Episode 3. The Mystery of D.B. Cooper

The Effect

It is the 24th November 1971 and at Portland International Airport a man checking in under the name ‘Dan Cooper’, purchases a one-way ticket and boards Flight 305 to Seattle. ‘Dan Cooper’ is a common enough name and, indeed, the man’s physical appearance is also quite ordinary. In fact, he is later described by others at the airport that day as “unremarkable”. Mr Cooper is simply a slightly balding caucasian male in his forties, seemingly taking a flight for work, and dressed as one would expect a businessman to be dressed: wearing a dark suit, white shirt and black tie, and carrying a single piece of luggage. A briefcase.

Dan Cooper is the last of the six crew and thirty-six passengers to board Flight 305 that day, which just so happens to be the day before Thanksgiving. He sits in the last row of the aircraft, a Boeing 727, and casually orders a bourbon and soda. Scheduled to be in the air for around an hour, the flight takes off promptly at 2.50pm. And nothing at all seems untoward. Nothing, that is, until Mr Cooper signals to one of the flight attendants, Florence Schaffner, and hands her a note. Schaffner doesn’t think much of it at first, merely slips the piece of paper into her pocket. But Cooper stops her. ‘You might want to read that now,’ he says. Puzzled, Florence Schaffner unfolds the note and scans the first line: ‘Miss. I have a bomb and briefcase and want you to sit by me.’ The colour drains from the woman’s face and she hurriedly drops down into the seat beside Cooper, who opens his briefcase and reveals its contents to her, contents she later describes to the authorities as consisting of: six sticks of dynamite, a battery and a dense tangle of wires. Follow my instructions carefully, Cooper tells Schaffner, or we’ll all be dead.

Cooper goes on to make a very specific set of demands. He asks for a total of four parachutes - two front attaching parachutes and two back - $200K in small bills in a knapsack, and a fuel truck waiting on the ground at Seattle airport. The demands are relayed to the plane’s captain, William Scott, who in turn radios air traffic control, asking them to alert the authorities. But securing $200K in cash - or around a million dollars in today’s money - is not easy and, unbeknownst to the rest of Flight 305’s passengers, who are kept completely oblivious to the seriousness of the situation unfolding around them, the plane is kept in the air for two hours until Cooper’s demands can be met. In case the worst should happen and the bomb go off, it circles above the waters of Puget Sound, while special agents on the ground scramble to assemble the cash, fuel and parachutes. And also take what they think will be a foolproof measure in enabling them to identify the perpetrator of the crime: photographing and recording the serial number of every bill they intend to hand over.

It is almost 6pm by the time Flight 305 finally lands. At Cooper’s insistence, the blinds are all kept down, preventing the scores of scope rifles on the ground from taking a clear shot inside. Cooper also specifies that the plane should remain parked on the runway, some distance from the buildings, and another flight attendant, Tina Mucklowe, is sent outside to interact with the authorities now swarming the ground at Seattle. While the plane refuels and the passengers disembark, with Cooper’s permission, she gradually brings the parachutes and money on board. The cash alone weighs 21 pounds and the crew still in attendance on Flight 305 cannot help but think that Cooper has specifically requested four parachutes because he plans to take hostages with him as he makes his escape. Nevertheless, Mucklowe hands them over, together with instructions on how to use the parachutes, which Cooper refuses, singling him out as an experienced parachutist.

For the four crew members still left on board the aircraft, their ordeal is not over. At 7.40pm, less than two hours after landing in Seattle, the plane takes off again, with Cooper instructing that it now heads in the direction of Mexico City. And that is not the end of his demands. He is very particular about how the aircraft must now be flown. The wing flaps should be down, he says, as though the flight is taking off, the landing gear also kept down, to create drag, slowing the plane’s speed. In addition, the aircraft should, he insists, be flown at an altitude of only 10 thousand feet. Despite an appeal from the captain that it would be far too dangerous to fly so low and so slow, Cooper will not be dissuaded. He is confident the plane will be fine.

Up ahead, a storm is gathering, and Cooper tells the remaining crew to all go into the cockpit. But before she does, Tina Mucklowe helps Cooper to lower the plane’s rear stairs. Air gushes into the cabin, almost sucking them both into the frigid night. Mucklowe scrabbles to safety, while behind her Cooper removes his tie, fixes on his knapsack and parachute. ‘Will you please take that bomb with you?’ Mucklowe pleads, before joining her colleagues. He doesn’t reply.

At around 11pm, seven hours after the skyjacking began, the flight lands safely in Reno, Nevada. The FBI rush on board, searching every inch of the plane for the mysterious Dan Cooper, a man who has apparently pulled off the unthinkable. But together with his parachute, briefcase and the $200K ransom, Dan Cooper has completely vanished. Never to be seen again.

