Dan or DB Cooper

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From Wikipedia

D. B. Cooper

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

D. B. Cooper, aka Dan Cooper, was a notorious airplane hijacker who in 1971, after receiving a ransom payout of $200,000, leapt from the back of a Boeing 727 as it was flying over the Pacific Northwest. No conclusive evidence has ever surfaced regarding Cooper's whereabouts, and several theories offer competing explanations of what happened after his famed jump. The only clues to have turned up in the case are ambiguous: around $5,000 that washed up on the banks of the Columbia River, and part of a sign believed to be from the rear stairway of the plane from which Cooper jumped. The nature of Cooper's escape and the uncertainty of his fate continue to intrigue people. Today, the Cooper case remains the world's only unsolved skyjacking.

The hijacking

At 16:35 on Thanksgiving Eve, November 24, 1971 in the United States, a man travelling under the name Dan Cooper hijacked a Northwest Orient Airlines Boeing 727-051, flight 305, flying from Portland International Airport (PDX) in Portland, Oregon, with the threat of a bomb (he had a briefcase containing wires and "red sticks"). Dan Cooper boarded the plane of only 36 passengers and 6 crew. He wore a black raincoat, loafers, a dark business suit, a neatly pressed white shirt, a narrow black necktie and a pearl stickpin. He also had black wrap-around sunglasses.

FBI wanted poster of D.B. Cooper The jet was barely in the air before he paged his flight attendant, Florence Schaffner, sitting nearby, for his drinks. As he paid her, he also handed her a note. She thought he was giving her his phone number, so she slipped it, unopened, into her pocket. Cooper leaned closer, "Miss, you'd better look at that note. I have a bomb." In the envelope was a note that said, "I have a bomb in my briefcase. I will use it if necessary. I want you to sit next to me. You are being hijacked."

When the flight attendant informed the cockpit about Cooper and the note, the pilot, William Scott, contacted Sea-Tac air traffic control and was instructed to cooperate with the hijacker. Scott instructed Schaffner to go back and sit next to Dan Cooper, who opened his case a crack and closed it again, long enough for Schaffner to see red cylinders and wires. He instructed her to tell the pilot not to land until the money and parachutes were ready at Sea-Tac. She went back to the cockpit to relay Cooper's instructions.

When the plane landed at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport near Seattle, Washington at 17:45, its intended destination, he released the passengers in exchange for $200,000 (in $20 bills) and four parachutes. At 19:45 he had the flight crew take the plane back into the air, ordering them to fly towards Mexico at low speed and altitude with the landing gear down and 15 degrees of flap. At some point during the journey he jumped out of the rear stairway of the airplane with the money and parachutes. The FBI believed his descent was at 20:11 over southwest Washington, because the rear stairway "bumped" at that time. Due to poor visibility, his descent went unnoticed by the United States Air Force F-106 jet fighters tracking the airliner. He was believed to have landed southeast of the town of Ariel by the edge of Lake Merwin, 30 miles north of Portland, Oregon.

Despite an eighteen-day search of the projected landing zone, no trace of the man or his parachute was ever found, and it remains unknown whether he survived the escape. On February 13, 1980, $5,800 (in bundles of $20 bills) of the ransom money was found by a family on a picnic five miles northwest of Vancouver, Washington on the banks of the Columbia River.

The FBI questioned and then released a man by the name of D.B Cooper, who was never considered a significant suspect. Due to a miscommunication with the media, however, the initials "D. B." became firmly associated with the hijacker and this is how he is now known.

Following three similar (but less successful) hijackings in 1972, the Federal Aviation Administration required that all Boeing 727 aircraft be fitted with a device known as the "Cooper Vane", a mechanical aerodynamic wedge that prevents the rear stairway from being lowered during flight.

Suspects

Richard McCoy, Jr.

One of the 1972 hijackings was carried out by Richard McCoy, Jr. On April 7, 1972, four months after D. B. Cooper's hijacking, McCoy boarded United Flight 855 during a stopover in Denver. It was a Boeing 727 with aft stairs, the same type used in the Cooper incident, which McCoy used to escape after giving the crew the same type of instructions as Dan Cooper.

Police started to investigate McCoy after a tip. He was a married former Mormon Sunday school teacher with two young children who was studying law enforcement at Brigham Young University. He was also a Vietnam veteran, a former Green Beret helicopter pilot, and an avid skydiver.

Following a fingerprint and handwriting match, McCoy was arrested two days after the hijacking. Inside his house FBI agents found a jumpsuit and a duffel bag filled with cash totalling $499,970. McCoy claimed innocence, but was convicted and received a 45-year sentence.

Once incarcerated, using his access to the prison's dental office, McCoy fashioned a fake handgun out of dental paste. He and a crew of convicts escaped in August 1974 by stealing a garbage truck and crashing it through the prison's main gate. It took three months for the FBI to locate McCoy, in Virginia. McCoy shot at the FBI agents and agent Nicholas O'Hara fired back with a shotgun, killing him.

D. B. Cooper: The Real McCoy, co-authored by an ex-FBI agent named Russell Calame, was published in 1991. The book made the case that Cooper and McCoy were really the same person, citing similar methods of hijacking and a tie left by Cooper similar to those worn by Brigham Young students. The author said that McCoy "never admitted nor denied he was Cooper." And when McCoy was directly asked whether he was Cooper he replied "I don't want to talk to you about it." The agent who killed McCoy is quoted as saying, "When I shot Richard McCoy, I shot D. B. Cooper at the same time." The widow of Richard McCoy, Karen Burns McCoy, sued and won a settlement from both the book's coauthors and its publisher.

Duane Weber

In August 2000, U.S. News and World Report ran an article about a widow in Pace, Florida named Jo Weber and her claim that her late husband, Duane Weber, had told her "I'm Dan Cooper" before his death in 1995. She became suspicious and began checking into her late husband's background. Duane Weber had served in the Army during World War II and later had served time in a prison near the Portland airport. Mrs. Weber recalled that her husband had once had a nightmare where he talked in his sleep about jumping from a plane and said something about "Leaving my fingerprints on the aft stairs." She had once found an old plane ticket in his papers for Northwest Airlines that said SEA-TAC (Seattle-Tacoma Airport). She also mentioned that just before he died, Duane had revealed the cause of an old knee injury. "I got it jumping out of a plane," Jo recalls him saying.

Mrs. Weber also recounts a 1979 vacation the couple took to Seattle, "a sentimental journey," Duane told Jo Weber, with a visit to the Columbia River. She remembers how Duane oddly walked down to the banks of the Columbia by himself just four months before the portion of Cooper's cash was found in the same area. One of the most convincing pieces of evidence Mrs. Weber related was the fact she had checked out a book on the Cooper case from the local library and saw notations in it that matched her husband's handwriting. Mrs. Weber began corresponding with FBI Agent Ralph Himmelsbach, the chief investigator of the Cooper case. Himmelsbach has said Weber is one of the best suspects he has come across.

Although the match between the composite drawing and pictures of Duane Weber must be considered inconclusive, recently, facial recognition software was used on 3,000 photographs (including that of Weber and two other suspects) to identify him as "the best match" of the 3,000.

Dan Cooper's offical case files are technically still open.

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Also note that no one has ever found any evidence that Dan Cooper lived or died in the parachute escape