SYSK’s Fall True Crime Playlist: SYSK Live: The DB Cooper Heist

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Welcome back, everybody.

We're moving along on our true crime playlist with an episode we recorded live in Seattle in 2017 on the unsolved mystery of D.B.

Cooper.

Someone using that alias hijacked a plane flying from Portland to Seattle in 1971 and jumped out mid-air, making off with $200,000.

People still float suspects today and they usually say the case is solved, but the FBI stopped investigating back in 2016 and they consider it unsolved.

This one is pretty fun, so I hope you enjoy it.

And if you like this live show, come see us when we hit the road again in 2026.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com.

Hey and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark.

There's Charles W.

Chuck Bryant and and we are here live at the beautiful Neptune Theater in beautiful Seattle and beautiful Washington.

Thank you, you guys.

Phenomenal.

I'm already a sweaty mess, so that must mean we're on stage.

We are off to a great start.

That must mean I'm awake.

Or sleeping.

Yeah, I sweat in my sleep, too.

Big time.

It's gross.

I'm always wiping his brow while he sleeps.

What movie are we going to watch tonight in the hotel?

Is Spy out yet?

I don't know.

And we can leave the seat up on the toilet?

I don't do that.

I don't either because I pee sitting down

because I'm 45 years old.

Do you really?

Well, yeah.

Might as well get into it.

What?

You do too?

Why have we never talked about this?

I started peeing sitting down during the middle of the night get up because it just makes sense because you don't want to wake up too much much and you don't want to like you know make a mess.

And then I think I just hit a certain age where I was like,

it's just nicer to sit down.

I don't need to prove anything to anyone.

I stand when you're your lady.

Huh?

You landed your lady.

You're all set.

Yeah.

I stand when I pee off my deck at night.

I don't do that.

I live in a condo complex.

They would write letters to me if I did that.

It's not good.

Man, I feel like an enormous weight's just been lifted off of.

I can't believe that you're not even 40 years old yet and you pee sitting down.

Yeah.

Let's start the podcast.

Are there other guys out there that pee sitting down?

All right.

We are starting a movement, baby.

That's right.

Your ladies will appreciate it.

Oddly, I pooped standing up.

This is so off the rails already.

Like

in conversation, you'll just be sitting there talking to him.

You're like, you're pooping right now, aren't you?

Yeah.

It's like, it's more efficient this way.

I get more done.

We should probably start over.

We should.

We're going to get off stage and come back out.

I can't believe.

What we've been talking about here this evening already.

Okay.

Let's all just take it down a notch, all right?

So we're podcasting.

We're about to start podcasting.

I think I already started the podcast.

Oh, God, which means that's going to be on like the thing we.

That's why I said we should start over.

Oh, okay.

You're right.

It stays here, everybody.

Yeah, it's all our secret.

500 people.

Okay.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark.

There's Charles W.

Chuck Bryant, and we are live here at the beautiful Neptune Theater in Seattle, Washington.

Man,

times two.

That's even better.

It's an in-joke.

People will be like, even better than what?

I'm a buoy.

Really?

There's more crossover between our fans and Howard Stern than our fans and Mariners fans, I think.

Boy, there's a Venn diagram out there that's

confusing me already.

Okay, so Chuck.

Yes.

This is a little bit of history.

Yeah.

So we're going to go back in the Wayback Machine.

That's right.

If you listen to the PR live podcast, you know that the Wayback Machine is imaginary, so settle down.

They heard that live.

Yeah, that was a good one, too.

There are PR professionals here because they emailed me today.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

I can tell.

That's the call of the PR professional.

So we're going back to a cold, stormy, rainy, pretty nasty Thanksgiving Eve in 1971.

And the story begins at PDX, Portland Airport.

And a man walked into PDX,

took a picture of his shoe on the carpet, and then walked along to the Northwest Orient Airlines ticket desk.

That's right.

And he walked up and he said, hi.

I am really interested in finding more about Flight 305, the flight to Seattle.

Would that happen to be a Boeing 727-100 airplane that you guys are going to fly on that route?

And the ticket agent went,

yes, as a matter of fact, it is.

And the man said, that is fantastic.

Here's my $20.

One ticket, please, for a one-way ticket between Portland and Seattle aboard.

Flight 305.

Yeah, and she was like, that's a weird question, but I guess he's very specific about what kind of plane he likes to fly on.

Plus, it's 1971, and I'm in no position to publicly question a man, so I'll just go along with this.

It's very true.

And it was $20 for that flight.

This is a very 70s podcast.

So they handed him his little ticket voucher and said, just fill this out, sir.

Don't need to see ID because it's 1971.

Just tell us who you are or whoever you want us to think you are.

And he wrote down in big block letters and a red ink pen, Dan Cooper.

Phew, you know where we're going with this, huh?

So the Boeing 727-100, as every single person in this room knows, is a smallish plane.

It's not the biggest plane in the Boeing fleet.

It's not the smallest either, but it's the only one that had an aft staircase, right?

And this particular flight, flying aboard this Boeing 727-100, Flight 305, had a crew of of five aboard it.

There was Captain William Scott, not Sean William Scott, we figured out later on.

Not Stiffler.

That would have made zero sense

had he had a former life in the 70s as an airline pilot.

Co-pilot Robert Radozak.

There's a C in there for those of you who like that kind of thing.

And there were three flight attendants.

There was a head flight attendant who was named Alice Hancock, right?

Yes.

And then two, I guess, regular flight attendants, attendants, Tina McClough, who's a hero of ours, and Florence Schaffner.

I think they called them stewardesses back then, to be fair.

Right.

But we're forward-thinking guys, so we're going to go ahead and say flight attendant.

We don't use the S-word.

You just make, well, never mind.

Never mind.

We've done quite enough extraneous stuff for us.

I know.

So Dan Cooper gets on the plane.

There's 37 other passengers because, again, it was the 70s.

They didn't overbook flights back then and say, I'm sorry you bought a ticket, but you really can't fly on this flight.

37 passengers, pretty empty, and Dan Cooper sits in seat 18C.

They pour him up a bourbon and 7-up, and he lights up a cigarette.

A Raleigh-brand cigarette.

Because it's 1971.

You can't smoke on planes.

Yeah.

And he looked to be about in his mid-40s.

He was, you know, kind of look like the men of the time.

Which is to say, you either looked, by 1971, you either looked a little more like Don Draper, kind of holding on to that 50s look, or you looked like Charles Manson.

He looked a little more like Don Draper.

Yeah.

Had the suit, had the skinny tie.

And we should talk a little bit about the suit.

The suit was a russet-colored suit, which was like that weird burgundy brown color.

That's potato-colored.

Right.

And it just so happened that he was wearing this suit during the one six-month period in history where you could wear that color suit out in public.

So he was okay.

And then his skinny tie was was a clip-on from JCPenney.

That's right.

He had a imitation Mother of Pearl tie pin.

He had an overcoat.

He had a hat.

He had a bag, kind of like a briefcase.

And he had these black cornrim sunglasses.

Dark kind of

olive skin, would you say?

They call him swarthy.

Which I think is like stewardess.

It's been phased out.

You know what I mean?

I thought swarthy.

I thought that was like a sea captain.

no i'm sure there were swarthy sea captains

because yeah because they were out in the sun so they ended up getting olive-skinned that's uh rugged okay

you're thinking of the gortons fisherman oh right oh he was swarthy sure he's swarthy as h

so uh he had uh he had this kind of dark wavy hair

And other than that, he was just sort of an unremarkable dude.

He wanted to blend in.

Right?

Well, yeah.

Okay.

So this guy's sitting in 18C.

He's being unremarkable, aside from wearing the sunglasses.

He's smoking with his left hand, which has nothing to do with anything, but we just kind of wanted to show off how much research we've done on this.

And when Florence Schaffner, the flight attendant working his area, comes over and gives him his bourbon, and I think seven up, right?

Yeah.

He hands her a note.

And to Florence Schaffner, she was 23.

She was very pretty.

She was at the time a stewardess.

And

this happened to her all the time.

Like businessmen drinking sevens and sevens, like passed her notes and hit on her all the time.

So when this guy in 18C, Dan Cooper, handed her a note, she took the note and just put it in her flight apron without looking at it and turned and walked away.

With all the other notes.

Right, exactly.

They were from previous flights.

Right.

Yeah.

From all the men who wanted to rescue her from her life.

Come away with me.

Right.

Swarthy.

And so, Dan Cooper sees this and he goes, Miss,

you may want to have a look at that note.

I have a bomb.

I think you know where we're going with this.

D.B.

Cooper.

You know, when we were coming here today, we were like, wow, we're really rolling the dice.

It's entirely possible that everyone here had the D.B.

Cooper case drilled into them from like third grade on.

That's not the case, is it?

No.

You didn't study it in class?

It's such a sigh of relief.

