SYSK’s Fall True Crime Playlist: SYSK Live: The DB Cooper Heist

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome back, everybody. We're moving along on our true crime
playlist with an episode we recorded live in Seattle in
twenty seventeen, on the unsolved mystery of dB Cooper. Someone
using that alias hijacked a plane flying from Portland to
Seattle in nineteen seventy one and jumped out mid air,
making off with two hundred thousand dollars. People still float

(00:23):
suspects today, and they usually say the case is solved,
but the FBI stopped investigating back in twenty sixteen and
they consider it unsolved. This one is pretty fun, so
I hope you enjoy it, and if you like this
live show, come see us when we hit the road
again in twenty twenty six Welcome to Stuff you should

(00:43):
know from HowStuffWorks dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and we
are here live at the beautiful Neptune Thiet and beautiful
Seattle and beautiful Washington. Thank you, guys, phenomenal.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
I'm already a sweaty mess, so that must mean we're
on stage.

Speaker 3 (01:35):
We are off to a great start.

Speaker 4 (01:37):
That must mean I'm awake.

Speaker 3 (01:39):
Or sleeping.

Speaker 4 (01:40):
Yeah, I sweat my sleep too big time. It's gross.

Speaker 3 (01:44):
I'm always wiping his brow.

Speaker 2 (01:48):
What movie we're going to watch tonight in the hotel?

Speaker 3 (01:52):
Is a spy out yet on?

Speaker 4 (01:55):
And we can leave the seat up on the toilet?
I don't.

Speaker 3 (01:58):
I don't do that.

Speaker 2 (01:59):
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.

Speaker 4 (02:11):
What you do too?

Speaker 2 (02:16):
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 age where I was like, it's just nicer
to sit down. I don't need to prove anything to anyone.

Speaker 3 (02:41):
Huh, you landed your lady, You're all set.

Speaker 2 (02:44):
Yeah, I stand when I pee off my deck at night,
I don't do that.

Speaker 3 (02:49):
I live in a condo complex.

Speaker 4 (02:51):
They would if I would be it's not good, man.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
I feel like an enormous weight's just been lifted off of.

Speaker 2 (02:58):
I can't believe that you're not even forty years old
yet and you pee sitting down.

Speaker 1 (03:01):
Yeah, let's start the podcast.

Speaker 2 (03:11):
Are there other guys out there that pee sitting down?

Speaker 1 (03:14):
All right?

Speaker 3 (03:15):
We're starting a movement, baby, that's right.

Speaker 2 (03:19):
Your ladies will appreciate it. Oddly, I pooped standing up.
This is so off the rails already.

Speaker 1 (03:32):
Like in conversation. Let's be sitting there talking to me.
You're like you're pooping right now, aren't you. Yeah, it's
like it's more efficient this way, I get more done.

Speaker 4 (03:42):
We should probably start over.

Speaker 3 (03:43):
We should.

Speaker 1 (03:44):
We're gonna get off stage and come back out. I
can't believe what we've been talking about here this evening already. Okay,
let's all just take it down a notch. All right,
So we're poking casting. We're about to start podcasting. I
think I already started the podcast, oh god, which means

(04:04):
that's gonna be on like the thing.

Speaker 4 (04:06):
We That's why I said we should start over.

Speaker 3 (04:08):
Okay, it stays here everybody.

Speaker 2 (04:12):
Yeah, it's all our secret. I think five hundred people.

Speaker 1 (04:19):
Okay, hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. We are live here at
the Beautiful Neptune Theater in Seattle, Washington.

Speaker 4 (04:45):
Man Times two that's an in joke. People will be
like even better than what.

Speaker 1 (05:02):
There's a lot of there's more crossover between our fans
and Howard Stern than our fans and Mariners fans.

Speaker 2 (05:07):
I think, boy, there's a Venn diagram out there that's
confusing me already.

Speaker 1 (05:14):
Okay, so Chuck, yes, this is a little bit of history. Yeah,
so we're going to 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 wayback machine is imaginary. So
settled down.

Speaker 4 (05:35):
They heard that live.

Speaker 1 (05:37):
Yeah that was a good one too.

Speaker 2 (05:39):
There are PR professionals here because they emailed me today.

Speaker 1 (05:42):
Oh really, yeah, I can tell that's the call of
the PR professional call. So we're going back to a cold, stormy, rainy,
pretty nasty Thanksgiving in nineteen seventy one, and the story

(06:03):
begins at PDX Portland Airport and a man walked into PDX,
took a picture of his shoe on the carpet, and
then walked along to the Northwest Orient Airlines ticket desk.
That's right, And he walked up and he said, Hi,
I am really interested in finding more about flight three

(06:25):
oh five, the flight to Seattle. Would that happen to
be a Boeing seven to twenty seven Dash one hundred
airplane that you guys are going to fly on that route?
And the ticket agentment yes, as a matter of fact,
it is, and the man said that it's fantastic.

Speaker 3 (06:43):
Here's my twenty dollars.

Speaker 1 (06:44):
Yeah, one ticket please, for a one way ticket between
Portland and Seattle, a board flight three oh five. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:53):
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.

Speaker 1 (06:58):
Plus, it's nineteen seventy and I'm in no position to
publicly question a man, so I'll just go along with this.

Speaker 4 (07:06):
It's very true.

Speaker 2 (07:09):
And it was twenty dollars for that flight. This is
a very seventies podcast. So they handed him as a
little ticket voucher and said just filled this out, sir, uh,
don't need to see ID because it's nineteen seventy one.
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, Dan Cooper.

Speaker 3 (07:33):
You know where we're going with this, son.

Speaker 1 (07:36):
So the Boeing seven twenty seven Dash one hundred is
every single person in this room knows is a smallish plane.
It's not the biggest plane in the Boeing fleet. It's
not the smallest either, but it's the only one that
had an af staircase. Right, And this particular flight flying
aboard this Boeing seven twenty seven DASH one hundred flight
three zero five had a crew of five aboard. There

(07:58):
was Captain William Scott, not Sean William Scott, we figured
out later on, not Stiffler.

Speaker 3 (08:05):
That would have made zero sense.

Speaker 1 (08:07):
Yeah, Hetty had a former life in the seventies as
an airline pilot co pilot Robert Radazak. There's a ce
in there for those of you who like that kind
of thing. And there were three flight attendants. There's a
head flight attendant who was named Alice Hancock, right, yes,
and then two I guess regular flight attendants, Tina mucclough,

(08:29):
who's a hero of ours, and Florence Schaffner.

Speaker 2 (08:32):
I think they called him stewardess's back then to be fair, right,
But we're forward thinking guys, so we're we're gonna go
ahead and say flight attendant.

Speaker 3 (08:38):
We don't use the S word.

Speaker 4 (08:42):
You just make well, never mind.

Speaker 1 (08:44):
Never mind, We've done quite enough extraneous stuff for her,
I know.

Speaker 2 (08:49):
So Dan Cooper gets on the plane. There's thirty seven
other passengers because again it was a seventies they didn't
overbook flights back then, and say I'm sorry you bought
a ticket, but you really can't fly on this flight.
Thirty seven passengers, pretty empty, and Dan Cooper seat sits
in seat eighteen C. They pour him up a bourbon
in seven up and he lights up a cigarette.

Speaker 3 (09:10):
A Raley brand cigarette.

Speaker 2 (09:11):
Because it's nineteen seventy one, you got smoke on planes. Yeah,
And he looked to be about in his mid forties.
He was, you know, kind of looked like the men
of the time, which is to say you either looked
by nineteen seventy one. He either looked a little more
like Don Draper, kind of holding on to that fifties look,
or you look like Charles Manson.

Speaker 4 (09:30):
He looked a little more like Don Draper. Yeah. Had
the suit had the skinny tie.

Speaker 1 (09:35):
And we should talk a little bit about the suit.
The suit was a russet colored suit, which was like
that weird burgundy brown color. It's potato colored it right,
and it just so happened that he was wearing the
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

(09:57):
clip on from J. C. Penny. That's right.

Speaker 2 (10:00):
He had a imitation Mother of Pearl type in. He
had an overcoat, he had a hat, he had a
bag kind of like a briefcase, and he had these
black corn rim sunglasses, dark kind of olive skin.

Speaker 4 (10:17):
Would you say?

Speaker 1 (10:18):
They call him swarthy, which I think is like stewardess
that's been phased out, you know what I mean.

Speaker 2 (10:23):
I thought swarthy. I thought that was like a sea captain.

Speaker 3 (10:28):
I'm sure there were swarthy sea captains.

Speaker 2 (10:31):
Because, yeah, because they're out in the sun, so they
ended up getting olive skinned.

Speaker 1 (10:35):
That's rugged. Okay, you're thinking of the Gordon's fishermen.

Speaker 4 (10:41):
Oh right, Oh he was swarthy.

Speaker 2 (10:43):
Sure, he's swarthy as h So he had he had
this kind of dark wavy hair, and other than that,
he was just sort of an unremarkable dude.

Speaker 4 (10:53):
He wanted to blend in right.

Speaker 1 (10:55):
Well, yeah, okay, so this guy's sitting in eighteen c
unremarkable aside from wearing the sunglasses, he's smoking with his
left hand, says, nothing to do with anything, but we
just kind of wanted to show off how much research
we've done on this. And when Florence Schaffner, the flight
attendant working his area, comes over and gives him his

(11:16):
bourbon and I think seven up right, yeah, 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 this happened to her all the time, like businessmen
drinking sevens and sevens like past her notes and hit
on her all the time. So when this guy in

(11:38):
eighteen 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 right over right.

Speaker 2 (11:50):
Yeah, from all the men who wanted to rescue her
from her life.

Speaker 1 (11:54):
Come away with me, it sworethy. And so Dan Cooper
sees this and he goes, miss, you may want to
have a look at that note.

Speaker 3 (12:04):
I have a bomb.

Speaker 4 (12:05):
I think you know where we're going with this, dB Cooper.

