SYSK’s Fall True Crime Playlist: SYSK Live: The DB Cooper Heist

Welcome back, everybody. We're moving along on our true crime playlist with an episode we recorded live in Seattle in twenty seventeen, on the unsolved mystery of dB Cooper. Someone using that alias hijacked a plane flying from Portland to Seattle in nineteen seventy one and jumped out mid air, making off with two hundred thousand dollars. People still float suspects today, and they usually say the case is solved, but the FBI stopped investigating back in twenty sixteen and

I'm already a sweaty mess, so that must mean we're on stage.

We are off to a great start.

That must mean I'm awake.

Or sleeping.

Yeah, I sweat my sleep too big time. It's gross.

I'm always wiping his brow.

What movie we're going to watch tonight in the hotel?

Is a spy out yet on?

And we can leave the seat up on the toilet? I don't.

I don't do that.

I don't either because I pee sitting down because I'm forty five years old. Do you really well, yeah, I might as well get into it.

What you do too?

Why we never talked about this. I started being sitting down during the middle of the night, Get up because if it just makes sense, because you don't want to wake up too much and you don't want to like make a mess. And then I think I just hit a certain age where I was like, it's just nicer to sit down. I don't need to prove anything to anyone.

Huh, you landed your lady, You're all set.

Yeah, I stand when I pee off my deck at night, I don't do that.

I live in a condo complex.

They would if I would be it's not good, man.

I feel like an enormous weight's just been lifted off of.

I can't believe that you're not even forty years old yet and you pee sitting down.

Yeah, let's start the podcast.

Are there other guys out there that pee sitting down?

All right?

We're starting a movement, baby, that's right.

Your ladies will appreciate it. Oddly, I pooped standing up. This is so off the rails already.

Like in conversation. Let's be sitting there talking to me. You're like you're pooping right now, aren't you. Yeah, it's like it's more efficient this way, I get more done.

We should probably start over.

We should.

We're gonna get off stage and come back out. I can't believe what we've been talking about here this evening already. Okay, let's all just take it down a notch. All right, So we're poking casting. We're about to start podcasting. I think I already started the podcast, oh god, which means that's gonna be on like the thing.

We That's why I said we should start over.

Okay, it stays here everybody.

Yeah, it's all our secret. I think five hundred people.

Okay, hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. We are live here at the Beautiful Neptune Theater in Seattle, Washington.

Man Times two that's an in joke. People will be like even better than what.

There's a lot of there's more crossover between our fans and Howard Stern than our fans and Mariners fans.

I think, boy, there's a Venn diagram out there that's confusing me already.

Okay, so Chuck, yes, this is a little bit of history. Yeah, so we're going to go back in the way back machine. That's right, Dud's If you listen to the PR Live podcast, you know that, like the wayback machine is imaginary. So settled down.

They heard that live.

Yeah that was a good one too.

There are PR professionals here because they emailed me today.

Oh really, yeah, I can tell that's the call of the PR professional call. So we're going back to a cold, stormy, rainy, pretty nasty Thanksgiving in nineteen seventy one, and the story begins at PDX Portland Airport and a man walked into PDX, took a picture of his shoe on the carpet, and then walked along to the Northwest Orient Airlines ticket desk. That's right, And he walked up and he said, Hi, I am really interested in finding more about flight three

Here's my twenty dollars.

Yeah, one ticket please, for a one way ticket between Portland and Seattle, a board flight three oh five. Yeah.

And she was like, that's a weird question, but I guess he's very specific about what kind of plane he likes to fly on.

Plus, it's nineteen seventy and I'm in no position to publicly question a man, so I'll just go along with this.

It's very true.

And it was twenty dollars for that flight. This is a very seventies podcast. So they handed him as a little ticket voucher and said just filled this out, sir, uh, don't need to see ID because it's nineteen seventy one. Just tell us who you are or whoever you want us to think you are. And he wrote down in big block letters in a red ink pin, Dan Cooper.

You know where we're going with this, son.

So the Boeing seven twenty seven Dash one hundred is every single person in this room knows is a smallish plane. It's not the biggest plane in the Boeing fleet. It's not the smallest either, but it's the only one that had an af staircase. Right, And this particular flight flying aboard this Boeing seven twenty seven DASH one hundred flight three zero five had a crew of five aboard. There was Captain William Scott, not Sean William Scott, we figured out later on, not Stiffler.

That would have made zero sense.

Yeah, Hetty had a former life in the seventies as an airline pilot co pilot Robert Radazak. There's a ce in there for those of you who like that kind of thing. And there were three flight attendants. There's a head flight attendant who was named Alice Hancock, right, yes, and then two I guess regular flight attendants, Tina mucclough, who's a hero of ours, and Florence Schaffner.

I think they called him stewardess's back then to be fair, right, But we're forward thinking guys, so we're we're gonna go ahead and say flight attendant.

We don't use the S word.

You just make well, never mind.

Never mind, We've done quite enough extraneous stuff for her, I know.

So Dan Cooper gets on the plane. There's thirty seven other passengers because again it was a seventies they didn't overbook flights back then, and say I'm sorry you bought a ticket, but you really can't fly on this flight. Thirty seven passengers, pretty empty, and Dan Cooper seat sits in seat eighteen C. They pour him up a bourbon in seven up and he lights up a cigarette.

A Raley brand cigarette.

Because it's nineteen seventy one, you got smoke on planes. Yeah, And he looked to be about in his mid forties. He was, you know, kind of looked like the men of the time, which is to say you either looked by nineteen seventy one. He either looked a little more like Don Draper, kind of holding on to that fifties look, or you look like Charles Manson.

He looked a little more like Don Draper. Yeah. Had the suit had the skinny tie.

