By Kevin Wilkerson, PubClub.com Lifestyle Editor
I am not exactly sure why – probably because I am a reporter and we are all naturally curious – I am fascinated by the unsolved mystery of hijacker D.B. Cooper.
That plus the fact that when you do a Google search of him, he is labeled as a pirate. As a Jimmy Buffett Parrothead, I like that pirate label. One day, I would like to go to the small bar in a small town of Airel, Washington, for D.B. Cooper Day, which is Thanksgiving Eve.
The story is familiar to many people. On On November 24, 1971, a man who identified himself as Dan Cooper – later incorrectly named as D.B. Cooper in a newspaper report – spent $20 on a one-way flight (boy, those were the days; can you imagine!?), boarded a plane with a device that looked like a bomb, demanded and got $200,000 cash and four parachutes. Then, somewhere over the Pacific Northwest, he jumped out of the back of the plane – the Boeing 727-51 plane had a back door that could be lowered to allow for boarding and deplaning of passengers – and disappeared.
He was never found, never heard from again and the only evidence is when a young boy found $5,800 of the ramson money in 1980 along the edge of the Columbia River, near Vancouver, Washington, and a cheap clip-on tie Cooper left on the plane. The FBI interviewed more than 800 suspects and, well, ziltch.
Personally, I think he died in the jump. He was either impaled by a tree or drowned in a lake or river. After all, he was wearing a business suit, hardly suitable for parachuting ouf of a plane. It was also dark and raining, deep in the woods and for some bizarre reason – which few of the D.B. Cooper sleuths seem to pay attention to – he requested the ransom money be in $20 bills. It’s not the weight – just 22 pounds – but the volume that’s the problem. Why in the world would he do that, I keep wondering. It takes 50 $20 bills to make up $1,000 and, well, let’s just say he would need much more than a George Costanza wallet to put all that cash. How would he possibly keep track of it all while plunging out of an airplane into the woods in a driving rainstorm? It makes no sense.
This is especially baffling considering the detail to which he planned every other element of the highjacking: ordering four specific parachutes, having the pilot fly the plane at a certain altitude and speed with the flaps, and so forth.
Another point I’ve never seen investigated is that since he wanted the plane to fly to Mexico City but he jumped out in impossible conditions in the Pacific Northwest. Was his car at the airport? Did anyone check the airport parking lot? Was he meeting a family member on a rural road? And why Mexico City (personally, I would have chosen Cancun)?
With my newspaper investigative journalism experience – I won an AP award for investigative journmalism – I would have loved to have taken a crack at this case.
A YouTuber, Dan Gryder, now claims he has solved the mystery due to tracking down a parachute that allegedly was provide to Cooper. He says it was Richard McCoy II, who did highjack and jump out of plane five months later. He was caught and later killed by police after he escaped from prison. The FBI ruled him out as the highacker.
A few months before Gryder,k someone else a fingered another suspect, a Boeing contractor from Pennsylvania,
Perhaps some mysteries are not supposed to be solved. Maybe the true identity of D.B Cooper will never be known. Pirates are like that; they pull of amazing feats, disappear but never really leave us.
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