The Method

The Dan Cooper skyjacking in November, 1971, was a heist almost too bizarre to believe. A man had single-handedly commandeered a passenger aircraft, stolen $200K in cash and sky dived into the wilderness in what would have been a difficult jump for anyone to survive. Yet Cooper did it on a stormy night in early winter, with no more specialist equipment than a suit and dress shoes. And despite a massive search, no trace of the man, his parachute or the vast majority of the money has ever been found. It has been a case that has baffled both professional and amateur detectives for almost five decades. But just how did the enigmatic Dan Cooper get away with such a crime, such a grand effect, and who might he have been? There seem to be as many explanations, as many methods, as there were dollars stolen that night in 1971, each raising more and more questions.

There were a whole plethora of variables at play just to determine where Cooper might have landed. What was the exact location of the plane when he flung himself from the rear stairwell? How might he have been affected by the wind speed? When did he pull the ripcord? Did his parachutes even open? Perhaps Dan Cooper never survived the jump at all…

If there had been a problem with his parachutes, from a fall of 10 thousand feet, an average-sized human would hit the ground at well over 150mph. Such a speed would create a huge impact, either driving a body into the earth where - in such a wild landscape - it could easily and quickly become obscured by soil and vegetation, or else smashed onto rocks - the obliterated body parts rapidly dispersed by wild animals. A gruesome thought, but a distinct possibility.

But suppose Dan Cooper didn’t have a problem with his parachutes and landed safely, perhaps in water. Indeed, a large white object like an opened chute was reported floating on the surface of Lake Merwin. But how could Cooper have survived the temperatures of such a large, natural body of water in late November? Could he have been wearing extra layers - even waterproofs - under his dark suit? No traces of any clothing related to Cooper have ever been found. But in 1978, seven years after the crime was carried out, a hunter discovers a plastic placard from a 727, seemingly ripped from the rear stairwell of Flight 305. Fifteen months after that, in February 1980, campers preparing a barbecue on the shores of the Columbia River set about digging a firepit, but instead dig up bills totalling over $5000. Although they were badly degraded, the serial numbers matched those recorded during the skyjacking. So, yes, suppose Cooper did land safely. He could still have perished in the hours or days following his jump, in the unforgiving landscape of Washington State. Although, despite a massive search by air and land, plus a submarine search of Lake Merwin, no body has ever been located.

When the plane lands in Reno that November night in 1971, sixty-six latent fingerprints are found. And not only that, but it is discovered that Dan Cooper has left several items behind, too: two parachutes, eight cigarette butts, his black clip-on tie and a silver tie clip. Since no DNA analysis is available at the time and there is no fingerprint database for the authorities to refer to, none of the fingerprints can be identified. The tie and tie-clip are, like descriptions of the man himself, also unremarkable. So a police sketch artist is drafted in to create a likeness of Dan Cooper from eye-witness accounts. When this likeness is released to the public, it generates thousands of tip-offs from people certain they know who Dan Cooper is, sparking an obsession with identifying the skyjacker that has endured ever since. But do any of the theories as to who was responsible for this most audacious crime hold any water?

Back in 1971, the authorities start with the name itself, the FBI suspecting ‘Dan Cooper’ is an alias. Since they know that criminals using aliases often choose one with some similarity to their real name, a check is run by Portland Police. They locate a petty criminal operating in the area with the name ‘DB Cooper’, and in the hours after the skyjacking, swoop in on Cooper’s house, hoping to arrest him making his way back to the property with his $200K ransom. But when they arrive, DB Cooper is already home. Knowing he couldn’t possibly have made it back to his house so quickly if he’d been the man responsible for the skyjacking, and with the marked cash nowhere to be found, DB Cooper is quickly ruled out of the investigation. However, a reporter from the Oregon Journal mistakenly reveals this as the name of the man police are still looking for, and ‘DB Cooper’ sticks, and is still used as the moniker of this mysterious criminal to this day.

