Things About The D.B. Cooper Case That Still Don't Make Sense

It's time to dip back into that neverending criminal well of investigation, speculation, debate, forum chatter amongst amateur sleuths, documentaries and video essays, and more: the D.B. Cooper case. Dating back to 1971 and supplying approximately 10 quadrillion pieces of content across various media, the case of the airplane hijacker who parachuted to safety continues to intrigue nearly 53 years later. Every now and then some outlet debuts a "shocking new D.B. Cooper evidence" headline, but no real breakthroughs have ever happened.

The D.B. Cooper story goes thusly: On a Wednesday like any other on November 24, 1971, a polite man in his 40s in a business suit rolled up to the Northwest Orient Airlines counter at Portland International Airport and bought a one-way ticket for flight #305 headed to nearby Seattle. He put on a big pair on sunglasses on the flight, ordered a bourbon and soda, and handed a note to a stewardess saying that he had a bomb in his attaché case. He demanded $200,000 in 20-dollar bills and four parachutes and opened the case to show the stewardess some wires and a mechanism inside.

When flight #305 landed in Seattle, Cooper got his money and parachutes, and let the other 36 passengers go. He ordered the plane back to the skies headed for Mexico City, and somewhere over southwestern Washington jumped right out of the plane, parachute on his back and money in hand. He was never seen again and left behind a litany of mysteries that linger to this day.

We might as well tackle the biggest question first, the one that's plagued both the FBI and armchair Sherlocks for decades: Why has there been zero progress identifying D.B. Cooper? Of course, we can assume that Cooper's real last name wasn't "Cooper," nor his first initials D.B. In fact, the FBI archives say that the "D.B." moniker wasn't used by the suspect; it was a mistake on the part of the media that never went away. Cooper's actual plane ticket read, "Dan Cooper," and that's it. 

In the five-plus decades since Cooper launched himself from flight #305 with $200,000 in cash (over $1.5 million modernly), the FBI has investigated over 1,000 suspects. Some of these suspects have become near-celebrities in their own right, like Robert Rackstraw, who was officially removed from the suspect list in 1979 but was still the subject of private investigations until he died in 2019. There was even a book written about investigations into him, titled, "The Last Master Outlaw," complete with a noir cover featuring a cigarette-smoking Cooper. Very recently in 2024, siblings Chanté and Rick McCoy III came forward and said that Cooper was their dad, Richard McCoy Jr. They've apparently got a ragged shred of parachute to prove it.

In the meantime, Cooper's own generic appearance has proven the perfect cover: "White male, [6-foot-1], 170-175 pounds, age-mid-40s, olive complexion, brown eyes, black hair, conventional cut, parted on left," per Popular Mechanics. This plus the suit and sunglasses means the description fits a whole lot of people.

This next question might seem odd considering that D.B. Cooper pulled off the most notorious heist of the 20th century, but still: How did he think he could get away with such an absurd idea? Cooper didn't plan a bank heist with a mask and getaway car. What's the real connection between an airplane up in the sky and an attaché case full of cash? And then he thought, "Well, if I want to get away as quickly and as far as possible I'll just use a parachute?" Put differently, we could ask, "Where did Cooper get his idea from?" It's pretty ludicrous on the surface and only seems plausible because he actually did it.

FBI agent Larry Carr, who was put in charge of the Cooper case in 2007, might have found an answer to this line of questioning thanks to some of those internet sleuths we've mentioned. As the FBI Archives explains, those sleuths uncovered an actual "Dan Cooper" — the name that D.B. Cooper gave when he got his plane ticket — not on the streets of any city, but in the pages of a comic book. There was a French-Canadian comic called "Dan Cooper" that featured a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot of the same name doing things like parachuting from the sky. The cover of issue number 7 — dating to around the time of the hijacking — even shows the fictional Cooper parachuting from a plane. Carr thinks that this might be where Cooper got his idea from.

Lots of people have asked our next question: Was D.B. Cooper's bomb even real? Folks would do well to remember that at the time of Cooper's crime airports were way more relaxed than they are now. We're talking no metal detectors, no X-ray machines, no attendants poking around in bags while wearing plastic gloves, no roving security barking at people to go here or go there, no risk of pat downs, no taking off your shoes, and certainly no post-9/11 "put your toiletries in little X-sized bottles in a Y-sized transparent bag" nonsense. Cooper is the one responsible for granting us many airport security procedures to begin with after he waltzed onto flight #305 with an apparent bomb. Yes, apparent.

In the same way that there were no security measures in place to discover if Cooper was actually carrying a bomb, there was no way for those on board flight #305 to determine if the bomb was real. When Cooper opened his attaché case to show the flight attendant what was inside, she saw "a case containing wires and red sticks," as Biography describes. Cooper said it was a bomb, and so she believed him — she had no choice. But is it unreasonable to assume that the bomb might have been just a bunch of junk in a bag? It's like the pointed finger gun in the hoodie pocket trick: It's not worth it to not believe it's real.

In 1980, a kid found a crucial piece of evidence related to the D.B. Cooper case: a bag that held one of the four parachutes that Cooper demanded in addition to $200,000. As the FBI explains, it contained $5,800 in $20-dollar bills that matched the serial numbers of the notes given to Cooper — bingo. The "rotting package" was discovered at Tena Bar on the Columbia River in an area over which Cooper jumped in southwest Washington state. This might seem like some kind of breakthrough at first, but what does it actually confirm? Of course, the bag would've landed on the ground along with Cooper and his other bags. The question is: Where did Cooper go from there?

Plenty of folks — FBI investigator Larry Carr included — think that Cooper didn't escape after parachuting, but died. The FBI calls Cooper's nighttime skydive "a dangerous proposition for a seasoned pro," and we have no idea if Cooper was anything approaching pro. Carr thinks he worked as a plane cargo loader at one point, and that's it. Cooper's clothing and shoes certainly weren't suited to parachuting to safety even if he'd jumped in the daytime, let alone in the pitch-black sky of a frigid, late November Washington night right into a dense, vast track of forested terrain that could kill anyone even if they walked in fully prepared to hike and camp overnight. The bag discovered in 1980 might be all that we'll ever find of Cooper.

It might seem obvious what D.B. Cooper wanted when he rolled up to the Northwest Orient Airlines at Portland International Airport back in 1971. He wanted money, plain and simple. He envisioned being loaded with cash and reclining on a sunny beach somewhere sucking down cocktails — end of story. But, that very simple conclusion draws us into a whole bunch of mismatched reasoning and further questions. 

Folks might be inclined to think "Oh, how brilliant!" of D.B. Cooper because every step of his plan worked — from the bomb threat to the hostage exchange to receiving the money and parachutes, etc. And, he got away. But like we said, he likely died for it because it doesn't seem like he planned his nighttime forest landing and post-landing too well. Ultimately, Cooper might be less of a criminal mastermind and more of an inspired idiot. If so, he pulled off his heist because of some combination of audacity, guts, luck, and stupidity.

Such thinking brings us around to the central unanswered D.B. Cooper mystery: What's his story? What led him to do what he did? Was it really about money? Amateur Cooper sleuth Eric Ulis said this exact thing to Oregon Public Broadcasting in 2021, and Ulis is the one who founded CooperCon (yes, a real thing), an annual convention for Cooper enthusiasts of all stripes. "I want to know who the real guy is, the real story," he said. For now, such questions remain unanswered.