Fact or Fiction: Is D.B. Cooper still alive?

The D.B. Cooper mystery involves the case of Northwest Airlines Flight 305, which was hijacked by a lone man. Learn more about the D.B. Cooper mystery.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Candice S. Gibson, Joints Day by my very
favorite staff writer, Joshua M. Clark's going, it's going well.

(00:21):
Thanks for having me, Candice, You're so welcome. So, Candice,
I know you're kind of into true crime, right, So
have you heard much about dB Cooper. I've heard a
whole lot, but I'm not going to steal your thunder fantasy.
Thank you, thank you. So I think dB Cooper is
well perpetrated the greatest tist of all time. Um, let
me tell you about Okay nine Thanksgiving Eve. I think

(00:42):
it was November. This guy named dB Cooper. Well that's
what it said on his ticket um boards his flight
from Portland, Oregon to Seattle, Washington. It's a pretty short flight, um,
but he has time to settle back, order a bourbon
and soda chain smoke back when you could smoke on
the plane. Um. And also he had time to pass

(01:03):
a ransom note to one of the stewardesses. Um and
it said that he was going to blow up the
plane if they didn't give him two hundred thousand dollars
and four parachutes. Well he took it pretty seriously. UM,
hijackings weren't, you know, really a widespread thing at the time.
So they land the plane in Seattle, Tacoma. Um, he
lets the passengers go, keeps the crew on board, and

(01:25):
then has them bring the money on board and the parachutes.
And I think he let the crew go but kept
the pilot on and told the pilot to go to Mexico.
But the plane never made it to Mexico. It made
it to Reno, and when it did, D B. Cooper
wasn't on board. At about ten thousand feet over Washington.
He had jumped out on this cold, rainy, cloudy night

(01:48):
over the Cascade Mountains in that state, never to be
heard from again. The FBI thinks he's dead. Is that
fact or fiction? From what you know, Well, it's really
tough to day whether it's a fact or fiction that
DBI Cooper is still alive. And you know, the FBI
has actually profiled about eight hundred people whom they believe

(02:09):
could possibly be DBI Cooper. UM. One man, Dwayne Weber,
actually confessed on his deathbed to his wife that he
was dB Cooper, but DNA evidence later ruled him out,
so we're not quite sure why he made that confession.
He was a little bit blacky. Maybe he liked the
tale just like us. Then Richard McCoy, who was a
Vietnam veteran and a Sunday school teacher, he pulled a

(02:31):
pretty similar sort of highest hijacking a plane, making all
of some cash, but he was ruled out too. And
there have been all sorts of suspects in this case,
and as far as any hard evidence, it's been pretty
few and far between. Back in ninety a boy playing
by the Columbia River found a couple of wads of
twenty dollar bills, which is the denomination DBI. Cooper demanded

(02:52):
his two thousand dollar ransom in and on these bills
the serial number actually matched the numbers of the bills
have been given to Deep It was money, but he
wasn't around nobody nothing. And then in two thousand and eight, uh,
some other boys found part of a parachute and they
thought maybe it's DBS. But these parachutes were made of
silk and not made of nylon, which his wise. So

(03:14):
the case is still ad opens, so we don't know
if it's factor fiction, we don't, and we've fairly scratched
the surface. So to learn more, Bread is dB Cooper
still alive On how stuff works dot com. We're more
on this than thousands of other topics because at how
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