During the early afternoon of the 24th of November 1971, the passengers of Northwest
Airlines flight 305 from Portland to Seattle are checking in. Among them is a seemingly
ordinary man wearing a dark raincoat, a suit, his hair neatly combed and his only luggage is
a black briefcase. Later a witness describes him as looking like a ‘business executive.’
At the counter, he purchases a one-way ticket to Seattle, stating his name is Dan Cooper. The
flight should only take 30 minutes and honestly could not be less exciting. After the passengers
take their seat the Boeing 727-100 takes off. There are 36 passengers on
board, filling just ⅔ of the seats. Dan Cooper seats himself in the rear of the aircraft.
After taking off the man flags down a flight attendant. He orders a bourbon and soda.
As he receives his drinks he lights a cigarette, nips from his drink and walks up to the stewardess
that had just served him, Florence Schaffner. Now as you can see on the photograph, a Boeing
727-100 has a staircase in the rear that is to be lowered for passengers to exit and enter the
plane. Mid-flight Florence sits next to the stairs when the man approaches her.
While smoking his cigarette he hands her a piece of paper with something written on it. Florence,
23 years old and pretty, initially thinks it is another lonely businessman that wants a date.
It wouldn’t be the first time someone tried to get her attention that way. She puts the note, unread,
in her purse. In response the man leans towards her. He whispers “ma’am, you might want to read
what’s on that note, I am carrying a bomb”. And with those words, one of the most
curious unsolved skyjackings in the history of aviation begins.
-Intro-
Dan Cooper
The note he handed Florence read ‘I want 200.000 dollars before 5 pm this afternoon in 20 dollar
bills cash. Put it in a backpack. I want four parachutes. When we land I want the plane to
be refuelled. Don’t do anything stupid or the bomb will explode.’ She is then sent to the
cockpit to communicate the demands to the pilots. When she returns Cooper has put on sunglasses,
which lead to the sketch of him wearing them. In the cockpit, the pilot, William Scott,
has received the demands. He communicated them to the tower in Seattle, while using the intercom to
notify the passengers that the plane is a bit delayed due to a mechanical error. Meanwhile,
Cooper remains calm and, as Florence later recalls, even a bit charming. She describes
him as ‘well-spoken, polite, and not at all like those career criminals.’ He orders a second drink,
again bourbon and soda, and pays with a 20 dollar bill, telling her she can keep the change.
Furthermore, it seems that Cooper is familiar with the area, mentioning at a certain point that a
city he can see from the sky looks like ‘Tacoma’, and he indeed was looking at Tacoma.
For the next 2 hours, the plane is circling in the sky. The FBI, immediately informed about the
situation, tried their best to get the ransom and parachutes. Getting the parachutes proved
more complicated than initially thought because Cooper explicitly requested civilian parachutes,
not military ones. Eventually, a local skydive centrum turned out to be the answer.
As for the money several local banks are ordered to give up all 20 dollar bills by the FBI.
And for good measure, several snipers are placed around the landing strip where the
plane would eventually land. The ransom money is photographed so the serial numbers are known
and once the money is spent and reported, they will be able to track down Cooper.
Through radio, it is communicated to the pilots that the money and parachutes are
ready at the Seattle-Tacoma airport, and on 5:39 PM the plane lands on a landing strip.
Cooper makes the pilots taxi the plane to a secluded but well-lit area.
Cooper orders the cockpit to dim their lights and then allows all passengers to leave the aircraft.
After this, Al Lee, the manager of Northwest Orient’s Seattle airfield, approaches the plane
with the package containing the 200.000 dollars. Cooper receives the packet. As the plane is
refuelled, he coordinates the departure with the pilots. He wants to fly towards Mexico City
with deployed landing gear, lowered wing flaps at 15 degrees and an unpressurised cabin. Cooper
orders the pilot not to pass 3 kilometres in elevation and keep the landing gear extended.
This reduces the maximum speed the plane will fly at. They then fly off in the direction of Mexico,
with the money and parachutes on board. It seems like Cooper may actually get away with it.
Now the entire hijack ends in a very peculiar way. The pilots are in their cockpit and Cooper
is on his own in the back of the plane. Nobody is with him, and the pilots have their doors closed.
