Four times now in this thread…
Please, can we let it go? It’s been more than fifty years and people still call the guy D B Cooper.
He also had a small bag with him whose contents are not known. It could have contained boots, gloves, etc…
Considering that Cooper seems to have prepared carefully, it’s certainly possible.
We should probably dial down that claim a bit.
Start with a nitpick. The US Mint and Bureau of Engraving, part of the Treasury Department, mint coins and print bills. The Federal Reserve processes bills and shreds them when they are deemed too worn for use. They shred about 5 to 10% of larger denomination bills they encounter. Cite. That same cite goes into some detail and makes no mention of scanning the serial number of every or any bill that they take in. I opine that it doesn’t happen. At any rate I’ve never encountered a headline saying, “Fed money shredders identify stolen funds: a confused nation wonders why”.
Now recording serial numbers can be useful, especially if a criminal is captured and found to possess a large number of marked bills. Invisible inks can be printed on hostage currency and maybe identified by someone with an ultraviolet light. But I am thoroughly unsurprised that the Treasury hasn’t located Cooper’s bills even assuming some were later found and spent by a miscreant. That said, if somebody showed up at the local store this century with heavily damaged bills dating from the early 1970s, yes the FBI might eventually learn of it. Lightly damaged bills found during the 1980s probably could be spent without too much trouble, I opine. Probably.
A lot of people have disappeared in such terrain and have never been found. The ruggedness is quite severe.
Note that bears, deer, elk and such die in these places all the time. Trying to locate the carcass of one particular such animal in a large wilderness area is hopeless.
Things like clothing and such is going to be ripped apart during the feasting and scattered over a wide area.
Consider the case of Steve Fossett. Disappeared in a light planc in Sept. 2007. Very extensive search including a large number of people searching sat images of the area. (He was quite famous so a lot of effort was put into it.) A year later a hiker found some ID cards and such. Followup searches found the plane. It took some work to find human remains. Some were found a half mile away from the crash site. And they had a plane to look for, not just a body.
All this is a sparsely forested area and the had a good idea of where he might have crashed.
BTW, I rule out absolutely positively as La Center WA as a possible landing site. The bag of Cooper cash that was found on an island in the Columbia is upstream of the drainage for that area. You have to make several weird assumptions to get there. E.g., Cooper survived, went east, dumped some of the money in the Columbia or upstream tributaries. And never spent the rest of the money. You also have to claim that the pilots of the plane had no idea where they were despite being close to PDX airspace.
Another thing, note the jump time. It gets dark there in November well before 6. Given the weather no one would have seen him after he left the plane. Cooper would have a really hard time just getting oriented to pull the rip cord, control the descent, land somewhere not completely hazardous.
Nature can be unforgiving, which supports the FBI’s story that Cooper died in the forests of Washington. What gives me pause is that there are no suspects listed in wiki fitting the profile of a middle age man who disappears around that time and is never heard from again. I mean it’s possible that Cooper died in November 1971. He could have been a drifter without family, friends, or acquaintances. But that conflicts with the FBI profile. Which makes me think the FBI profile is wrong or Cooper survived. If he was a drifter, he was a drifter with resources and character capable of carrying out his plan. While surviving the hijacking seems unlikely, I think hijacking an airplane then disappearing without anyone apparently noticing ever is more unlikely. Hijacking an airplane and fumbling the money bag does sound plausible though. Or maybe Gary Seven is the culprit.
Here’s an excellent recap of the hijacking, drop zone, parachutes and search, as well as the money found on Tina Bar and a rundown of a few of the suspects. https://youtu.be/CbUjuwhQPKs?si=eUaOC-Me_QJPnAah
Thanks @K364. I watched part of that and it explains how the serial numbers of the money were known. It seems the Seattle bank had an already prepared package of $250,000 just in case someone needed ransom money. It was not prepared for the Cooper hijacking, but for any ransom demand. Of course, the serial numbers had been recorded beforehand.
FWIW, according to the Weather Underground archive, it was around 46 degrees and rainy that night.
https://www.wunderground.com/history/daily/KPDX/date/1971-11-24
That data is for the Portland airport, which is right along the Columbia River. In other words, basically at sea level. Cooper is believed to have jumped over the mountains of southern Washington, which are at higher elevation and therefore lower temperatures.
I’ve always wondered how sure the authorities were as to where Cooper jumped. The whole crew was on the flight deck from shortly after takeoff until after the plane landed in Reno. The flight crew said there was a slight upset to the plane somewhere north of Portland, and that was assumed to be from Cooper leaving the plane. What if that was just the stairs being lowered, and Cooper actually jumped later? Maybe he had the last laugh knowing hundreds of people were looking for him in the wrong place.
Didn’t turn out that Loki was DB Cooper?
Batman, IIRC.
The money found on Tina Bank indicates he jumped somewhere in the general Portland-Vancouver area. If it was deliberately buried, then most likely he jumped north of the Columbia, since there aren’t any bridges near that place. If it floated there and was buried by natural effects, he could have jumped either north or south of the Columbia.
There’s also the location of the money relative to the Lewis River. The likely location of his jump is in the Lewis River drainage, but that empties into the Columbia downstream from Tina Bank. So people assume it couldn’t have floated there via that river. So they deduce he either jumped into the Washougal River drainage, which is upstream but well to the east of the flight track, or he survived and buried it there, but never came back for it. I’m not sure how likely this is, but the money could have been caught in an eddy in the Columbia and carried upstream to the bank.
How long was Cooper standing in the open air while exposed to the elements while going a minimum of 115 miles per hour? He wasn’t exactly dressed for the weather on the ground let alone at altitude. It seems unlikely Cooper would have been able to stand at the back of the plane exposed to the elements for very long.
I watched the video linked above, so I was familiar with the Lewis and Washougal River basin theories. I’ve never seen any analysis a landing on the south side of the Columbia.
I know that area a bit; grew up near Tacoma and travelled down to Portland quite a few times. Even did the Seattle-to-Portland bike ride a few times.
I haven’t either. Most of the area south is built up area, so very likely any body would have been found by now. I suppose he could have landed in the Columbia itself and floated way downriver or out to sea.
That’s a great video, K364. I didn’t know the money’d been buried (deliberately or otherwise). However, it doesn’t make sense to just bury it without a bag or box or other way to protect it unless he was desperate to hide it. To me, that’s a strike against deliberately burying it – I think it happened naturally.
So many things just don’t add up – Cooper was specific about the wing flaps being at 15 degrees, but he must’ve known flying at no more than 10,000 feet with the landing gear down would’ve meant they couldn’t make Mexico City. What was his thought process?
Was the bag left behind on the aircraft? It would seem odd to bring a bag with your skyjumper gear, empty it when you donned the gear, then tote the empty bag along with you.