And we should talk a little bit about the suit. The suit was a russet colored suit, which was like that weird burgundy brown color. It's potato colored it right, and it just so happened that he was wearing the suit during the one six month period in history where you could wear that color suit out in public. So he was okay. And then his skinny tie was a clip on from J. C. Penny. That's right.

He had a imitation Mother of Pearl type in. He had an overcoat, he had a hat, he had a bag kind of like a briefcase, and he had these black corn rim sunglasses, dark kind of olive skin.

Would you say?

They call him swarthy, which I think is like stewardess that's been phased out, you know what I mean.

I thought swarthy. I thought that was like a sea captain.

I'm sure there were swarthy sea captains.

Because, yeah, because they're out in the sun, so they ended up getting olive skinned.

That's rugged. Okay, you're thinking of the Gordon's fishermen.

Oh right, Oh he was swarthy.

Sure, he's swarthy as h So he had he had this kind of dark wavy hair, and other than that, he was just sort of an unremarkable dude.

He wanted to blend in right.

Well, yeah, okay, so this guy's sitting in eighteen c unremarkable aside from wearing the sunglasses, he's smoking with his left hand, says, nothing to do with anything, but we just kind of wanted to show off how much research we've done on this. And when Florence Schaffner, the flight attendant working his area, comes over and gives him his bourbon and I think seven up right, yeah, he hands her a note. And to Florence Shaffner, she was twenty three,

Yeah, from all the men who wanted to rescue her from her life.

Come away with me, it sworethy. And so Dan Cooper sees this and he goes, miss, you may want to have a look at that note.

I have a bomb.

I think you know where we're going with this, dB Cooper.

You know, when we were coming here today, we were like, oh, we're really rolling the dice. It's entirely possible that everyone here had the dB Cooper case drilled into them from like third grade on.

That's not the case, is no, you didn't study it in class.

It's just a high relief.

I told that to you, MEI, and Yumy was like, that's so dumb. She's like, do you know everything about the burning of Atlanta? And I said no, and she's like, no, no, you don't, And they don't know everything about dB Cooper and I went back to sleep.

So this was not the first commercial airplane hijacking. It actually the first one was in nineteen forty eight, and remarkably between nineteen sixty eight, just three years earlier, in the time dB Cooper hijacked this plane, there were one hundred commercial hijackings in three years.

Yeah, so this is not new.

It was not new, but I remember, like if anyone here grew up in like the seventies and stuff, it was a thing like planes got hijacked all the time because you could bring guns and bombs on planes and you didn't need.

ID and no one cared, right, and they were like, hmm, this is weird.

Yeah, that's pretty much where the FBI was at the time, and by nineteen seventy one, they were just starting to like get hip to the idea of hijackings being a problem, and so their first idea was, well, we'll put an air marshal on every flight. And then they looked at the schedule of flights in the United States and they were like, oh, this may have been a bad idea, but.

They tried a good idea.

It was a fine idea if everyone, if like a third of the population of the United States were air marshals, and yeah, it was a good idea.

It's a good idea if you want one of every like three hundred flights with an air markets right.

Right, and the other two hundred ninety nine open for hijacking. Right. So this was they figured out after a few years, like why the logistics of American air tragicy.

Edgar Hoover's idea, by the way, right, he was still in charge of the FBI in nineteen seventy one.

Yeah, so he'd been there for about fifty years, right, Yeah, So his idea was air marshalls didn't work, but they were still trying it. There was no air marshal on flight three zero five, the dB Cooper hijacking flight.

Yeah, they're like Portland to Seattle. Maybe we should put like three air marshals on that one.

I tried to light and I mean it made sense that there would not be an air marshal on that flight because most hijackings were crazed loan gunmen with a handgun who wanted to be taken to Cuba for political reasons. Basically, no one flying from PDX to c Tech wanted to be taken to Cuba, so there was no reason for an air marshal to beyond the flight. It was a pretty good bet to not have an air marshal on. They just didn't expect TB. Cooper because he was a

This is actually I did a little more research between nineteen sixty eight and seventy nine. It's literally referred to as the Golden Age of skyjacking. I was talking to Josh's like I didn't know that you could have. I thought a golden age was about something good. I didn't know you could have the golden age of dysentery, right, the good old days.

It was good for the hijackers because they could get away with it no problem.

Maybe that's who wrote that, the Golden age of skyjacking man. All right, So Floren Schaeffner, I'm sorry. Shaffer reads the note and she says, you know what, give me our Cooper says, you know what, give me that note back, which is a very key thing because that means they won't have a sample of his handwriting. So he asked for the note back, and from that point on he did not converse.

Like everything else.

He had them right down to take to the captain so they would have no more like physical evidence of his handwriting.

Yeah. The only handwriting sample he had was that ticket duplicate and it was in block letters, which yeah, Cooper.

So she sits down and she says, uh, you know, I want to know.

That this is legit, this is for real?

Can I can I like get a look at that bomb that you're talking about?

Makes sense? And he shows her right, Yeah, he gives her a little peak.

He opened her his bag just enough and she went to put her fingers in and he snapped the hut.

Just like pretty woman. Yeah, yeah, and uh, but she sees what you know. She sees red sticks of dynamite and a battery and and I guess presumably like an alarm clock with two bells on it.

Right, it's got like a skull and crossbones. It's like he says, you die or something.

Electrical tape is all around it because he watched a lot of cartoons and he knows how to make a bomb.

Well she I mean she bought it. Clearly, she saw the bomb and she took down a note. He said, take this down. I have a ransom demand. He said, I want two hundred thousand dollars by five pm in cash. Put it in a knapsack. I want two back parachutes and two front parachutes when we land. I want a fuel truck ready to refuel. No funny stuff or all do the job, which is h That was tough talking nineteen seventy one.

