When a skyjacker known as D.B. Cooper chose Thanksgiving Eve 40 years ago to leap out of a jetliner into a cold, stormy night clutching a $200,000 ransom, he created more than a mystery.
Dan Cooper, as he had registered for the flight, gave birth to an American subculture.
"Cooper sleuthing" remains healthy as evidenced by a D.B. Cooper Symposium in Portland, Ore., on Saturday. (The "D.B." moniker was the result of a mistake in a news report.)
Not even Hollywood action heroes can outdo the legend of D.B. Cooper: After smoking a cigarette and ordering a bourbon and soda, a neatly dressed loner used the threat of a bomb to hijack a Northwest Orient 727 flying from Portland to Seattle on Nov 24, 1971. He politely released the 36 other passengers in exchange for $200,000 and four parachutes.
Cooper then ordered the plane to "fly to Mexico," but somewhere in a rainstorm over southeastern Washington forests, Cooper lowered the jet's rear escape ramp and stepped into history with a backpack full of $20 bills, leaving behind a clip-on tie. He was never seen again, and the crime is the only unsolved American hijacking. The only real development came in 1980, when an 8-year-old boy found $5,800 in tattered ransom money along the Columbia River near Vancouver, Wash.
FBI Special Agent Fred Gutt of the Seattle Division FBI Headquarters says the skyjacking "is still an open investigation. Some matters are still being researched, but we have no further leads at this time."
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A recent lead • Earlier this summer, Marla Cooper of Oklahoma City told the FBI that D.B. Cooper was her uncle L.D. Cooper. Marla Cooper says that as a young girl in 1971 she saw her uncle "bloody and bruised" at her home in Washington state.
Marla Cooper's uncle, who died in 1999, was ruled out in August when the DNA found on the necktie D.B. Cooper left behind did not match samples from L.D. Cooper's family.
Gutt acknowledges the DNA sample found on the necktie might not belong to D.B. Cooper.
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Was D.B. a Utahn? • Gregg Gossett, of Ogden, told reporters in 2008 that his late father once confessed that he was the hijacker. The FBI doesn't consider him a likely suspect.
A stronger connection to Cooper is Richard Floyd McCoy Jr. of Provo, a former Green Beret and Brigham Young University student.
A few months after Cooper's skyjacking attempt, McCoy successfully bailed out of the tail of a 727 over Provo with a $500,000 ransom. McCoy was soon arrested and convicted. Some conspiracy theorists believe he was either a Cooper accomplice or perhaps Cooper himself. McCoy only added grist to the theories when he escaped from federal prison and a 45-year sentence in 1974 by making a fake pistol out of dental paste, then driving a garbage truck with a gang of other inmates through the prison gate. McCoy was killed three months later in a shootout with police.
It is a tribute to the resonance of Cooper's legend in Utah that a bar in the basement of the Walker Center in Salt Lake City was named after him in the early 1970s and survived nearly three decades.
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New energy in the case • Geoffrey Gray, a freelance crime reporter, published Skyjack: The Hunt for D.B. Cooper this spring, a book that delves not only into the dozens of theories of what happened to D.B. Cooper, but also into the obsessive subcultural that has grown around the legend in four decades.
"Why this enduring fascination with D.B. Cooper after 40 years? Cooper was the ultimate individualist," says Gray, who believes Cooper survived the jump. "He was bold. He didn't just fight against the system, he fought against gravity itself. He transcended not just gravity but the moral dynamics of the nation. With his bourbon and cigarettes, he upholds our fascination with the genteel thief."
Gray doesn't favor any particular suspect but finds the alias "Dan Cooper" is a tantalizing link to a popular 1970s French comic-book hero. The comic-book Dan Cooper is a Royal Canadian Air Force test pilot familiar with parachuting. That and other evidence, Gray says, point to Cooper being a French Canadian.
Gray, who is sponsoring the D.B. Cooper Symposium, says he hopes to turn up more leads in the case by putting Cooper sleuths from around the country together in one room.
"A lot of people are content with this just being a mystery, but not me," Gray says. "I want to know who the guy is."
Gutt says, short of a physical evidence breakthrough, the case will remain unsolved and the fascination with D.B. Cooper will continue. "It's Northwest lore, if you will," Gutt says. "I understand why it holds the interest of folks. There's the lost treasure, a daring escape. And no one is injured — except maybe the hijacker. For all those reasons, it captures the imagination of people."
gwarchol@sltrib.com
