My father was an FBI agent who retired about the time of the DB Cooper hijacking. And one his duties in the Bureau was the investigation of hijackings.
A few years ago, he passed away and I was going through his personal effects, I found a binder that has a list of somewhere around 250 signatures… And that is all it has, a list of names. No date, no title. Nothing. I thought could be a list of people from a high school reunion or perhaps people he worked with as a retirement memento.
One of the names, on page 2 of 4, is the name D.B. Cooper, as plain as day. There is no other name that I recognized.
I have wondered if this is some sort of cryptic clue to the D.B. Cooper mystery and debated with myself whether I should bring the binder to the authorities.
That’s weird, since “D.B. Cooper” was just a mistake by the media which stuck in the public consciousness. It wasn’t the name actually used by the hijacker.
Are they signatures or just a list of names? In other words, are they all in the same handwriting (your father’s, I would expect) or in different handwritings?
I’m surprised by the absolute confidence expressed in this thread that the money has not been spent. Was bill serial number checking so perfect in the '70’s that this can be known with any degree of certainty?
Was it 100%? No. But it was 10 thousand $20 bills, almost all with serial numbers starting with L. So could a few have slipped by? Sure.
But we know a bunch was found in the river, and NONE has gone thru the US Treasury where they receive old bills. And none by any banks some time after.
So the Mint checks every bill coming in to be destroyed. They are recorded, just to make sure no one grabs a few and steals them, etc. Not one of the 10000 bills have come in.
Sure maybe someone spent a couple and they never got sent to the Mint. But we know for sure the bulk of the bills was never spent.
There was a "D.B. Cooper " on another suspect list, thats where the media got ahold of that moniker. Not connected to the hijacker. I mean Cooper is quite common.
James Long, who was a reporter for the Oregon Journal at the time, was on the phone to a source from an airline involved in the hijacking, and wrote down the name D. B. Cooper.
“Either because the Northwest [source] gave it to me wrong or because the noisy [phone] connection helped me misunderstand it,” Long says, he wrote down D.B. rather than Dan that day. As history will verify, the wrong name stuck.
Long didn’t have an opportunity to verify the info before it was published due to the urgency of getting out the story.
UPI reporters would scoop up duplicates of the Journal’s typewritten stories, rewrite or retype them, and send them out on the wire. Long says he doesn’t remember all the details, but after getting the garbled name-initials from his airline source, “I wrote a quick story because I was writing for our one-dot edition with a deadline of about 3:30 or 4 [p.m.], and I remember we were pushing it because they kept saying they had to have it now.”
Long and others tried to correct the record but the name D. B. Cooper was so catchy that there was no putting the genie back in the bottle.
“So that’s the full account and you’re the first to get it. The FBI did put out a press release, I think it was the next day, saying the hijacker used the name Dan Cooper, and we did run that statement, but it never caught on,” he said.
“Everybody just kept saying D.B., and we gave up trying to change it.”
Yeah, I think everyone knows that D.B. was an error or fabrication by the reporter. But the “fact” that it originated from some other suspect list was news to me as well.
Common with CTers. We pulled off the perfect crime (JFK Assassination, 9/11, moon-landing hoax) so let’s drop hints that a Big-Brain like C. T. can piece it together.
UFR, The signatures are not all legible. I can decipher about 75% of the signatures.
But the “D.B. Cooper” name is very legible. Most of the names are typically male.
The theory that my father collected signatures is plausible, but I never knew him to collect signatures. My best guess is that it is people that he worked with. I knew a few people that he worked with and those names
I doubt the DB Cooper signature was a joke. As I said, he retired around the time of the hijacking. It could have been a few months before Nov 24, 1971 hijack date but no later than January of 1972. My best guess is that he retired in September, 1971 as that is when he turned 50 yrs old.
As we mentioned- DB Cooper was not connected to the hijacking, that was Dan Cooper. Of course, since Cooper is a common name there are people with those initials and last name. But he did not get the hijackers signature. AFAIK, we never got his signature.
Just found a document that indicates that my father retired in March 1972, so 3-4 months after the hijacking. I guess my memory from 50+ years ago is a little fuzzy.