Unsolved Mystery: Where Is DB Cooper?
A 50-year old skyjacking mystery that spawned a dozen more in the 1970s
Anyone who knows me know that I love unsolved mysteries. The stranger the better. And the mystery of DB Cooper is truly one of the most baffling of all time (and there are so many to choose from). The basics: Dubbed “DB Cooper,” this skyjacker was initially a passenger on Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305, a Boeing 727 aircraft, wearing loafers and a business suit. He turned out, however, to be quite otherwise. On the night of Thanksgiving Eve, 1971, the man (see images above), wearing a trench coat, hijacked a flight bound for Seattle from Portland, Oregon, with what appeared to be a bomb in his briefcase.
Soon after Cooper demanded $200,000 from a frightened stewardess in the form of a passed note. He further asked for four parachutes in exchange for the lives of the 36 passengers on board. No one was harmed. After the plane landed in Seattle to collect the money in exchange for the hostages, Cooper ordered the flight to resume again, towards Mexico City with only airline staff on board. After refueling, the plane climbed again skywards. Cooper this time ordered pilots to fly the plane at just 10,000 feet at that time. At some point around 8PM, somewhere between Mt. Rainier and northern Portland, Cooper ordered that the pilot to open the aircraft's rear door and jumped into a stormy night, against 200-mile per hour headwinds. Even an expert would have difficulty navigating the terrain of southwestern Washington at that height and at that speed in a storm. Still, it is perfect weather if one is in the mood to not be followed.
Why below 10,000 feet? Does this suggest the man had some understanding of parachuting? In the ensuing decades, many theories by amateur and professional alike have arisen as to who of where this man might be now, but none of them have ever proven to be conclusive. Looking backwards, the Official website of the FBI described the earliest account of DB Cooper as thus:
On the afternoon of November 24, 1971, a nondescript man calling himself Dan Cooper approached the counter of Northwest Orient Airlines in Portland, Oregon.
He used cash to buy a one-way ticket on Flight #305, bound for Seattle, Washington.
Thus began one of the great unsolved mysteries in FBI history.
Cooper was a quiet man who appeared to be in his mid-40s, wearing a business suit with a black tie and white shirt.
He ordered a drink—bourbon and soda—while the flight was waiting to take off.
And so it began.
This was before the plane had departed. After the drink he passed the note to the stewardess to sit by him and showed her the briefcase with what looked to be sticks of dynamite and wires. For over half a century, all paths attempting to solve the mystery have led to dead ends, despite forensic technological advancements in the intervening years. The only consolation to hamstrung investigators is that Cooper left behind some evidence, including on his seat on the back row of the plane, 18-E — a clip-on tie. Private investigator and researcher Eric Ulis has said that the tie was purchased at a J.C. Penny around Christmas 1964 for $1.49. Yet, despite 66 latent fingerprints found aboard the airliner, the black clip-on tie, the tie clip, and two of the four parachutes he used to escape and some rotted cash, we are no closer to solving how this man jumped into 200 mile and hour winds on a stormy night in 1971.
The mystery of DB Cooper is so labyrinthine and complex that the term “The Cooper Vortex” exists — or, needed to be invented — as a warning against travelling too deep down into the wormhole that is this cold case.
First question: Did Cooper survive? "No experienced parachutist would have jumped in the pitch-black night, in the rain, with a 200-mile-an-hour wind in his face, wearing loafers and a trench coat,” Special Agent Larry Carr wrote in a 2007 case update. “It was simply too risky."
Second question: Who was DB Cooper? The non-descript face staring back at us in the FBI drawing could be, quite frankly, any middle aged white dude of that era. “Disgruntled Vietnam veterans. Airline staff. A transgender person by the name of Barb,” writes Stuart Heritage of The Guardian, covering all the bases. “All, in one way or another, are seized upon and vetted.” Heritage here is reviewing the Netflix documentary series DB Cooper: Where Are You?! “But gradually, one name keeps returning to the surface: Robert Rackstraw,” Heritage concludes. Possibly. If Rackstraw is indeed the mysterious Cooper, we will never know conclusively, as he passed on in 2019.
But the case has been cold for a long time. So much so, in fact, that by 2016, the FBI “redirected resources allocated to the D.B. Cooper case to focus on other investigative priorities.” Cooper’s brazen skyjacking led to over a dozen copycat robberies in the 1970s. He initiated the age of skyjacking.