Again, he wants a lot of cartoons. And that's what you say when you mean business. That roughly is about one point two million dollars today.

Yeah, I think it's a little low.

If you're gonna go through a skyjacking.

It's a lot of work for a million dollars.

Yeah, I would have said, like, if you're gonna ask for two hundred grand, ask for three hundred or four hundred, that's just me sure, I'm no skyjacker. So this is turns out to be the only threat that Dan Cooper makes during the entire ordeal.

He he is this very first note that he gave up.

So from that point, like I said, he dictated everything else, so they could just pass notes back and forth. And aside from a couple of conversations with the pilots on the cockpit phone from the rear of the plane to the cockpit, they didn't have any interaction the pilots whatsoever with Danku.

Right, So they were like almost no help whatsoever during the investigation. Right. And then the fact that he asked for two parachutes was a stroke of brilliant because it did show his hand to the FBI that he was going to jump out of the plane with the ransom money. But it also said FBI, I'm probably going to make a hostage jump with me, so don't tamper with any of these parachutes, which if the FBI had would have been murder. But we're talking about Jaegar Hoover's FBI, so

That's right.

So Schaffner takes that ransom note, gives it to Alice Cancock. She takes it over to the pilot and the co pilot, and well what did they do? Josh, you do a great pilot. They called Seatech Airport instead.

Uh, seatach We just want to advise you on a bit of a fiddlestick. So we got going on here son and Bono was taking control of the plane. He wants two hundred thousand dollars in negotiable American currency by five pm.

Negotiable American currency. Yeah, it's a very weird thing to ask for it.

It was, And so sea Tech was like, we should probably call the cops, and the cops said we should probably call the FBI.

Well, yeah, this was the Seattle Police Department in nineteen seventy one. They're like, no, no, no, no, no, we we don't deal with things like this.

They're like, wait, wait, this guy doesn't want to go to Cuba. We don't understand it.

Like we're literally waiting for John Rambo to wander through town, right so we can harass.

Him just ten more years.

Wait, that was Oregon, though, wasn't it?

Okay? Pretty close? That joke will kill night tomorrow night?

Yeah, man, Rambo joke, yeah.

Remember it. So all of a sudden, like there's all this crazy energy going on down on the ground, right, So the FBI comes in and they're they're trying to get the money together. They're like, you, we have an hour. You got to give us more time. It's like, no, you can't have more time. They're like, okay, that's fine, we'll get all this stuff together. You guys are gonna have to stay up there until we get everything ready

Yeah, it's experiencing mechanical problems. So we're just gonna keep flying.

We're gonna stay aloft, see what happens. Captain Scott is a gambling man.

So everyone was drinking and smoking cigarettes, so they didn't care. They were hooking up in the bathroom.

This is ninety seventy one.

It could have been Chuck.

You would have been like I told you, we should have driven.

It's nothing.

Could have been to Portland.

So they had to circle for an hour, and they ended up telling the passengers, oh, we just need to burn off some gas and everything will be fine, right, And the passengers apparently were totally unaware that they've been hijacked. That's how cool Cooper was, right, But one passenger later said, I had a pretty good feeling we'd been hijacked, and the press pool was like, shut up, go cut off the day he was that next person.

Yeah, so I was at that game. Yeah, I was at that game seven. It was all right, he's that dude, you know, Oh yeah, any remarkable event. Yeah, I was there.

It was it was I knew it was a hijacking. You really had me stumped there for a second. I'm roll play game seven. So SeaTac is circling, right, They're circling, circling an hour killing time, but just burning off gas. And Florence Schaffner has gone away to take the note to Alice han Cockley takes notes to the cockpit. She's on the relay team basically now, and dB Cooper says, well, Dan Cooper says, hey, Tina Mucklow, why don't you sit

Yeah, I'm kind of curious. Could anyone here recognize Tacoma from an airplane?

From an airplane or an airplane?

Why do they have a huge like field cut out of grass? It says Tacoma corn.

What are they saying?

I think they're saying corn.

Yeah, the smell.

Oh boy, I knew that.

I knew this would go over well here.

By the way, we didn't mention they diverted all the other flights away from from SeaTac at the time because they wanted that to be the only plane in the area. And to me, the most remarkable part of this whole story is one of the other planes in the air, the dude, the pilot gets on and tells everyone else on that plane what's going on.

Well, he like he patched into the calm link between flight three zero five and SeaTac for the listening enjoyment of the passengers on his flight. It's insane.

It's like, I'm sorry, we're delayed, but here's what's going on on another flight nearby.

A right to sit back and listen to the dulcet tones of a skyjacking.

Again. It was the seventies. Everyone was drinking. They're like, this is remarkable. Thank god, it's not us.

Everything's better when you're drinking.

All right.

So he recognizes Tacoma, which apparently everyone in this room could do.

Yeah, right, we were impressed by that. But it's nothing.

Occasionally went spells like coma. So all of these are sort of clues.

Though, if he recognized Tacoma a new by the air Force base, that clearly maybe the guy's kind of from the area might be a clue. Later on, So Mucklaw at this point asked Dan Cooper. She said, do you have a grudge against our airlines, sir? And he said, no, ma'am, I don't have a grudge against your airline. I just have a grudge critic right. She was like yeah, like they did.

So back on the ground, the FBI is like going crazy, The local cops are going crazy. Everybody's going crazy trying to get two hundred grand in cash together. Turns out that was the easiest part of this whole thing. So Northwest Orients president at the time, Donald nyrop.

Any Nyrops in the house.

No, he would have been in Minnesota.

Oh okay, yeah.

But I'm convinced that someone in here is going to be related to someone in this story.

Oh I am too, Yeah, I'm just.

I'm waiting for somebody stay would be like that's a.