In the cockpit after 45-odd minutes of flying in a southern direction, the pilots notice a change in
pressure in the rear compartment of the aircraft. What supposedly happened is that Cooper tied the
ransom package to his body with a parachute cord. He then put on two parachutes, one on his back
and one on his front. He lowers the stairs at the rear of the aircraft -mid flight!- and walks
down. Due to rain and thick clouds he is unable to see the earth, but he jumps regardless. The
FBI report states that ‘somewhere between Seattle and Reno, a little after 8 pm, the hijacker did
the incredible: he jumped out of the back of the plane with a parachute and the ransom money.’
The Manhunt
Now, because the aeroplane only consists of the pilots and Cooper, nobody saw him jump.
Because of the change in pressure in the compartment , as they’re mid-flight the
pilots reckon Cooper might have left the aircraft. They notify the FBI when they notice the change,
but it isn’t until the plane lands in Reno airport after 10 pm, 2 hours later, that it is confirmed
Cooper is no longer in the aircraft. A manhunt is immediately on its way. On this map, you can
see the suspected landing zone and the flight path of the aircraft. In the immediate aftermath, there
is no clue of Cooper. He’s simply gone. The area where he parachuted into is filled with cliffs,
thick woods, rivers and lakes. The search area is enormous because of the height he jumped from.
Throughout the entire night and next morning, boats sail on the nearby Lake Merwin and Yale
Lake, without any success. Helicopters that search the woods and cliffs with flashlights don’t return
the hijacker either. Everything points towards Cooper getting away with his crazy and daring
plan. And although the media judge most criminals, Cooper is turned into some sort of heroes status.
The press talks about his Hollywood film-like hijacking continuously. Cooper’s act captured
the publics imagination and the fact he wasn’t caught left a sense of mystery around the case.
How was it possible that he got away with it? As for suspects, the first official suspect was
a man named D.B. Cooper, living in Oregon. Yeah, as if this man would have used his real name.
Nevertheless, this D.B. Cooper is listed as an official suspect and when a journalist catches on,
he scrambles the names, naming the robber D.B. cooper. As such the robber, Dan Cooper
became known as ‘D.B Cooper’. As for the actual D.B. Cooper, it soon becomes clear
he didn’t hijack an aeroplane and jumped out of it when the police find him at home.
So are there any clues Dan Cooper left in the aircraft? Well yeah, quite a lot to be fair.
First of all, he left his tie, his tie pin and 66 fingerprints. But perhaps most importantly,
he never tried to hide his face. He was seen by so many people on the plane that some very realistic
composite sketches were made of his face. Oh and he had some experience with parachute jumping if
we want to assume he didn’t have a death wish, and he seemed knowledgeable about civilian air traffic
considering he knew he could open the trapdoor mid-flight. This was not even known to some people
working with aircraft, because, well, who opens a trapdoor mid-flight? His specific demands about
the wing flaps and landing gear support the thesis he had some professional aviation knowledge.
The fact the Boeing 727-300 is one of the few planes with stairs in the back and with motors
high enough that they wouldn’t burn Cooper as he jumped from the plane points towards
expert knowledge of civilian aircraft as well. Furthermore, he may have gotten his
name from ‘Dan Cooper’, a comic series about a test pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force.
All that is sure is that Cooper wasn’t found, nor were his parachutes or was the ransom money. It
wasn’t for several years that the police would see some of the ransom money back.
Suspects
Because of the upcoming winter season the manhunt in the area is postponed, as the
blizzards simply make the region unworkable. The search is resumed in early 1972. FBI agents,
volunteers, employees of Northwest Airlines and 200 soldiers spend 36 days combing through
the area Cooper dropped into. A body is found, but it turned out it’s of a missing teenager.
Meanwhile, the news made international headlines and there is a global lookout for the dollar
bills. A reward of 1000 dollars is issued to the person that manages to track a bill
that was among the ransom. Nevertheless, these extensive searches yield no results,
neither the money, parachute or Cooper was found. The FBI says they ‘interviewed hundreds of people,
tracked leads across the nation and searched the aircraft for evidence.