It is hard not to get drawn into the minutia of this fascinating story. And by minutiae, I am speaking quite literally. A Titanium/Stainless steel particle was discovered on the tie, suggesting that the man we know as Cooper might have worked, it has been suggested, as a manager or an engineer in a manufacturing facility, possibly an aircraft engineering facility. Could he have had a grudge of some sort against his employer, Boeing?
One final coda to this bewildering cold case: Some of the money was found, suggesting perhaps that DB Cooper may indeed be dead, or, at the very least, somehow separated from some of the cash during the landing. A bad landing? Who would go to all the trouble of a skyjacking — one of the first — only to leave a substantial part of the take on the table? In 1980, Brian Ingram, then aged 8, found $5,880 of Cooper’s $200,000 ransom. Ingram was searching for firewood with his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Harold Dwayne Ingram of Vancouver, Washington. The money was found partially buried in the sand on the north shore of the Columbia River. The money (below) was verified via their serial numbers.
“Little Miss Lake Panasoffkee, which is how she is now known, was found by two teenage hitchhikers in Lake Panasoffkee, Florida, on February 19, 1971. She remains, to this day, unidentified. She was wearing a green floral poncho/shawl, a green shirt and green plaid pants. She also wore a Baylor watch, a gold chain, and a golden ring on her ring finger, so the motive probably wasn't a robbery. And that, perhaps is the saddest part of this story. That in 52 years, no one has claimed her body for burial. And with every year, the chances that we will know who she is get dimmer.” (The Corsair)
“And just like that, Iran’s seemingly frozen politics has come unstuck. Less than two months after its hard-line president, Ebrahim Raisi, a religious conservative and former prosecutor who’d overseen mass executions of political prisoners, died in a helicopter crash in May, Iran’s president-elect—surprise!—is a reformist who’s pledged to pursue open diplomacy with the United States and to halt Tehran’s crackdown on women refusing to obey the country’s hijab laws. The election of Masoud Pezeshkian, a former minister of health and a deputy speaker of parliament from Iran’s northwest, promises to bring the sidelined reformist movement back to the center of Iranian politics. That movement had its heyday during the presidency of Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005), but since then Khatami has essentially become a nonperson in Iran, with authorities refusing to allow Iranian media even to mention his name. And Mir Hossein Mousavi, the last reformist to run for president, has been under continuous house arrest since losing in 2009 to the radical-right President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in an election that is widely considered to have been fraudulent. Now, as president, Pezeshkian will be in position to steer Tehran away from the spiraling showdown with Washington that has been building since President Donald Trump blew up the US-Iran nuclear agreement in 2018.” (Bob Dreyfuss/The Nation)
“Zambia is not stranger to mystery and intrigue. Zambia the country was born in 1964, situated between black and the then white-ruled regimes of southern Africa. In the late 60s and 70s, the country was home to mercenaries and secret agents from many nations. High-flying South African military planes conducted photographic sorties over its territory regularly. It was one of the crucial ‘chess pieces’ during the Cold War’s African phase.” (The Corsair)
“President Joe Biden has a new problem: a competitive race in deep blue New York. Elected officials, union leaders and political consultants are panicking over polls showing a steady erosion of Biden’s support in a state he won by 23 points four years ago. They’re so worried they’ve been trying to convince the Biden team to pour resources into New York to shore up his campaign and boost Democrats running in a half-dozen swing districts that could determine control of the House. Biden aides have not focused on New York, committing no significant resources to a state where they expect the president to easily win all 28 electoral college votes in November.” (Nick Reisman/Politico)
“Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state this afternoon. The President’s two year old German Shephard, Commander, was dragged by the leash into the fractured American political process in 2023. But the larger mystery less asked is why is Commander biting people — Secret Service agents, in particular? Are they that just that damned delicious?” (The Corsair)
“In the past 24 hours we have seen again the brutality of the Putin regime, and the murderous band of barbarians called the Russian military. The deliberate attack by a Russian precision missile on the Okhmatdyt hospital, despite its horror, is part of a wider Russian campaign to terrorise the people of Ukraine. This was not the actions of a few bad apples. It is the outcome of a systemic, command-led campaign to terrorise and brutalise Ukrainians, just as the Russians did with Syrians and Chechens. Russian political and military leaders have nurtured a culture of indiscriminate killing in Ukraine and set the conditions for it to flourish. They bear full responsibility for the killings at Okhmatdyt hospital, Bucha and other atrocities across Ukraine in the past two and half years.” (Futura Doctrina)