Lie, or for someone to stand up and say I am dB Cooper. Oh yeah, that would be amazing. We'd have to come up with a different show tomorrow, oh yeah, or just bring him along.

Sure, and here he is everybody.

Yeah.

So Donald Nyrop, the president of Northwest Orient, He's like, yeah, sure, we'll totally pay that. We have a huge insurance policy on this kind of thing. Apparently Northwest had to pay like twenty grand and their insurance company paid out one hundred and eighty gram. And they tapped c First Bank, which had a downtown branch. And in this downtown branch

Yeah, that was actually the harder part. Yeah.

Back in nineteen seventy one, the big recreational skydiving craze had not yet taken hold. It happened here and there. Yeah, but uh, the manager at Sea Tax said, I got a guy. Don't you worry. He's got an operation called Seattle sky Sports in itsaquah.

Anybody from Mesqua shout out to Ishaquah.

Why do you call it Seattle sky Sports? Did they mooch off of Seattle?

Yeah, off of the teat of Seattle.

He's like, I gotta guy. His name is Earl Kasi, and he agreed to help. Little side note Earl Kassi was actually murdered three years ago.

Yeah.

Yeah, apparently has to bring them down.

We're all having too much fun. Uh. He got killed by a blow to the head in his garage.

But apparently you know some cooperists that are still active today on the internet, You know these conspiracy dudes that.

His everyone did it. I love that.

Everybody see, you can all be conspiracy theorist hat, although women can't be because they're too smart. It's always guys, did you know so Earl Cossi was killed? But they think it has nothing to do with it, even though cooperists are like, are you sure they're trying to silence some man?

Exactly? So very well timed.

So Cassi called his his operation and to the to the dude working there and said, hey, can you get together these parachutes and need two fronts and two backs? The guy said sure, ruh, And in his haste he packs three regular shoots, well, not three regular, he packs one military shoot, two regular shoots and one thing that I still don't understand, called a dummy shoot right that doesn't open.

No. So, like if you were working at Seattle Sky Sports in Issaqua, you get really, really sick of having to fold up the whole parachute every time somebody was training, throwing out the pilot shoot, which is just the little shoot that comes out first and pulls the bigger shoot out. Right, if all you're trying to do is throw that part out, you don't need the bigger shoot. So if you are an employee, at Seattle Sky Sports in Issaqua. You may have the idea that you should just sew the bigger

Every parachute should open right.

But this is the thing, and they're called dummy shoots. The thing is everybody's like, oh, we got it covered, we'llt's put a big X on it, and everybody will know it's a dummy shoot. So one of these dummy shoots made it into the four shoots that were delivered to D. B. Cooper. So the money and the shoots go in the cop car and he does a donuts gidding out like in front of the plane and gets out and stands outside and waits for the plane to land.

Yeah he uh he said, you know what, I bet you there's gonna be snipers on the ground, because I've seen a movie or two. I've seen Black Sunday. Anyone.

No, didn't they come out like five or six years later maybe uh huh.

Actually, I have to look that up.

I think that was seventy six.

You know this, sure?

All right?

He said, I have a dream about a movie one day that would be called Black Sunday. And there's gonna be snipers at that airport, So have everybody put the shades down on the windows. They're all drunk, they don't care, they won't ask any questions. And so they did so, which turned out to be a pretty good move because they were in fact snipers right exactly.

So the plane lands and no one's allowed to get off yet, Cooper says, hey, Tina, do me a solid go out and get the money in the shoots and come back with them. Okay, then we can let the passengers off, and Mucklowell leaves the plane. And at this point, and this is one of the first reasons why Tina Mucklough is one of our heroes. Once she's off the plane, she could have been like, so long jumps see in hell,

And went back on the plane. And I mean like that's metal.

Chuck would have said out loud, see you would hell yeah, flight three oh five.

I would have walked straight to the baggage claim or the ground transportation and said take me to cousin Ikes and need some loose leaf tea. Good luck with the skuy jacking, right, yeah, But she came back, which is amazing.

To come back. So she traded herself for these hostages. And the hostages were allowed to leave, and so too were Alice Hancock and Florence Schaffner. The rest of the crew is basically like, there's no reason for you to stay here, so go. So it was down to Schaffner and Cooper and then in the cockpit Radazac and Scott right and Scott and Radazac repaid Tina muckloud by staying themselves. There was a rope ladder actually that they could have

Yeah.

In my like in my comedic mind's eye, I see them getting out on the rope swing or a rope ladder.

That's different.

Rope swing, that would be amazing.

They may have like it's like a tire swing, and the run the plane.

They get off on the rope ladder.

Tina mucklaugh never comes back and dB Cooper's just sitting on the plane by himself.

He's like, Oh, it happened again.

Yeah, is he typing? No, that's sorry. I didn't know they had a rope ladder. It's crazy.

Sure every airplane has a rope ladder in the cup wake up, fashioned out of like old cheets.

So the FAA actually had a their chief psychiatrist on the ground and this dude does a quick analysis, you know, like let me do one of those movie readings of who this guy is and what's gonna happen. And he says, you know what's gonna happen is you're gonna give this guy the money and the parachutes. You're gonna go up there in the plane. He's gonna jump out and blow up the plane and just let everyone know that. Right, He's gonna tell the pilot and co pilot that this is what's coming.

Right, He's gonna force Muckloud to jump with them and then blow up the plane afterward. Right, but yeah, make sure the make sure the cockpit knows. And then he added and he probably has some sort of fixation on longer than usual nipples, So make sure he's not exposed to those, because he has some sort of fetish based on his experience with his mother. Because it's in nineteen seventy one psychoanalysts for the FAA, Hey, if I had done that in a German accident, it would have sunk in even faster.