I told that to Yumi and Yumi was like, that's so dumb.

She's like, do you know everything about the burning of Atlanta?

And I said, no.

And she's like, no.

No, you don't.

And they don't know everything about D.B.

Cooper.

And I went back to sleep.

So this was not the first commercial airplane hijacking.

It actually, the first one was in 1948.

And remarkably,

between 1968,

just three years earlier and the time D.B.

Cooper hijacked this plane, there were 100 commercial hijackings in three years.

Yeah, so this is not new.

It was not new, but I remember, like, if anyone here grew up in like the 70s and stuff, it was a thing.

Like, planes got hijacked all the time because you could bring guns and bombs on planes, and you didn't need ID, and no one cared.

Right.

They were like, hmm, this is weird.

Yeah, that's pretty much where the FBI was at the time.

And by 1971, they were just starting to like get hip to the idea of hijackings being a problem.

And so their first idea was, well, we'll put an air marshal on every flight.

And then they looked at the schedule of flights in the United States, and they were like, oh, this may have been a bad idea.

But they tried it.

It was a good idea.

It was a fine idea if everyone...

If like a third of the population of the United States were air marshals, then yeah, it was a good idea.

It's a good idea if you want one of every like 300 flights with an air marshal.

Right, right.

And the other 299 open for hijacking, right?

So this was, they figured out after a few years, like, why the logistics of American air travel.

J.

Edgar Hoover's idea, by the way.

Right.

He was still in charge of the FBI in 1971.

Yeah, so he'd been there for about 50 years, right?

Yeah.

So his idea was air marshals.

Didn't work, but they were still trying it.

There was no air marshal on Flight 305, the D.B.

Cooper hijacking flight.

Yeah, they're like, Portland to Seattle, maybe we should put like three air marshals on that one.

Hi-traffic flight.

And I mean, it made sense that there would not be an air marshal on that flight because most hijackings were crazed lone gunmen with a handgun who wanted to be taken to Cuba for political reasons, basically.

No one flying from PDX to SeaTech wanted to be taken to Cuba.

So there was no reason for an air marshal to be on the flight.

It was a pretty good bet to not have an air marshal on.

They just didn't expect D.B.

Cooper because he was a pretty novel person.

The idea of a single guy taking control of a flight for money with a bomb, that was new.

And like our whole conception of a mad bomber hijacking a flight comes from D.B.

Cooper and Sonny Bono's character in Airplane 2.

This is actually, I did a little more research, between 1968 and 79, it's literally referred to as the golden age of skyjacking.

I was talking to Josh.

I was like, I didn't know you could have, I thought a golden age was about something good.

I didn't know you could have the golden age of dysentery.

The good old days.

It was good for the hijackers because they could get away with it, no problem.

Maybe that's who wrote that.

The golden age of skyjacking.

Man.

All right, so Florence Schaffner, I'm sorry, Schaffer reads the note,

and she says,

you know what?

Give me, or Cooper says, you know what, give me that note back, which is a very key thing because that means they won't have a sample of his handwriting.

So he asked for the note back, and from that point on, he did not converse like everything else he had them write down to take to the captain.

So they would have no more like physical evidence of his handwriting.

Yeah, the only handwriting sample he had was that ticket duplicate and it was in block letters, which yeah, he went like this.

F ⁇ ing Cooper.

So she sits down and she says, uh,

you know, I want to know that this is legit.

This is for real.

Can I can I like get a look at that bomb that you're talking about?

Makes sense?

And he shows her, right?

Yeah, he gives her a little peek.

He opened his bag just enough, and she went to put her fingers in and he snapped it shut and she went,

just like Pretty Woman.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But she sees what, you know, she sees red sticks of dynamite and a battery and I guess presumably like an alarm clock with two bells on it.

Right.

It's got like a skull and crossbones.

It's like it says, you die or something.

Electrical tape is all around it because he watched a lot of cartoons.

He knows how to make a bomb.

Well, she, I mean, she bought it, clearly.

She saw the bomb and she took down a note.

He said, take this down.

I have a ransom demand.

He said, I want $200,000 by 5 p.m.

in cash.

Put it in a knapsack.

I want two back parachutes and two front parachutes.

When we land, I want a fuel truck ready to refuel.

No funny stuff.

Or I'll do the job.

Which is, that was tough talk in 1971.

Again, He watched a lot of cartoons and that's what you say when you mean business.

That roughly is about $1.2 million today.

I think it's a little low if you're going to go through a skyjacking.

It's a lot of work for a million dollars.

Yeah, I would have said, like, if you're going to ask for 200 grand, ask for 300 or 400.

That's just me.

Sure.

I'm no skyjacker.

So this turns out to be the only threat that Dan Cooper makes during the entire ordeal.

It's this very first note that he gave up.

So from that point on, like I said, he dictated everything else so they could just pass notes back and forth.

And aside from a couple of conversations with the pilots on the cockpit phone from the rear of the plane to the cockpit,

they didn't have any interaction, the pilots, whatsoever with Dan Cooper.

Right.

So there was like almost no help whatsoever during the investigation, right?

And then the fact that he asked for two parachutes was a stroke of brilliance because it did show his hand to the FBI that he was going to jump out of the plane with the ransom money, but it also said, FBI, I'm probably going to make a hostage jump with me, so don't tamper with any of these parachutes, which if the FBI had, would have been murder.

But we're talking about J.

Edgar Hoover's FBI.

So

they may have tried just that.

So it's pretty smart that he asked for two pairs because they didn't know what he was going to do.

That's right.

So Schaffner takes that ransom note, gives it to Alice Hancock.

She takes it over to the pilot and the co-pilot.

And,

well, what did they do?

Josh, you do a great pilot.

They called C-Tech Airport and said.

SeaTech, we just want to advise you on a bit of a fiddlesticks we got going on up here.

Sonny Bono is taking control of the plane.

He wants $200,000 in negotiable American currency by 5 p.m.

Negotiable American Currency.

Yeah.

It was a very weird thing to ask for.

It was.

And so C-Tech was like, we should probably call the cops.

And the cops said, we should probably call the FBI.

Well, yeah, this was the Seattle Police Department in 1971.

They were like, no, no, no, no, no.

We don't deal with things like this.

They're like, wait, wait.

This guy doesn't want to go to Cuba?

We don't understand.

Like, we're literally waiting for John Rambo to wander through town so we can harass him.

Just 10 more years.

Wait, that was Oregon, though, wasn't it?

Okay.

Pretty close.

That joke will kill tomorrow night.

Yeah, man.

Rambo joke.

Yeah, remember it.

So all of a sudden, like, there's all this crazy energy going on down on the ground, right?

So the FBI comes in, and

they're trying to get the money together.

They're like,

we have an hour.

You've got to give us more time.

It's like, no, you can't have more time.

They're like, okay, that's fine.

We'll get all this stuff together.

You guys are going to have to stay up there until we get everything ready for you.

So the plane is circling SeaTech, and they told the passengers that the plane was experiencing mechanical problems,

which I would have had a problem hearing, you know?

It wouldn't have, like, I think they could have thought that through a little more.

Yeah, it's experiencing mechanical problems, so we're just going to keep flying.

We're going to stay aloft.

See what happens.

Captain Scott is a gambling man.

Everyone was drinking and smoking cigarettes.

They didn't care.

They were hooking up in the bathroom.

This is 1971.

If it had been Chuck, you would have been like, I told you we should have driven.

I know.

It's nothing.

Could have been to Portland.

So they had to circle for an hour, and they ended up telling the passengers, oh, we just need to burn off some gas and everything will be fine, right?

And the passengers apparently were totally unaware that they'd been hijacked.

That's how cool Cooper was, right?

But one passenger later said, I had a pretty good feeling we'd been hijacked.

And the press poll was like, shut up, go, get off the day.

He was that guy.

He was the next person.

Yeah.

I was at that game.

Yeah, I was at that game seven.

It was all right.

He's that dude, you know?

Oh, yeah.

Any remarkable event?

Yeah, I was there.

It was.

No, we got you.

I knew it was a hijacking.

You really had me stumped there for a second.

I'm role-playing.

Game seven.

So

C-Tech is circling, right?

They're circling, circling, an hour, killing time, but just burning off gas.

And

Florence Schaffner has gone away to take the note to Alice Hancock, who takes notes to the cockpit.

She's on the relay team, basically, now.

And D.B.

Cooper says, well, Dan Cooper says, hey, Tina Mucklau, why don't you sit beside me for a while?

And she did.

And she ended up kind of taking a bit of a seat in history, if you will.

If you'll allow us that terrible analogy.

And she sat down and she got, she spent a lot of time with Dan Cooper.

And they ended up chatting.

And she said Dan Cooper kept a level head during a very tense situation, like the whole time.

And they chatted about things like Tina Mucklow's home state, which is Minnesota.