The next suspect to be investigated comes as the result of an anonymous tip-off from a man who rings the FBI’s ‘tip line’. This man claims to be certain his friend is DB Cooper, stating that over a beer the same friend outlined to him in great detail a plan of how to hijack a plane. The name of the man with this plan is Richard Floyd McCoy Jnr. Authorities dig into McCoy’s background, as more and more aspects of his life seem to fit the bill. McCoy has completed two army tours, and served as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. He once worked as a skydiver for the Utah National Guard and so possesses a considerable knowledge of planes, skydiving and explosives. Even more intriguing is the fact that, according to the tipster, he also carried out a second skyjacking just five months after Flight 305. And the similarities between these two skyjackings are uncanny: both men handed notes to staff on the flights claiming they were carrying bombs, both men allowed the planes’ passengers to go free, and both men insisted the planes were flown low and slow when they made their jumps. Even his family positively identify the tie and clip as belonging to McCoy. As a result, handwriting analysis is carried out to compare the notes used in the two crimes, and it is deemed to be a positive match to McCoy. His home is searched and a duffel bag of cash found there, leading to his arrest for the second skyjacking and a forty-five year prison sentence. But, despite all this, the handwritten note is the only piece of evidence to link him to the Flight 305 skyjacking. His fingerprints do not match those found on the plane, eyewitnesses swear he is not the man they saw and, moreover, McCoy has a valid alibi - his signature on receipts and forms in Las Vegas, where he spent the Thanksgiving of 1971. Soon after he is sentenced for the second skyjacking, McCoy makes a daring escape from prison and is killed in a shoot-out with the FBI, taking anything he might have known about the Flight 305 heist with him to the grave.

The DB Cooper case, and the subsequent tangled string of leads presented to the authorities, spawns a whole squadron of armchair detectives and amateur sleuths, all vying to be the one to finally crack the crime. One such group, the ‘Case Breakers’, announces in 2011 that they have identified a new suspect. An informant has come to them to share details of a man regularly claiming to be DB Cooper, they say: a larger-than-life cocaine dealer called Dick Briggs or ‘DB’. At a party in Oregon in 1980, Briggs is asked to prove that he is indeed Cooper, and responds by pointing at a couple at the same party and predicting that within five days, they will be the ones to find the stolen money. Amazingly, five days later the couple’s son unearths $5800 in decomposing cash, and although severely deteriorated, the serial numbers do in fact match the serial numbers of the notes recorded during the Cooper heist. But Dick Briggs doesn’t match the physical description of Cooper and doesn’t have a background in parachute training. Furthermore, when his fingerprints are compared to those recovered from Flight 305, they don’t match either. Briggs dies in a single vehicle car accident in December 1980, making the chance of questioning him about the case a complete impossibility.

The identification of Briggs as a suspect quickly leads the Case Breakers to turn their attention to another man. An associate of Dick Briggs named Robert Rackstraw. Unlike Briggs, photos of Rackstraw from the early 1970s do bear a similarity to the police likeness of Cooper. And, indeed, Rackstraw was investigated by the authorities for the crime in the late ‘70s. The Case Breakers are certain: Rackstraw, they say, has all the credentials necessary to carry out such a heist. He was part of the air mobile division in Vietnam, has undergone para training and is familiar with explosives. He also has a background of rule breaking and criminal activity. Dismissed from the army for insubordination, he holds a record of previous arrests for forgery, domestic violence, murder, and is also known to have attempted to fake his own death by issuing a false mayday call from a plane, before safely landing that same plane and painting it a different colour. Furthermore, he was introduced to skydiving by his uncle Ed Cooper. But despite all this, the evidence linking Rackstraw to the skyjacking of Fight 305 is all circumstantial. Could the real reason behind this lack of concrete evidence be down to the fact that Rackstraw once worked for the CIA, and there is some kind of cover-up at play? We will never know, as in 2019 he dies of a heart condition, never confessing to being DB Cooper. Indeed, Rackstraw’s only admission was that he was afraid of heights.

Over the years that follow, more and more theories sprout up as to the identity of this now near legendary criminal. Could he be a former paratrooper with the Michigan Air National Guard, a man who claimed to parachute safely down to a highway with his $200K ransom, from where an associate picked him up and drove him to safety? Could he have been a retired US army major out for revenge on the FBI, following his daughter’s tragic death in a previous plane jacking? Or could the elusive DB Cooper have actually been two men working together - railroad staff with a grudge against air travel for taking business away from the railways?

In 2009 the tie Cooper left behind on the aircraft was analysed and traces of chemical elements found on the material, elements that in the early 1970s could only have come from a few laboratories or aerospace maintenance facilities across the country. Yet still no solid suspect could be identified. In fact, in the 45 years before the case was officially closed in 2016, the FBI investigated over a thousand suspects in the DB Cooper skyjacking.

The unremarkable-looking man with an unremarkable name has since become something of a US icon, an everyday seeker of justice who managed to make a superhero-style escape with a vast sum of money and, quite literally, vanish. As the years go past, the likelihood of definitively identifying Cooper dwindles ever further, and it’s quite possible that this so-called ‘Robin Hood’ of the skies may never be found.

© 2025, Lora Jones. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited without written permission.