Speaker 1 (12:11):
You know, when we were coming here today, we were like, oh,
we're really rolling the dice. It's entirely possible that everyone
here had the dB Cooper case drilled into them from
like third grade on.

Speaker 4 (12:23):
That's not the case, is no, you didn't study it
in class.

Speaker 3 (12:26):
It's just a high relief.

Speaker 1 (12:28):
I told that to you, MEI, and Yumy was like,
that's so dumb. She's like, 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.

Speaker 2 (12:44):
So this was not the first commercial airplane hijacking. It
actually the first one was in nineteen forty eight, and
remarkably between nineteen sixty eight, just three years earlier, in
the time dB Cooper hijacked this plane, there were one
hundred commercial hijackings in three years.

Speaker 3 (13:05):
Yeah, so this is not new.

Speaker 2 (13:06):
It was not new, but I remember, like 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.

Speaker 4 (13:17):
ID and no one cared, right, and they were like, hmm,
this is weird.

Speaker 1 (13:22):
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 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
were like, oh, this may have been a bad idea, but.

Speaker 4 (13:41):
They tried a good idea.

Speaker 1 (13:42):
It was a fine idea if everyone, if like a
third of the population of the United States were air marshals,
and yeah, it was a good idea.

Speaker 2 (13:51):
It's a good idea if you want one of every
like three hundred flights with an air markets right.

Speaker 1 (13:55):
Right, and the other two hundred ninety nine open for hijacking. Right.
So this was they figured out after a few years,
like why the logistics of American air tragicy.

Speaker 2 (14:05):
Edgar Hoover's idea, by the way, right, he was still
in charge of the FBI in nineteen seventy one.

Speaker 1 (14:09):
Yeah, so he'd been there for about fifty years, right, Yeah,
So his idea was air marshalls didn't work, but they
were still trying it. There was no air marshal on
flight three zero five, the dB Cooper hijacking flight.

Speaker 2 (14:21):
Yeah, they're like Portland to Seattle. Maybe we should put
like three air marshals on that one.

Speaker 1 (14:26):
I tried to light and I mean it made sense
that there would not be an air marshal on that
flight because most hijackings were crazed loan gunmen 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 beyond the flight. It was a

(14:47):
pretty good bet to not have an air marshal on.
They just didn't expect TB. Cooper because he was a
pretty novel person. The idea 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 dB Cooper and Sonny Bono's

(15:09):
character an Airplane two.

Speaker 2 (15:12):
This is actually I did a little more research between
nineteen sixty eight and seventy nine. It's literally referred to
as the Golden Age of skyjacking. I was talking to
Josh'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, right,
the good old days.

Speaker 1 (15:31):
It was good for the hijackers because they could get
away with it no problem.

Speaker 2 (15:35):
Maybe that's who wrote that, the Golden age of skyjacking man.
All right, So Floren Schaeffner, I'm sorry. Shaffer reads the
note and she says, 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

(15:57):
did not converse.

Speaker 4 (15:59):
Like everything else.

Speaker 2 (16:00):
He had them right down to take to the captain
so they would have no more like physical evidence of
his handwriting.

Speaker 1 (16:05):
Yeah. The only handwriting sample he had was that ticket
duplicate and it was in block letters, which yeah, Cooper.

Speaker 2 (16:14):
So she sits down and she says, uh, you know,
I want to know.

Speaker 4 (16:17):
That this is legit, this is for real?

Speaker 2 (16:20):
Can I can I like get a look at that
bomb that you're talking about?

Speaker 4 (16:24):
Makes sense? And he shows her right, Yeah, he gives
her a little peak.

Speaker 1 (16:27):
He opened her his bag just enough and she went
to put her fingers in and he snapped the hut.

Speaker 2 (16:34):
Just like pretty woman. Yeah, yeah, and uh, but she
sees what you know. She sees red sticks of dynamite
and a battery and and I guess presumably like an
alarm clock with two bells on it.

Speaker 1 (16:48):
Right, it's got like a skull and crossbones. It's like
he says, you die or something.

Speaker 2 (16:52):
Electrical tape is all around it because he watched a
lot of cartoons and he knows how to make a bomb.

Speaker 1 (16:56):
Well she I mean she bought it. Clearly, she saw
the bomb and she took down a note. He said,
take 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

(17:17):
fuel truck ready to refuel. No funny stuff or all
do the job, which is h That was tough talking
nineteen seventy one.

Speaker 2 (17:26):
Again, he wants a lot of cartoons. And that's what
you say when you mean business. That roughly is about
one point two million dollars today.

Speaker 4 (17:35):
Yeah, I think it's a little low.

Speaker 2 (17:37):
If you're gonna go through a skyjacking.

Speaker 1 (17:39):
It's a lot of work for a million dollars.

Speaker 2 (17:41):
Yeah, I would have said, like, if you're gonna ask
for two hundred grand, ask for three hundred or four hundred,
that's just me sure, I'm no skyjacker. So this is
turns out to be the only threat that Dan Cooper
makes during the entire ordeal.

Speaker 4 (17:55):
He he is this very first note that he gave up.

Speaker 2 (17:58):
So from that point, 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, they didn't have any interaction the pilots whatsoever
with Danku.

Speaker 1 (18:16):
Right, 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 jump with me, so don't tamper with any

(18:37):
of these parachutes, which if the FBI had would have
been murder. But we're talking about Jaegar Hoover's FBI, so
they may have tried just that. So it's pretty smart
that he asked for two pairs because they didn't know
what he was going to do.

Speaker 4 (18:52):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (18:52):
So Schaffner takes that ransom note, gives it to Alice Cancock.
She takes it over to the pilot and the co pilot,
and well what did they do? Josh, you do a
great pilot. They called Seatech Airport instead.

Speaker 1 (19:08):
Uh, seatach We just want to advise you on a
bit of a fiddlestick. So we got going on here
son and Bono was taking control of the plane. He
wants two hundred thousand dollars in negotiable American currency by
five pm.

Speaker 2 (19:26):
Negotiable American currency. Yeah, it's a very weird thing to
ask for it.

Speaker 1 (19:30):
It was, And so sea Tech was like, we should
probably call the cops, and the cops said we should
probably call the FBI.

Speaker 2 (19:37):
Well, yeah, this was the Seattle Police Department in nineteen
seventy one. They're like, no, no, no, no, no, we we don't
deal with things like this.

Speaker 1 (19:44):
They're like, wait, wait, this guy doesn't want to go
to Cuba. We don't understand it.

Speaker 2 (19:48):
Like we're literally waiting for John Rambo to wander through town,
right so we can harass.

Speaker 1 (19:53):
Him just ten more years.

Speaker 4 (19:55):
Wait, that was Oregon, though, wasn't it?

Speaker 1 (19:57):
Okay? Pretty close? That joke will kill night tomorrow night?

Speaker 4 (20:02):
Yeah, man, Rambo joke, yeah.

Speaker 1 (20:06):
Remember it. So all of a sudden, like there's all
this crazy energy going on down on the ground, right,
So the FBI comes in and they're they're trying to
get the money together. They're like, you, we have an hour.
You got to give us more time. It's like, no,
you can't have more time. They're like, okay, that's fine,

(20:27):
we'll get all this stuff together. You guys are gonna
have to stay up there until we get everything ready
for you. So the plane is circling SeaTac and they
told the passengers that 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

(20:47):
that through a little more.

Speaker 2 (20:49):
Yeah, it's experiencing mechanical problems. So we're just gonna keep flying.

Speaker 1 (20:52):
We're gonna stay aloft, see what happens. Captain Scott is
a gambling man.

Speaker 2 (21:00):
So everyone was drinking and smoking cigarettes, so they didn't care.
They were hooking up in the bathroom.

Speaker 4 (21:05):
This is ninety seventy one.

Speaker 3 (21:07):
It could have been Chuck.

Speaker 1 (21:08):
You would have been like I told you, we should
have driven.

Speaker 3 (21:11):
It's nothing.

Speaker 4 (21:12):
Could have been to Portland.

Speaker 1 (21:15):
So they had to circle for an hour, and they
ended up telling the passengers, oh, we just need to
burn off some gas and everything will be fine, right,
And the passengers apparently were 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'd been hijacked, and
the press pool was like, shut up, go cut off

(21:37):
the day he was that next person.

Speaker 4 (21:40):
Yeah, so I was at that game. Yeah, I was
at that game seven. It was all right, he's that dude,
you know, Oh yeah, any remarkable event. Yeah, I was there.

Speaker 1 (21:52):
It was it was I knew it was a hijacking.
You really had me stumped there for a second. I'm
roll play game seven. So SeaTac is circling, right, They're circling,
circling an hour killing time, but just burning off gas.

(22:13):
And Florence Schaffner has gone away to take the note
to Alice han Cockley takes notes to the cockpit. She's
on the relay team basically now, and dB Cooper says, well,
Dan Cooper says, hey, Tina Mucklow, 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

(22:33):
in history, if you will feel allow us that terrible analogy.
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
chatted about things like Tina Mucklow's home state, which was Minnesota.
They talked about a nearby Air Force base and how

(22:56):
long it took to drive to SeaTac It was like
twenty minutes or something. Thing. You guys can actually probably
guess the air Force base. We don't know, uh that one. Yeah,
And then they also at one point he looked out
the window and he said, it 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.

Speaker 2 (23:18):
Yeah, I'm kind of curious. Could anyone here recognize Tacoma
from an airplane?

Speaker 1 (23:23):
From an airplane or an airplane?

Speaker 2 (23:26):
Why do they have a huge like field cut out
of grass? It says Tacoma corn.

Speaker 4 (23:35):
What are they saying?

Speaker 3 (23:37):
I think they're saying corn.

Speaker 4 (23:38):
Yeah, the smell.

Speaker 2 (23:46):
Oh boy, I knew that.

Speaker 4 (23:49):
I knew this would go over well here.

Speaker 2 (23:53):
By the way, we didn't mention they diverted all the
other flights away from from SeaTac at the time 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.