They talked about a nearby Air Force base and how long it took to drive to SeaTac.

It was like 20 minutes or something.

You guys can actually probably guess the Air Force base.

We don't know.

That one.

And then

they also, at one point, he looked out the window and he said, it looks like we're over Tacoma.

So all this would indicate a lot to the FBI later on, right?

That this guy was maybe a local.

Yeah, I'm kind of curious.

Could anyone here recognize Tacoma from an airplane?

From an airplane?

From an airplane?

Wow.

Do they have a huge field cut out of grass that says Tacoma?

Corn?

What are they saying?

I think they're saying corn.

Yeah?

The smell?

Oh boy.

I knew this would go over well here.

By the way, we didn't mention they diverted all the other flights away from

SeaTac at the time because they wanted that to be the only plane in the area.

And to me, the most remarkable part of this whole story is one of the other planes in the air, the dude, the pilot gets on and tells everyone else on that plane what's going on.

Well, he like he patched into the comm link between flight 305 and SeaTac for the listening enjoyment of the passengers on his flight.

It's insane.

It's like, I'm sorry we're delayed, but here's what's going on on another flight nearby.

All right.

Just sack and listen to the dulcet tones of a skyjacking.

Again, it was the 70s.

Everyone's drinking.

They're like, this is remarkable.

Thank God it's not us.

Everything's better when you're drinking.

All right, so he recognizes Tacoma, which apparently everyone in this room could do.

Yeah, right.

We were impressed by that, but it's nothing.

Occasionally.

He went, smells like Tacoma.

So all of these are sort of clues, though.

If he recognized Tacoma, he knew about the Air Force Base that clearly maybe the guy's kind of from the area.

Might be a clue later on.

So

Mucklow at this point asked Dan Cooper, she said, Do you have a grudge against our airline, sir?

And he said, No, ma'am, I don't have a grudge against your airline.

I just have a grudge.

Cryptic.

Right.

She was like,

Yeah, like they did.

So back on the ground, the FBI is like going crazy.

The local cops are going crazy.

Everybody's going crazy trying to get 200 grand in cash together.

Turns out that was the easiest part of this whole thing.

So Northwest Orient's

president at the time, Donald Nyrop.

Any Nyrops in the house?

No?

He would have been in Minnesota.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

But I'm convinced that someone in here is going to be related to someone in this story.

Oh, I am too.

Yeah.

I'm just.

I'm waiting for somebody to stand up and be like, that's a lie.

Or for someone to stand up and say, I am T.B.

Cooper.

Oh, yeah.

That would be amazing.

We'd have to come up with a different show tomorrow night.

Oh, yeah.

Or just bring him along.

Sure.

And here he is, everybody.

So Donald Nyrop, the president of Northwest Orient, he's like, yeah, sure, we'll totally pay that.

We have a huge insurance policy on this kind of thing.

Apparently, Northwest had to pay like 20 grand and their insurance company paid out 180 grand.

And they tapped C First Bank, which had a downtown branch.

And in this downtown branch, they had a really great idea.

They had stacks of $20 bills in varying amounts so that it looked like a nervous teller ran into the back and like put some 20s together in the event of a bank robbery, right?

And then would come out and be like, here you go, bank robber.

You're getting off scot-free.

But it turns out that every serial number on every one of those 20s had been recorded.

So it worked for bank robberies, worked just as well for skyjackings as well.

So they had the money, no problems.

The parachutes were just very difficult.

Yeah, that was actually the harder part.

Yeah.

Back in 1971, the big recreational skydiving craze had not yet taken hold.

It happened here and there.

But the manager at SeaTac said, I got a guy.

Don't you worry.

He's got an operation called Seattle Sky Sports in Issaqua.

Anybody from Issaquah?

Shout out to Issaquah.

Why do you call it Seattle Sky Sports?

Did they mooch off of Seattle?

Yeah.

Off of the teat of Seattle.

He's like, I got a guy.

His name is Earl Cassey.

And he agreed to help.

Little side note, Earl Cassey was actually murdered three years ago.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Apparently, he has fun.

He likes to bring the room down.

I know.

We're all having too much fun.

He got killed by a blow to the head in his garage, but apparently, you know, some cooperists that are still active today on the internet, you know, these conspiracy dudes.

That's really tight.

That is.

Everyone did it.

I love that.

Everybody.

See, you can all be conspiracy theories.

Get out your tinfoil hat.

Although women can't be because they're too smart.

It's always guys.

Did you know?

So Earl Cassie was killed, but they think it has nothing to do with it, even though Cooperists are like, are you sure they're trying to silence a man?

Exactly.

So Cassie...

That was pretty great, man.

Very well-timed.

So Cassie called his operation and to the dude working there and said, hey, can you get together these parachutes?

I need two fronts and two backs.

The guy said, Sure, bruh.

And

in his haste, he packs three regular chutes.

Well, not three regular, he packs one military chute,

two regular chutes, and one thing that I still don't understand called a dummy chute

that doesn't open.

No.

So, like, if you were working at Seattle Sky Sports and Issaquah,

you would get really, really really sick of having to fold up the whole parachute every time somebody was training throwing out the pilot chute, which is just the little chute that comes out first and pulls the bigger chute out, right?

If all you're trying to do is throw that part out, you don't need the bigger chute.

So if you're an employee at Seattle Sky Sports and Issaquah, you may have the idea that you should just sew the bigger part shut.

There should be no parachute that has like the most important part sewn shut, right?

I think we can all decide that that is our rule every parachute should open right but this is the thing and they're called dummy chutes the thing is everybody's like oh we got it covered we'll just put a big X on it and everybody will know it's a dummy shoot so that one of these dummy chutes made it into the four chutes that were delivered to D.B.

Cooper so the money and the chutes go in the cop car and he does a donut skidding out like in front of the plane and gets out and stands outside and waits for the plane to land, I should say.

So when they get everything together, they let Flight 305 know that they've come and get it, basically.

And they prepare to land.

And D.B.

Cooper does something very smart.

Yeah,

he said, you know what?

I bet you there's going to be snipers on the ground because I've seen a movie or two.

I've seen Black Sunday.

Anyone?

No?

Didn't that come out like five or six years later?

Maybe.

Actually, I'll have to look that up.

Yeah, I think that was 76.

You know this?

Sure.

All right.

He said, I have a dream about a movie one day that would be called Black Sunday.

And there's going to be snipers at that airport.

So have everybody put the shades down on the windows.

They're all drunk.

They don't care.

They won't ask any questions.

And so they did so, which turned out to be a pretty good move because there were, in fact, snipers.

Right, exactly.

So the plane lands, and

no one's allowed to get off yet.

Cooper says, hey, Tina, do me a solid.

Go out and get the money and the chutes and come back with them, okay?

Then we can let the passengers off.

And Muklau leaves the plane and at this point, and this is one of the first reasons why Tina Muklau is one of our heroes, once she's off the plane, she could have been like, so long, chumps, see you in hell.

Which...

May have been a little harsh had she said that with an earshot of somebody in this hostage situation.

She could have thought it.

Her actions could have said as much.

She didn't.

She got the shoots.

She got the money.

And she essentially traded herself for the hostages and went back on the plane.

That's what she's so out of there.

That's metal.

Chuck would have said out loud, see you in hell, Flight 305.

I would have walked straight to the baggage claim or the ground transportation and said, take me to Cousin Ike.

I need some loose leaf tea.

Good luck with the skyjacking.

Right.

Yeah, but she came back, which is amazing.

She did come back.

So she traded herself for these hostages.

And

the hostages were allowed to leave.

And so, too, were Alice Hancock and Florence Schaffner.

The rest of the crew is basically like, there's no reason for you to stay here, so go.

So it was down to Schaffner and Cooper.

And then in the cockpit, Radozak and Scott, right?

And Scott and Radozak repaid Tina Mucklow by staying themselves.

There was a rope ladder, actually, that they could have climbed out of.

They had almost no interaction whatsoever with D.B.

Cooper.

They could have, at their leisure, they could have put on bathing suits and climbed out this rope ladder and laid on the tarmac for a while and then gone to the safety of like the FBI barricade.

And they didn't.

They stuck around and they were like, we're going to see this hijacking through.

Yeah, in my

like in my comedic mind's eye, I see them getting out on the rope swing or a rope ladder.

That's different.

Rope swing.

That would be amazing.

They may have like.

It's like a tire swing on the run of the plane.

They get off on the rope ladder.

Tina Mucklaw never comes back, and D.B.

Cooper's just sitting on the plane by himself.

He's like, oh, it happened again.

Is he typing?

No, he's not.

Oh, no, that's

right.

I didn't know they had a rope ladder.

That's crazy.

Sure.

What's that for?

Every airplane has a rope rope-ladder in the car.

Wake up, man.

It's fashioned out of like old cheats.

