Mysteries Uncovered: True Stories of the Paranormal and Unexplained

In November 1971, a suave-looking businessman hijacked an airliner, demanded $200,000, and then parachuted over Washington state, never to be seen again. He became the subject of poems and songs and the inspiration for television characters, and even entered the annals of crime as a legend alongside the likes of Bonnie & Clyde and Jesse James. The case remains the only unsolved air piracy case in history.

The saga of D. B. Cooper began on a miserably wet and windy afternoon on November 24, 1971, when a man approached the flight counter at Portland International Airport. He had dark hair and a medium complexion, stood between 5 feet 10 inches and 6 feet (1.8m) tall, weighed around 170–180 pounds (77–82kg), and was in his mid- to late 40s. He was well dressed, wearing a business suit and raincoat and carrying a black suitcase that he checked in as hand luggage. He was unremarkable in every respect—just another airport visitor. The airline employee who attended him later recollected that the man’s behavior appeared perfectly normal as he booked himself a one-way ticket on Northwest Orient Airlines’ Flight 305 that afternoon for Seattle, Washington, giving the name “Dan Cooper.” He subsequently became known as “D. B. Cooper” after a wire service report erroneously referred to him this way.

The Boeing 727-100 departed Portland on time at 2:50pm with Cooper sitting in seat 18C. There were only 36 passengers on board—less than a third of the plane’s capacity. Once the plane was airborne, Cooper ordered a bourbon and soda and lit up a Raleigh filter-tipped cigarette (separate smoking sections on jetliners were not introduced until 1973; a smoking ban not introduced until late 1980s¹¹).

Shortly after takeoff, Cooper handed a note to flight attendant Florence Schaffner. Assuming the note was simply Cooper’s phone number, Schaffner stuffed it into her pocket without reading it. She was used to unwanted attention from male passengers. “I thought he was trying to hustle me,” she later said. Cooper then leaned forward and whispered, “Miss, you better look at that note. I have a bomb.”²² The note read, “I have a bomb in my briefcase. I will use it if necessary. I want you to sit next to me. You are being hijacked.”³³

Cooper slowly opened his briefcase, revealing a mass of wires and red-colored sticks. “All I’ve got to do is touch the end of this wire to the terminal,” he told Schaffner. He then ordered her to write down his demands: $200,000 in unmarked bills (more than $1 million today), four parachutes, and a truck waiting at Seattle-Tacoma (Sea-Tac) International Airport to refuel the aircraft. He said that if his demands were met, he would release all the passengers unharmed. If not, he would blow up the plane. Schaffner took the note and scurried off to the plane’s cockpit where the pilot, William Scott, immediately contacted Sea-Tac air control. They immediately contacted Seattle Police and the FBI, who in turn called Donald Nyrop, President of Northwest Orient Airlines. Nyrop contacted the pilot and instructed him to cooperate with Cooper and inform him that the company would pay the ransom.

Meanwhile, Cooper asked Schaffner to tell the pilot that he wasn’t allowed to land at Sea-Tac until all the money was collected and the parachutes were ready. Cooper ordered another flight attendant, Tina Mucklow, to sit beside him. She later described him as being extremely polite, but occasionally impatient.

On the ground, the FBI began to gather the ransom from banks in the Seattle area. While the notes were unmarked, most were minted in 1969, in a series beginning with an L. Furthermore, the FBI ran the bills through a Recordak machine, which created a microfilm of each one, capturing their serial numbers. The money was easy enough to collect, but the FBI had some difficulty finding four suitable parachutes. Initially, they planned to source military parachutes from McChord Field Air Force Base in Pierce County, Washington. However, Cooper demanded civilian sport parachutes, which allow for a much slower landing speed and are steerable. Eventually, Seattle police managed to track down some parachutes from a skydiving school in Issaquah, Washington.

