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FBI closes case on D.B. Cooper

William Parcher

Show me the monkey!
William Parcher
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Jul 26, 2005
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They never confirmed any of the many leads. They couldn't figure out his real identity. I think that the common theory is that he died. It's an interesting story.

The FBI says it's no longer actively investigating the unsolved mystery of 1970s plane hijacker D.B. Cooper.

The bureau announced Tuesday that it's "exhaustively reviewed all credible leads" during its 45-year investigation and has redirected those resources to other priorities.

The FBI has investigated since a man calling himself Dan Cooper hijacked a Boeing 727 headed for Seattle after boarding at Portland International Airport on Nov. 24, 1971. He later jumped out the back of the plane in southwest Washington wearing a business suit and a parachute after receiving $200,000 in ransom money.

No sign of Cooper has emerged, though bundles of his cash, matched by serial numbers, were found in 1980.

The FBI says it has conducted searches, collected all available evidence and interviewed all identified witnesses. It says it's chased an immense number of tips but none have resulted in identifying the hijacker.
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http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-n...f/2016/07/db_cooper_investigation_is_ove.html
 
To be fair, he's probably spent the money by now, so they might as well forget it.
 
The money was all recorded by serial number. They knew the numbers and they were publicly shared. None of it ever entered circulation. Whatever happened to the money it was never spent.
 
William Parcher said:
The money was all recorded by serial number. They knew the numbers and they were publicly shared. None of it ever entered circulation. Whatever happened to the money it was never spent.
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That's always been the one thing that makes it seem likely he died. Even if he had spent the money overseas, over the course of so many years and changing hands so many times, you would think that some of it would have eventually made its way to a US bank and be recognized. Of course, I am not sure how sophisticated banks were at spotting marked serial numbers at that time.
 
simonxlong said:
That's always been the one thing that makes it seem likely he died. Even if he had spent the money overseas, over the course of so many years and changing hands so many times, you would think that some of it would have eventually made its way to a US bank and be recognized. Of course, I am not sure how sophisticated banks were at spotting marked serial numbers at that time.
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IIRC, the government agencies record serial numbers of all bills that are going to be destroyed. If I'm remembering correctly, then the fact they never recorded any from the heist does seem to indicate that D. B. hid the money then died.
 
On another forum it was discussed that given the time frame available to gather the money, make sure it was $200,000, pack it up and then get it to the plane, there might not have been time to adequately record the serial numbers. That the FBI might've just said they had recorded the numbers in order to discourage copycats.

I've read about it -- including accounts that he bailed out over a desolate mountainous section of Washington. It was actually more like a suburb of Portland near I-5. I lived in Vancouver, Washington briefly in the 1970s and when I pinned down the locale I remembered driving through the general area. Several times.
 
Nine years later in 1980 just north of Portland on the Columbia River, a young boy named Brian Ingram was digging a fire pit in the sand at a place called Tena Bar.
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I used to go to 'beach' parties on sandy spots along the Columbia River north of Portland. Possibly near where they found some of the money buried in 1980. There'd be as many as thirty or forty people and we'd usually make a fire, too, mostly using huge pieces of the drift wood that were always scattered about. One of the highlights was when one of the container ships (heading to or from the Port of Portland) would turn their spotlight on us from mid-channel. Great times.

I'm neither convinced Cooper survived or didn't survive. What a crazy guy. I guess I kind of hope he made it.
 
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Cooper jumped somewhere between Mt St Helens and Portland. Obviously he was eaten by a Sasquatch, endemic to that area.

(I saw a TV documentary years ago which basically said exactly that.)
 
Therefore D.B. Cooper is the Zodiac Killer.
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newyorkguy said:
I'm neither convinced Cooper survived or didn't survive. What a crazy guy. I guess I kind of hope he made it.
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Yeah, I think the arguments that the money hasn't turned up are a bit flawed both because the FBI would lie about it, and because they assume that Cooper was in it for the money. It's not exactly your average crime and he was hardly your average criminal. A person that crazy yet well-prepared might anticipate that the bills would be marked and just do it for the thrill.
 
TubbaBlubba said:
A person that crazy yet well-prepared might anticipate that the bills would be marked and just do it for the thrill.
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Cooper was described as calm and collected, well spoken, even thoughtful. Most people, even professional criminals, would have real trouble keeping cool in such circumstances, especially for hours, yet Cooper never seemed phased by the whole experience. Then he takes the money and parachute and jumps out of the plane, at night. He seems like such an unusual hijacker that, assuming he survived the jump, one has to wonder whether it was about the money or something else entirely.

By 1971, the government had been tracing ransom money using serial numbers for decades, so it seems unlikely to me that Cooper would do the necessary research to perpetrate the crime, but never consider that possibility. He may have thought of a way to spend the currency without attracting attention, perhaps overseas, hence why it never turned up.

Also, while not wanting to go too far down conspiracy theory lane, I think the possibility remains that the crime could have an additional motive(s) that we are simply unaware of and that was either more important to Cooper personally or more lucrative than the $200k.
 