Did you tell them that? Make sure you tell them that, guys? Is that all right?

I'm gonna go ahead and say now what I'm gonna say in like an hour backstage?

All right, that was amazing what it?

Thank you?

I thought that's not what you're gonna say.

Actually, I didn't see that one coming. You got me when you Yeah, I had no idea where you were going.

Literally, you said longer than usual nipples, and I went in my head, I went, am, I is this.

Happening like Josh Josh.

Am I stole in Atlanta? Is the trip? Am? I sleep? Pure? Goal? Buddy?

Thank you?

Where are we? I am so thrown?

So we said Cooper was cool, right, Yeah, the cool head he was. He was so cool he ordered food for the crew during the refueling process.

Yeah, he's a nice guy. You want to know who else is cool? It's Tina Mucklaw.

Because once they released the passengers and they got the money on board, she sat back down and he offered her a couple of the stacks of money, and she said, well, you go ahead and say it, no tipping aloud.

Smooth again.

Had it been me, well, first of all, I would have been uncle likes by then. But if I was dumb enough to get back on, I would be like, yeah, get pay it for.

Yeah, just two stacks of bills?

Yeah, what gives jerk? I want half?

She's amazing. So the plane's being refueled. He passed along a request, very specific request for what's to happen when they go to take off. He said, I want to take off with that aft staircase that I know is back there down in the jump off the plane position. And they said, you can't take off with the plane. You can't take off with the door down. And he said, well, can you check on that?

Are you sure?

And they said no, you can't do that. And he said, are you super sure? And they said no, you can't do that. He said all right, and they said, oh, but once you're up there, you can totally lower it and jump out.

And he said, well, why didn't we just start there, because that's really the only thing that matters.

Fine. Fine, And then the pilot's like, well, where do you want to go? And Dan Cooper says, Mexico City, let's say. And the pilot goes, well, that's that's kind of far. We're gonna have to refuel is Reno, okay, And Dan Cooper goes, I don't know how I can get this across anymore. Clearly, I'm jumping out of the plane the next time we go up fy wherever you want? Just fine, south southward.

Yeah, So they refuel the plane and the only time Dan Cooper gets a little a little ruffled is when it takes a little long for his liking, and he says it.

It shouldn't take this long. Let's get the show on the road, right.

He picked up for one of the few times he picked up the cockpit or the cabin and cockpit phone and said, let's get the show on the road. I would have screamed it and like hit the phone and then hit myself in the head with it and then just started crying and been like, it's never gonna work.

This is never gonna work.

I think as well established we'd be the worst guy and hostages.

Yeah, just getting no. I don't want any part of it.

He also gives them instructions on how to fly the plane, which is getting really specific. He said, don't go any higher than ten thousand feet, set your wing flaps at fifteen degrees, which apparently we learned is an angle that only the seven to seven to one hundred could position those wing flaps.

Which everyone in this room knows because it's a Boeing.

Sure, And he said, don't go any faster than one hundred and ninety miles per hour two hundred knots, So that means they're going to be flying slow and low, like you're cooking ribs or jumping off a plane. Because that means the cabin isn't pressurized, and that means when you open that door, you're not just gonna suck everything out. It's still skydiveable.

Mm hmm.

Yeah.

Oh it's the terminology.

Okay.

So Cooper had some problems, right, He had specifically asked for a knapsack, and the FEDS had given him the two hundred in a bank bag, which, as we all know, is a very unwieldy, clumsy bag. Right, it's like a canvas bag. There's nothing to it. What do you like tuck it under your arm? What are you supposed to do with that? Right? So he's like, well, you need

Of them, yeah, because it was the dummy shoot, the military shoot, and then shoot is that what.

We're gonna call it?

Yeah, the medium shoot, and then the pink one, which was, like Josh said, is the best one. So he cuts the stuff loose, he makes a handle for it.

Things are happening at this point. They moved to the rear of the plane.

He and Tina mucklaw, and he says, you know, I think I need help lowering the staircase. So she goes back there with him. She's a little freaked out at this point. She was calm and cool, but like it's go time, and she thinks she's gonna get sucked out, rightfully, so, because she didn't understand the physics of you know, the plane being that low and that slow, or she did another road.

The hell with physics. I am still freaked out.

Oh yeah, we're about to lower a staircase of ten thousand feet.

Why did I mention physics exactly?

So she gets back there and he said, she said, can I at least have some of that rope so I can tie myself to the interior of this plane?

Like that's how helpful she was. She's like, just let me lash myself to the plane.

Let me all help meself. Right, Yeah, I just spit like all the way across it.

I spit earlier.

It's fine, Okay, good.

We should learn to synk those up, right, like in Vegas. That's what I was thinking.

Yeah, man, we're in syncs.

Yeah, my god.

Except well, never mind, So she asked for some rope to lash herself in, and he goes, at this point, you know what, never mind.

He literally like this is the quote.

He goes, never mind, never mind.

He said, you know what, you just go back up to the cockpit and you see that first class curtain.

Just don't come any further back. I got it from there.

He turns back around and looks and then he turns back around to where she was and he just sees like a pile of dust to where she was just standing. She was like in the cockpit all of a sudden, and so it's go time in the cockpit at seven forty two pm, the little light comes on that says a door ajar, I guess. And they said that the pilots were like Tina like wants to call back one more time.

He's like, no, you can't call him, and they're like, no, really, we should call We can totally call him. Like the FAA shrink said like he might blow us up. He said some other weird stuff too, but he said, well, like he's gonna blow us up, we should really butter this guy out.

And we could have left on that rope swing and we stayed because of you.

Rope ladder.

So they call, They do call the pilot.

It's like ring ring ring, Oh, yes, ring ring, and you let it ring a couple of times, ring ring. Uh.