When the aircraft landed at Sea-Tac Airport, the passengers and two flight attendants disembarked, leaving just Cooper, Mucklow, William Scott the pilot, first officer Bill Rataczak, and the flight engineer H. E. Anderson on board. Cooper ordered the pilot to taxi the plane to a secluded area and told him to dim the cabin lights to deter snipers. Cooper waited on board while the money and parachutes were delivered by a single Northwest Orient employee, who was ordered to drive up to the front door of the plane, where he was met by Mucklow. While the aircraft was refueling, Cooper detailed his flight plan to the remaining crew. He wanted the pilot to head toward Mexico City at the minimum speed possible and flying no higher than 10,000 feet (3,048m). He also ordered the captain to fly with the landing gear down and the flaps lowered 15 degrees. The copilot, Bill Rataczak, informed Cooper that the plane’s range was limited to approximately 1,000 miles (1,610km) under his specified flight configuration. This meant that they could not get as far as Mexico without refueling. Cooper, the pilot, and the copilot decided to fly to Reno, Nevada; refuel; and then head to Mexico City. “Let’s get this show on the road,” Cooper announced. The aircraft was back in the air at 7:40pm. Unbeknownst to Cooper, McChord Air Force Base had sent a jet fighter, a jet trainer, and a cargo plane with parachutists aboard to shadow the flight.

The weather worsened and the 727 was soon flying through the night sky in a severe rainstorm. After approximately 20 minutes, Cooper ordered Mucklow to the cockpit. As she complied, she turned around to see Cooper putting on his parachute. He had cut the cords from one of the other parachutes to secure the bag of ransom money to his waist. At 8:13pm, a warning light in the cockpit indicated that the plane’s rear airstair had been unlatched. Over the intercom, the pilot asked if there was anything the crew could do to help. “No!” Cooper replied. That was the last they heard from him. Moments later, there was a change in air pressure, indicating that the rear airstair was open. The crew thought that Cooper had jumped from the plane, but decided to take no chances and continued to Reno.

The lowered rear airstair scraped the runway and sparks flew as the plane landed. The crew then discovered that Cooper was gone. Nobody—including the crews in the following aircraft—had seen a thing. Cooper and his cash had literally disappeared into thin air, plummeting to earth in the dark. All Cooper had left behind were eight cigarette butts, a thin black tie with a mother-of-pearl tie clip, and two of the four parachutes. The authorities later pinpointed Woodland, Washington, as the most likely place that Cooper had landed.

Lewis River runs through Woodland, and the surrounding country is peppered with deep ravines and dense forests. Even experienced hunters are regularly lost there.

The quaint town was rapidly transformed into a bustling command post for legions of FBI agents, police officers, and soldiers from Fort Lewis, Washington. A search party for the “very cool” hijacker—according to Fredericksburg’s Free Lance-Star newspaper—was assembled right away. Assisted by planes, military and privately owned helicopters, Jeeps, and tracking dogs, the authorities set about exploring one of the nation’s most remote forests, looking for the mysterious hijacker, or for any clues that might reveal what had happened to him.

The FBI announced that Cooper must have been “either an experienced jumper or crazy,” to have pulled off such a dangerous stunt. He was wearing a light business suit and street shoes when he had parachuted into the pitch darkness of a thunderstorm. The wind strength at the time was 200mph (322km/h) and the temperature 7 degrees below zero. “Up looked like down to him. He had no visual reference. He couldn’t have possibly known where he was,” said FBI agent Ralph Himmelsbach.⁴⁴

The FBI was working on the theory that Cooper was probably hiding in dense undergrowth and that he had most likely sustained, at the very least, a broken leg from the jump. However, freshly fallen, thick snow made searching for him almost impossible. After a week, assuming that Cooper must have died, the search was abandoned. The FBI believed they were simply looking for a body and a bag of money, and further investigation on the ground would have to wait until the spring thaw. In late March 1972, 300 soldiers duly combed the thawing terrain for almost three weeks. Once again, no body, no money, and no parachute were found. The FBI released the ransom serial numbers to financial institutions, hoping that somebody somewhere might have come into contact with the mysterious hijacker.

Eight years later, on February 10, 1980, 8-year-old Brian Ingram made a remarkable discovery. While playing on a beach along the Columbia River, approximately 9 miles (14.5km) from Vancouver, he came upon three packets of cash, totalling $5,800.