TubbaBlubba said:
Yeah, I think the arguments that the money hasn't turned up are a bit flawed both because the FBI would lie about it, and because they assume that Cooper was in it for the money. It's not exactly your average crime and he was hardly your average criminal. A person that crazy yet well-prepared might anticipate that the bills would be marked and just do it for the thrill.
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As I posted above, they did find some of the money, and in circumstances that suggest that it got covered naturally rather than deliberately. I suspect that Cooper's parachute didn't open, and he became one with nature in an entirely different way than what he intended.
 
jhunter1163 said:
As I posted above, they did find some of the money, and in circumstances that suggest that it got covered naturally rather than deliberately. I suspect that Cooper's parachute didn't open, and he became one with nature in an entirely different way than what he intended.
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He would've liked them to think that.
 
jhunter1163 said:
As I posted above, they did find some of the money, and in circumstances that suggest that it got covered naturally rather than deliberately. I suspect that Cooper's parachute didn't open, and he became one with nature in an entirely different way than what he intended.
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Even though I agree with you, I prefer to think otherwise. Similar to the film "Escape From Alcatraz." There is no way those guys survived, but the notion is entertaining.
 
TheGoldcountry said:
Even though I agree with you, I prefer to think otherwise. Similar to the film "Escape From Alcatraz." There is no way those guys survived, but the notion is entertaining.
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I thought the MythBusters proved that the escape was completely plausible, even likely.

Also, pay no attention to the fact that I'm commenting on this thread. Obviously, I'm not D.B. Cooper. Obviously.
 
More than likely he died on the night, but it is possible that the FBI either didn't have the serial numbers, or did a lousy job tracking them later.
 
Hmmm...Aha!!!

William Parcher starts a thread about the DB Cooper investigation being closed.
There is no evidence on this board that William Parcher existed before DB Cooper.
Obviously Parcher is gloating because he is DB Cooper!!!11!!1!!11

Being smarter than the FBI is so much fun! ;)
 
Garrison said:
More than likely he died on the night, but it is possible that the FBI either didn't have the serial numbers, or did a lousy job tracking them later.
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I think it is highly likely he died on the night. But the FBI did have the serial numbers and have published them. An 8-year old boy found a small amount ($2000?) of the money alongside a river in 1980. The bundle was still packed and arranged in the manner it was originally handed over to the hijacker. It is the only money recovered and it suggests D.B. Cooper didn't make it.
 
I don't seem to recall, why the likelihood that he died? Was the terrain that harsh, was it a bad height to jump from, too windy..?

(I know nothing about parachuting.)
 
TubbaBlubba said:
I don't seem to recall, why the likelihood that he died? Was the terrain that harsh, was it a bad height to jump from, too windy..?

(I know nothing about parachuting.)
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Harsh terrain, jumping from an airliner with a higher speed than you'd normally use for skydiving.

One of the issues is that nobody knows how experienced DB Cooper was as a skydiver. If he was an expert, he might have made it; if he was a novice, he likely would have died.

One of the parachutes he was provided with was actually a practice chute and was sewn shut.
 
Segnosaur said:
Harsh terrain, jumping from an airliner with a higher speed than you'd normally use for skydiving.

One of the issues is that nobody knows how experienced DB Cooper was as a skydiver. If he was an expert, he might have made it; if he was a novice, he likely would have died.

One of the parachutes he was provided with was actually a practice chute and was sewn shut.
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What's the kind of thing that might've happened? That he moved at such a high horizontal speed that the parachute failed to unfold properly or quickly enough? That his horizontal speed would be high enough when hitting the ground that he might seriously injure himself, or smash into a mountainside or something?
 
If he died in the jump, he would have had the money on him.

When the money was found it narrowed down the area for a search, either to find the rest of the money, or the remains of Cooper and his equipment.

I find it illogical to not search in the vicinity of the found money, or to model how the money got where it was when it slipped out when Cooper died, and then search where sensible models point to. I conclude that this was done, but neither were Cooper's remains nor the rest of the money found.

The fact they haven't found anything else considerably lowers the probability that he died in the jump immediately, IMO.
 
elgarak said:
The fact they haven't found anything else considerably lowers the probability that he died in the jump immediately, IMO.
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Although the possibility of suffering injury, crawling to shelter and then succumbing is still there.
 
Lawsuit filed against FBI to make D.B. Cooper investigation file public.

A Los Angeles-based filmmaker has filed a lawsuit Thursday to compel the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice to release the investigative files in the notorious D.B. Cooper hijacking case...

Tom Colbert, the filmmaker and a former journalist, claims the FBI's announcement came a day after a two-part series aired on The History Channel that featured him and a team of experts conducting their own investigation on D.B. Cooper's true identity. Colbert says his team found more than 100 pieces of evidence that points to Cooper being Robert W. Rackstraw, a 72-year-old Vietnam War veteran with parachute training who lives in Southern California.

Rackstraw has claimed to be D.B. Cooper in the past, but wouldn't confirm or deny it when Colbert interviewed him for the show, the lawsuit said. The show, "D.B. Cooper: Case Closed?" aired on July 10 and 11. According to the lawsuit, Colbert made a Freedom of Information Act request for the Cooper case file to the FBI on July 12 and didn't receive a response.

The lawsuit said the bureau "took advantage of the airing of the program to close its case and hide the fact that it could not develop evidence sufficient to prosecute Rackstraw beyond a reasonable doubt because of earlier Bureau investigative errors and failures."...
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http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-n...f/2016/09/lawsuit_filed_against_fbi_to_m.html
 
elgarak said:
If he died in the jump, he would have had the money on him.
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Not necessarily. It depends on how well he had the money secured on him.

If he were holding some of the cash in his hands, or somehow tied to him loosely, it could have become dislodged during the jump, or when he pulled the rip cord, potentially leaving miles between him and the lost cash.

Another issue is that the money that was found may have been washed down river, meaning that not only would they need to search the immediate area, but also miles upstream as well.
 
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