Speaker 1 (24:15):
Well, he like he patched into the calm link between
flight three zero five and SeaTac for the listening enjoyment
of the passengers on his flight. It's insane.

Speaker 2 (24:27):
It's like, I'm sorry, we're delayed, but here's what's going
on on another flight nearby.

Speaker 1 (24:33):
A right to sit back and listen to the dulcet
tones of a skyjacking.

Speaker 4 (24:40):
Again. It was the seventies. Everyone was drinking. They're like,
this is remarkable. Thank god, it's not us.

Speaker 3 (24:45):
Everything's better when you're drinking.

Speaker 4 (24:50):
All right.

Speaker 2 (24:50):
So he recognizes Tacoma, which apparently everyone in this room
could do.

Speaker 1 (24:54):
Yeah, right, we were impressed by that. But it's nothing.

Speaker 4 (24:57):
Occasionally went spells like coma. So all of these are
sort of clues.

Speaker 2 (25:08):
Though, if he recognized Tacoma a new by the air
Force base, that clearly maybe the guy's kind of from
the area might be a clue. Later on, So Mucklaw
at this point asked Dan Cooper. She said, do you
have a grudge against our airlines, 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

(25:30):
they did.

Speaker 1 (25:32):
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 hundred grand in cash together. Turns out
that was the easiest part of this whole thing. So
Northwest Orients president at the time, Donald nyrop.

Speaker 4 (25:49):
Any Nyrops in the house.

Speaker 3 (25:51):
No, he would have been in Minnesota.

Speaker 1 (25:54):
Oh okay, yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:55):
But I'm convinced that someone in here is going to
be related to someone in this story.

Speaker 4 (25:58):
Oh I am too, Yeah, I'm just.

Speaker 1 (26:00):
I'm waiting for somebody stay would be like that's a.

Speaker 2 (26:02):
Lie, or for someone to stand up and say I
am dB Cooper. Oh yeah, that would be amazing. We'd
have to come up with a different show tomorrow, oh yeah,
or just bring him along.

Speaker 3 (26:14):
Sure, and here he is everybody.

Speaker 4 (26:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (26:18):
So Donald Nyrop, the president of Northwest Orient, He's like, yeah, sure,
we'll totally pay that. We have a huge insurance policy
on this kind of thing. Apparently Northwest had to pay
like twenty grand and their insurance company paid out one
hundred and eighty gram. And they tapped c First Bank,
which had a downtown branch. And in this downtown branch

(26:39):
they had a really great idea. They had stacks of
twenty dollars 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 robbery. You're getting off scott free. But it
turns out that every serial number on every one of

(27:00):
those twenties had 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 difficult.

Speaker 4 (27:12):
Yeah, that was actually the harder part. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:15):
Back in nineteen seventy one, the big recreational skydiving craze
had not yet taken hold. It happened here and there. Yeah,
but uh, the manager at Sea Tax said, I got
a guy. Don't you worry. He's got an operation called
Seattle sky Sports in itsaquah.

Speaker 1 (27:30):
Anybody from Mesqua shout out to Ishaquah.

Speaker 2 (27:37):
Why do you call it Seattle sky Sports? Did they
mooch off of Seattle?

Speaker 1 (27:41):
Yeah, off of the teat of Seattle.

Speaker 2 (27:45):
He's like, I gotta guy. His name is Earl Kasi,
and he agreed to help. Little side note Earl Kassi
was actually murdered three years ago.

Speaker 4 (27:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (27:57):
Yeah, apparently has to bring them down.

Speaker 4 (28:01):
We're all having too much fun. Uh. He got killed
by a blow to the head in his garage.

Speaker 2 (28:06):
But apparently you know some cooperists that are still active
today on the internet, You know these conspiracy dudes that.

Speaker 4 (28:14):
His everyone did it. I love that.

Speaker 2 (28:17):
Everybody see, you can all be conspiracy theorist hat, although
women can't be because they're too smart. It's always guys,
did you know so Earl Cossi was killed? But they
think it has nothing to do with it, even though
cooperists are like, are you sure they're trying to silence

(28:37):
some man?

Speaker 4 (28:40):
Exactly? So very well timed.

Speaker 2 (28:50):
So Cassi called his his operation and to 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, ruh, And in his haste he
packs three regular shoots, well, not three regular, he packs
one military shoot, two regular shoots and one thing that

(29:14):
I still don't understand, called a dummy shoot right that
doesn't open.

Speaker 1 (29:19):
No. So, like if you were working at Seattle Sky
Sports in Issaqua, you get really, really sick of having
to fold up the whole parachute every time somebody was training,
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,

(29:39):
you don't need the bigger shoot. So if you are
an employee, at Seattle Sky Sports in Issaqua. You may
have the idea that you should just sew the bigger
part shut. There should be no parachute that has like
the most important part sewn shut right.

Speaker 4 (29:58):
Every parachute should open right.

Speaker 1 (30:00):
But this is the thing, and they're called dummy shoots.
The thing is everybody's like, oh, we got it covered,
we'llt's put a big X on it, and everybody will
know it's a dummy shoot. So one of these dummy
shoots made it into the four shoots that were delivered
to D. B. Cooper. So the money and the shoots
go in the cop car and he does a donuts

(30:20):
gidding out like in front of the plane and gets
out and stands outside and waits for the plane to land.
I should say, So when they get everything together, they
let flight three oh five know that they come and
get it basically, and they prepare to land, and dB
Cooper does something very smart.

Speaker 2 (30:38):
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.

Speaker 1 (30:48):
No, didn't they come out like five or six years
later maybe uh huh.

Speaker 4 (30:55):
Actually, I have to look that up.

Speaker 3 (30:58):
I think that was seventy six.

Speaker 4 (31:00):
You know this, sure?

Speaker 1 (31:01):
All right?

Speaker 2 (31:04):
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 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 did so,
which turned out to be a pretty good move because
they were in fact snipers right exactly.

Speaker 1 (31:23):
So the plane lands and no one's allowed to get
off yet, Cooper says, hey, Tina, do me a solid
go out and get the money in the shoots and
come back with them. Okay, then we can let the
passengers off, and Mucklowell leaves the plane. And at this point,
and this is one of the first reasons why Tina
Mucklough is one of our heroes. Once she's off the plane,

(31:44):
she could have been like, so long jumps see in hell,
which may have been a little harsh. Has she said
that with an earshot of somebody in this sausage situation?
She could have thought it. Her actions could have said
as much. She did. She got the shoots, she got
the money, and she essentially traded herself for the hostages.

Speaker 3 (32:06):
And went back on the plane. And I mean like
that's metal.

Speaker 1 (32:10):
Chuck would have said out loud, see you would hell yeah,
flight three oh five.

Speaker 2 (32:14):
I would have walked straight to the baggage claim or
the ground transportation and said take me to cousin Ikes
and need some loose leaf tea. Good luck with the
skuy jacking, right, yeah, But she came back, which is amazing.

Speaker 1 (32:27):
To come back. So she traded herself for these hostages.
And the hostages were allowed to leave, and so too
were Alice Hancock and Florence Schaffner. The rest of the
crew is basically like, there's no reason for you to
stay here, so go. So it was down to Schaffner
and Cooper and then in the cockpit Radazac and Scott

(32:50):
right and Scott and Radazac repaid Tina muckloud by staying themselves.
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 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,

(33:12):
and they didn't. They stuck around and they like were like,
we're gonna see this hijacking through.

Speaker 4 (33:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:17):
In my like in my comedic mind's eye, I see
them getting out on the rope swing or a rope ladder.

Speaker 3 (33:25):
That's different.

Speaker 4 (33:26):
Rope swing, that would be amazing.

Speaker 3 (33:28):
They may have like it's like a tire swing, and
the run the plane.

Speaker 4 (33:31):
They get off on the rope ladder.

Speaker 2 (33:33):
Tina mucklaugh never comes back and dB Cooper's just sitting
on the plane by himself.

Speaker 3 (33:38):
He's like, Oh, it happened again.

Speaker 4 (33:39):
Yeah, is he typing? No, that's sorry. I didn't know
they had a rope ladder. It's crazy.

Speaker 1 (33:51):
Sure every airplane has a rope ladder in the cup
wake up, fashioned out of like old cheets.

Speaker 2 (34:02):
So the FAA actually had a their chief psychiatrist on
the ground and this dude does a quick analysis, 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 and the parachutes. You're gonna go up

(34:23):
there in the plane. He's gonna jump out and blow
up the plane and just let everyone know that. Right,
He's gonna tell the pilot and co pilot that this
is what's coming.

Speaker 1 (34:35):
Right, He's gonna force Muckloud to jump with them and
then blow up the plane afterward. Right, but yeah, make
sure the 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 it's in nineteen

(35:03):
seventy one psychoanalysts for the FAA, Hey, if I had
done that in a German accident, it would have sunk
in even faster.

Speaker 3 (35:16):
Did you tell them that? Make sure you tell them that, guys?
Is that all right?

Speaker 2 (35:23):
I'm gonna go ahead and say now what I'm gonna
say in like an hour backstage?

Speaker 4 (35:26):
All right, that was amazing what it?

Speaker 3 (35:29):
Thank you?

Speaker 1 (35:30):
I thought that's not what you're gonna say.

Speaker 4 (35:32):
Actually, I didn't see that one coming. You got me
when you Yeah, I had no idea where you were going.

Speaker 2 (35:50):
Literally, you said longer than usual nipples, and I went
in my head, I went, am, I is this.

Speaker 3 (35:56):
Happening like Josh Josh.

Speaker 4 (35:58):
Am I stole in Atlanta? Is the trip? Am? I sleep? Pure? Goal? Buddy?

Speaker 1 (36:06):
Thank you?

Speaker 4 (36:31):
Where are we? I am so thrown?

Speaker 1 (36:34):
So we said Cooper was cool, right, Yeah, the cool
head he was. He was so cool he ordered food
for the crew during the refueling process.

Speaker 4 (36:45):
Yeah, he's a nice guy. You want to know who
else is cool? It's Tina Mucklaw.

