Search for ransom money
A month after the hijacking, the FBI distributed lists of the ransom serial numbers to financial institutions, casinos, racetracks, and other businesses that routinely conducted significant cash transactions, and to law enforcement agencies around the world. Northwest Orient offered a reward of 15% of the recovered money, to a maximum of $25,000. In early 1972, U.S. Attorney General John N. Mitchell released the serial numbers to the general public. In 1972, two men used counterfeit 20-dollar bills printed with Cooper serial numbers to swindle $30,000 from a Newsweek reporter named Karl Fleming in exchange for an interview with a man they falsely claimed was the hijacker.
In early 1973, with the ransom money still missing, The Oregon Journal republished the serial numbers and offered $1,000 to the first person to turn in a ransom bill to the newspaper or any FBI field office. In Seattle, the Post-Intelligencer made a similar offer with a $5,000 reward. The offers remained in effect until Thanksgiving 1974, and though there were several near-matches, no genuine bills were found. In 1975 Northwest Orient's insurer, Global Indemnity Co., complied with an order from the Minnesota Supreme Court and paid the airline's $180,000 claim on the ransom money.
Later developments
Subsequent analyses indicated that the original landing zone estimate was inaccurate: Scott, who was flying the aircraft manually because of Cooper's speed and altitude demands, later determined that his flight path was significantly farther east than initially assumed. Additional data from a variety of sources—in particular Continental Airlines pilot Tom Bohan, who was flying four minutes behind Flight 305—indicated that the wind direction factored into drop zone calculations had been wrong, possibly by as much as 80 degrees. This and other supplemental data suggested that the actual drop zone was probably south-southeast of the original estimate, in the drainage area of the Washougal River.
Investigation suspended
On July 8, 2016, the FBI announced that it was suspending active investigation of the Cooper case, citing a need to focus its investigative resources and manpower on issues of higher and more urgent priority. Local field offices will continue to accept any legitimate physical evidence—related specifically to the parachutes or the ransom money—that may emerge in the future. The 60-volume case file compiled over the 45-year course of the investigation will be preserved for historical purposes at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. On the FBI website, there is currently a 28-part packet full of evidence gathered over the years. All the evidence is open to the public to read.
Physical evidence
The official physical description of Cooper has remained unchanged and is considered reliable. Flight attendants Schaffner and Mucklow, who spent the most time with Cooper, were interviewed on the same night in separate cities, and gave nearly identical descriptions: 5 feet 10 inches (1.78 m) to 5 feet 11 inches (1.80 m) tall, 170 to 180 pounds (77 to 82 kg), mid-40s, with close-set piercing brown eyes and swarthy skin.
Three major pieces of evidence were left on the plane when D.B. Cooper jumped: His black clip on tie, a mother of pearl tie clip, and eight filter-tipped Raleigh cigarette butts. The information about the tie and tie clip were not announced to the public for almost 20 years, when in 1991 it was revealed in the book D.B. Cooper: The Real McCoy. Sometime after the hijacking the cigarette butts were lost, and have not turned up since.
Only four pieces of evidence (two definite and two potential) linked to D. B. Cooper have turned up from 1978–2017:
· In November 1978, a placard printed with instructions for lowering the aft stairs of a 727 was found by a deer hunter near a logging road about 13 miles (21 km) east of Castle Rock, Washington, well north of Lake Merwin, but within Flight 305's basic flight path.
· On Sunday, February 10, 1980, eight-year-old Brian Ingram was vacationing with his family on the Columbia River at a beachfront known as Tina (or Tena) Bar, about 9 miles (14 km) downstream from Vancouver, Washington, and 20 miles (32 km) southwest of Ariel. He uncovered three packets of the ransom cash as he raked the sandy riverbank to build a campfire. The bills were significantly disintegrated, but still bundled in rubber bands. FBI technicians confirmed that the money was indeed a portion of the ransom: two packets of 100 twenty-dollar bills each, and a third packet of 90, all arranged in the same order as when given to Cooper. In 1986, after protracted negotiations, the recovered bills were divided equally between Ingram and Northwest Orient's insurer; the FBI retained fourteen examples as evidence. Ingram sold fifteen of his bills at auction in 2008 for about $37,000. To date, none of the 9,710 remaining bills have turned up anywhere in the world. Their serial numbers remain available online for public search. The Columbia River ransom money and the airstair instruction placard remain the only confirmed physical evidence from the hijacking ever found outside the aircraft.