Dan Cooper hijacker.

Uh, mister Cooper, we want to make sure your FLA is as comfortable as possible. Is there anything we can do to help you back there to make your hijacking more successful?

Sir, no, click, I know, it's kind of rude, he said, no, hung up. And then at eight twelve pm, the crew felt the plane kind of jiggle a little bit, as if someone had jumped off the rear of it, and they said.

DNA, go jacking.

We're flying the plane. She's like, wait a minute, only one of you is flying, you know.

It takes both of us, you don't know.

And that's it.

So from the moment that Tina Mucklaugh left shut that first class curtain, nobody to anyone's knowledge, ever saw Dan Cooper again.

Yep, but that's not the end of the show.

No, it's not. So there was a man hunt, all right.

So Dan Cooper had pretty clearly signaled his intentions that he was going to jump off the back of the seven twenty seven, and the FBI was like, we need to scramble some jets. Let's get some fighter jets that are in the area. We're gonna scramble them to go follow this seven to twenty seven.

What is the scrambling? I never get that.

It's like like, go.

I know, but they.

It just sounds it sounds chaotic, like they're scrambling jets.

I think that's I think that's the point, Like people are supposed to run around and bump into each other and fall out and then.

Get up and get in their jets and fly off. Oh, that's scrambling.

That's classics.

I would have renamed it would be like, activate the jets.

That's not bad, that's not bad at all.

Scramble the jets.

It sounds desperate.

You're right, activate the jets.

So either however, the jets were brought into this picture, there was a problem with them and that they were way too fast for the seven twenty seven, which is putting along and one hundred and ninety miles an hour. Then all of a sudden there's a jet that goes yeah, and then the next one comes and they're like, what are we gonna do, Well, We'll stick a helicopter on them. This is like Goldilocks. The helicopter was too slow. Seven twenty seven is just putts it along.

Yeah.

Yeah, people are going and trying to catch up. Nothing happening.

They should have scrambled a seven twenty seven and just followed right behind.

It makes sense as matter.

What the headlights on, right, So they're scrambling.

The point is nobody saw Dan Cooper jump when he jumped, So they used that eight twelve pm oscillation to kind of figure out where they should start looking, and they zeroed in on a place called aerial Water, wishing to New Lewis River.

Anybody from Ariel, good because we got jokes.

Nobody from Ariel. Anyone ever heard of the Lewis River. Oh okay, So they get on, they get this man hunt going. They're combing, they're they're scrambling and combing. Those are the two things you do.

Yeah.

In the FBI it was a massive manhunt too. There's like a thousand troops and cops combing this area.

Yeah. No one from Seattle PD. Of course, they were just sitting.

Around stoned, hanging out in Nisqua waiting for Rambo. Here's another fun fact. There was a millionaire a local millionaire who we don't know.

Do you know the name?

No, I've looked.

If anybody knows, yells, just stand up and say it with dignity.

It was on it was on the news.

So this local millionaire says, you know what, that's near Lake Merwin and I'm going to rent a submarine because I'm a millionaire, and that's you know, we're what I do.

Yeah, I don't work. I'm a millionaire.

He got a submarine and he trolled the depths of Lake Merwin. He said he rented a small submarine because he's not an extravagant local MIDI.

Now the twenty five seems ostentatious. The hydraulics on it. Who needs that in a submarine?

Does it have a metal detector? Which would not have helped because it was cash bills exactly.

So you'd make a great local millionaire.

I would if only.

The other weird thing that happened was the the CIA got involved, which is a little bit strange, and they scrambled the SR seventy one blackbird, right.

They scrambled it several times.

Yeah, it was almost over easy.

Terrible.

You should be ashamed.

It doesn't even make sense because once you scramble it. It can't be over easy. Terrible joke, Chuck, that's.

What I say. It's all right, rebound, rebound, Is.

This really happening? Did you talk about long nipples?

All right?

The SR seventy one Blackbird was at the time super secret. We all know about it now, but at the time it was very secret, and it was kind of a big deal to get this thing up in the air.

So especially multiple times, like one time, it's like, your dad is the head of CIA and you're the head of Seattle PD, so you can make it happen maybe once, right, multiple times. That's weird that the SR seventy one was scrambled.

Right.

The FBI is very studious and likes to do a lot of obvious stuff, So they interviewed everybody in the area with the last name of Cooper, which there's like a square one.

This is like square negative five.

Yeah, yeah, sure, no, it's negative five. I looked it up.

Okay, So you look up all the Coopers in the area and at this point they have a press conference. And if you've noticed, we've been calling this dude Dan Cooper the whole time, because up until this time he was just Dan Cooper. So they have a press conference and there's it's sort of I don't think we know who messed it up, right.

Well, or okay, a cop, either a file clerk or a cop of talking in front of a reporter got either UPI or AP, depending on who you ask, And they were saying like, what Cooper could could have done something like this?

Right?

And somebody said, well, there's a Dan Cooper who's a cat burglar in the area. That's a terrible suggestion. Cat burglar does not go to hijacker, you know. And this reporter was like, what a scoop and hit the wire with cops looking for dB Cooper.

Yeah, he said dB Cooper.

Did I say Dan Cooper?

Yeah, that's all right.

The little part of my brain was like, you just said Dan. Let's start over. So a cop was talking in front of an AP reporter and they said what Cooper do you know could have done this? And the cop said, well, there's this d dB Cooper.

What did you just say. Did you just say a D Cooper?

I said, there's a dB Cooper I got at that time, he's a cat burglar. And the reporter said, this is hitting the wire and he reported that the cops were looking for a dB Cooper and it just changed from that point on.