Speaker 2 (36:50):
Because once they released the passengers and they got the
money on board, she sat back down and he offered
her a couple of the stacks of money, and she said, well,
you go ahead and say it, no tipping aloud.

Speaker 4 (37:04):
Smooth again.

Speaker 2 (37:08):
Had it been me, well, first of all, I would
have been uncle likes by then. But if I was
dumb enough to get back on, I would be like, yeah,
get pay it for.

Speaker 1 (37:16):
Yeah, just two stacks of bills?

Speaker 4 (37:18):
Yeah, what gives jerk? I want half?

Speaker 2 (37:21):
She's amazing. So the plane's 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 aft staircase that I know is
back there down in the jump off the plane position.
And they said, you can't take off with the plane.

(37:42):
You can't take off with the door down. And he said, well,
can you check on that?

Speaker 4 (37:45):
Are you sure?

Speaker 2 (37:46):
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.

Speaker 4 (37:56):
And he said, well, why didn't we just start there,
because that's really the only thing that matters.

Speaker 1 (38:00):
Fine. Fine, And then 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 fy wherever you want?

(38:23):
Just fine, south southward.

Speaker 2 (38:25):
Yeah, 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.

Speaker 4 (38:37):
It shouldn't take this long. Let's get the show on
the road, right.

Speaker 1 (38:41):
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 hit the phone and
then hit myself in the head with it and then
just started crying and been like, it's never gonna work.

Speaker 3 (38:56):
This is never gonna work.

Speaker 2 (38:57):
I think as well established we'd be the worst guy
and hostages.

Speaker 4 (39:01):
Yeah, just getting no. I don't want any part of it.

Speaker 2 (39:05):
He also gives them instructions on how to fly the plane,
which is getting really specific. He said, don't go any
higher than ten thousand feet, set your wing flaps at
fifteen degrees, which apparently we learned is an angle that
only the seven to seven to one hundred could position
those wing flaps.

Speaker 1 (39:21):
Which everyone in this room knows because it's a Boeing.

Speaker 2 (39:24):
Sure, And he said, don't go any faster than one
hundred and ninety miles per hour two hundred knots, So
that means they're going to be flying slow and low,
like you're cooking ribs or jumping off a plane. Because
that means the cabin isn't pressurized, and that means when
you open that door, you're not just gonna suck everything out.

(39:45):
It's still skydiveable.

Speaker 1 (39:48):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 4 (39:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (39:49):
Oh it's the terminology.

Speaker 4 (39:51):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (39:52):
So Cooper had some problems, right, He had specifically asked
for a knapsack, and the FEDS had given him the
two hundred 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, you need

(40:12):
to make a handle for this thing. I'll harvest one
of these parachutes for it's rigging, And he chose the
pink one, which the pink one was actually the best
one of all.

Speaker 2 (40:24):
Of them, yeah, because it was the dummy shoot, the
military shoot, and then shoot is that what.

Speaker 4 (40:30):
We're gonna call it?

Speaker 2 (40:30):
Yeah, the medium shoot, and then the pink one, which was,
like Josh said, is the best one. So he cuts
the stuff loose, he makes a handle for it.

Speaker 4 (40:38):
Things are happening at this point. They moved to the
rear of the plane.

Speaker 2 (40:41):
He and Tina mucklaw, 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 calm and 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, or she did

(41:03):
another road.

Speaker 3 (41:04):
The hell with physics. I am still freaked out.

Speaker 1 (41:07):
Oh yeah, we're about to lower a staircase of ten
thousand feet.

Speaker 4 (41:11):
Why did I mention physics exactly?

Speaker 2 (41:15):
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?

Speaker 1 (41:22):
Like that's how helpful she was. She's like, just let
me lash myself to the plane.

Speaker 4 (41:26):
Let me all help meself. Right, Yeah, I just spit
like all the way across it.

Speaker 3 (41:29):
I spit earlier.

Speaker 1 (41:30):
It's fine, Okay, good.

Speaker 4 (41:33):
We should learn to synk those up, right, like in Vegas.
That's what I was thinking.

Speaker 1 (41:40):
Yeah, man, we're in syncs.

Speaker 4 (41:42):
Yeah, my god.

Speaker 2 (41:45):
Except well, never mind, So she asked for some rope
to lash herself in, and he goes, at this point,
you know what, never mind.

Speaker 3 (41:53):
He literally like this is the quote.

Speaker 1 (41:55):
He goes, never mind, never mind.

Speaker 2 (41:57):
He said, you know what, you just go back up
to the cockpit and you see that first class curtain.

Speaker 4 (42:03):
Just don't come any further back. I got it from there.

Speaker 2 (42:06):
He turns back around and looks and then he turns
back around to where she was and he just sees
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 at seven
forty two pm, the little light comes on that says
a door ajar, I guess. And they said that the

(42:31):
pilots were like Tina like wants to call back one
more time.

Speaker 1 (42:35):
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
FAA shrink said like he might blow us up. He
said some other weird stuff too, but he said, well,
like he's gonna blow us up, we should really butter
this guy out.

Speaker 2 (42:50):
And we could have left on that rope swing and
we stayed because of you.

Speaker 4 (42:55):
Rope ladder.

Speaker 3 (42:58):
So they call, They do call the pilot.

Speaker 1 (43:00):
It's like ring ring ring, Oh, yes, ring ring, and
you let it ring a couple of times, ring ring. Uh.

Speaker 4 (43:09):
Dan Cooper hijacker.

Speaker 1 (43:12):
Uh, mister Cooper, we want to make sure your FLA
is as comfortable as possible. Is there anything we can
do to help you back there to make your hijacking
more successful?

Speaker 2 (43:23):
Sir, no, click, I know, it's kind of rude, he said, no,
hung up. And then at eight 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.

Speaker 1 (43:40):
DNA, go jacking.

Speaker 4 (43:44):
We're flying the plane. She's like, wait a minute, only
one of you is flying, you know.

Speaker 1 (43:48):
It takes both of us, you don't know.

Speaker 4 (43:52):
And that's it.

Speaker 2 (43:52):
So from the moment that Tina Mucklaugh left shut that
first class curtain, nobody to anyone's knowledge, ever saw Dan
Cooper again.

Speaker 4 (44:00):
Yep, but that's not the end of the show.

Speaker 3 (44:02):
No, it's not. So there was a man hunt, all right.

Speaker 1 (44:07):
So Dan Cooper had pretty clearly signaled his intentions that
he was going to jump off the back of the
seven twenty seven, and 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 this seven to twenty seven.

Speaker 2 (44:21):
What is the scrambling? I never get that.

Speaker 3 (44:23):
It's like like, go.

Speaker 4 (44:26):
I know, but they.

Speaker 2 (44:28):
It just sounds it sounds chaotic, like they're scrambling jets.

Speaker 1 (44:32):
I think that's I think that's the point, Like people
are supposed to run around and bump into each other
and fall out and then.

Speaker 3 (44:36):
Get up and get in their jets and fly off. Oh,
that's scrambling.

Speaker 1 (44:40):
That's classics.

Speaker 4 (44:41):
I would have renamed it would be like, activate the jets.

Speaker 3 (44:44):
That's not bad, that's not bad at all.

Speaker 4 (44:49):
Scramble the jets.

Speaker 3 (44:51):
It sounds desperate.

Speaker 4 (44:52):
You're right, activate the jets.

Speaker 1 (44:54):
So either however, the jets were brought into this picture,
there was a problem with them and that they were
way too fast for the seven twenty seven, which is
putting along and one hundred and ninety miles an hour.
Then all of a sudden there's a jet that goes yeah,
and then the next one comes and they're like, what

(45:17):
are we gonna do, Well, We'll stick a helicopter on them.
This is like Goldilocks. The helicopter was too slow. Seven
twenty seven is just putts it along.

Speaker 4 (45:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (45:28):
Yeah, people are going and trying to catch up. Nothing happening.

Speaker 2 (45:33):
They should have scrambled a seven twenty seven and just
followed right behind.

Speaker 3 (45:37):
It makes sense as matter.

Speaker 4 (45:38):
What the headlights on, right, So they're scrambling.

Speaker 1 (45:48):
The point is nobody saw Dan Cooper jump when he jumped,
So they used that eight twelve pm oscillation to kind
of figure out where they should start looking, and they
zeroed in on a place called aerial Water, wishing to
New Lewis River.

Speaker 3 (46:01):
Anybody from Ariel, good because we got jokes.

Speaker 2 (46:06):
Nobody from Ariel. Anyone ever heard of the Lewis River.
Oh okay, So they get on, they get this man
hunt going. They're combing, they're they're scrambling and combing. Those
are the two things you do.

Speaker 3 (46:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (46:18):
In the FBI it was a massive manhunt too. There's
like a thousand troops and cops combing this area.

Speaker 4 (46:24):
Yeah. No one from Seattle PD. Of course, they were
just sitting.

Speaker 2 (46:28):
Around stoned, hanging out in Nisqua waiting for Rambo. Here's
another fun fact. There was a millionaire a local millionaire
who we don't know.

Speaker 4 (46:41):
Do you know the name?

Speaker 3 (46:43):
No, I've looked.

Speaker 1 (46:44):
If anybody knows, yells, just stand up and say it
with dignity.

Speaker 4 (46:49):
It was on it was on the news.

Speaker 2 (46:51):
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 you know, we're what I do.

Speaker 1 (47:03):
Yeah, I don't work. I'm a millionaire.

Speaker 2 (47:06):
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 MIDI.

Speaker 1 (47:14):
Now the twenty five seems ostentatious. The hydraulics on it.
Who needs that in a submarine?

Speaker 4 (47:23):
Does it have a metal detector? Which would not have
helped because it was cash bills exactly.

Speaker 1 (47:31):
So you'd make a great local millionaire.

Speaker 4 (47:33):
I would if only.

Speaker 2 (47:36):
The other weird thing that happened was the the CIA
got involved, which is a little bit strange, and they
scrambled the SR seventy one blackbird, right.