So the FAA actually had

their chief psychiatrist on the ground, and this dude does a quick analysis, you know, like, let me do one of those movie readings of who this guy is and what's going to happen.

And he says, you know, what's going to happen is you're going to give this guy the money.

and the parachutes.

You're going to go up there in the plane.

He's going to jump out and blow up the plane

and just let everyone know that.

Right.

He's going to force him to.

He's force pilot and co-pilot that this is what's coming.

Right.

He's going to force Mucklow to jump with him and then blow up the plane afterward, right?

But yeah,

make sure the cockpit knows.

And then he added, and he probably has some sort of fixation on longer-than-usual nipples, so make sure he's not exposed to those because he has some sort of fetish based on his experience with his mother.

Because

it's a 1971 psychoanalyst for the FAA.

Hey, if I had done that in a German accent, it would have sunk in even faster.

Did you tell them that?

Make sure you tell them that, guys.

Is that all right?

I'm going to go ahead and say now what I'm going to say in like an hour backstage.

All right.

That was amazing.

Was it?

Thank you.

I thought that's not what you were gonna say, actually.

I didn't see that one coming.

You got me.

When you, yeah.

I had no idea where you were going.

Literally, you said longer than usual nipples, and I went in my head, I went, am I, is this happening?

You're like, Josh Josh am I still in Atlanta is the trip am I asleep

pure gold buddy thank you

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Where are we?

I am so thrown.

So we said Cooper was cool, right?

Yes.

The cool head.

He was so cool, he ordered food for the crew.

During the refueling process.

Yeah, he's a nice, nice guy.

Yeah.

You want to know who else is cool?

It's Tina Mucklaw because once they released the passengers and they got the money on board, she sat back down and he offered her a couple of the stacks of money and she said, well, you go ahead and say it.

No tipping allowed.

Smooth.

Again, had it been me, well, first of all, I would have been at Uncle Ike's by then.

But if I was dumb enough to get back on, I would be like, yeah, pay it forward.

Yeah, just two stacks of bills?

Yeah.

What gives, jerk I want half

she's she's amazing so the plane's being refueled he passed along a request

very specific request for what's to happen when they go to take off he said I want to take off with that aft staircase that I know is back there down

in the jump off the plane position and they said you can't take off with the plane you can't take off with the door down and he said well can you check on that are you sure and they said no you can't do that and he said are you super sure and they said no, you can't do that.

He said, all right.

And they said, oh, but once you're up there, you can totally lower it and jump out.

And he said, well, why didn't we just start there?

Because that's really the only thing that matters.

He's like, fine, fine.

And then the pilot's like, well, where do you want to go?

And Dan Cooper says, Mexico City, let's say.

And the pilot goes, well, that's kind of far.

We're going to have to refuel.

Is Reno okay?

And Dan Cooper goes, I don't know how I can get this across anymore clearly.

I'm jumping out of the plane the next time we go up.

Fly wherever you want.

Just fly southward.

Yeah.

So they refuel the plane.

And the only time Dan Cooper gets a little, a little ruffled is when it takes a little long for his liking.

And he says, it shouldn't take this long.

Let's get the show on the road.

Right.

He picked up, for one of the few times, he picked up the cockpit or the cabin and cockpit phone and said, let's get the show on the road.

I would have screamed it and like hit the phone and then hit myself in the head with it and then just started crying and been like, It's never gonna work.

This is never gonna work.

I think it's well established.

We'd be the worst skyjackers ever.

And hostages.

Yeah, just get, no, I don't want any part of it.

He also gives them instructions on how to fly the plane, which is getting really specific.

He said, don't go any higher than 10,000 feet.

Set your wing flaps at 15 degrees, which apparently we learned is an angle that only the 727100 could position those wing flaps.

Which everyone in this room knows because it's a Boeing.

Sure.

And he said, don't go any faster than 190 miles per hour, 200 knots.

So that means they're going to be flying slow and low, like you're cooking ribs,

or jumping off a plane.

Because that means the cabin isn't pressurized.

And that means when you open that door, you're not just going to suck everything out.

It's still sky divable.

Yeah?

Oh, that's the terminology.

Okay.

So Cooper had some problems, right?

He had specifically asked for a knapsack, and the feds had given him the 200 grand in a bank bag, which as we all know is a very unwieldy, clumsy bag, right?

It's like a canvas bag.

There's nothing to it.

What do you like?

Tuck it under your arm?

What are you supposed to do with that, right?

So he's like, well, I need to make a handle for this thing.

I'll harvest one of these parachutes for its rigging.

And he chose the pink one,

which the pink one was actually the best one of all of them.

Yeah, because it was the dummy shoot, the military shoot.

The Susso chute.

Is that what we're going to call it?

Yeah.

The medium shoot.

Yeah.

And then the pink one, which, like Josh said, is the best one.

So he cuts the stuff loose.

He makes a handle for it.

Things are happening at this point.

They move to the rear of the plane, he and Tina Mucklaw.

And he says, you know, I think I need help lowering the staircase.

So she goes back there with him.

She's a little freaked out at this point.

She's super freaked out.

Like, she was calm and cool, but like, it's go time.

And she thinks she's going to get sucked out,

rightfully so, because she didn't understand the physics of, you know, the plane being that low and that slow.

Or she did another pick and rib.

She was going to hell with physics.

I am still freaked out.

Yeah.

We're about to lower a staircase at 10,000 feet.

Why did I mention physics?

Exactly.

So she gets back there and he said, she said, can I at least have some of that rope so I can tie myself to the interior of this plane?

Like, that's how helpful she was.

She's like, just let me lash myself to the plane.

Let me spit

myself.

Right.

I just spit like all the way across the interior.

I spit earlier.

It's fine.

Okay, good.

We should learn to sync those up.

Right.

Like in Vegas.

That's what I was supposed to do.

Yeah.

Man, we are in sync now.

Yeah.

My God.

Except, well, never mind.

So she asked for some rope to lash herself in, and he goes, at this point, you know what?

Never mind.

He literally, like, this is the quote.

He goes, never mind.

Never mind.

He said, you know what?

You just go back up to the cockpit and you see that first-class curtain.

Just don't come any further back.

I got it from there.

He turns back around and looks, and then he turns back around to where she was, and he just sees like a pile of dust where she was just standing.

She was like in the cockpit all of a sudden.

And so it's go time in the cockpit, 7.42 p.m.

The little light comes on that says door ajar, I guess.

And

they said that the pilots were like, Tina, like, let's call back one more time.

She's like, no, you can't call him.

And they're like, no, really, we should call him.

So we can totally call him.

Like, the FAA shrink said, like, he might blow us up.

He said some other weird stuff, too, but he said,

like, he's going to blow us up.

We should really butter this guy up.

And we could have left on that rope swing and we stayed because of you.

Rope ladder.

So they call.

They do call and the pilot's like, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring.

Oh, am I Cooper?

Yes.

Ring, ring.

You let it ring a couple of times.

Ring, ring.

Ring, ring.

Uh, Dan Cooper, hijacker.

Uh, Mr.

Cooper, uh, we want to make sure your flight is as comfortable as possible.

Is there anything we can do to help you back there to make your hijacking more successful, sir?

No.

Click.

I know, it's kind of rude.

He said no, hung up, and then at 8.12 p.m., the crew felt the plane kind of jiggle a little bit as if someone had jumped off the rear of it.

And they said, Tina, go check.

We're flying the plane.

She's like, wait a minute, only one of you is flying.

No, it takes both of us.

You don't know.

And that's it.

So from the moment that Tina Mucklaw left, shut that first class curtain, nobody, to anyone's knowledge, ever saw Dan Cooper again.

But that's not the end of the show.

No, it's not.

So there was a manhunt, right?

So Dan Cooper had pretty clearly signaled his intentions that he was going to jump off the back of the 727.

The FBI was like, we need to scramble some jets.

Let's get some fighter jets that are in the area.

We're going to scramble them to go follow the 727.

What is the scrambling?

I never get that.

It's like

go.

I know, but they'll

it just sounds

chaotic.

Like, they're scrambling jets.

I think that's I think that's the point.

Like, people are supposed to run around and bump into each other and fall out and then get up and get in their jets and fly off.

I would say that's scrambling.

That's classic scrambling.

I would have renamed it.

It would be like activate the jets.

That's not bad.

That's not bad at all.

Scramble the jets.

Sounds desperate, you're right.

Activate the jets.

So,

however, the jets were brought into this picture,

there was a problem with them in that they were way too fast for the 727, which is punting along at 190 miles an hour.

And all of a sudden, there's a jet that goes.

And then the next one comes.

And they're like, what are we going to do?

Well, we'll stick a a helicopter on them this is like Goldilocks the helicopter was too slow

727 is just putzing along yeah yeah people are going

and

trying to catch up nothing happening they should have scrambled to 727

and just followed right behind that makes sense as matter with the headlights on

right

so they're scrambling the point is nobody saw Dan Cooper jump when he jumped.

