A DBC article that just published in Seattle Metropolitan magazine:
Seattle Met, 2021
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LoginIs D.B. Cooper Still on the Run?
Fifty years ago a mysterious criminal parachuted out of an airliner and into legend. An FBI agent, a self-trained scientist, and an outsider theorist have all dedicated years to unraveling the Northwest’s iconic puzzle. But can you catch a myth?
By Allison Williams Illustrations by Joseph Laney Updated September 27, 2021
One minute, Dan Cooper was a real man. Of course, “Dan Cooper” may not have been the name on his birth certificate, but his body was corporeal enough as he stood in a Boeing 727-100 on November 24, 1971. A stairway dangled dangerously from the belly of the near-empty airliner flying over southwestern Washington. No one knows whether he leapt confidently off those open steps from 10,000 feet in the air, or maybe closed his eyes and inched downward into the storm outside. But exit he did, and in that moment birthed something new: one of Washington’s biggest legends.
Fifty years later, we call that question mark D.B. Cooper, and there’s nothing person-like about him anymore. The criminal-shaped hole of D.B. Cooper—the initials arose from a reporter’s transcription error—filled with accusation and acclaim, suspicion and swagger, overflowing with America’s runaway imagination. Countless lives have been shaped by the pursuit of one measly criminal who made off with $200,000.
The broad strokes of the crime were familiar enough, taking place in the midst of the golden era of skyjacking. Hijackers captured more than 150 American flights between 1961 and 1972; so common was the practice, and Cuba so often the criminal’s destination, that U.S.-based airliners carried landing instructions for Havana’s airport. Ransoms were so common that Seattle’s Seafirst Bank had earmarked currency for the occasion.
So when passenger 18C flashed what looked like a bomb on Flight 305, en route from Portland to Seattle the day before Thanksgiving of 1971, the flight crew was alarmed but not totally surprised. They complied with the man’s demands, landing the plane at Sea-Tac to trade the passengers for the cash and parachutes he requested. Gathered in the cockpit after taking off again, the crew felt a bump around 8:13pm, just north of Vancouver. They found little trace of Cooper or cash when they landed in Reno two hours later.
In those first few days of the Cooper mythos, the world knew him as an ordinary criminal on the run. Law enforcement flew planes southwest of Mount St. Helens, eying the thick forest for a parachute caught in the trees or a drifter holed up in a cabin. An assistant U.S. attorney who happened to be a passenger on Flight 305 told The Seattle Times, “I hope we’ll have a quick prosecution of this case.” But no sign brought law enforcement closer to a figure already morphing from man to cipher.
The past five decades have logged hundreds of suspects, multiple copycats, and a curious obsession from the general public. D.B. Cooper has a way of worming into people’s lives and professional spheres, the very mystery of his identity, motive, and ultimate fate weaving itself out of one century and unfurling into the next.
The Agent: Larry Carr
In the basement of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s downtown Seattle headquarters, sometime in the mid-2000s, one agent descends to the file room to dig through old paperwork. He’s lost in administrivia for hours, paging through typewritten reports bound in manila folders with metal tabs.
Special Agent Larry Carr could be Hollywood’s classic G-man. A rectangular jaw centers on a squared-off head, shoulders at near-perfect right angles. But Carr speaks with ease and humor; he’ll joke that his forays into the Cooper files, now almost two decades in the past, took place where the FBI secrets its proof of space aliens.
It wasn’t merely the information that fascinated Carr, the interviews and the evidence reports and the charts of the Victor 23 flight path of Flight 305. He was riveted by even the documentation.
“How did they get anything done?” he wonders of a bureau in the last six months of J. Edgar Hoover’s definitive reign, of formality and typewritten reports. Back then the very layout of an FBI agent’s desk was prescribed, down to the position of the pencils and blotter and phone.
Carr calls himself “a bit more free-spirited” than our standard FBI agent; after all, in 2004 he actually begged to be put on the D.B. Cooper case, a hoary unsolved crime with no new leads. The agent figured he’d make quick work of the then-33-year-old case by using DNA evidence to conclusively implicate one Richard McCoy Jr.
McCoy made delicious sense, his oval face reminiscent of the FBI’s sketch of Cooper. Better, he executed a near-identical hijacking four months after Flight 305. And Carr had something the Hoover-era spooks never did, a DNA lab. Carr eyed the necktie worn by Cooper, a skinny JCPenney-bought clip-on that the hijacker had tossed aside during the crime.
What came next was the FBI version of a “wah-wah” trombone. FBI labs told Carr that the tie was too contaminated; before the era of DNA investigation, too many people had touched it. Plus Carr dug deeper into those yellowed files and realized that McCoy’s alibi was too solid. No “Real McCoy” headlines for Carr.
And yet he remained undaunted. Even as the FBI shifted its main mission to counterterrorism after 9/11, Carr was a criminal specialist who worked bank robberies, crimes usually solved through public tips. If Carr could reignite the case in the public eye, useful Cooper information would flow right to him. “I liken myself to Tom Sawyer having other people paint my fence,” says Carr now. “I could just sit back and drink lemonade.”
And so Carr got permission to do what the FBI is not exactly known for: share its secrets. In 2007, the bureau released a flurry of details of their investigation. Redacted suspect names litter the NORJAK files—the investigation named for “Northwest hijacking.” A 1973 report to the acting director of the FBI notes, “There are currently 588 suspects, 236 of whom have been eliminated.”