Speaker 3 (47:48):
They scrambled it several times.

Speaker 2 (47:50):
Yeah, it was almost over easy.

Speaker 4 (47:58):
Terrible.

Speaker 1 (48:01):
You should be ashamed.

Speaker 2 (48:02):
It doesn't even make sense because once you scramble it. It
can't be over easy. Terrible joke, Chuck, that's.

Speaker 3 (48:08):
What I say. It's all right, rebound, rebound, Is.

Speaker 4 (48:11):
This really happening? Did you talk about long nipples?

Speaker 1 (48:16):
All right?

Speaker 2 (48:19):
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.

Speaker 1 (48:30):
So especially multiple times, like one time, it's like, your
dad is the head of CIA and you're the head
of Seattle PD, so you can make it happen maybe once, right,
multiple times. That's weird that the SR seventy one was scrambled.

Speaker 4 (48:46):
Right.

Speaker 1 (48:47):
The FBI is very studious and likes to do a
lot of obvious stuff, So they interviewed everybody in the
area with the last name of Cooper, which there's like
a square one.

Speaker 3 (49:00):
This is like square negative five.

Speaker 1 (49:03):
Yeah, yeah, sure, no, it's negative five. I looked it up.

Speaker 2 (49:07):
Okay, 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 the whole time, because up until this time he
was just Dan Cooper. So they have a press conference
and there's it's sort of I don't think we know
who messed it up, right.

Speaker 1 (49:25):
Well, or okay, a cop, either a file clerk or
a cop of talking in front of a reporter got
either UPI or AP, depending on who you ask, And
they were saying like, what Cooper could could have done
something like this?

Speaker 4 (49:41):
Right?

Speaker 1 (49:42):
And somebody said, well, there's a Dan Cooper who's a
cat burglar in the area. That's a terrible suggestion. Cat
burglar does not go to hijacker, you know. And this
reporter was like, what a scoop and hit the wire
with cops looking for dB Cooper.

Speaker 4 (50:00):
Yeah, he said dB Cooper.

Speaker 3 (50:01):
Did I say Dan Cooper?

Speaker 4 (50:02):
Yeah, that's all right.

Speaker 1 (50:02):
The 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
cop said, well, there's this d dB Cooper.

Speaker 4 (50:20):
What did you just say. Did you just say a
D Cooper?

Speaker 1 (50:24):
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 Cooper and it just changed from
that point on.

Speaker 2 (50:42):
Yeah, I mean, he was never a dB Cooper. It
was literally a mistake. So that's why we all know
him as dB 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.

Speaker 4 (50:58):
So it actually ended up kind of working in their favor.

Speaker 1 (51:00):
Yeah, And anytime a tip like that came in, like
the office prankster would come in with the facts and
be like hot lead, hot lead. It was like a
joke around the Portland office. Everybody loved Richard.

Speaker 4 (51:16):
And this will.

Speaker 2 (51:18):
This will come up later too when it comes time
to solve the crime.

Speaker 4 (51:22):
They Later on, the FBI.

Speaker 2 (51:23):
Learned that there was a comic book in the nineteen
fifties about a Dan Cooper who was a Canadian jet
pilot and it was a Belgian comic, which is a
little weird, but it was you know, there was literally
a Dan Cooper who jumped out of planes and comic book.

Speaker 4 (51:40):
Form right exactly, could be a clue.

Speaker 1 (51:42):
Maybe and that's a niche comic, right, so I would
say so printed in Belgium in the French about a
Canadian fighter.

Speaker 4 (51:49):
Pilot in the frame.

Speaker 1 (51:50):
All they had to do is find, like the ten
people who knew of that comedy. We're going to be like,
what'd you do? We know it was one of you.
And so the UBI had a pretty clear belief, very
openly stated belief, that D. B. Cooper died in the jump.
It was just the line that they took right off
the bat. They're like, there's no way this guy survived.

(52:11):
And the he wasn't the lead agent on the case,
but he became the most famous agent, Ralph himmels.

Speaker 4 (52:17):
Bach Any Himmel's box in the house. No, you're a liar,
You're a.

Speaker 1 (52:24):
Liar, so Himmel's Bach. Like I said, he wasn't a
lead agent, but he was out of the Seattle office,
and he became the most famous agent associated with it.
And he actually gave the case its official name nor Jack,
which is stupid.

Speaker 4 (52:39):
Anyway, Northwest Jack Skyjack.

Speaker 1 (52:42):
Right, but removed the sea. It's just called the D. B.
Cooper Case, you know, or Hi Steven better. So he
self published a book in nineteen eighty six about the case,
and himmels Bach said he thinks that D. B. Cooper
didn't even get a shoot open, that he plunged to
his death and hit the forest floor with such impact

(53:02):
that he basically was buried immediately with the parachutes still attached,
and maybe even the money. And uh, that was Himmel's
box take. It was excuse me, are you gonna get that?
I realized it wasn't its twist off, And then I
realized I had my lighter from the loose leaf tea place.

Speaker 3 (53:19):
Nice, nice going.

Speaker 4 (53:27):
You.

Speaker 1 (53:27):
Yeah, I just saw the sum of Chuck's college education.

Speaker 4 (53:39):
So Cooper had jumped from the plane. Did he live?
Did he not? The odds are against him in a
lot of ways. Outside.

Speaker 2 (53:45):
The temperature that night was twenty degrees fahrenheit.

Speaker 1 (53:49):
Yeah, Hey we're in America, man, just say twenty degrees.

Speaker 4 (53:53):
Yeah, you're right, twenty degrees.

Speaker 2 (53:57):
USA. At ten thousand feet it was negative seven degrees yeah,
and he was going one hundred and ninety miles an hour.
There was freezing rain. It was there was like a
quarter crescent or not a quarter crescent, a crescent moon. Yeah,
those are two different things. Crescent moon in the sky,
but it was cloudy and rainy, so there's probably was

(54:18):
zero light. It's freezing. He's ten thousand feet.

Speaker 3 (54:21):
He's not dressed for the occasion.

Speaker 4 (54:23):
Oh, he's wearing loafers. He's wearing an overcoat.

Speaker 2 (54:26):
He's got this he doesn't have this knapsack, so he's
fashioning this weird kind of knapsack with this pink rope.

Speaker 1 (54:31):
Plus plus the area's jumping out into and he's flying
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 POINTI ist am I right? See, I
know the point is trees are round. Plus despite what

(54:55):
the FAA guy said, the FAA psychiatrists, yeah, he did
not leave the bomb to be detonated after he jumped off.

Speaker 3 (55:02):
He took it with him.

Speaker 1 (55:03):
Bank bag, bomb, overcoat, loafers, parachute was my dB Cooper pressure.

Speaker 2 (55:15):
And by the way, the FBI later on they interviewed Maclock,
who was the one who saw Yeah, Schaffner saw the bomb.

Speaker 4 (55:22):
Like you just did.

Speaker 2 (55:23):
And she said, yeah, you have these red sticks taped together,
and they went, huh, that wasn't dynamite. Dynamite isn't red.
You've seen too many cartoons dynamite as tan. Road flares
are red. So it was more than likely a fake
bomb with an alarm clock and road flares.

Speaker 1 (55:39):
Plus dB Cooper did not help his cause by his
choice of parachutes, right he So he chose a military
shoot as his main shoot. It was not a great shoot.
The ripcord wasn't as easily accessed as the recreational shoots,
and once it deployed you can't steer it very well.

Speaker 3 (55:57):
It was not the best choice.

Speaker 1 (55:59):
Even worse was his choice of the dummy shoot for
his front reserve choot. He took the best shoot and
gutted it to make a handle for the bank bag,
let the second best shoot, and chose the two worst
shoots to jump out with. Right.

Speaker 2 (56:13):
So, I didn't know you couldn't steer a military shoot,
but it makes total sense.

Speaker 3 (56:17):
No, Yeah, they're just like, go for it, pal.

Speaker 2 (56:19):
Yeah, because if I was in the military, I would steer.
I'd be like, well, how don't we go over here instead?
I see a lot of guns down there.

Speaker 3 (56:29):
Yeah, let's take it.

Speaker 2 (56:30):
This way, so they just drop you apparently. Yeah, man,
I guess they know what they're doing. Though, So some
other theories, because it's Washington, believe it or not, some
people actually posited that he was eaten by sasquatch.

Speaker 1 (56:48):
Yeah, with a straight face. I mean, let's be honest,
how many of you in here were thinking the same thing.

Speaker 4 (56:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (56:58):
Some other people say, well, he was clearly burned up
by the jet exhaust, because when you come down the
stairs of a seven twenty seven, the rear jet engines
right in front of you, and it would have been
seven eight hundred degrees right there. But the FBI conducted
a test right afterward where they took a seven twenty
seven up and they took a two hundred pound sled.

Speaker 2 (57:21):
A two hundred pound prison victim.

Speaker 3 (57:24):
Right, he was condemned.

Speaker 1 (57:27):
Don't worry about it, it's fine, and they said, and
threw it off. And they found that the two hundred
pound sled 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.

Speaker 2 (57:48):
Well, it was kind of good news bad news though,
because what it did do at least was it mimic
that same oscillation. Yeah, so they're like, oh, you know what,
it was the exact same thing happened when you were
in the air. So that eight twelve pm jump time,
like it was probably right on the money.

Speaker 4 (58:02):
So we know probably where he might have landed.

Speaker 1 (58:04):
Right, So there's a lot of questions remaining, right, and
there were some clues left behind. The thing that really
kind of confounded the FBI at first was that 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.

(58:26):
He had left a couple of things on board the plane, right.
He'd left his clip on tie, which was the second
biggest secret that night.

Speaker 2 (58:37):
Well, that's what you do before you jump out. Sure,
you know, you take it off. There was a clip
on all along.

Speaker 4 (58:44):
You unbutton that button and you're like, I'm out.

Speaker 3 (58:46):
Of here, all right.