So they used the 8-12 p.m.

Oscillation to kind of figure out where they should start looking.

And they zeroed in on a place called Ariel, Washington, near the Lewis River.

Anybody from Ariel?

Good, because we got Ariel jokes.

Nobody from Ariel.

Anyone ever heard of the Lewis River?

Okay.

So they get this manhunt going.

They're scrambling and combing.

Those are the two things you do here in the fbi there was a massive manhunt too there's like a thousand troops and cops combing this area yeah no one from seattle pd of course they were just sitting around stoned

hanging out in issua waiting for rambo

here's another fun fact there was a millionaire a local millionaire who we don't know do you know the name No, I've looked.

If anybody knows, please tell us.

Just stand up and say it with dignity.

It was on the news, so this local millionaire says, you know what?

That's near Lake Merwin, and I'm going to rent a submarine

because I'm a millionaire, and that's, you know, we're.

That's what I do.

Yeah.

I don't work.

I'm a millionaire.

He got a submarine and he trolled the depths of Lake Merwin.

He said he rented a small submarine.

Because he's not an extravagant local millionaire.

No, no.

A 20-footer will do.

The The 25 seems ostentatious.

The hydraulics on it, who needs that in a submarine?

Does it have a metal detector?

Which would not have helped because it was cash bills.

Exactly.

See, you'd make a great local millionaire.

I would.

If only.

The other weird thing that happened was the

CIA got involved, which is a little bit strange.

Yeah.

And they scrambled the SR-71 Blackbird,

right?

They scrambled it several times.

Yeah,

it was almost over easy.

Terrible.

Ooh, you should be ashamed of it.

It doesn't even make sense.

Because once you scramble it, it can't be overeat.

Terrible joke, Chuck.

That's what I say.

It's all right.

Rebound, rebound.

Is this really happening?

Did you talk about long nipples?

All right.

The SR-71 Blackbird was at the time super secret.

We all know about it now, but at the time it was very secret.

And it was kind of a big deal to get this thing up in the air.

Especially multiple times.

Like one time it's like your dad is the head of CIA and you're the head of Seattle PD.

So you can make it happen maybe once, right?

Multiple times, that's weird that the SR-71 was scrambled, right?

The FBI is very studious and likes to do a lot of obvious stuff.

So they interviewed everybody in the area with the last name of Cooper.

Which there's like a square one.

Sure.

This is like square negative five.

Yeah, yeah, sure.

No, it's negative five.

I looked it up.

Okay.

So you look up all the Coopers in the area, and at this point, they have a press conference.

And if you've noticed, we've been calling this dude Dan Cooper the whole time.

Yeah.

Because up until this time, he was just Dan Cooper.

So they have a press conference and there's, it's sort of,

I don't think we know who messed it up, right?

Well, it depends on who's

either a file clerk or a cop

talking in front of a reporter.

Gotcha.

Either UPI or AP, depending on who you ask.

And they were saying, like, what Cooper could have done something like this?

Right.

And somebody said, well, there's a Dan Cooper who's a cat burglar in the area.

That's a terrible suggestion.

Cat burglar does not go to hijacker, you know?

And this reporter was like, What a scoop, and hit the wire with cops looking for D.B.

Cooper.

Yeah, he said D.B.

Cooper.

Did I say Dan Cooper?

Yeah, that's all right.

The little part of my brain was like, You just said Dan.

Let's start over.

So a cop was talking in front of an AP reporter, and they said, What Cooper do you know could have done this?

And the cop said, Well, there's this D.B.

Cooper.

what did you just say

did you just say a d cooper i i said there's a d b cooper i got at that time he's a cat burglar and the reporter said this is hitting the wire and he reported that the cops were looking for a db cooper

and it just changed from that point on yeah i mean he was never a db cooper it was literally a mistake so that's why we all know him as db cooper today and the fbi actually a little smart, believe it or not, and they said, you know what, let's keep it that way.

That way we'll know if any tips come in on a Dan Cooper, we'll know it's a hot lead.

So it actually ended up kind of working in their favor.

Yeah.

And anytime a tip like that came in, like the office prankster would come in with the facts and be like, hot lead, hot lead.

It was like a joke around the Portland office.

Everybody loved Richard.

And

this will come up later, too, when it comes time to solve the crime.

Later on, the FBI learned that there was a comic book in the 1950s about a Dan Cooper who was a Canadian jet pilot, and it was a Belgian comic, which is a little weird.

But it was, you know, there was literally a Dan Cooper who jumped out of planes in comic book form.

Right, exactly.

It could be a clue, maybe.

And that's a niche comic, right?

So it's

printed in Belgium in the French about a Canadian fighter pilot.

In the French.

All they had to do was find the 10 people who knew of that comic and be like, what'd you do?

We know it was one of you.

And so the FBI had a pretty clear belief, very

openly stated belief, that D.B.

Cooper died in the jump.

That was just the line that they took right off the bat.

They're like, there's no way this guy survived.

And

he wasn't the lead agent on the case, but he became the most famous agent, Ralph Himmelsbach.

Any Himmelsbach in the house?

No.

You're a liar, sir.

Yeah, you're a liar.

So Himmelsbach, like I said, he wasn't the lead agent, but he was out of the Seattle office, and he became the most famous agent associated with it.

And he actually gave the case its official name, Norjack, which is stupid.

So Northwest Jack, Sky Jack.

Right, but remove the C.

It's just call it the D.B.

Cooper case, you know, or Heist even better.

So he self-published a book in 1986 about the case.

And Himmel's box said he thinks that D.B.

Cooper didn't even get a chute open, that he plunged to his death and hit the forest floor with such impact that he basically was buried immediately, with the parachute still attached, and maybe even the money.

And that was Himmel's box take.

That was, excuse me.

Are you going to get that?

I realize it wasn't a twist off.

And then I realized I had my lighter from the loose leaf tea place nice

nice going

you yeah just saw the sum of Chuck's college education

so Cooper had jumped from the plane did he live did he not the odds are against him in a lot of ways.

Outside the temperature that night was 20 degrees Fahrenheit.

Hey, we're in America, man.

Just say 20 degrees.

Yeah, you're right.

20 degrees.

USA.

At 10,000 feet, it was negative 7 degrees.

And he was going 190 miles an hour.

There was freezing rain.

There was like a quarter crescent, or not a quarter crescent, a crescent moon.

Yeah.

Those are two different things.

Sure.

Crescent moon in the sky, but it was cloudy and rainy, so there probably was zero light.

All right.

It's freezing.

He's 10,000 feet.

He's not dressed for the occasion.

No, he's wearing loafers.

He's wearing an overcoat.

He's got this, he doesn't have this knapsack, so he's fashioned this weird kind of knapsack with this pink rope.

Plus, plus, the area he's jumping out into, and he's flying at 10,000 feet over the Cascades.

Some of the Cascades, as you guys know, are higher than 10,000 feet.

Very dangerous jump.

And there's a lot of pointy trees.

I mean, the pointiest.

Am I right, Seattle?

The pointiest trees around.

Plus, despite what the FAA guy said, the FAA psychiatrist, he did not leave the bomb to be detonated after he jumped off.

He took it with him.

Bank bag, bomb, overcoat, loafers, parachute.

Pointy trees.

That was my D.B.

Cooper jump impression.

And by the way, the FBI later on, they interviewed Muklawk.

Who was the one who saw the bomb?

Schaffner.

Yeah, Schaffner saw the bomb, like you just did.

And she said, yo, you have these red sticks taped together.

And they went, huh?

That wasn't dynamite.

Dynamite isn't red.

You've seen too many cartoons.

Dynamite is tan.

Road flares are red.

So it was more than likely a fake bomb with an alarm clock and road flares.

Plus, D.B.

Cooper did not help his cause by his choice of parachutes, right?

So he chose a military shoot as his main shoot.

It was not a great chute.

The ripcord wasn't as easily accessed as the recreational chutes.

And once it deployed, you can't steer it very well.

It was not the best choice.

Even worse was his choice of the dummy chute for his front reserve chute.

He took the best chute and gutted it to make a handle for the bank bag, left the second best chute and chose the two worst chutes to jump out with, right?

I didn't know you couldn't steer a military chute, but it makes total sense.

No, yeah.

They're just like, go for it, pal.

Yeah.

Because if I was in the military, I would steer, I would be like, well, how don't we go over here instead?

I see a lot of guns down there.

Yeah.

Let's take it this way.

So they just drop you, apparently.

Yeah.

Man, I guess they know what they're doing, though.

So, some other theories,

because it's Washington, believe it or not, some people actually posited that he was eaten by Sasquatch.

Yeah.

With a straight face.

I mean, let's be honest.

How many of you in here were thinking the same thing?

