THE MYSTERY of DB Cooper has plagued authorities since he skydived mid-flight after hijacking a plane in 1971.
When Cooper boarded the plane heading for Seattle-Tacoma Airport on Thanksgiving Eve, no one suspected the man sitting in seat 18C.
Dan ‘DB’ Cooper bought a one-way ticket to Seattle, Washington for a flight leaving from Portland, Oregon on November 19, 1971, with 36 people on board.
He boarded the plane like any other passenger, but when a flight attendant passed by, he slipped her a note.
Florence Schaffner was working on the flight deck that day and when Cooper passed her the note, she thought nothing of it.
Flight passengers traveling alone would often pass their phone numbers or hotel addresses to the attendants.
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She slipped the note into her pocket and continued checking on other passengers, but when she passed by Cooper again, she was ordered to read it.
The writing on the note made her rush to the cockpit to tell the pilot that their plane was being hijacked.
He had demanded $200k and two parachutes immediately on landing and wrote he would detonate a bomb if they did not comply with his demands.
When she returned, Cooper had moved over to allow her to sit down and revealed what appeared to be a bomb.
The pilot, Captain William Scott, radioed to ground control to relay Cooper’s demands and said they had been told not to land until the money was prepared and two parachutes had been supplied.
Cooper warned that the money should only be in $20 bills and should not have successive serial numbers.
Authorities rushed to gather the money with the varying serial numbers, but each bill they chose started with L.
They finally gathered the money and parachutes and were ordered to have only one individual meet the plane at an empty, well-lit area of the runway.
Cooper had reportedly not chosen the plane he boarded at random.
Authorities said he was familiar with the Boeing 727-100 before he bought his ticket and used his knowledge to carry out the heist.
After receiving the money and the parachute, Cooper released the 36 passengers, and Shaffner, but told the second flight attendant, Tina Mucklow, and the three men in the cockpit to remain on board.
He told Scott to remain below the altitude of 10k feet and to keep the airspeed below 150 knots, which would allow an experienced skydiver to jump from the plane safely.
The crew was ordered to depressurize the cabin which would allow the door to be opened and the aft stairs lowered without a gust of wind coming into the cabin.
They were then told to remain in the cockpit, which did not have any windows, and to not come out until they landed in Reno, Nevada.
At the time, there were no cameras on planes, and 15 minutes into the flight, a red light came on, warning the pilot that the plane door was open.
Scott asked Cooper on the intercom if he was okay and needed anything, Cooper yelled, “No!”
Those were the last words ever heard from DB Cooper.
When the plane landed in Reno, the crew finally opened the cockpit door to find the cabin empty, the money gone, and one parachute left behind.
The pilot notated their location when the cabin door was opened mid-flight, having suspected that was when Cooper had skydived from the plane.
However, the inclement weather that day prevented authorities from conducting a search until the following day, but when they responded to the area, they found no evidence to determine if Cooper had survived the jump.
His body has never been found.
In 1980, a boy was digging in the sand near a river in north Portland when he found a bag of money that matched the serial numbers of Cooper’s money, all beginning with L.
It led authorities to believe that Cooper had perished in his dive, sending the bag of money into the nearby river.
On the 50th anniversary of Cooper’s disappearance, Katie Bush, a historian at the Clark County Historical Museum in Vancouver, Washington, told OPB that people continue to ask about him half a century later.
She told the outlet, “The mythos of D.B. Cooper is really what keeps it alive.”
She continued, “The other big names in crime that happened around here, and not to try and valorize or anything, but like the Green River Killer, Ted Bundy – there was some closure that happened to that, and this is still a complete mystery.”
But she said people have other motives to learn the truth about what happened to the infamous DB Cooper.
“Everyone’s hoping that they can find some of his money out there,” she said.
“Maybe someday it will come floating down the Columbia and we’ll find it. We all want to find a bag of money on the side of the road.”
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The FBI officially closed the DB Cooper case in July 2016, although the mystery remains unsolved.
Upon closing the case, the FBI said it was closing “one of the longest and most exhaustive investigations in [its] history.”