Carr’s Tom Sawyer insouciance led him to the natural arena for crime solving in the mid-2000s: the internet. A skydiving website called Dropzone—home to sports-related public forums—hosted a thread about Cooper’s infamous jump. Soon it garnered thousands of pages of theories and questions, infighting and skirmishes; your classic online forum. Carr made a profile—username “Ckret”—and joined the fray in September 2007.
It took Carr only two months to reveal his true identity. He answered questions on Dropzone and debated theories and minutiae, like the angle of the plane’s flaps. Or why, among the parachutes provided, Cooper selected an advanced military-grade parachute. In one of his first 2007 posts he profiled Cooper: “He was also a ‘know-it-all.’ The type of person who would learn a few facts and then become an expert on the subject. One of those people who has just enough knowledge to be dangerous.”
Over the course of 14 months Ckret posted 522 times on Dropzone. He got to know the regulars, made jokes, spitballed what a D.B. Cooper reality show would entail. Crucially, Carr was convinced that a scientist outside the FBI could analyze one of the only pieces of evidence ever found after Cooper’s jump: $5,800 in twenty-dollar bills unearthed in 1980 by an eight-year-old boy on a Columbia River sandbar just north of Vancouver. The serial numbers matched the cash given to Cooper, but the worn bills offered no answers to how they got there. “It has not added up yet, but I am waiting,” wrote Ckret in a 2008 post.
But nothing, not the fast-pitched discussion on Dropzone, not even the citizen scientists Carr let study the D.B. Cooper evidence, offered him workable leads. In July 2016 the investigation was functionally shelved.
Carr doesn’t think the Cooper case will ever be solved. He’s sure the man died on November 24 moments after he jumped out of the plane, given the weather, the dark of the night, and a leap that took deft skydiving skills under the best of circumstances.
“I kind of apply Occam’s Razor to this,” he says now, the 50th anniversary falling a year before his retirement. “Whatever is the simplest explanation.” Still, he gets the draw. The Robin Hood mystique of it all. “You know, no one died. No one got hurt. It’s a mystery.”
The Theorist: Bruce Smith
In a Washington town so small it barely rates a label on Google Maps, a self-described “out of shape, grumpy” journalist named Bruce Smith dances outside the Ariel Store Pub. The settlement of Ariel, about 30 miles north of Portland, boasts little more than a post office and a Pacific Power facility for the dam that creates Lake Merwin. And, of course, this gritty little bar, a no-frills tavern.
“D.B. Cooper, Where are You?” reads a red poster on the ceiling. After all, estimates put his landing zone nearby. For decades the weekend after Thanksgiving meant D.B. Cooper Days, when bar owner Dona Elliott hired the same country band every year and hosted a Cooper lookalike contest.
Smith knew all the regulars, so deep were his ties to the oddball circle of amateur Cooper hunters. He can picture the old general store during 1971’s ground search—“dozens of FBI agents running around in their $400 suits and Italian shoes in the mud.” But by 2008 the annual event was a chance to dance and drink Black Butte Porter in the November drizzle. A party.
“We talk about the old days, we crack jokes, we make fun of each other. We get angry and spittle starts flying,” he says. There was Marla Cooper in attendance, sure her uncle L.D. was the true culprit. Geoffrey Gray, who wrote the bestseller Skyjack in 2010. Robb Heady, a copycat who successfully jumped out of a Boeing 727 but was soon apprehended. All Cooper, all the time. “Like being a kid in a toy store on Christmas Eve,” Smith says with a sigh.
Smith arrived in Washington state in the 1990s as a follower of Yelm’s J.Z. Knight and her metaphysical teachings; he’s always quested for answers. While working as a journalist in Eatonville, he stumbled upon the Cooper case and got hooked; now self-employed at his own Mountain News website, he chronicles the Cooper world.
Smith took to the same Dropzone forum frequented by Special Agent Carr. “It was the Cheers tavern, online, for me,” says Smith, a digital hangout for theorists—mostly men, he notes, despite the fact that true crime is hugely popular with women. Cooper, somehow, is a guy thing.
Smith pores over FBI inconsistencies. Where did the left-behind Raleigh brand cigarette butts end up? Who, exactly, sourced the parachutes given to the hijacker? For a keen observer with boundless imagination, Cooper is a choose-your-own adventure episode of The X-Files.
Like Carr, Smith has a profile of the mysterious criminal: ex-military, likely special forces. Perhaps someone trained in covert operations during the Vietnam War, someone who would select the trickiest parachute of the four available. Was he a well-trained soldier with a grudge after being shipped back to the states, or perhaps one put up to the task by the CIA?
Smith’s thoughts are wilder than some, tamer than others. His book D.B. Cooper and the FBI pokes at the government’s failures, from sloppy evidence supervision to witnesses left unquestioned. Since Carr’s release, much of the formal investigation has become available to civilians and he thrills that the “FBI does not have the full control over the storyline.” Cooper belongs to everyone now.
And he will until the case is solved—which Smith thinks will happen. He points to technological progress in processing evidence, but also metaphysical advancements that recall his days with J.Z. Knight. “Psychic sleuthing,” he says, will allow a person to “penetrate through and transform time and space” to solve crime. Remote viewing as law enforcement. Someday soon, he thinks, someone, maybe even him, can go back in time and actually observe Dan Cooper disappear into the dark night.