Some other people say, well, he was clearly burned up by the jet exhaust because when you come down the stairs of a 727, the rear jet engine's right in front of you, and it would have been 700, 800 degrees right there.

But the FBI conducted a test right afterward where they took

a 727 up and they took a 200 pound sled a 200 pound prison victim right

he was condemned don't worry about it it's fine

and uh they said yep and threw it off and they found that the 200 pound sled uh

that's a euphemism i guess now sure uh went straight down so it didn't come in contact in any way with the jet exhaust so it kind of did away with this idea that he burned up uh well it was kind of good news bad news, though, because what it did do, at least, was it mimicked that same oscillation.

Yeah.

So they're like, oh, you know what?

It was the exact same thing happened when you were in the air.

So that 8.12 p.m.

jump time, like, it was probably right on the money.

So we know probably where he might have landed.

Right.

So there's a lot of questions remaining, right?

And there were some clues left behind.

The thing that

really kind of confounded the FBI at first was that they combed the area where they were looking for him with like a thousand thousand people just combing this area.

This SR-71 blackbird circling around looking.

They didn't find anything.

He had left a couple of things on board the plane, right?

He left his clip-on tie, which was his second biggest secret that night.

Well, that's what you do before you jump out.

Sure.

You know, you take it off.

It was a clip-on all along.

You unbutton that button and you're like, I'm out of here.

He left eight cigarette butts of his Raleigh brand cigarettes.

He'd smoked eight over five hours.

And all eight butts have since been lost, right?

They found a hair on the headrest.

The thing is, the FBI traded in fingerprints.

That was their big thing at the time.

And Dan Cooper had been very smart to not leave a single print on any of the cigarette butts.

Yeah, true.

But there was fingerprints on the in-flight, I guess, Sky Mall magazine.

Yeah.

R.I.P.

Skymall.

What do you mean?

It's not around.

It's gone.

Yeah, Skymall's gone.

Did you guys not know this?

No way.

Yeah.

That's why I said R.I.P.

Skymall.

I know, but I just,

I don't know.

Where am I going to get my putting green that doubles as a cat feeder?

My friend, you can just go to Frontgate because Frontgate has everything everyone needs.

What's that?

Frontgate, they advertised in Sky Mall.

But they have stores, too.

I don't even know where I am right now.

That's Uncle Ike's.

What year is it?

No.

So it would be seven years before any trace of the hijacking, any real clue turned up.

And it was in 1978.

There were some hunters in Oregon hunting animals, I guess.

right

unless it was the most dangerous game right

you don't know it's Oregon you never know there are less civilized people than we have here

they found a plastic instruction placard showing how to lower the aft staircase in the woods so this is like a really good clue it was but it didn't it didn't lead to anything new well no it was definitely from flight 305 which was I guess I'm saying it was cool it was cool Like, if you were the hunter, you'd be like, I'm keeping this.

Sure.

But it was on the flight path, so it didn't generate any new leads, but it generated a lot of renewed interest in the case because, believe it or not, the D.B.

Cooper case had kind of fallen to the wayside in the last like seven years.

People just didn't think much about it anymore.

It's not made of skyjacking.

Right, exactly.

So it was like a dime a dozen.

But all of a sudden, everybody's like, oh, we got to make a movie.

Who's the biggest movie star we've got?

Tree Williams.

Make him as D.B.

Cooper.

And that's what they did.

Has anyone ever seen The Pursuit of D.B.

Cooper?

No, that's right.

Nobody?

That's right, everybody.

God bless you, Seattle.

Smart town, Chuck.

I figured here, like, somebody, because it was a local thing, 1981, very, very bad movie was made.

Several.

Starring Treat Williams and Robert Duvall,

right?

Whose mom needed surgery at the time to lay off?

So here's what you.

Well, first of all, if you want to know how big a piece of garbage this movie is, it had three directors.

And if you know anything about filmmaking, if you have more than one director, it's probably a really bad movie for one reason or another.

If it has three, then it's guaranteed to be bad.

But all you need to do is go home tonight when you get back to

your houseboat.

In Issaqua.

Does anyone here live on a houseboat?

No?

Okay.

Because I was going to ask if I could come stay over.

Because those things are awesome.

That was just sleepless in Seattle.

You've seen that too many times.

Oh, no, they exist.

Because I tried to stay in an Airbnb, actually, before I came here.

On a houseboat?

Yeah, I totally did.

And I ended up in some stupid hotel downtown.

Go home to your YouTubes.

Type in Pursuit of D.B.

Cooper and watch the first three minutes

Because this movie literally starts with the point from where D.B.

Cooper jumps out of the back of the plane

It starts from the point where we know nothing else that happened

is literally fictional from that point forward on the movie poster is back schmacks

So it starts with pursuit of D.B.

Cooper and has Robert Duvall, the names all come up and all that.

And it's got a Jew's heart playing.

It's like,

and Treat Williams, it's a terrible voiceover recording.

You just hear a yeah.

And he jumps off the thing, because that's what you do when you jump off a plane and you're skyjacking.

He parachutes down in the night, in the night, and he crashes through some trees and lands.

And then there's this really little sad, yahoo!

Everything was sad about that.

And Treat Williams gets on the ground and he takes out a cigar and he takes out a lighter because that's what you do too when you successfully land it after skyjacking.

He doesn't light the lighter though.

He rips open the money bag and he takes out a $100 bill and he lights that.

And then he uses that to light a cigar.

And that is how that movie opens.

And it goes downhill from there.

And Robert Duvall is, he's just, you can tell.

He starts every scene going like this.

Let's do it.

It's so bad.

But I do encourage you.

It was, I mean, when I was a kid and it came out, it was like we got HBO on my street.

And it was a really big deal when we got cable and HBO.

So I would literally watch any movie that came out.

It was like Krull.

That's on.

I'll watch Krull.

Hey, hey, hey.

Krull was okay.

Horror Games.

Great movie.

Sure.

Pursuit of D.B.

Cooper.

Why not?

I was not exposed to that.

Yeah.

I think my mother shielded me from that movie.

Good for you, mom.

Yeah.

Watch the first two minutes on YouTube.

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So,

we were still talking about the placard, weren't we?

No, no, no.

All right, well, we'll go to 1980.

The first real good clue turns up in 1980.

Right.

And this is a big clue.

Big clue.

So, there's a young lad named Brian Ingram.

He was eight, I think, at the time.

Yeah.

And his family was camping on Tina Bar.

Are you guys familiar with Tina Bar?

Do you guys know what that is?

It's

the Columbia River.

Yeah.

So, are we correct in understanding that you would just call that an island, not a bar?

Okay, all right.

So Tina Island, everywhere else, the Ingram family was camping and Brian Ingram was fashioning a fire pit for his family.

Oh father's going to love this fire pit.

He'll be proud of me yet.

Oh father, won't you love me?

And as he's as he's like, as he's going like this to the sand, poor little eight-year-old, he turns up a stack of bills, several stacks of bills, actually,

three.

And these stacks of $20 bills total $5,880.

And he's like, father,

and father takes those and starts looking at them.

And he's like, we should probably call the police.

So they go and call the police.

Yeah, again, they call the Seattle police, which

evidently all they do is forward calls to the FBI at this point.

They're like, Seattle PD, please hold.

So the FBI is like, read us a serial number.

And he reads one, and they're like, read us another.

Reads another and they're like, that's D.B.

Cooper money.

And Ingram's father is like, what did you say?

And they're like, nothing.

So the FBI gets their hands on it.

And actually, we should say, it turns out they let little Brian Ingram

take some of the money, $3,000 of this money, actually.

Yeah, this is later on.

They returned to little, not bad, right?

Right.

And you want to know what's even better?

In 2008, little Brian Ingram sold that money on eBay for $37,000.

Right?

Yeah.

Take that, father.

So the thing is, this money showed up in a place where it should not have been.

It showed up 20 miles south of Ariel, Washington.

in another river.

So they were looking here in the Lewis River, right?

Everybody knows Lewis River, Ariel, Washington here.

Tina Bar is down here, just a little south of Vancouver.

Is my geography, my air geography, right?

Of Vancouver, Washington, everybody.

Vancouver, Washington.

Is it like this?

That's even more amazing.

This is what I suspected, and I looked it up on Google Maps, and they were like, what do you mean, Tina Bar, Josh?

So I wasn't able to conclusively find it.

But I did have this idea that it somehow ended up above it.

And an FBI hydrologist looked at this money, said the FBI has a hydrologist.

Right.

I'm a retainer.

Himmles, Bach, got a hold of him.

And the guy was like, so this stuff's only been exposed to the elements for a year, even though it was found, what, nine years after the robbery, right?

Yeah.

And it got here one of two ways, the guy said.

So the Columbia River flooded in 1974.

Yes.

And it was also dredged in like 1977.

So one of those two probably got this here, but no one's ever said conclusively how it ended up where it was.

So it did.

Yeah.