Yeah, I mean, he was never a dB Cooper. It was literally a mistake. So that's why we all know him as dB Cooper today. And the FBI actually a little smart, believe it or not, and they said, you know what, let's keep it that way. That way we'll know if any tips come in on a Dan Cooper, will know it's a hot lead.

So it actually ended up kind of working in their favor.

Yeah, And anytime a tip like that came in, like the office prankster would come in with the facts and be like hot lead, hot lead. It was like a joke around the Portland office. Everybody loved Richard.

And this will.

This will come up later too when it comes time to solve the crime.

They Later on, the FBI.

Learned that there was a comic book in the nineteen fifties about a Dan Cooper who was a Canadian jet pilot and it was a Belgian comic, which is a little weird, but it was you know, there was literally a Dan Cooper who jumped out of planes and comic book.

Form right exactly, could be a clue.

Maybe and that's a niche comic, right, so I would say so printed in Belgium in the French about a Canadian fighter.

Pilot in the frame.

All they had to do is find, like the ten people who knew of that comedy. We're going to be like, what'd you do? We know it was one of you. And so the UBI had a pretty clear belief, very openly stated belief, that D. B. Cooper died in the jump. It was just the line that they took right off the bat. They're like, there's no way this guy survived. And the he wasn't the lead agent on the case, but he became the most famous agent, Ralph himmels.

Bach Any Himmel's box in the house. No, you're a liar, You're a.

Liar, so Himmel's Bach. Like I said, he wasn't a lead agent, but he was out of the Seattle office, and he became the most famous agent associated with it. And he actually gave the case its official name nor Jack, which is stupid.

Anyway, Northwest Jack Skyjack.

Right, but removed the sea. It's just called the D. B. Cooper Case, you know, or Hi Steven better. So he self published a book in nineteen eighty six about the case, and himmels Bach said he thinks that D. B. Cooper didn't even get a shoot open, that he plunged to his death and hit the forest floor with such impact that he basically was buried immediately with the parachutes still attached, and maybe even the money. And uh, that was Himmel's box take. It was excuse me, are you gonna get that?

Nice, nice going.

You.

Yeah, I just saw the sum of Chuck's college education.

So Cooper had jumped from the plane. Did he live? Did he not? The odds are against him in a lot of ways. Outside.

The temperature that night was twenty degrees fahrenheit.

Yeah, Hey we're in America, man, just say twenty degrees.

Yeah, you're right, twenty degrees.

USA. At ten thousand feet it was negative seven degrees yeah, and he was going one hundred and ninety miles an hour. There was freezing rain. It was there was like a quarter crescent or not a quarter crescent, a crescent moon. Yeah, those are two different things. Crescent moon in the sky, but it was cloudy and rainy, so there's probably was zero light. It's freezing. He's ten thousand feet.

He's not dressed for the occasion.

Oh, he's wearing loafers. He's wearing an overcoat.

He's got this he doesn't have this knapsack, so he's fashioning this weird kind of knapsack with this pink rope.

Plus plus the area's jumping out into and he's flying at ten thousand feet over the cascades. Some of the cascades, as you guys know, are higher than ten thousand feet, very dangerous jump. And there's a lot of pointy trees. I mean the POINTI ist am I right? See, I know the point is trees are round. Plus despite what the FAA guy said, the FAA psychiatrists, yeah, he did not leave the bomb to be detonated after he jumped off.

He took it with him.

Bank bag, bomb, overcoat, loafers, parachute was my dB Cooper pressure.

And by the way, the FBI later on they interviewed Maclock, who was the one who saw Yeah, Schaffner saw the bomb.

Like you just did.

And she said, yeah, you have these red sticks taped together, and they went, huh, that wasn't dynamite. Dynamite isn't red. You've seen too many cartoons dynamite as tan. Road flares are red. So it was more than likely a fake bomb with an alarm clock and road flares.

Plus dB Cooper did not help his cause by his choice of parachutes, right he So he chose a military shoot as his main shoot. It was not a great shoot. The ripcord wasn't as easily accessed as the recreational shoots, and once it deployed you can't steer it very well.

It was not the best choice.

Even worse was his choice of the dummy shoot for his front reserve choot. He took the best shoot and gutted it to make a handle for the bank bag, let the second best shoot, and chose the two worst shoots to jump out with. Right.

So, I didn't know you couldn't steer a military shoot, but it makes total sense.

No, Yeah, they're just like, go for it, pal.

Yeah, because if I was in the military, I would steer. I'd be like, well, how don't we go over here instead? I see a lot of guns down there.

Yeah, let's take it.

This way, so they just drop you apparently. Yeah, man, I guess they know what they're doing. Though, So some other theories, because it's Washington, believe it or not, some people actually posited that he was eaten by sasquatch.

Yeah, with a straight face. I mean, let's be honest, how many of you in here were thinking the same thing.

Yeah.

Some other people say, well, he was clearly burned up by the jet exhaust, because when you come down the stairs of a seven twenty seven, the rear jet engines right in front of you, and it would have been seven eight hundred degrees right there. But the FBI conducted a test right afterward where they took a seven twenty seven up and they took a two hundred pound sled.

A two hundred pound prison victim.

Right, he was condemned.

Don't worry about it, it's fine, and they said, and threw it off. And they found that the two hundred pound sled that's the euphemism, I guess now, went straight down, so it didn't come in contact in any way with the jet exhaust. So it kind of did away with this idea that he burned up.

Well, it was kind of good news bad news though, because what it did do at least was it mimic that same oscillation. Yeah, so they're like, oh, you know what, it was the exact same thing happened when you were in the air. So that eight twelve pm jump time, like it was probably right on the money.

So we know probably where he might have landed.

Right, So there's a lot of questions remaining, right, and there were some clues left behind. The thing that really kind of confounded the FBI at first was that they combed the area where they were looking for him, with like a thousand people just combing this area, the SR seventy one blackbirds circling around looking. They didn't find anything. He had left a couple of things on board the plane, right. He'd left his clip on tie, which was the second biggest secret that night.

