As it turns out, I retain the copyrights to the original story as submitted. Here you go. (And Dice, I'll buy you lunch if you just spent 8 bucks to read this.)
The FBI May Never Find D.B. Cooper, but the Secret Service Might
by Brian Rafferty
For thirty-eight years, the Bureau has been stumped. How did $5,800 of skyjacker D.B. Cooper’s ransom money arrive at a little beach on the Columbia River, and what weathered it down into weird little ovals? It wouldn’t be so important a question if this wasn’t the only physical evidence found of the only skyjacker in history who has never been caught or identified. And while the FBI publicly called it quits on the case last year, private citizens and online sleuthing communities are just getting warmed up.
Virtually every lead in the case for decades has been generated by the public, and while many of them are less than credible, some of them have been taken seriously by law enforcement. One such lead came from the DropZone website, where it was suggested in 2008 that “Dan Cooper,” the name the hijacker actually gave at the airline check-in counter, was an alias inspired by a Belgian Comic Book character. Like the skyjacker, the fictional “Dan Cooper” parachuted to safety after high-altitude ordeals. After that lead, the FBI reportedly switched its focus to finding a suspect who may have spent time in French-speaking countries.
While the suspect profile is key, the money really is the bottom line. Tying somebody to it is just about the only chance of getting a conviction, if the hijacker is even still alive 46 years later, as he is assumed by many to have died in the jump. With only partial finger prints and inconclusive DNA profiles, the found ransom money is the linchpin of the investigation. But after four decades of fruitless scrutiny, what details did we all miss about this money?
It was discovered on a beach known as Tena Bar, where in 1980 a boy and his daddy cleared a spot for a campfire and unearthed “three little driftwoods,” to use the words of the father, Dwayne Ingram. It took a moment to realize that this driftwood was actually bundled money with the edges seemingly rotted off all the way around. Decomposition had apparently robbed the bills of everything but the serial numbers and the center portraits of Andrew Jackson.
After scouring the beach for more cash, the Ingram family called the FBI, who brought in shovel teams and a tractor to look for more evidence. No body, bomb, bills or parachute were located. All they found were little fragments of money strewn about, which today can be found in two tiny boxes in the FBI vault, averaging about a millimeter in diameter each. In total, those fragments appear to make up less than a single bill’s worth of material.
The bulk of the cash was reduced to small, oval-shaped bundles, oddly symmetrical, and stacked in the sand. What caused the bills to drop so much weight has never been contended, as the FBI made it clear from the get-go that “The money was badly decomposed.” This is viewed as gospel, as wherever you look, online or in books about the case, that word appears repeatedly: decomposed. Along with degraded and deteriorated, it makes up the Holy Trinity of adjectives used to describe Cooper’s found bills.
The online sleuths agree, and have plenty more to say about the money. Two-hundred and fifty pages of material have been written and reposted solely about the money at the DB Cooper Forum, a website dedicated to the case, and all of it is virtually unanimous. Everyone believes the money got there naturally. Nobody seems to think the money could have been buried by hand. Excerpted here are individual opinions from a recent exchange on the Forum:
- “I don't think anyone has, or even can, provide a meaningful reason for deliberately burying the money at Tina Bar.”
- “A plant (burial) doesn't make any sense.
- “Once I saw the TV news show with the shards I (reluctantly) kissed the T bar money plant theory goodbye.”
- “Yes, the KATU video sure does send the plant theory Bye-bye.”
- “Plant: there is NO evidence of a plant - none, zip, nada!”
Notice another word that is used over and over again: Plant.
The “plant theory,” as it has come to be known, postulates that Cooper survived his 1971 skydive from a commercial airliner and later returned to bury some of the loot. Why? To confuse investigators, and possibly even fake his own death. It is the only theory offered to explain a deliberate burial, and is wholly inadequate, like everything in the case. Even with the bills appearing to have been “trimmed” in the opinion of geologist Phil Scoles, who is involved in an independent investigation, burying the money hasn’t made any sense to most people so far.
But looking at the money from another perspective brings up another possibility entirely, one that could bring another government agency into the investigation: the U.S. Secret Service. After all, they’re the agency that deals with counterfeiting. Just have a look at what can be done with the edges of a Federal Reserve Note, like the ones missing from the Cooper cash:
If the above photo looks funny, it’s because George Washington is not on the Ten dollar bill. This image is of what the U.S. Secret Service of yesteryear referred to as a “raised note,” the arch-nemesis of the distracted 20th-century cashier. Much more prevalent a century ago, this type of altered bill has had the value inflated by applying the edges of a bigger bill to the body of a smaller bill. Look close and you'll see the natural semi-circle made by trimming the Ten.
While the FBI and the online sleuths have focused on the bundled money that was found, a focus on the missing edges gives an alternate reason for burying the money. Rather than trimming off the edges, Cooper may have trimmed out the serial numbers that could identify the money. Then it wouldn’t be a “plant,” but a simple disposal, much like an unwanted apple core, with Tena Bar being the dumping ground.