There you go.

I got it.

It would be another 28 years before any more clues turned up.

So that's a very long wait.

In 2008, just eight short years ago, some kids were playing on their, was it their own land in Amboy?

Mm-hmm.

A little south of Ariel.

Anyone from Amboy?

No.

I suspected not.

Are we in Washington?

Okay.

Yeah, but nobody's from Amboy.

We got more response in Birmingham.

No.

About Amboy?

Yeah.

They're like, we like the sound of that.

So these kids were playing in the woods on their property and they said, oh, look at there.

There's a parachute.

And they start pulling out this parachute for like an hour.

It's like a magic trick.

And they finally get to the end of the parachute and they run and show Pa.

And they say, Pa, I found a parachute in the woods.

What should we do?

Right.

And Pa

recognized that this is the most exciting thing that ever happened in Amboy, Washington,

called

the cops, who called the Seattle police, who called the FBI.

And the FBI did something smart.

They're like, Well, you know who would know if this was D.B.

Cooper's parachute?

Good old Earl Cossey.

That's right, he's not dead yet.

Not dead yet.

Oh.

Too soon?

That's a good.

He's not dead yet.

That's celebratory.

None of us are dead yet.

Right?

That's a good way of looking at it, Chuck.

Good save.

Way to find the silver lining.

So Earl Cossey looked at this thing and he was like, no.

Yeah, he said, I'm sorry.

He said,

Cooper's shoot was nylon.

That's clearly silk.

Good try.

Yeah, he said, this is,

I know whose shoot this is, actually.

Yeah.

It turns out that back in 1945, a jet pilot named Floyd Walling bailed out of his Corsair jet that was going down and parachuted out in the woods around Amboy, Washington, right?

Which isn't too far from Ariel.

And it wasn't Cooper's chute.

You guys all remember when they found that parachute, right?

Like 2008.

It wasn't that long ago.

It was a big deal.

And it wasn't his chute, but it did suggest that possibly he could have made it because Floyd Walling had, and he walked out of the woods in terrible weather just like D.B.

Cooper would have had to.

So it kind of shined a light on the whole thing again.

Yeah, it kind of kicks some interest up.

So

over the years, there have been many, many, many, many suspects.

Like we're talking over a thousand.

The FBI won't even say how many suspects they've had.

Or weirdly, people confessing to be D.B.

Cooper.

It's one of those strange things that people do where they claim to be something that will send you to prison.

Well, a lot of them are already in prison, but they're in worse prison and hoping to go to good prison.

No, it's true.

Apparently, state prisoners will try to confess to federal crimes because the cinnamon buns are better in federal prison.

I was thinking cinnamon buns.

Were you really?

Yep.

That's because there's cinnamon buns in our green room.

Yeah.

Well, no, we mentioned that in the prisons.

That's like a commodity in prison, right?

Cinnamon buns?

Yeah, it's like currency.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

All right.

Cinnamon buns and cigarettes.

We know.

So, there's a very famous sketch.

If you go home, before you get on YouTube and look at the first three minutes of that terrible movie, which you definitely need to do, just Google, get on the Googles and type in

D.B.

Cooper sketch.

There's a very singular, famous sketch of D.B.

Cooper.

It looks like Kevin Spacey.

It looks a lot like Kevin Spacey.

Yeah.

Or Don Draper.

Again.

As Kevin Spacey.

It would be Kevin Spacey as Don Draper.

Yeah.

Yeah, sure.

So if you go home and look at that, it's like, you know, got this kind of short-haired guy.

It looks like he's sort of from the 50s or 60s.

It's got the hair, he's got the sunglasses on and the tie, the skinny tie.

And that's the only sketch that they have of D.B.

Cooper that they got from the flight attendants, specifically Tina Mucklaw, because she spent like five hours right next to the dude.

Yeah.

She, incidentally,

was really messed up after this, understandably, and she went to be a nun in Oregon in the 1980s, which is a little weird.

I didn't know they had convents in Oregon.

Sure.

They've got convents.

There's convents everywhere.

There's a convent right over in the alley.

Yeah, there's a convent behind us right now.

But even worse than that, the Mother Superior in an article I read at the convent said, She never really fit in here.

Oh.

You're not supposed to see that if you're a Mother Superior.

That's a Mother Inferior, if you ask me, you know?

Good one.

Sorry, you go ahead.

No, you.

All right, if you look at some of the behavior that Cooper displayed, you're going to turn up some clues, and that's what the FBI does.

They kind of examine what happened.

He chose a military shoot, which could mean one of two things.

Either he was former military, which could narrow it down, or it could mean he has...

No idea what he's doing when it comes to jumping out of a plane.

Right, and the choice of that dummy shoot would definitely suggest that because even recreational skydivers say like even if you're just a military parachutist, you're going to see a huge X on a parachute and instinctively shy away from that parachute, you know?

I thought it stood for extreme.

Right.

Mountain Dew Extreme.

So a lot of people say, I think he probably is ex-military, had some like parachuting experience, probably a paratrooper or something like that.

Yeah.

A lot of people point to the idea that

he knew a lot about the plane.

He knew about the wing flap degree that it could go to.

He knew about altitude.

A lot of the witnesses later on said that he clearly was very much aware of what was going on in the cabin.

He just knew the plane very much.

So a lot of other people say this guy was probably an airline employee, maybe even a pilot actually, based on the altitude and stuff that he gave him to fly.

Yeah, and one of the weird things that he knew was that the 727-100 had an aft staircase that you could lower and jump out of because this wasn't common knowledge at the time.

Apparently a small group of people knew this.

You were either an employee of Boeing or you may have been in the CIA because in the Vietnam War we actually used the 727 over Cambodia, which is where we were not supposed to be.

And they lowered that aft staircase of the 727 to drop supplies.

He said, go.

You can't steer, but go.

Well, and then there's the the whole thing with the SR-71 Blackbird.

So a lot of Cooperists still say that he might have been secretly a member of the CIA.

Right, right.

Because he knew about the AF staircase, he knew about the, or the Blackbird was scrambled, so they had like some skin in the game.

Right.

So a lot of suspects have come and gone and come back and stayed over the years.

The FBI says about it, well, they won't say, but a lot of people say about a thousand, like Chuck said.

But one of the first ones to emerge was a dude named Richard McCoy.

And in February of 1972, I think four months after the D.B.

Cooper heist, Richard McCoy hijacked a 727-100 flight.

And he asked for $500,000 in cash, and he parachuted successfully out the back over Utah, right?

Yep.

So a lot of people say, that's pretty similar.

Yeah.

Maybe that was D.B.

Cooper.

Well, and $500,000, to me, that makes sense.

Like, $200,000 worked out fine.

Right.

I should have asked for more to begin with.

Right.

So let me try it again.

Let's try it again.

It turns out that he was a green beret in Vietnam.

So that sort of fits with the whole profile.

He looked a little bit like the sketch of Dan Cooper.

A little bit.

Yeah.

He was 29 years old.

So he was much younger than Cooper, but he didn't look 29.

I'll say that.

He looked much older than that.

True.

He looked more like Don Draper than Charles Manson.

It's true.

I'll say that.

Absolutely.

So this guy gets caught actually after pulling off this heist initially, and he goes to prison and he makes a fake gun out of dental plaster from the dentist in the prison.

And he takes the truck by force and literally crashes through the front gate of the prison and escapes and is later killed in a shootout by cops.

Which is to say, Richard McCoy knew how to live.

He did.

And die.

And his family would later go go on to say, actually, he was at home in Thanksgiving, 1971.

So it probably wasn't him.

Right.

Good suspect, though.

Suspect number two is named Dwayne Weber.

Is this your guy?

No, this isn't your guy.

No, this isn't my guy.

I like this guy.

He's fine, but I don't like him.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah.

So Dwayne Weber was a career criminal, and the definition of a career criminal is one where you and your alias have both done time in prison.

And he and his alias had done a combined 16 years, right?

So he was on his deathbed and his wife Joe came around and said, how are you doing?

It's like, well, I'm still dying.

I have a confession for you that I'd like you to hear.

I am Dan Cooper.

And Joe's like, I don't know who that is.

And Dwayne blows up.

They have a fight on his deathbed.

Never speak of it again, and he dies nine days later.

So Joe starts poking around after that.

She's like, who is this Dan Cooper?

Which is a legitimate question after an experience like that that she went through.

I would say so.

And she finds out via internet, this is 1995, that Dan Cooper was D.B.

Cooper.

And she said, you know what?

I think that he was telling the truth.

I think he was D.B.

Cooper.

Because, you know what?

I remember in 1979, we were on a vacation.

We were on a car trip.

We were kind of right around the area where the hijacking, or I'm sorry, where the landing supposedly took place.

And my husband stopped the car and just pointed and said, you know what?

That's where D.B.

Cooper walked out of the woods.