Speaker 1 (58:47):
He left eight cigarette butts of his Rawley brand cigarettes.
He'd smoked eight over five hours, and all eight butts
have since been lost. Right, They found a hair on
the headrest. They the thing 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

(59:09):
print on any of the cigarette butts.

Speaker 4 (59:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (59:12):
True, but there was fingerprints on the in flight.

Speaker 4 (59:15):
I guess sky Mall.

Speaker 1 (59:16):
Magazine Rip sky Mall. What do you mean it's not around,
It's gone. Yeah, sky Mall's gone. Did you guys not
know this? No? Ways?

Speaker 3 (59:31):
Yeah, that's why I said, alright.

Speaker 2 (59:35):
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?

Speaker 1 (59:43):
My friend, you can just go to front Gate because
fron K has everything everyone needs. What's that fron K
They advertised in sky Mall, but they have stores too.

Speaker 4 (59:54):
I don't even know where I am right now.

Speaker 3 (59:58):
That's uncle likes.

Speaker 4 (01:00:01):
What year is it?

Speaker 2 (01:00:03):
No, So it would be seven years before any trace
of the hijacking, any real clue turned up, and it
was in nineteen seventy eight. There were some hunters and
Oregon hunting animals. I guess, right, unless it was the
most dangerous game.

Speaker 3 (01:00:25):
You don't know. It's Oregon.

Speaker 4 (01:00:27):
You never know.

Speaker 2 (01:00:29):
There are less civilized people than we have here. They
found a plastic instruction placard showing how to lower the
A F staircase in the woods.

Speaker 4 (01:00:38):
So this is like a really good clue.

Speaker 1 (01:00:40):
It was, but it didn't lead to anything new.

Speaker 2 (01:00:43):
Well, no, it was definitely from flight three oh five,
which was I guess I'm saying it was cool.

Speaker 1 (01:00:48):
It was cool, like if you were the Hunter, you'd
be like, I'm keeping this sure, But 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
had kind of fall into the wayside in the last
like seven years. People just didn't think much about it anymore. Oh,
they just skyjackings, right exactly. So it was like a

(01:01:10):
diamond dozen. But all of a sudden, everybody's like, we
got to make a movie. Who's the biggest movie star.
We've got treat Williams, make him his dB Cooper, And
that's what they did.

Speaker 4 (01:01:21):
Has anyone ever seen the pursuit of T B. Cooper?

Speaker 1 (01:01:24):
No, that's that's right, everybody. God bless you, Seattle smart
Town chunk.

Speaker 2 (01:01:32):
I figured here, like somebody because it was a local thing.
Nineteen eighty one, very very bad movie was made several
starring Treat Williams and Robert duvall Right.

Speaker 3 (01:01:45):
Whose mom needed surgery at the time. To layoff.

Speaker 4 (01:01:51):
So here's what you well.

Speaker 2 (01:01:51):
First of all, if you want to know how big
a piece of garbage this movie is, it had three directors,
And if you know anything about film making, if you
have more than one director, it's probably a really bad
movie for one reason or another. If it 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 boat.

Speaker 3 (01:02:13):
In it's a quah.

Speaker 4 (01:02:16):
Does anyone here live in a house boat? Now? Okay?

Speaker 2 (01:02:20):
Because I was gonna ask if I could come stay
over because those things are awesome.

Speaker 1 (01:02:26):
That was just Sleepless in Seattle. You've seen that too
many times.

Speaker 4 (01:02:29):
Oh no, they exist.

Speaker 2 (01:02:32):
Because I tried to stay in an airbnb actually before
I came here on a house boat. Yeah, I totally did,
and I ended up in some stupid hotel downtown. Go
home to your YouTube's type in Pursuit of dB Cooper
and watch the first three minutes.

Speaker 4 (01:02:51):
Because this movie literally starts.

Speaker 2 (01:02:53):
With the point from where dB Cooper jumps out of
the back of the plane. It starts from the point
where we know nothing else that happened is literally fictional.

Speaker 1 (01:03:04):
From that point slogan on the movie posters fac smacks.

Speaker 4 (01:03:12):
So it starts with the pursuit of D. B.

Speaker 2 (01:03:15):
Cooper and has Robert duvall the names all come up
and all that, and it's got a jewe heart plane.
It's like Wong Bong Bong Bong Bong and Treat Williams.
It's a terrible voice voiceover recording. You just hear yeah.
And he jumps off the thing because that's what you do.
And he jump off a plane and your skyjacking. He
parachutes down in the night and the night and he

(01:03:37):
catches through some trees and lands and then just this
really little sad yahoo.

Speaker 3 (01:03:45):
Everything was sad about that.

Speaker 2 (01:03:47):
And Treat Williams gets on the on the ground and
he and he takes out a cigar and he takes
out a lighter because that's what you do too when
you successfully landed after skyjacking.

Speaker 4 (01:03:56):
He doesn't light the lighter though.

Speaker 2 (01:03:58):
He rips open the money bags had a one hundred
dollars 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.

Speaker 4 (01:04:12):
And Robert deval Is he's just you can tell.

Speaker 1 (01:04:15):
When he starts every scene going yeah, let's do it.

Speaker 2 (01:04:21):
It's so bad, But I do encourage you. It was
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 Kroll, that's on, I'll watch Kroll was okay,
Four Games, great movie. Sure, pursuit of dB Cooper, why not?

Speaker 1 (01:04:41):
I was not exposed to that.

Speaker 4 (01:04:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:04:43):
I think my mother shielded me from that movie. Good
for you, mom. But watch the first two minutes on
j So we're still talking about the Placard, weren't we?

Speaker 2 (01:05:18):
No, no, no, all right, we'll go to nineteen eighty was
the first real good clue turns up in nineteen eighty Right,
this is a big clueue.

Speaker 1 (01:05:25):
So there's a young lad named Brian Ingram, he was
eight I think at the time. Yeah, and his family
was camping on Tina Bar. Are you guys familiar with
Tina bar. Do you guys know what that is?

Speaker 4 (01:05:35):
It?

Speaker 1 (01:05:35):
Columbia River? Yeah, so are we correct and understanding that
you would just call it an island not a bar?

Speaker 3 (01:05:42):
Okay?

Speaker 1 (01:05:42):
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's going to love this fire pit.
He'll be proud of me. Yet, Oh, father, won't you
love me? And as he's as, he's like, he's going

(01:06:04):
like this to the sand, poor little eight year old.
He turns up a stack of bills, several stacks of bills,
actually three, and these stacks of twenty dollars bills total
fifty eight and eighty dollars, and he's like father.

Speaker 3 (01:06:22):
And father.

Speaker 1 (01:06:23):
Father takes those and starts looking at him, and he's like,
we should probably call the police. So they go and
call the police.

Speaker 4 (01:06:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:06:29):
Again, they call the Seattle Police, which evidently all they
do is forward calls to the FBI.

Speaker 1 (01:06:34):
At this point they're like, Seattle PD, please hold. So
the FBI is like, read a serial number, and he
reads one and they're like read us. Another reads another,
and they're like that's dB Cooper money and Ingram's father's like,
what did you say?

Speaker 3 (01:06:53):
And they're like nothing.

Speaker 1 (01:06:58):
So the FBI gets their hands on it, and actually
we should say it turns out they let little Brian
Ingram take some of the money. Three thousand dollars of
this money.

Speaker 2 (01:07:08):
Actually yea later on they returned a little not bad, right, right?
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.

Speaker 1 (01:07:20):
Right, yeah, take that, father. So the thing is, this
money showed up in a place where it should not
have been. It showed up twenty miles south of Aeriel, Washington,
in another river. So they were looking here in the
Lewis River, right, everybody knows Lewis River, Aeriel, Washington. Here,

(01:07:43):
Tina Barr's down here just a little south of Vancouver.
Is my geography, my air geography right of Vancouver, Washington.
Everybody Vancouver, Washington. That is it? Like this, that's even
more amazing. This is what I suspect. 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

(01:08:05):
conclusively find it, but I did have this idea that
it somehow ended up above it. And an FBI hydrologist
looked at this money.

Speaker 4 (01:08:14):
Said, FBI has a hydrologist, right.

Speaker 1 (01:08:17):
I'm retainer him knows Bach got ahold of him. And
the guy was like, so this stuff's only been exposed
to the elements for a year, even though it was
found what nine years after the robbery? Right? Yeah, and
it got here one of two ways, the guy said,
So the Columbia River flooded in nineteen seventy four, Yes,

(01:08:37):
and it was also dredged in like nineteen seventy seven,
So one of those two probably got this yere, but
no one's ever said conclusively how it ended up where
it was.

Speaker 4 (01:08:46):
So it did, Yeah, there you go, I got it.

Speaker 2 (01:08:50):
It would be another twenty eight years before any more
clues turned up, so that's a very long wait. In
two thousand and eight, just eight short years ago, some
kids were playing on there was it their own land
in Amboy, h little south of Ariel.

Speaker 4 (01:09:04):
Anyone from Amboy.

Speaker 1 (01:09:06):
No, I suspected, not are we in Washington? Okay, yeah,
but nobody's from Amboy.

Speaker 2 (01:09:13):
We got more response in Birmingham, No about Amboy.

Speaker 3 (01:09:17):
Yeah, They're like, we like the sound of that.

Speaker 2 (01:09:23):
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.

Speaker 4 (01:09:33):
It's like a magic trick. And they finally get to
the end of.

Speaker 2 (01:09:36):
The parachute and they run and show Paw and they say, Paw,
I found a parachute in the woods.

Speaker 4 (01:09:43):
What should we do? Right?

Speaker 1 (01:09:45):
And Paw recognize that this is the most exciting thing
that ever.

Speaker 3 (01:09:49):
Happened in Amboy, Washington.

Speaker 1 (01:09:52):
Called the cops, who called the Seattle police, who called
the FBI, and the FBI did something smart. They're like, well,
you know, who would know if this was dbe Cooper's parachute?
Good old Earl Costy's right, he's not dead yet, not
dead yet, oh too soon.

Speaker 4 (01:10:16):
That's a good he's not dead yet.