By the fifth anniversary of the hijacking, they’d considered more than 800 suspects and eliminated
all but two dozen from consideration.’ Theories ranged from Cooper working
in the chemical industry to Cooper being a transgender mechanic from Washington state.
It wasn’t until six years later that a hunter finds a manual to open the Boeing 727-stairs
north of Lake Merwin. The first sign that Cooper actually dropped in the area. Nearly nine years
later, in 1980, the 8-year-old Brian Ingram is camping with his family around the Columbia River,
downstream from Vancouver, Washington. Over there he finds three packages containing
5800 dollars. It is part of the ransom money. The bills are heavily damaged,
some are missing and the remaining bills were wrapped together. The missing bills were never
found and there was no satisfying answer as to why the package with bills was over there - it’s
outside the area that Cooper could have landed. And, well, it remained mostly quiet after that.
That isn’t to say the media went quiet as well because Cooper became a cult hero. His name became
synonymous with curious unsolved mysteries. It wasn’t until 2007, 36 years after the
hijacking, that the FBI announced they managed to create a partial DNA profile from the tie pin.
A new composition drawing was published which shows an aged Cooper, and evidence such as an
image of the ticket he bought was published. The FBI also came out with a bit of a curious detail:
it turns out one of the parachutes Cooper used was a parachute made for practice. The parachute
bag was sewn up, meaning at most Cooper would have just had one working parachute when he jumped from
the plane at high speed. But no credible leads arise following the release of this new evidence.
Officially the case was open, but the FBI admit the most likely turn of events was that Cooper
did not survive his jump. He parachuted from an incredible height into a heavily wooded area,
unable to steer because of the storm. In July 2016 the FBI announced it had ‘redirected
resources allocated to the Cooper case in order to focus on other investigative priorities.’
They said the case was one of the most prolonged and most exhaustive in the agency’s history.
Solving the case?
As such the Cooper case remained one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in FBI history.
But in the same week the FBI closed the case, a History Channel documentary aired following
a five-year-long investigation by a private detective hired by TV producer Tom Colbert.
The documentary claimed Cooper did not just survive the parachute jump,
but he was still alive in 2016. It pointed to a 72-year-old California man, Robert W. Rackstraw.
Rackstraw was a Vietnam war veteran that had training in parachute jumping. He was questioned
about the skyjack in 1978 but denied being Cooper, and the next year he was stripped off the suspects
list. In response to the documentary, Rackstraw’s lawyer said the allegation was the ‘stupidest
thing he ever heard’ and that his client wasn’t Cooper, but nobody wanted to listen.’
The lead the investigations claim that led them to this conclusion, was a letter that was sent
to several major news outlets in December 1971, a month after the hijack.. A Dan Cooper sent it and
the taunting letter contained a string of letters and numbers at the bottom of the page. Thought
to be a prank initially, a code breaker decoded the message and said it pointed to 3 army units
Rackstraw was connected to when he was in Vietnam. The letter supposedly served as a confirmation
to those that knew he planned the skyjack to let them know he was alive and well and
survived the jump. The letter was obtained through the Freedom of Information Act
and its contents also point towards Rackstraw’s detailed skillsets he received from his service
with the Green Berets in 1968, among which phigh-altitude military parachuting, psychological
operations and special forces classes. Colbert also claimed that the FBI
tried to keep the case unsolved because Rackstraw supposedly was a CIA Operative.
His employment at the CIA was never confirmed. He did have a criminal past, among which a
murder-charge of his stepfather (which he was acquitted of during the trial), aircraft theft,
possession of explosives and check fraud. But, when a witness was confronted with a
photograph of Rackstraw, she said he didn’t look anything like the man she saw on the aircraft.
If Rackstraw indeed was Cooper he would have been 28 at the time of the skyjack. But,
so far, no arrests have been made and the FBI denied any formal investigation or follow-up.
As such the infamous Skyjacking by Dan Cooper remains just that: one of the FBI’s most
exhaustive and most extraordinary unsolved cases. Certainly, D.B. Cooper’s case isn’t the only
unsolved mystery. Is there a case you’d like to know more about and perhaps see a video of?
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