D.B. Cooper is in the news again. New claims are being made about the identity of the man who was last seen Thanksgiving eve, 1971 aboard a Boeing 727 as it was flying over southwest Washington. He parachuted from the plane via its rear exit stairs, launching decades of debate about who he was and what was his fate.
Northwest Orient Airlines flight #305 began its itinerary in Washington D.C. on November 24, 1971. After stops in Minneapolis, Missoula, Great Falls and Spokane, the aircraft was boarding passengers in Portland for its final leg, a thirty-minute flight to Seattle.
Taking a seat near the rear was a middle-aged man conservatively dressed in a dark suit and tie under a white raincoat, carrying a black attaché case. He lit a cigarette and ordered a bourbon and soda. He had paid cash for his ticket at the Portland airport counter and, in those pre-TSA days, gave his name as Dan Cooper. Shortly after takeoff, he handed a note to a flight attendant that he had a bomb. He opened his attaché to show her red cylinders attached with wires to a battery.
After landing in Seattle, he allowed the other passengers, but not the crew, to disembark. He sipped a second bourbon and soda while awaiting delivery of $200,000 in cash – equivalent to more than $1.2 million today – and four parachutes. After refueling, the plane took off, headed to Reno for another refueling, then to Mexico City. Somewhere north of Portland, “Cooper” opened the aircraft’s rear stairs and stepped out, carrying his 10,000 unmarked twenty-dollar bills. That was the last anyone saw of D.B. Cooper.
In the 1960s, and into the seventies, airplane hijackings – “skyjacking” – were so frequent, especially to Cuba, that they became material for stand-up comics. D.B. Cooper became something of a folk hero. The Ariel General Store & Tavern, in the general vicinity of where Cooper bailed out, for years hosted an annual “D.B. Cooper Days.”
In 1980, an eight-year-old boy discovered three packets of twenty-dollar bills on the shore of the Columbia River. Although badly deteriorated, FBI technicians confirmed the bills, bound with rubber bands and still in sequential order, were part of the D.B. Cooper ransom. No additional currency has been found. Whether the hijacker survived, or even could have, has been debated for decades. No trace of Dan Cooper, or any evidence of his remains, or his identity, has been found. In 2016, forty-five years after the hijacking, the Federal Bureau of Investigation finally closed its case. D.B. Cooper’s is the only case of air piracy in commercial aviation history that remains unsolved.
A TV producer named Thomas Colbert claims that he, with a team of retired law-enforcement and military officers, has determined who Cooper is: a former paratrooper and Vietnam War veteran named Robert Rackstraw. Now retired and living in San Diego, Rackstraw had been a suspect, but the F.B.I. ruled him out in 1979. And Rackstraw isn’t talking to anybody.
And Northwest Orient Airlines? The company later dropped the “Orient” and in 2008 was absorbed into Delta Airlines.