· In 2017, a group of volunteer investigators uncovered what they believe to be "potential evidence, what appears to be a decades-old parachute strap" in the Pacific Northwest. This was followed later in August 2017 with a piece of foam, suspected of being part of Cooper's backpack.
Subsequent FBI disclosures
In late 2007, the FBI announced that a partial DNA profile had been obtained from three organic samples found on Cooper's clip-on tie in 2001, though they later acknowledged that there is no evidence that the hijacker was the source of the sample material. "The tie had two small DNA samples, and one large sample," said Special Agent Fred Gutt. "It's difficult to draw firm conclusions from these samples." The Bureau also made public a file of previously unreleased evidence, including Cooper's 1971 plane ticket (price: $20.00, paid in cash), and posted previously unreleased composite sketches and fact sheets, along with a request to the general public for information which might lead to Cooper's positive identification.
They also disclosed that Cooper chose the older of the two primary parachutes supplied to him, rather than the technically superior professional sport parachute; and that from the two reserve parachutes, he selected a "dummy"—an unusable unit with an inoperative ripcord intended for classroom demonstrations, although it had clear markings identifying it to any experienced skydiver as non-functional. (He cannibalized the other, functional reserve parachute, possibly using its shrouds to tie the money bag shut, and to secure the bag to his body as witnessed by Mucklow.) The FBI stressed that inclusion of the dummy reserve parachute, one of four obtained in haste from a Seattle skydiving school, was accidental.
In March 2009, the FBI disclosed that Tom Kaye, a paleontologist from the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle, had assembled a team of "citizen sleuths", including scientific illustrator Carol Abraczinskas and metallurgist Alan Stone. The group, eventually known as the Cooper Research Team, reinvestigated important components of the case using GPS, satellite imagery, and other technologies unavailable in 1971. Although little new information was gained regarding the buried ransom money or Cooper's landing zone, they were able to find and analyze hundreds of minute particles on Cooper's tie using electron microscopy. Lycopodium spores (likely from a pharmaceutical product) were identified, as well as fragments of bismuth and aluminum.
In November 2011, Kaye announced that particles of pure (unalloyed) titanium had also been found on the tie. He explained that titanium, which was much rarer in the 1970s than in the 2010s, was at that time found only in metal fabrication or production facilities, or at chemical companies using it (combined with aluminum) to store extremely corrosive substances. The findings suggested that Cooper may have been a chemist or a metallurgist, or possibly an engineer or manager (the only employees who wore ties in such facilities at that time) in a metal or chemical manufacturing plant, or at a company that recovered scrap metal from those types of factories.
In January 2017, Kaye reported that rare earth minerals such as cerium and strontium sulfide had also been identified among particles from the tie. One of the rare applications for such elements in the 1970s was Boeing's supersonic transport development project, suggesting the possibility that Cooper was a Boeing employee. Other possible sources of the material included plants that manufactured cathode ray tubes, such as the Portland firms Teledyne and Tektronix.
Theories and conjectures
Over the 45-year span of its active investigation, the FBI periodically made public some of its working hypotheses and tentative conclusions, drawn from witness testimony and the scarce physical evidence.
Suspect profiling
Cooper appeared to be familiar with the Seattle area and may have been an Air Force veteran, based on testimony that he recognized the city of Tacoma from the air as the jet circled Puget Sound, and his accurate comment to Mucklow that McChord AFB was approximately 20 minutes' driving time from the Seattle-Tacoma Airport—a detail most civilians would not know, or comment upon. His financial situation was very likely desperate. According to the FBI's retired chief investigator, Ralph Himmelsbach, extortionists and other criminals who steal large amounts of money nearly always do so because they need it urgently; otherwise, the crime is not worth the considerable risk. Alternatively, Cooper may have been "a thrill seeker" who made the jump "just to prove it could be done."
Agents theorized that Cooper took his alias from a popular Belgian comic book series of the 1970s featuring the fictional hero Dan Cooper, a Royal Canadian Air Force test pilot who took part in numerous heroic adventures, including parachuting. (One cover from the series, reproduced on the FBI web site, depicts test pilot Cooper skydiving in full paratrooper regalia.) Because the Dan Cooper comics were never translated into English, nor imported to the U.S., they speculated that he may have encountered them during a tour of duty in Europe. The Cooper Research Team suggested the alternative possibility that Cooper was Canadian, and found the comics in Canada, where they were also sold. They noted his specific demand for "negotiable American currency", a phrase seldom if ever used by American citizens; since witnesses stated that Cooper had no distinguishable accent, Canada would be his most likely country of origin if he were not a U.S. citizen.
