On November 24, 1971, an unidentified man, who later came to be known as D. B. Cooper, hijacked a plane and disappeared after procuring a ransom amount from the airlines. Cooper threatened the passengers and the pilot with a bundle of red sticks and wires. He demanded a ransom amount and promised to free some passengers. After he received the ransom, he asked the pilot to head to Mexico City and parachuted out of the plane after the take-off.
D. B. Cooper or his body, as many suggest he might not have survived the jump, remains a mystery even half a century after the incident occurred. He left behind a clip-on tie before he jumped off. The accessory became a central piece of physical evidence in the case. It was a steep jump from 10,000 feet over southern Washington, and Larry Carr, a former FBI agent who worked closely on the case, told CNN that there are multiple reasons to believe D. B. Cooper is dead.
It was a stormy night when Cooper decided to skydive off the plane with a parachute. Moreover, D. B. Cooper reportedly didn’t ask the pilot on board for any updates on the location of the plane. He was seemingly inexperienced when it came to skydiving or any kind of parachuting. However, the allegations of Cooper’s inexperience are only suspicions.
Although the ransom money he demanded and the gravity of the crime doesn’t make D. B. Cooper’s hijack an inherently bizarre one, his grand escape and the mystery make it one of the most popular crimes.
How much did D. B. Cooper Steal?
D. B. Cooper demanded a total of $200,000 and four parachutes as ransom money and set 36 passengers free in return. He then ordered the pilot to fly to Mexico City, and after the plane took off, he strapped the money to his waist and parachuted off. Authorities could not recover the full amount stolen by Cooper. However, the New York Times reported that a sum of $6000 from the total cash was released by the FBI in 1986.
14-year-old Brian Ingram of El Reno, Oklahoma, reportedly found the bunch of $20 bills stolen by D. B. Cooper. He found the notes water-stained and partially decomposed on the banks of the Columbia River in southwestern Washington in 1980. As a reward, Brian was offered $3000, half of the total amount he found. The remaining was paid back to the Royal Globe Insurance Company, the insurance company that backed Northwest Orient Airlines.
The tie that D. B. Cooper left behind and the ransom money the river found remain the central evidence in finding the mysterious hijacker. The river was 40 feet deep and half a mile wide at the time of D. B. Cooper’s escape, leading many to believe that Cooper did not survive the jump.
The rest of the $194,000 paid by the Airlines in 1971 remains unrecovered. It is suspected that the money is still tied to D. B. Cooper’s waist in case he didn’t make it alive after disappearing into the night on Thanksgiving Eve in 1971.
The Mystery of D. B. Cooper is a 2020 true-crime documentary that explores the legend of Cooper and the investigation to find the unidentified hijacker that began in 1971 and continues even to this day. The docufilm is streaming on Max.