Commentators speculated that Cooper had crash-landed into the Columbia River and that his body had become wedged in one of its many creeks. There was much debate as to how the money came to be there and for how long. The FBI believed that the cash had not been lying on the beach since 1971 because the elastic bands securing the packets had not disintegrated. The area had been dredged in 1974 and no money had been found then. Furthermore, the packets were lying above clay deposits that had been deposited on the shore by the dredging. “High water lifted that money out,” remarked local fisherman Sid Tipper. FBI operatives dug up the entire beach, but found no more cash or other evidence of Cooper’s possible fate. Over the subsequent years, private divers painstakingly searched the Columbia River, but to no avail.

The baffling case initiated one of the longest and most exhaustive investigations in FBI history. In the immediate aftermath, reports concerning the elusive D. B. Cooper spread across the nation. While most people lambasted the hijacker, there were some—lawmen included—that commended him for his courage and intelligence. “If he took the trouble to plan this thing out so thoroughly, well, good luck to him,” said one sheriff. “You can’t help but admire the guy,” said another FBI agent, who was a member of the initial search team.⁵⁵ Agent Himmelsbach, however, was not impressed with the cultlike following Cooper amassed, referring to him as “a stupid, desperate rascal who endangered many lives.”

In 2000, there was a brief glimmer of hope that Cooper could be identified when the FBI announced that they had managed to extract DNA from the cigarette butts found on the plane. Seven years later, they announced that they had managed to get a partial DNA sample from the tie, but they couldn’t be sure if the DNA was from Cooper or from somebody else. Meanwhile, the DNA samples from the cigarettes had inexplicably vanished.

Over the years, a plethora of theories have been advanced as to Cooper’s identity and whether he could have survived his perilous parachute jump. The most common view is that he either died on impact, or from the harsh climatic conditions he subsequently encountered. The area near where Cooper had jumped was just 5–10 miles (8–16km) from Interstate 5, a busy road. “I still think he perished, but you have to keep an open mind,” commented Himmelsbach.

It was evident that Cooper had extensive knowledge of the 727 aircraft, of the Seattle area, and of airport procedure. He knew the correct terminology for equipment and knew exactly how long it should take the plane to refuel. He also knew that McChord Air Force Base would have available parachutes and that the rear airstair of the plane would lower in flight far enough to allow somebody to clear the plane if jumping from it. Furthermore, when the plane took off the second time, he ordered the pilot to fly at just 10,000ft (3,048m) with its landing gear in position and to lower the flaps 15 degrees to slow the aircraft down. Mucklow also said that Cooper knew exactly how to put on a parachute.

Between 1971 and 2016, the FBI processed over a thousand “serious suspects.” From publicity seekers, such as Jack Coffelt, who claimed to be Cooper in the hopes that he could sell his story, to deathbed confessions, like that of Duane Weber, who told his wife “I am Dan Cooper.” Some have been more plausible than others, and many have been ruled out by the FBI. One outlandish theory even suggests that Cooper survived the jump but didn’t survive an encounter with the legendary Sasquatch in Washington’s dense woods.

One of the favorite suspects was Richard Floyd McCoy, a former Sunday-school teacher who perpetrated a 1972 “copycat” hijacking. On April 7, 1972, McCoy boarded United Airlines’ Flight 855 in Denver. Once in the air, he claimed that he had a bomb on his person. He demanded four parachutes and $500,000, which was delivered to San Francisco International Airport. He jumped from the aircraft over Provo, Utah. However, he left behind a magazine covered in his fingerprints. He was tracked down and apprehended two days later and sentenced to 45 years in prison. Two years later, McCoy escaped from Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary and was killed by police officers in a shootout. Due to the striking similarities in the two hijacking cases, he was a lead suspect for numerous years. Bernie Rhodes, a former probation and parole officer for the District of Utah, and Russell P. Calame, a former FBI special agent in charge of the Utah State Bureau of Investigation, presented this theory in their 1991 book D. B. Cooper: The Real McCoy. However, the FBI later announced that he was not a suspect owing to significant differences between him and the description of D. B. Cooper. Nevertheless, McCoy remains a leading contender among numerous would-be sleuths.

