how good
these people are. He's like, no, I'm not, yes you are. No,

(01:27:59):
I'm not, yes you are. You are. He's like, okay,
I am. You can go on YouTube. Boy, you got
you got a lot of YouTube and den people. You
can go on YouTube as well and and look up
Larry Carr. And for many many years they kept all
this evidence sort of under wraps, and you can look
ut videos. Now Larry Carr said, you know what we
should do the modern ages. Here we have the YouTube's

(01:28:20):
and we can let everyone see this evidence. Even though
I think it's kind of funny that the FBI's official
things like no, he totally died. No one told Larry
car that, yeah, you know, because he's let's make a
YouTube video. Let's show everyone that the skinny tie. All
the kids are into it. Now he shows the clip
on tie. You can see all the you can see
the money, the clip on tie, all this evidence. Hoping

(01:28:43):
for a lead, and he oversaw a DNA evidence actually
being removed from the tie. They found three people's profiles.
They also found and we don't even know but pure
titanium and impatience pollen. Hopefully that will eventually crack the case.
But it made every but he just be like, what
we thought we had a handle on this impatience pollen?

(01:29:05):
Where did that come from? So? UM, bring us all
with my friends. Thank you the Cooper heist. It changed
America forever, right, DeBie Cooper is the reason we all
started walking through metal detector shortly afterward. He's the reason. Seriously,
he's the reason that the airlines were given the right
to search your bags before you get on one of
their planes. Um, and they apparently reinstituted the death penalty

(01:29:30):
for hijacking. I don't know when they took it off.
Was it like c ships being hijacked? And then I
don't either. But the I think the coolest outcome of
this whole thing was if you look at a Bowing
seven seven they still make them airplane. If you look
at that a staircase in the back, there's a white

(01:29:51):
paddle that holds the stairs closed. Pretty smart. You can't
open the a staircase midflight because you have to go
outside and pull the paddle down, and then the astaircase
will open. And it's a pretty smart, easy solution to
a pretty complex case. And they call that little white
paddle a Cooper vein. That's right, and that is the

(01:30:14):
story of dB Cooper and that is our show. Goodnight Seattle,
goodnight everyone. Thank you for more on this and thousands

(01:30:45):
of other topics. Is that how stuff works? Dot com

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}SYSK Live: The DB Cooper Heist