Evidence suggested that Cooper was knowledgeable about flying technique, aircraft, and the terrain. He demanded four parachutes to force the assumption that he might compel one or more hostages to jump with him, thus ensuring he would not be deliberately supplied with sabotaged equipment. He chose a 727-100 aircraft because it was ideal for a bail-out escape, due to not only its aft airstair but also the high, aftward placement of all three engines, which allowed a reasonably safe jump despite the proximity of the engine exhaust. It had "single-point fueling" capability, a then-recent innovation that allowed all tanks to be refueled rapidly through a single fuel port. It also had the ability (unusual for a commercial jet airliner) to remain in slow, low-altitude flight without stalling; and Cooper knew how to control its air speed and altitude without entering the cockpit, where he could have been overpowered by the three pilots. In addition, Cooper was familiar with important details, such as the appropriate flap setting of 15 degrees (which was unique to that aircraft), and the typical refueling time. He knew that the aft airstair could be lowered during flight—a fact never disclosed to civilian flight crews, since there was no situation on a passenger flight that would make it necessary—and that its operation, by a single switch in the rear of the cabin, could not be overridden from the cockpit. Some of this knowledge was virtually unique to CIA paramilitary units.
In addition to planning his escape, Cooper retrieved the note and wore dark glasses, which indicated that he had a certain level of sophistication in avoiding the things that had aided the identification of the perpetrator of the best-known case of a ransom: the Lindbergh kidnapping. It is not clear how he could have reasonably expected to ever spend the money, fence it at a discount or otherwise profit. Although Cooper made the familiar-from-fiction demand of non-sequentially numbered small bills, mass publicity over the Lindbergh case had long made it public knowledge that even with 1930s technology, getting non-sequential bills in a ransom was no defense against the numbers being logged and used to track down a perpetrator. In the Lindbergh case, fencing what he could as hot money and being very careful with what he did personally pass, the perpetrator had been caught through the ransom money nonetheless, with identification and handwriting evidence brought in only at the trial.
Although unconscionably perilous by the high safety, training and equipment standards of skydivers, whether Cooper's jump was virtually suicidal is a matter of dispute. The author of an overview and comparison of World War II aircrew bail-outs with Cooper's drop asserts a probability for his survival, and suggests that like copycat Martin McNally, Cooper lost the ransom during descent. The mystery of how the ransom could have been washed into Tena Bar from any Cooper jump area remains. The Tena Bar find anomalies led one local journalist to suggest that Cooper dumped the ransom, knowing he could never spend it.
According to Kaye's research team, Cooper's meticulous planning may also have extended to the timing of his operation and even his choice of attire. "The FBI searched but couldn't find anyone who disappeared that weekend," Kaye wrote, suggesting that the perpetrator may have returned to his normal occupation. "If you were planning on going 'back to work on Monday', then you would need as much time as possible to get out of the woods, find transportation and get home. The very best time for this is in front of a four-day weekend, which is the timing Dan Cooper chose for his crime." Furthermore, "if he was planning ahead, he knew he had to hitchhike out of the woods, and it is much easier to get picked up in a suit and tie than in old blue jeans."
The Bureau was more skeptical, concluding that Cooper lacked crucial skydiving skills and experience. "We originally thought Cooper was an experienced jumper, perhaps even a paratrooper," said Special Agent Larry Carr, leader of the investigative team from 2006 until its dissolution in 2016. "We concluded after a few years this was simply not true. A Boeing 727 at flaps 15 degrees and light weight probably flies at 150 knots or 172 mph. No experienced parachutist would have jumped in the pitch-black night, in the rain, with a 172 mph wind in his face wearing loafers and a trench coat. It was simply too risky. He also missed that his reserve parachute was only for training and had been sewn shut—something a skilled skydiver would have checked." He also failed to bring or request a helmet, chose to jump with the older and technically inferior of the two primary parachutes supplied to him, and jumped into a probable 15 degrees Fahrenheit wind at 10,000 feet in November over Washington state without proper protection against the extreme wind chill.
The FBI speculated from the beginning that Cooper did not survive his jump. "Diving into the wilderness without a plan, without the right equipment, in such terrible conditions, he probably never even got his chute open," said Carr. Even if he did land safely, agents contended that survival in the mountainous terrain at the onset of winter would have been all but impossible without an accomplice at a predetermined landing point. This would have required a precisely timed jump—necessitating, in turn, cooperation from the flight crew. There is no evidence that Cooper requested or received any such help from the crew, nor that he had any clear idea where he was when he jumped into the stormy, overcast darkness.
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