The intriguing mystery: What happened to Dan Cooper, the only plane hijacker who could never be caught? | Abroad

Flashback to November 24, 1971: A smart gentleman with a briefcase puts cash on the table at Northwest Airlines for a ticket from Portland to Seattle. Eyewitnesses describe him as in his forties in a chic suit, with a raincoat and a black tie.

The flight only lasts 30 minutes, so Cooper quickly addresses the flight attendant on duty. He orders a whiskey and a soft drink from the last row.

Before they are in the air, Cooper hands a note to Florence Schaffner. “Another hopeless businessman in need of a break,” the 23-year-old beauty thinks, putting the paper in her pocket. Cooper addresses her politely. “Miss, you’d better read it. I have a bomb.”

The note says that Schaffner must sit next to him. This way he can show her the contents of his suitcase: a tangle of cables, red cylinders and a battery. She immediately fears the worst.

Schaffner writes down his demands and presents them to the pilot. It turns out that he wants $200,000 and four parachutes, and fuel must be refueled quickly upon landing. He would not let the other 35 passengers disembark until all conditions had been met.

The plane ended up circling Seattle for two hours, time it took to get everything practically settled. The other travelers were told that “a minor mechanical defect” had to be solved.

Stewardess Tina Mucklow has meanwhile become his new confidant. She noted that Cooper knew the area well. For example, he was able to indicate perfectly when they flew over the port city of Tacoma and he correctly indicated that it was only a twenty minute drive to the air force base at McChord Field. “He didn’t look nervous,” she recalls. “On the contrary, he seemed thoughtful and kept calm the whole time. I asked him why he chose Northwest Airlines for his act. He replied that he didn’t necessarily have anything against our airline, but that he felt a kind of resentment in him.”

After landing, Cooper received 10,000 $20 bills. Beforehand, the notes were quickly copied onto microfilm, so that they were registered if they were to reappear later. Spicy detail: Mucklow was the one who had to drag the heavy bag of money to him, in front of the astonished passengers. Jokingly, she asked if she could have some of the money. Cooper promptly offered her a stack of bills, but she politely declined.

After all passengers had disembarked, the crew was instructed to set course for Mexico City. However, the aircraft was not allowed to fly higher than 3,000 meters, the landing gear had to remain unfolded and the speed could not exceed 185 km/h.

All remaining crew members then had to sit in the cockpit. Not much later, the hijacker jumped out of the aircraft with a parachute, the bag of money and his ‘bomb case’. Immediately the last sign of life Cooper ever gave…

The FBI deployed major resources to locate the ingenious thief. Officers even pushed a 91-pound weight out of a plane in an effort to recreate the conditions and define a more precise search area. Two hundred soldiers joined forces, helicopters scanned the area to find any remains of the parachute.

Northwest Airlines also did its part, promising a 15 percent finder’s fee. The Oregon Journal published all serial numbers and would pay $1,000 to the first person to show up with a ticket to the plane hijacking. All efforts ultimately proved in vain.

Until eight-year-old Brain Ingram went to gather wood on the banks of the Columbia in 1980. He found three bundles containing 290 weathered bills, worth a total of $5,800. The serial numbers did match those of the ransom.

The remarkable find only led to more questions: Had the money gone straight into the water? Why were ten bills missing from one of the bundles? And where was the rest of the loot hidden? It will undoubtedly be worst for Ingram. After all, he was allowed to keep half of the money as a reward. In 2008, he put up for sale fifteen notes at auction, which brought him another $37,000.

In 45 years, more than a thousand suspects would pass in review. The tie Cooper had taken off just before his jump could, in theory, have caused a breakthrough. However, conclusive DNA evidence was not forthcoming.

In 2016, the FBI officially closed the investigation. “We have applied all the innovative investigative techniques, but now it is time to dedicate our staff to other more urgent matters,” the official statement read.

The US security agency speculated from the beginning that Cooper did not survive the jump himself. “That remains our main thesis,” explains Larry Carr. He was the last man to lead the investigation. “We certainly didn’t rule out the piste of an experienced paratrooper, but such a person would never take the plunge in those harsh weather conditions. The rain fell in torrents and the wind blew at high altitudes at speeds of 275 km/h. That was simply too risky.”

“Cooper also didn’t realize that his spare parachute was a sewn-up training piece, something that would never happen to an experienced skydiver. He also did not have a helmet or other decent material to protect himself against the extremely low wind chill. There’s a good chance he didn’t even manage to open his parachute in those circumstances.”

If Cooper landed safely, he still had to survive on mountainous terrain in the depths of winter. According to the FBI, this was only possible if an accomplice was waiting for him at a pre-arranged point. And to perform that precisely timed jump would have required the help of a crew member. “Very unlikely, there is absolutely no evidence for that,” it sounds.

And yet… Out of sheer fascination, several ‘copycats’ subsequently ventured a similar leap. Some even in worse weather conditions, others barely knew how to open their parachutes. Each and every one of them survived. And so the mystery lives on, all the way to Netflix: ‘DB Cooper: Where Are You?’