On November 24, 1971, a man using the name Dan Cooper boarded a Portland to Seattle flight and handed a note to the flight attendant, saying that he had a bomb and was hijacking the plane. The man demanded that the plane land at Seattle's SeaTac Airport.
The plane sat on the rainy tarmac for about two hours, while FBI agents tried to negotiate the release of 36 passengers and crew members. In his hijacking note, Cooper demanded that he be given $200,000 and four parachutes. The Northwest Airlines Boeing 727 stayed on the runway for nearly two hours until Cooper's demands were met. He released all but the pilot, co-pilot and flight attendant.
The pilot was ordered by Cooper to fly to Reno at a low speed and an altitude of 10,000 feet. Early into that flight, he ordered the flight attendant into the cockpit. A few minutes later, it became obvious the hijacker had opened the stairwell at the back of the 727, and had parachuted out into the frigid and rainy night. He was the first hijacker to have ever pulled off such a hijacking.
For 36 years, the FBI has investigated the crime, but has never determined the true identity of Dan Cooper. It was presumed Cooper died in the jump.
FBI agent Larry Carr says Cooper had apparently tried to use a dummy reserve parachute, unknowingly supplied by the FBI. It was stitched shut and used for classroom demonstrations only.
"There are so many mysteries within the mystery," said Carr as he displayed old evidence from the D.B. Cooper file. "There's no longer a reason to hold that back. Someone may be sitting on something, and that one piece of the puzzle that fits that we've been missing that leads to resolution of the case."
Despite many leads and interviews with potential suspects, the D.B. Cooper mystery has remained unsolved. About eight years after the hijacking, an 8-year-old child found about $5,800 worth of decaying$20 bills in the sand along the Washington State side of the Columbia River in Cowlitz County. The serial numbers showed the bills were among those given to Cooper. Investigators have often theorized that Cooper fell to his death in the river, but they've never found his body or the missing parachutes.