Marla Cooper was “thoroughly convinced” that her “odd uncle,” Lynn Doyle Cooper, was the hijacker. In a 2011 interview with ABC News, she recollected how, over the Thanksgiving holiday in 1971 (when she was just eight years old), her uncle was visiting her grandmother’s house in Sisters, Oregon. During the visit, he alluded to “plotting something underhanded.” Marla claimed that her uncle Lynn informed her that he was going turkey hunting. When he returned from his trip, he was badly injured, and she overheard him telling her father that he had hijacked an airplane. Marla also heard him saying: “Our money problems are over. We just need to go back and get the money.” Marla said that she had never really given too much consideration to this strange memory until her mother briefly mentioned the incident before her death two years earlier. The comments her mother made jogged Marla’s memory and she decided to research the D. B. Cooper case. “Over the next few days, I was just flooded with memories of what happened,” she said.⁶⁶ DNA testing failed to link Lynn to the tie that Cooper had left behind on the plane. However, Special Agent Fred Gutt cautioned that the test did not necessarily rule him out as a suspect because it was impossible to determine whether the DNA on the tie was that of the hijacker or of somebody else who had handled the tie.⁷⁷

One of the more peculiar suspects to emerge was John List, who, on November 9, 1971, murdered his wife, mother, and three children in their home in Westfield, New Jersey. After slaughtering his family, List went on the run. He had planned the murders so meticulously that the bodies of his victims were not discovered for a month. Fifteen days after the List murders, Cooper hijacked the Northwest Airlines Boeing 727. List wasn’t apprehended until 1989. He had assumed a new identity and created a new life for himself in Virginia; his new wife and friends were completely unaware of his real identity. Soon after his arrest, rumors circulated that he was Cooper. “D. B. Cooper? That’s about as ridiculous as anything I’ve ever heard,” said New Jersey Police Chief James Moran, who had spent much of his career tracking down List. According to Himmelsbach, however, List “fits the profile, the description,” adding, “He’s the kind of guy with nothing to lose.” In 1971, List was 41 years old, while Cooper was estimated to be around 48.⁸⁸ Ultimately, there was no conclusive evidence to indicate that List was Cooper, and the FBI subsequently confirmed that they did not consider him a genuine suspect.

A longtime skydiving and aviation enthusiast named Ted Mayfield was also suspected of being the elusive hijacker. Mayfield had served in the 101^st Airborne Division during the Vietnam War, where he learned to skydive. In the immediate aftermath of the 1971 hijacking, he met with FBI agents who were seeking advice on whether it was possible to jump out of a Boeing 727. While Mayfield was a skydiving expert, he said that he wasn’t sure. However, when he discovered that the rear airstair could be lowered mid-flight, he concluded that it would be possible. Agent Himmelsbach dismissed the notion that Mayfield was the hijacker early on in the case, but, years later, Daniel Dvorak and Matthew Mysers, two amateur researchers, proposed him as a suspect once more and stated that they had found circumstantial evidence to prove he was Cooper. However, when they inquired where he was between 2pm and 8:15pm on the day of the hijacking, Mayfield retorted that he was at parachute school in the city of Donald, Oregon, during the day, had a dinner engagement that night, and that several people could vouch for his whereabouts. “They said Cooper was tall and slender. I told them I’m not tall and slender. I’m 4 inches too short and 40 pounds too heavy.”⁹⁹

In 1995, Mayfield was charged with two counts of criminally negligent homicide in connection with two skydiving deaths at his skydiving business, Sheridan Sky Sports. He agreed to plead guilty after the charges were reduced to second-degree manslaughter and served five months in prison. He passed away in 2015 after sustaining a fatal injury while attempting to manually turn over the propeller of a plane at Sheridan Airport.

For years, Lyle Christiansen of Morris, Minnesota, waged a campaign to prove that his brother, Kenneth, could have been the infamous Cooper. Kenneth Christiansen was a former US Army paratrooper and flight attendant on Northwest Orient who at one time had lived in Bonney Lake, Washington. Lyle had watched an episode of the popular Unsolved Mysteries TV show on the Cooper case (first broadcast in 1988) and, when the FBI sketch of Cooper appeared on screen, was immediately struck by its resemblance to his brother. As his conviction grew, Lyle attempted to persuade the filmmaker Nora Ephron to make a movie based on his suspicions.