Speaker 2 (01:10:19):
That's a celebratory None of us are dead yet, right.

Speaker 1 (01:10:24):
That's a good, good way of looking at it, Chuck,
good save way to find the silver lining.

Speaker 3 (01:10:29):
So Earl Cossi looked at this thing and he was.

Speaker 2 (01:10:31):
Like, no, yeah, he said, I'm sorry. He said, uh, Cooper,
shoot was nylon. That's clearly silk.

Speaker 1 (01:10:38):
A good try, Yeah, he said, this is I know
who shoot this is actually Yeah, it turns out that
back in nineteen forty five, a jet pilot named Floyd
Walling bailed out of his coarse air jet that was
going down and parachuted out in the woods around Amboy Washington, right,
which isn't too far from aerial And it wasn't Cooper's shoot.

(01:11:00):
You guys all remember when they found that parachute right
like two thousand and eight.

Speaker 3 (01:11:04):
It wasn't that long ago.

Speaker 1 (01:11:05):
It was a big deal and it wasn't his shoot,
but it did suggest that possibly he could have made
it because Floyd Walling had and he walked out of
the woods in terrible weather, just like dB Cooper would
have had to. So it kind of shined the light
on the whole thing again.

Speaker 4 (01:11:23):
Yeah, it kind of kicks some interest up.

Speaker 2 (01:11:24):
So over the years, there have been many, many, many,
many suspects, like we're talking 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.

Speaker 1 (01:11:43):
Well a lot of them are already in prison, but
they're in worse prison and hoping to go to a
good prison.

Speaker 4 (01:11:49):
No, it's true.

Speaker 2 (01:11:49):
Apparently state prisoners will try to confess to federal crimes
because the cinnamon buns are better in federal prison.

Speaker 3 (01:11:57):
I was thinking cinnamon bust, were you really?

Speaker 2 (01:11:59):
Yep, that's because there's cinnamon buns in our green room.

Speaker 4 (01:12:02):
Yeah, well no.

Speaker 2 (01:12:04):
We've mentioned that in the prison. That's like a commodity
in prison, right, cinnamon buns.

Speaker 3 (01:12:08):
Yeah, it's like currency.

Speaker 1 (01:12:08):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, all right, cinnamon buns and cigarettes.

Speaker 3 (01:12:13):
We know.

Speaker 4 (01:12:18):
So there's a very famous sketch.

Speaker 2 (01:12:19):
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 Googles and type in dB Cooper sketch. There's a
very singular famous sketch of dB Cooper.

Speaker 3 (01:12:37):
It looks like Kevin Spacey.

Speaker 1 (01:12:40):
It looks a lot like Kevin Spacey.

Speaker 4 (01:12:42):
Yeah, or Don Draper again.

Speaker 3 (01:12:44):
As Kevin Spacey.

Speaker 4 (01:12:47):
I think it would be Kevin Spacey as Don Draper. Yeah, yeah, sure.

Speaker 2 (01:12:50):
So if you go home and look at that, it's like,
you know, got this kind of shortiar guy looks like
he's sort.

Speaker 4 (01:12:54):
Of from the fifties or sixties.

Speaker 2 (01:12:55):
It's got the hair, he's got the sunglasses on, and
the tie, the skinny tie, and that this is the
only sketch that they have of dB Cooper that they
got from the flight attendant, specifically Tina Mucklaw, because she
spent like five hours right next to the dude. She
incidentally was really messed up after this, understandably, and she
went to be a nun in Oregon in the nineteen eighties,

(01:13:18):
which is a little weird. I didn't know they had
convents in Oregon.

Speaker 1 (01:13:22):
Sure, comments everywhere, convents everywhere.

Speaker 4 (01:13:24):
There's a convent right over in the alley.

Speaker 1 (01:13:26):
Here'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 never really fit in here. Oh,
you're not supposed to. If you're a mother superior, that's
a mother inferior. If you ask me, you know, good one.

Speaker 4 (01:13:47):
So sorry, you go ahead, all right.

Speaker 2 (01:13:50):
If you look at some of the behavior that Cooper displayed,
you're going to turn up some clues.

Speaker 4 (01:13:54):
And that's what the FBI does.

Speaker 2 (01:13:55):
It kind of examine what happened he chose a military shoot,
which could mean one of two things. Either he was
former military, which 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.

Speaker 1 (01:14:08):
Right, And the choice of that dummy choot would definitely
suggest that, because even recreational skydivers say, like, even if
you're just a military parachutist, you're going to see a
huge X on a parachute and instinctively shy away from
that parachute.

Speaker 4 (01:14:23):
You know, I thought it stood for extreme.

Speaker 3 (01:14:26):
Right, mountain dew extreme.

Speaker 1 (01:14:30):
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 he knew 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 he clearly

(01:14:53):
was very much aware of what was going on in
the cabin.

Speaker 3 (01:14:57):
He just knew the plane very much.

Speaker 1 (01:14:59):
So a lot of other people say this guy was
probably an airline employee, maybe even a pilot actually, based
on the altitude and stuff that he gave him to fly.

Speaker 2 (01:15:08):
Yeah, and one of the weird things that he knew
was that the seven twenty seven one hundred had an
af staircase that you could lower and jump out of.
Because this wasn't common knowledge at the time, Apparently a small.

Speaker 4 (01:15:19):
Group of people knew this.

Speaker 2 (01:15:20):
You were either in an employee of Boeing or you
may have been in the CIA, because in the Vietnam War,
we actually used the seven twenty seven over Cambodia, which
is where we were not supposed to be, and they
lowered that aft staircase of the seven twenty seven to
drop supplies.

Speaker 1 (01:15:36):
It's a go you can't steer but go well.

Speaker 2 (01:15:40):
And then there's the whole thing with the SR seventy
one Blackbird. So a lot of cooperists still say that
he might have been secretly a member of the CIA,
right because he knew about the aft staircase, He knew
about the or the blackbird was scrambled, so they had
like some skin in the game, right.

Speaker 1 (01:15:57):
So a lot of suspects have come and gone and
come back and stayed over the years. The FBI says
about it, well, they won't say, but a lot of
people say about a thousand, like Chuck said. But one
of the first ones to emerge was a dude named
Richard McCoy. And in February of nineteen seventy two, I think,
four months after the dB Cooper heist, Richard McCoy hijacked

(01:16:20):
a seven to twenty seven to one hundred flight and
he asked for five hundred thousand dollars in cash, and
he parachuted successfully out the back over Utah. Right, yep,
So a lot of people say it's pretty similar. Yeah,
maybe that was Dbe Cooper.

Speaker 4 (01:16:36):
Well in five.

Speaker 2 (01:16:36):
Hundred grand, that to me that makes sense, Like two
hundred grand worked out fine, right, I should have asked
for more to begin with.

Speaker 1 (01:16:42):
Right, So let me try it again, Try it again.

Speaker 2 (01:16:45):
It turns out that he was a Green Beret in Vietnam,
so that sort of fits with the whole profile. He
looked a little bit like the sketch of Dan Cooper and.

Speaker 3 (01:16:55):
A little bit.

Speaker 2 (01:16:56):
Yeah, he was twenty nine years old, so he was
much younger than but he didn't look twenty nine.

Speaker 4 (01:17:01):
I'll say that he looked much older than that.

Speaker 1 (01:17:03):
True.

Speaker 2 (01:17:04):
He looked more like Don Draper than Charles Manson. I'll
say that absolutely. So this guy gets caught actually after
pulling off this, he initially 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

(01:17:26):
of the prison and escapes and is later killed in
a shootout by cops.

Speaker 1 (01:17:30):
Which is to say Richard McCoy knew how to live.

Speaker 4 (01:17:34):
He did.

Speaker 2 (01:17:37):
And die, and his family would later go on to say, actually,
he was at home in Thanksgiving nineteen seventy one, so
it probably wasn't him, right, good suspect.

Speaker 1 (01:17:49):
Though, Suspect number two is named Dwayne Weber.

Speaker 4 (01:17:52):
This is your guy.

Speaker 1 (01:17:53):
No, this isn't No, this isn't my guy.

Speaker 3 (01:17:55):
I like this guy.

Speaker 1 (01:17:55):
He's fine, but I don't like him, you know what
I mean. Yeah, So, Dwayne Webber was a career criminal,
and the definition of a career criminal is one where
you and your alias have both done time in prison. Yeah,
and he and his alias had done it combined sixteen years. Right.
So he was on his deathbed and his wife Joe

(01:18:16):
came around and said, how you doing. It's like while
I'm still dying. I have a confession for you. I'd
like you to hear. I am Dan Cooper and Joe's like,
I don't know who that is, and Duayne blows up.
They have a fight on his deathbed, never speak of

(01:18:37):
it again, and he dies nine days later. So Joe
starts poking around after that. She's like, who is this
Dan Cooper? Which is a legitimate question after your experience
like that that she went through.

Speaker 4 (01:18:49):
I would say so.

Speaker 2 (01:18:49):
And she finds out via Internet this is nineteen ninety
five that Dan Cooper was Dbe Cooper, and she said,
you know what, I think that he was still the truth.
I think he was dB Cooper because you know what,
I remember in nineteen seventy nine, we were on a vacation.

Speaker 4 (01:19:06):
We were on a car trip.

Speaker 2 (01:19:08):
We were kind of right around the area where the
hijacking or 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 dB Cooper walked out of.

Speaker 1 (01:19:22):
The woods, which is a weird thing to say on vacation.

Speaker 4 (01:19:25):
Very weird thing to say.

Speaker 2 (01:19:26):
It's even weirder that she didn't say, what the hell
are you talking about.

Speaker 3 (01:19:30):
Yeah, agreed, there's.

Speaker 4 (01:19:33):
Another story later on they were on another vacation.

Speaker 3 (01:19:36):
No, this is the same vacation.

Speaker 4 (01:19:37):
Oh it was the same one. Yeah, yeah, all right.

Speaker 2 (01:19:39):
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, 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

(01:19:59):
just drive on.