Photo Used by Permission of CitizenSleuths.com
As in the previous photo of the fake Ten, notice the shape this recovered ransom bill has: semi-circles on the sides. The corners with the number 20 are all gone, and so are the identifying words, “TWENTY DOLLARS” that should be on the bottom. What is here is the serial number, which authorities had recorded, a fact that Cooper may have suspected early on. Within 36 hours of the hijacking, newspapers had published that the FBI would not confirm whether the bills were “marked” or not. So the cash may have become too hot for him to spend as-is.
When an old-timer made a “poor man’s counterfeit” like the phony Ten in our example, he took $21 in the form of two Tens and a Single, and altered each of them a little bit. He’d trim the left edge off of one Ten and the right edge off of the other. Then he’d paste them onto the single and spend all three bills, making $30 out of the original $21. It’s not very profitable. Even using Twenties, you’d still need to invest $41 to make a fake Twenty and possibly go to federal prison.
However, it is an entirely different story if you’re already trying to escape federal charges and you’re loaded with cash that will lead the FBI right to you. On Thanksgiving of ’71, the whole world was looking for a skyjacker carrying specific serial numbers, not a small-time flimflammer trying to pass off a doctored single. The edges of those bills would have made ideal $20 disguises for a steady stream of George Washington Singles given to Cooper as change as he made his way out of the search area.
A far more common method of making an “eleven dollar bill” as they were also called, was to just remove the corners and cover the “1” with a “10,” but a “20” worked just as well. Interestingly, according to the Sleuths at the DB Cooper Forum, no corner of a Twenty has ever surfaced in evidence or in any photo of the evidence pertaining to this case. The edges are gone entirely.
If D.B. Cooper was the Master Criminal that Walter Cronkite reported him to be, it might not take him long to realize that he had the raw materials at his fingertips to make the highest quality “Raised Note” Twenties possible, redeeming the ransom for up to 95% of its worth after an investment in Singles and glue.
What you see in the photos above is possible evidence of a salvage operation, with the cornerless Twenties being like stripped chassis in a junkyard. If so, then the reason why nobody ever found Cooper's money in circulation because they couldn’t tell which bills were his without their serial numbers.
The question of how many Cooper bills may have been passed would not even be a question for the FBI, but for the Secret Service.
If this theory holds, it may have been overlooked by the FBI for multiple reasons. In addition to not being their area of expertise, the practice of raising notes peaked between the 1880’s and 1920’s, with the last mentions of it in newspaper archives having been over a decade ago. Additionally, it could impact the case by helping eliminate suspects, such as Barb “Bobby” Dayton, who claimed to have stashed the loot in a cistern and found it deteriorated some time later.
One current suspect, Robert Rackstraw, is being fingered for the skyjacking by another independent investigator that claims Rackstraw purposefully dumped the money elsewhere to fake his own death. This story relies on the money staying whole and being transported by a flood, before deteriorating over time as per the conventional view of the money’s physical state. If the bills were cut to make phony Twenties, it could eliminate this theory, if not Rackstraw altogether.
The most exciting aspect of this new angle is that theoretically, if Cooper did pass any of these notes, he may have gotten arrested for it, only not as a skyjacker. If so, the government could have a new set of fresh leads to investigate, and not just from arrest records, but potential physical evidence. While the Secret Service reportedly destroys the counterfeits it confiscates, they are also known to keep a few as samples. If this includes raised notes, then this means there is a feint heartbeat of a chance that the government already possesses the edges of Cooper’s Twenties and doesn’t even know it.
Interesting as it sounds, the Raised Note theory is not without a hurdle, in the form of those “shards” of money the FBI found in 1980. A debris field was described of tiny pieces of twenty dollar bills all through the sand where the bundles were discovered. How they arrived there has also been a big mystery, as some of the fragments were reportedly found up to three feet beneath the surface of the sand, leading some to theorize that they had floated to shore over time and become buried gradually.
However, according to an on-location news broadcast in 1980, “most of the pieces of money they found…up near the surface,” despite the FBI having dug much deeper. Since the Ingram family had previously been digging on the beach while trying to separate the brittle bills themselves, the fragments may very well have been spread like cookie crumbs after its discovery. The FBI team may then have inadvertently caused a small number of shards to sink to a depth of three feet while digging. In short, the money fragments found may simply have been the result of an innocently contaminated crime scene.
Was this little sand bar the location where Cooper, cold and on the run after his jump, clumsily hacked apart his cash with the pocket knife he carried? If so, he treated the serial numbers much like a homing device, or a dye pack in a bank robbery. He got rid of them.
Some of the more scientific minds involved in the case have contributed research that supports the Raised Note theory. In addition to Scoles, another group of researchers brought into the case by the FBI a decade ago made a different discovery on the Cooper bills. The group, nicknamed the Citizen Sleuths, experimented with new dollar bills soaked in river water and buried in sand, both taken from the shoreline near Tena Bar. The test bills contained a form of algae. The ransom notes had none. This suggests they likely did not get to the beach by way of the river.
What does this all mean? That unless a second master criminal, knowledgeable in a counterfeiting technique nearly extinct by 1971, happened upon Cooper's frozen corpse that winter, it is increasingly likely that he survived the jump. He may have left a trail that we can track even now. And he may have lived long enough to laugh at quite a few hair-brained theories about his money, just like this one.
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