From the beginning, the FBI was distinctly unenthusiastic about Lyle’s claims, as were some of Lyle’s neighbors. One of them, Julia Bowen, recalled that Kenneth had a lot of money and was always generous with it before he passed away from cancer in 1994, but she could not imagine him carrying out such a crime.¹⁰¹⁰ In 2007, the FBI commented that Christiansen wasn’t a viable suspect because he weighed just 150 pounds (68kg) and was only 5 feet 8 inches (1.7m) tall.

Yet another suspect in a long line was Barbara Dayton, the first woman in Washington to have a sex-change operation. Dayton was born Bobby Dayton in 1926 and had gender-reassignment surgery in December 1969. She lived in West Seattle and had experience as a recreational pilot. She served in the US Merchant Marines and with the US Army during World War II. Following her discharge, she worked with explosives in the construction industry. She hoped to become a pilot, but was unable to obtain a commercial pilot’s license. According to her friend Ron Forman, she disguised herself as a man to carry out the hijacking as a way to get back at the airline industry and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). According to her family, she never spent the $200,000 because she hid it in a cistern in Woodburn, Oregon, near where D. B. Cooper landed.

Dayton’s family later withdrew their claims for fear that she could be prosecuted for the crime. Forman suggested that the small amount of money that was discovered on the Columbia River shore could have been planted by Dayton to spark interest in the case. The FBI, however, said that Dayton did not match the description of Cooper. Flight attendant Mucklow confirmed that she had sat so close to Cooper that she would have noticed if he were a woman.¹¹¹¹

A further suspect came to light in 2016 when the History channel ran a documentary titled D. B. Cooper: Case Closed? It was the work of Tom Colbert, who spent five years researching the Cooper case with a team of 40 investigators. The program suggested that Cooper was Robert W. Rackstraw, a 72-year-old Vietnam War veteran and paratrooper then living in Southern California. In 1969, Rackstraw was stationed at Fort Rucker, Alabama, for helicopter and fixed-wing flight training before being deployed in Vietnam. He returned to Fort Rucker in 1971 and was detained for domestic assault. A later military investigation charged Rackstraw with falsifying college records and lying about his rank and medals. In due course he was forced to resign from the Army for claiming he was a Green Beret and for fabricating five campaign ribbons and five Purple Hearts. Rackstraw’s troubles with the law were only beginning: In 1978, he was acquitted of murdering his stepfather before faking his own death. He was later convicted of grand theft and passing bad checks. Colbert noted that Rackstraw had been mentioned in the original FBI files. Colbert also believed that Cooper was working for the CIA, who had concealed his identity. Colbert’s team’s analysis of handwriting samples and DNA evidence did not rule out Rackstraw as the hijacker. Rackstraw himself had made teasing comments to the media about the D. B. Cooper case. “I wouldn’t discount myself . . . ,”¹²¹² he once said to a reporter who asked him if he was the notorious hijacker. When questioned during the documentary, Rackstraw refused to either confirm or deny that he was Cooper; he would only say that the evidence the program had accumulated was intriguing. Colbert later wrote a book about his investigations titled The Last Master Outlaw.

Colbert’s investigation discovered another clue that potentially linked Rackstraw to the case. In December 1971, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Seattle Times received a letter allegedly from Cooper himself. Although there had been numerous hoax letters in the past, the FBI was particularly interested in this one because it revealed details not publicly released. The letter also contained a series of seemingly random numbers, which the FBI was unable to decipher. Colbert hired Rick Sherwood, a code breaker for the Army Security Agency during the Vietnam War, to examine the numbers. According to Sherwood, Rackstraw would have had the same Army “basic cryptology” training as him. Sherwood found possible ciphers in the numbers that identified Rackstraw’s Vietnam military units: the 371st Radio Research Unit, the 11th General Support Company, and the Army Security Agency.

Back in 1979, the FBI had looked into the possibility that Rackstraw might be D. B. Cooper, but ruled him out because the hijacker was estimated to be in his forties and, in 1971, Rackstraw was only 28 years old. Nevertheless, the FBI conclusion quite evidently hadn’t quashed theories that Rackstraw was the culprit.¹³¹³ According to Colbert, the FBI refused to look at the evidence he and his team accumulated because they “don’t want to admit that a group of volunteer investigators solved a high-profile case that its G-men couldn’t.”¹⁴¹⁴ If Colbert was anticipating a deathbed confession from Rackstraw, he was sorely disappointed. Rackstraw passed away from natural causes in 2019.