Which is a weird thing to say on vacation.

Very weird thing to say.

It's even weirder that she didn't say, what the hell are you talking about?

Yeah.

Agreed.

There's another story.

Later on, they were on another vacation.

No, this is the same vacation.

Oh, it's the same one.

Yeah, yeah.

All right, we'll just call this the communication vacation.

The non-communication vacation, because they clearly didn't talk to one another.

Because he stopped over the Columbia River on a bridge, literally stops on a bridge, gets out of the car, goes to the back, opens the trunk, and it's just gone for like 10 minutes, gets back in the car,

and they just drive on.

Yeah.

And she doesn't say anything.

She's just sitting there like this.

I know Yumi.

Yumi would have been like, why'd you take your foot off the gas?

Yeah,

there would have been, Emily would have had 300 questions on why we stopped on a bridge and I opened the trunk.

Yeah.

Not Joe.

Not Joe.

Yeah.

So a lot of people still like Dwayne Weber, but he's actually, the FBI said, no, that's not the guy.

We ruled him out with DNA, right?

Yes.

The next guy is my guy, Kenny Christensen, Chuckers.

That's right.

He was a pretty well-liked suspect for a while.

He,

keeping with the series of family members outing their family as D.B.

Cooper.

Yeah, which actually supports the family motto that I was brought up with.

Never trust family.

It's a proud Clark tradition.

So his brother Lyle actually,

this gets a little weird.

He outed him as a suspect in an effort to get the screenwriter Nora Efron.

Sleepless in Seattle, right?

Yeah.

It's all coming for Seattle, baby.

Didn't even see that coming.

He tried to get Nora Efron to write a movie about D.B.

Cooper via his brother being the main suspect.

And he, weirdly, I guess he didn't have an agent.

He hired a private investigator to get him in touch with Nora Efron.

Right.

Very strange.

But he championed his own brother as the main suspect.

Or outed him.

That's another way to put it for sure.

Sure.

And a guy named Joffrey Gray wrote a really great article in New York Magazine, if you guys are interested about this particular guy.

But

there's a lot of similarities between D.B.

Cooper and Kenny Christensen.

For one, he looks a lot like him right off the bat.

He was a purser for Northwest Orient Airlines.

That's a big deal.

Former paratrooper.

He was quiet.

He smoked cigarettes.

He drank bourbon.

Lived in the area where the hijacking took place, which is to say around here.

And

in I think 2011, Joffrey Gray, the guy who wrote that New York Magazine article, got in touch with Florence Schaffner and said, what about this guy?

And Florence Schaffner said, I think you may be on to something here.

Yeah.

And like Dwayne Weber, Kenny Christensen on his deathbed tried to make a confession to his brother Lyle.

He said, I have something really important to tell you, but I'm not sure

if I can say this.

And Lyle said, no, no, no, I don't want to hear it.

Did you guys know that you can not hear a deathbed confession?

Well, not only that, but I want nothing more than to hear a deathbed confession.

I would be dying.

I would be like, oh my god.

I could be like a dish.

Yes.

What do you have to say?

But he was like, no, no, no, I don't want to hear what you got to say.

Just go ahead and die.

And then he lay on top of him

until he stopped squirming.

Here, this pillow will make you comfortable.

You sleep now, brother.

What is going on with these people?

Did you just do the Buffalo Bill voice?

No.

Okay.

That was coincidental.

Who else do we have?

L.D.

Cooper.

Yeah.

Little on the nose.

Dad.

With the name.

He lived in the area, too.

Yeah, and he was also outed by a family member, keeping with the Clark family tradition.

This time it was his niece.

And she said, you know what?

I remember, this is in 2011, this is not too long ago.

She said, you know what?

I remember back in Thanksgiving 1971, just like it was yesterday,

and And Uncle L.D.

showed up bruised and bleeding

for dinner, but he was euphoric, which was weird.

And I'm just now mentioning this.

Right.

And what she said, by the way, she had a book coming out simultaneously as she's telling everybody.

What did she say that she overheard?

Because this is where she loses Chuck and me.

Well, yeah, she said he went to talk to, he was my uncle, and he went to talk to my dad, and I overheard them in the hallway say, we did it.

Our money problems are over.

We hijacked the plane.

The book by Simon ⁇ Schuster on sale now.

Yeah.

At your local airport.

But there were a few things.

It wasn't totally out of the blue.

He was an engineer at Boeing.

No, his brother was.

Oh, his brother was.

Yeah, but they were in on it together.

Sure, right.

Because we hijacked the plane.

Right.

He's a silent partner.

And, weirdly, remember those Dan Cooper comic books?

He was one of the 10 people on the planet that was a fan of the Dan Cooper comic book.

That's a little weird.

It's pretty good.

The weird thing is, is he didn't have any experience skydiving, which a lot of people say, well, it's just too insane to think that somebody who never skydived before did their first skydive during a heist out of a 727.

But the people who knew L.D.

Cooper say, no, he was just crazy enough to do something like that.

And you can make a case that that actually explains the choice of the dummy shoot, to tell you the truth.

That's right.

And the military shoot, even.

Yeah.

All right, so the legacy of D.B.

Cooper, to this day, the heist remains the only unsolved airline hijacking in the history of the world.

In America.

In America.

Really?

Are there other ones?

Yeah.

I'm only standing behind America.

Oh, okay, I gotcha.

Yeah, right.

Every year, if you go to the Ariel Store and Tavern in Ariel, Washington, you can go to the D.B.

Cooper Days Festival.

Yeah, have you guys?

Has anyone ever been to that?

We should all go, let's go right now.

We're going to meet up this Thanksgiving.

You can win a D.B.

Cooper look-alike contest.

If you look like Kevin Spacey, yes, or Charles Manson or Don Draper,

which none of us do.

Well, I'm talking about you and me.

I look like Justin Bieber.

I look like I ate Justin Bieber.

I just spit out my tooth.

That's how I lost it.

I broke it on Justin Bieber's bones.

Justin Bieber's bones.

They're pliable, though.

You can go to that and win the contest.

There have been songs over the years.

It was that terrible movie.

There have been countless TV reenactments and dramatizations.

Unsolved mysteries, am I right?

Yeah.

Everybody see that one?

You can watch that on the YouTube, too.

And there are many, many Cooperist websites, most notably one called dropzone.com.

And DropZone actually used to be a recreational skydiving site until it got mostly taken over by D.B.

Cooper aficionados.

They hijacked the website.

They did, as a matter of fact.

And this site is like so hot for Cooper sleuths that a guy named Secret started posting on it, and he seemed to have a lot of information about the D.B.

Cooper case that people didn't know about.

And it turned out that these Cooper sleuths were so good, they unmasked the Secret guy as the new agent in charge of the D.B.

Cooper case, Larry Carr, who was posting secretly as Secret on the drop zone boards.

That's how good these people are.

He's like, no, I'm not.

Yes, you are.

No, I'm not.

Yes, you are.

Yes, you are.

He's like, okay, I am.

You can go on YouTube.

Boy, you got a lot of YouTube and Disney Night, people.

You can go on YouTube as well and look up Larry Carr.

And for many, many years, they kept all this evidence sort of under wraps.

And you can look up videos now.

Larry Carr said, you know what we should do?

The modern age is here.

We have the YouTubes and we can let everyone see this evidence.

Even though I think it's kind of funny that the FBI's official thing is like, no, he totally died.

No one told Larry Carr that.

Yeah.

You know?

Because he's like, let's make a YouTube video.

Let's show everyone the skinny tie.

All the kids are into it now.

He shows the clip-on tie.

You can see the money, the clip-on tie, all this evidence,

hoping for a lead.

And he oversaw DNA evidence actually being removed from the tie.

They found three people's profiles.

They also found, we don't even know, but pure titanium and impatience pollen.

Hopefully that will eventually crack the case, but it made everybody just be like, what?

We thought we had a handle on this.

Impatience pollen, where did that come from?

So, um...

Bring us home, my friend.

Thank you.

The Cooper heist, it changed America forever, right?

D.B.

Cooper is the reason we all started walking through metal detectors shortly afterward.

He's the reason, seriously, he's the reason that the airlines were given the right to search your bags before you get on one of their planes.

And they apparently reinstituted the death penalty for hijacking.

I don't know when they took it off.

Was it like seaships being hijacked and then I have no idea I don't either but the the the

I think the coolest outcome of this whole thing was if you look at a Boeing 727 they still make them airplane if you look at that aft staircase in the back there's a white paddle that holds the stairs closed pretty smart you can't open the aft staircase mid-flight because you have to go outside and pull the paddle down and then the aft staircase will open.

And it's a pretty smart, easy solution to a pretty complex case.

And they call that little white paddle a Cooper vein.

That's right.

And that is the story of D.B.

Cooper, and that is our show.

Good night, Seattle.

Good night, everyone.

Thank you.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com.

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