Speaker 4 (01:20:00):
Yeah, and she doesn't say anything. I know you me M.

Speaker 3 (01:20:07):
Would have been like, why did you take your foot off?

Speaker 2 (01:20:09):
The guests, yeah, you know what there would have been
Emily would have had three hundred questions on why we
stops on a bridge and I opened the truck.

Speaker 1 (01:20:18):
Yeah, not Joe, not Joe. Yeah. 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 DNA. Right, Yes,
the next guy is my guy, Kenny Christiansen Chuckers.

Speaker 4 (01:20:36):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (01:20:36):
He was a pretty well liked suspect for a while.
He keeping with the series of family members outing their
family as D. B.

Speaker 4 (01:20:45):
Cooper.

Speaker 1 (01:20:45):
Yeah, which actually supports the family motto that I was
brought up with. Never trust family.

Speaker 2 (01:20:53):
It's a proud Clark tradition. So his brother lyle. Actually,
this gets a little weird. He outed him as a
suspect in an effort to get the screenwriter Nora Efron
Sleepless in Seattle, Right, Yeah, didn't you see that coming.
He tried to get Nora Efron to write a movie

(01:21:14):
about TB. Cooper via his brother being the main suspect.
And he, weirdly, I guess he didn't have an agent.
He hired a private investigator to get him in touch
with Nora Evron. Right, very strange. But he championed his
own brother as the main suspect.

Speaker 3 (01:21:29):
Or out at him, that's another way to put it,
for sure.

Speaker 1 (01:21:32):
Sure, And a guy named Jeoffrey Gray wrote a really
great article in the New York Magazine if you guys
are interested about this particular guy. But there's a lot
of similarities between D. B. Cooper and Kenny Christiansen. For one,
he looks a lot like him right off the bat.
He was a purser for Northwest Orient Airlines. That's a

(01:21:52):
big deal. Yeah, former paratrooper. Yeah, 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 in I think twenty eleven, Jeoffrey Gray, the guy
who wrote that New York Magazine article, got in touch
with Florence Shaffner and said, what about this guy? And

(01:22:13):
Florence Shafner said, I think you may be onto something here.

Speaker 2 (01:22:16):
Yeah, And like Dwayne Weber, Kenny Christiansen, on his deathbed,
tried to make a confession to his brother Lyle. He said,
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.

Speaker 1 (01:22:37):
Did you guys know that you can not hear a
deathbed confession?

Speaker 2 (01:22:41):
Well, not only that, but I want nothing more than
to hear a deathbed confession.

Speaker 4 (01:22:46):
I would be dying. I would be like, oh my god,
a dish, Yes, what do you have to say? But
he was like, no, no, no, no, I want to hear
what you gotta say. Just go ahead and die.

Speaker 1 (01:22:55):
And then he laid on top of him yeah till
he stopped scoring.

Speaker 4 (01:22:59):
Here the this pillow will make you comfortable.

Speaker 3 (01:23:03):
You sleep now, brother, what is.

Speaker 4 (01:23:05):
Going on with these people? Did you just do the
Buffalo bill voice? No, okay, that was coincidental. Who else
do we have? Ld? Cooper? Yeah, a little on the
nose with the name.

Speaker 3 (01:23:21):
He lived in the area too.

Speaker 2 (01:23:22):
Yeah, And he was also outed by a family member,
keeping with the Clark family tradition. Right this time it
was his niece. And she said, you know what I remember.
This is in twenty eleven. This is not too long ago.
She said, you know what, I remember back in Thanksgiving
nineteen seventy one, just like it was yesterday, and Uncle L. D.
Showed up bruised and bleeding.

Speaker 4 (01:23:45):
For dinner.

Speaker 2 (01:23:46):
But he was euphoric, which was weird. And I'm just
now mentioning this.

Speaker 1 (01:23:51):
All right. And she said, by the way, she had
a book coming out simultaneously.

Speaker 3 (01:23:56):
She's everybody where.

Speaker 1 (01:23:58):
Did she say that she overheard because this is where
she loses chucking me.

Speaker 2 (01:24:02):
Well, yeah, she said, he went to talk to he
was my uncle and went to talk to my dad,
and they were overheard them in the hallway say we
did it. Our money problems are over. We hijacked the plane.
The book by Simon and Schuster on sale now.

Speaker 3 (01:24:22):
At your local airport.

Speaker 2 (01:24:25):
But there were a few things. It wasn't totally out
of the blue. He was an engineer at Boeing.

Speaker 3 (01:24:30):
No, his brother was.

Speaker 2 (01:24:31):
Oh, his brother was, Yeah, but they were in on
it together. Sure, right, because we hijacked the plane. Right,
he's a silent partner. And weirdly, he remember those Dan
Cooper comment books. He was one of the ten people
on the planet that was a fan of the Dan Cooper.

Speaker 4 (01:24:45):
That's a little weird, it's pretty good.

Speaker 1 (01:24:47):
The weird thing is is he didn't have any experienced skydiving,
which a lot of people say, Oh, it's just too
insane to think that somebody who never skydived before did
their first sky dive during a heist out of A
seven twenty seven. But the people who knew LD Cooper say, no,
he was just crazy enough to do something like that.
And you can make a case that that actually explains

(01:25:10):
the choice of the dummy shoot.

Speaker 2 (01:25:11):
Tell you the truth, that's right, and the military shoot
even Yeah, all right, So the legacy of dB Cooper
to this day, the heist remains the only unsolved airline
hijacking in the.

Speaker 1 (01:25:23):
History of the world in America. In America? Really are
there other ones? Oh yeah, I'm only standing behind America.

Speaker 4 (01:25:33):
Oh okay, I gotcha. Yeah right.

Speaker 2 (01:25:38):
Every year, if you go to the Aerial Store in
Tavern in Ariel, Washington, you can go to the dB
Cooper Days Festival.

Speaker 1 (01:25:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:25:45):
Have you guys? Has anyone ever been to that?

Speaker 2 (01:25:48):
We should all go. Let's go right now, we're going
to meet up this Thanksgiving. You can win a dB
Cooper Lookalike contest.

Speaker 1 (01:25:57):
If you look like Kevin Spacey yes.

Speaker 2 (01:25:59):
Or Charles Manson er Don Draper, which none of us do. Well,
I'm talking about you and me.

Speaker 1 (01:26:05):
I look like Justin Bieber.

Speaker 2 (01:26:17):
I look like I ate Justin Bieber. I had to
spit out my tooth. That's how I lost it.

Speaker 4 (01:26:27):
I broke it on Justin Bieber's bones.

Speaker 3 (01:26:30):
They're pliable though.

Speaker 2 (01:26:33):
You can go to that and when the contest. There
have been songs over the years. There was that terrible movie.
There have been countless TV reenactments and dramatizations.

Speaker 3 (01:26:41):
Unsolved mysteries, am I right?

Speaker 1 (01:26:43):
Yeah? Everybody see that one.

Speaker 4 (01:26:44):
You can watch that on the YouTube too.

Speaker 1 (01:26:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:26:47):
And there are many many Cooperist websites, most notably one
called drop zone dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:26:53):
And drop Zone actually used to be a recreational skydiving
site until it got mostly taken over by dB Cooper ficionados.

Speaker 4 (01:27:01):
They hijacked the website.

Speaker 1 (01:27:02):
He 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 seemed to
have a lot of information about the DBI 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

(01:27:24):
Cooper case, Larry Carr, who's posting secretly as Secret on
the drop zone boards.

Speaker 3 (01:27:30):
That's how good these people are.

Speaker 4 (01:27:31):
He's like, no, I'm not, yes you are. No, I'm
not yes you are. You are.

Speaker 1 (01:27:38):
He's like, okay, i am.

Speaker 2 (01:27:40):
You can go on YouTube, boy, you got a lot
of YouTube and the night people. You can go on
YouTube as well and look up Larry Carr. And for
many many years they kept all this evidence sort of
under wraps, and you can look up videos. Now Larry
Carr said, you know what we should do the modern
ages here we have the youtubes 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

(01:28:01):
totally died, right, No one told Larry car that. No,
you know, because he's let's make a YouTube video. Let's
show everyone the skinny tie.

Speaker 3 (01:28:10):
All the kids are into it now.

Speaker 4 (01:28:12):
He shows the clip on tie.

Speaker 2 (01:28:13):
You can see all the you can see the money,
the clip on tie, all this evidence, hoping for a.

Speaker 1 (01:28:19):
Lead, and he oversaw 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 Pallen.
Hopefully that will eventually crack the case. But it made
everybody just be like, what we thought we had a
handle on this. Impatience Pallen, where did that come from?

Speaker 4 (01:28:43):
So bring us home, my friend.

Speaker 3 (01:28:45):
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:28:45):
The Cooper heist it changed America forever, right, dbe Cooper's
the reason we all started walking through metal detector shortly afterward,
He's the reason.

Speaker 3 (01:28:54):
Seriously, He's the.

Speaker 1 (01:28:55):
Reason that the airlines were given the right to search
your bags before you get on one of their planes,
and they apparently reinstituted the death penalty for hijacking. I
don't know when they took it off. Was it like
sea ships being hijacked? And then have no idea? I
don't either.

Speaker 3 (01:29:14):
But the.

Speaker 1 (01:29:16):
I think the coolest outcome of this whole thing was
if you look at a Boeing seven twenty seven, they
still make them airplane. If you look at that aft
staircase in the back, there's a white paddle that holds
the stairs closed. Pretty smart. You can't open the aft
staircase mid flight because you have to go outside and
pull the paddle down and then the aft staircase will open.

(01:29:39):
And it's a pretty smart, easy solution to a pretty
complex case. And they call that little white paddle a
Cooper vein.

Speaker 2 (01:29:48):
That's right, and that is the story of dB Cooper,
and that is our show.

Speaker 1 (01:29:56):
Good Night Seattle, good night everyone.

Speaker 3 (01:29:59):
Thank you m

Speaker 1 (01:30:18):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
HowStuffWorks dot com.

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