The previous year, another suspect came to light: Walter “Walt” Reca. According to Carl Laurin, author of D.B. Cooper & Me: A Criminal, a Spy, My Best Friend, Cooper was none other than his best friend, Reca, a former military paratrooper and intelligence operative. The two men had met in the 1950s, bonded over their mutual love of skydiving, and remained friends over the years. “My best friend, Walter, was a daredevil. He was determined, he was fearless, he was tough as nails and had a temper, and he carried more pain than any man I’ve ever known,” said Laurin. He began suspecting that Reca was Cooper, but when he questioned him Reca was evasive and refused to answer. In the years leading up to Reca’s death in 2014, he allegedly gave Laurin his story under the proviso that Laurin would not reveal his true identity until after his death. Laurin would listen to Reca over the phone and then send him written notes of what he had said. However, Reca never signed this “confession.”

Reca’s niece, Lisa Story, said that she thought it possible that her uncle was Cooper. She recalled that, after the date of the hijacking, Reca had spent his money at places that routinely dealt with large cash deposits, perhaps to avoid detection. He had also put a down payment on a house, purchased furniture and a car, as well as deposited money in a safety-deposit box at a Canadian bank. Story suggested that the reason Reca was never investigated by the FBI could have been because, after the hijacking, the government had employed him as a covert intelligence operative.

Those who support the Reca theory point to the testimony of truck driver Jeff Osiadacz. He was driving his truck near the rural resort of Cle Elum, Washington, on the night of the hijacking when he spotted a man walking along the road. It was raining heavily and Osiadacz assumed that the man’s car had broken down and he was walking to get help. Osiadacz had no room for a passenger in his cab, so he continued on to the Teanaway Junction Café, near Cle Elum. While drinking a coffee, Osiadacz saw the same man enter the café, looking like a “drowned rat.” His hair was dark, slicked back from the rain, and he had a raincoat folded under his arm. The man sat next to Osiadacz. At one point he called “a friend” on a pay phone and asked Osiadacz if he could give this friend directions to the café. Osiadacz complied and didn’t ask the mysterious stranger any “stupid questions,” judging from the man’s appearance that he might be mentally ill. The man thanked him, paid for his coffee, and left. It was not until the following day that Osiadacz found out about the hijacking. He said that the original FBI sketches looked nothing like the man he had encountered, but when contacted by Laurin, he said that the man looked exactly like Reca.¹⁵¹⁵

In 2016, the FBI announced that they were no longer actively investigating the Cooper hijacking and that resources dedicated to the case were now being allocated elsewhere. During the 45-year investigation, the FBI had exhaustively reviewed every credible lead, interviewed all identified witnesses, and collected all available evidence. In those 45 years, FBI agents had come and gone, applying the latest investigative technology techniques. The case evidence is preserved at FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC. It includes Cooper’s boarding pass, a few deteriorated bills, Cooper’s tie, and the pink parachute Cooper left on the plane after using its strings to secure the ransom to his body.

Along with other aircraft hijackings in the 1960s and 1970s, the D. B. Cooper case played its part in transforming airline travel; metal detectors, luggage-screening machines, and handheld body scanners would soon become commonplace at major airports around the world. Cooper’s final contribution to aircraft design was the Cooper vane, a latching device on Boeing 727s that prevented the rear airstair from being lowered mid-flight.

The story of D. B. Cooper has gained a flourishing cult following. Some consider him a suave gentleman thief, comparable to Robin Hood, claiming that he harmed nobody and successfully outwitted a large corporation, Northwest Orient Airlines. They like to believe that he survived the parachute jump and, after committing the “perfect crime,” resumed his place in society. “People don’t want me to find him,” said former FBI agent Richard Tosaw, who conducted his own private search for Cooper. “They don’t want to hear that D.B. Cooper failed.”¹⁶¹⁶ As well as numerous books, the case inspired a 1981 feature film, The Pursuit of D. B. Cooper, starring Robert Duvall in the title role. Each year, the Ariel Store and Tavern, near where Cooper jumped, holds a party to honor the “notorious antihero” and the hijacking’s anniversary. One of the events is a D. B. lookalike contest.