Well, that's what you do before you jump out. Sure, you know, you take it off. There was a clip on all along.

You unbutton that button and you're like, I'm out.

Of here, all right.

He left eight cigarette butts of his Rawley brand cigarettes. He'd smoked eight over five hours, and all eight butts have since been lost. Right, They found a hair on the headrest. They the thing is the FBI traded in fingerprints. That was their big thing at the time, and Dan Cooper had been very smart to not leave a single print on any of the cigarette butts.

Yeah.

True, but there was fingerprints on the in flight.

I guess sky Mall.

Magazine Rip sky Mall. What do you mean it's not around, It's gone. Yeah, sky Mall's gone. Did you guys not know this? No? Ways?

Yeah, that's why I said, alright.

I know, but I just uh, I don't know where am I going to get my putting green that doubles as a cat feeder?

My friend, you can just go to front Gate because fron K has everything everyone needs. What's that fron K They advertised in sky Mall, but they have stores too.

I don't even know where I am right now.

That's uncle likes.

What year is it?

No, So it would be seven years before any trace of the hijacking, any real clue turned up, and it was in nineteen seventy eight. There were some hunters and Oregon hunting animals. I guess, right, unless it was the most dangerous game.

You don't know. It's Oregon.

You never know.

There are less civilized people than we have here. They found a plastic instruction placard showing how to lower the A F staircase in the woods.

So this is like a really good clue.

It was, but it didn't lead to anything new.

Well, no, it was definitely from flight three oh five, which was I guess I'm saying it was cool.

It was cool, like if you were the Hunter, you'd be like, I'm keeping this sure, But it was on the flight path. So it didn't generate any new leads. But it generated a lot of renewed interest in the case because, believe it or not, the dB Cooper case had kind of fall into the wayside in the last like seven years. People just didn't think much about it anymore. Oh, they just skyjackings, right exactly. So it was like a diamond dozen. But all of a sudden, everybody's like, we

Has anyone ever seen the pursuit of T B. Cooper?

No, that's that's right, everybody. God bless you, Seattle smart Town chunk.

I figured here, like somebody because it was a local thing. Nineteen eighty one, very very bad movie was made several starring Treat Williams and Robert duvall Right.

Whose mom needed surgery at the time. To layoff.

So here's what you well.

First of all, if you want to know how big a piece of garbage this movie is, it had three directors, And if you know anything about film making, if you have more than one director, it's probably a really bad movie for one reason or another. If it has three, then it's guaranteed to be bad. But all you need to do is go home tonight when you get back to your to your house boat.

In it's a quah.

Does anyone here live in a house boat? Now? Okay?

Because I was gonna ask if I could come stay over because those things are awesome.

That was just Sleepless in Seattle. You've seen that too many times.

Oh no, they exist.

Because I tried to stay in an airbnb actually before I came here on a house boat. Yeah, I totally did, and I ended up in some stupid hotel downtown. Go home to your YouTube's type in Pursuit of dB Cooper and watch the first three minutes.

Because this movie literally starts.

With the point from where dB Cooper jumps out of the back of the plane. It starts from the point where we know nothing else that happened is literally fictional.

From that point slogan on the movie posters fac smacks.

So it starts with the pursuit of D. B.

Cooper and has Robert duvall the names all come up and all that, and it's got a jewe heart plane. It's like Wong Bong Bong Bong Bong and Treat Williams. It's a terrible voice voiceover recording. You just hear yeah. And he jumps off the thing because that's what you do. And he jump off a plane and your skyjacking. He parachutes down in the night and the night and he catches through some trees and lands and then just this really little sad yahoo.

Everything was sad about that.

And Treat Williams gets on the on the ground and he and he takes out a cigar and he takes out a lighter because that's what you do too when you successfully landed after skyjacking.

He doesn't light the lighter though.

He rips open the money bags had a one hundred dollars bill and he lights that and then he uses that to light a cigar, and that is how that movie opens, and it goes downhill from there.

And Robert deval Is he's just you can tell.

When he starts every scene going yeah, let's do it.

It's so bad, But I do encourage you. It was when I was a kid and it came out. It was like, we got HBO on my street and it was a really big deal when we got cable and HBO. So I would literally watch any movie that came out. It was like Kroll, that's on, I'll watch Kroll was okay, Four Games, great movie. Sure, pursuit of dB Cooper, why not?

I was not exposed to that.

Yeah.

I think my mother shielded me from that movie. Good for you, mom. But watch the first two minutes on j So we're still talking about the Placard, weren't we?

No, no, no, all right, we'll go to nineteen eighty was the first real good clue turns up in nineteen eighty Right, this is a big clueue.

So there's a young lad named Brian Ingram, he was eight I think at the time. Yeah, and his family was camping on Tina Bar. Are you guys familiar with Tina bar. Do you guys know what that is?

It?

Columbia River? Yeah, so are we correct and understanding that you would just call it an island not a bar?

Okay?

All right? So Tina Island everywhere else. The Ingram family was camping and Brian Ingram was fashioning a fire pit for his family. Oh, father's going to love this fire pit. He'll be proud of me. Yet, Oh, father, won't you love me? And as he's as, he's like, he's going like this to the sand, poor little eight year old. He turns up a stack of bills, several stacks of bills, actually three, and these stacks of twenty dollars bills total fifty eight and eighty dollars, and he's like father.

And father.

Father takes those and starts looking at him, and he's like, we should probably call the police. So they go and call the police.

Yeah.

Again, they call the Seattle Police, which evidently all they do is forward calls to the FBI.

At this point they're like, Seattle PD, please hold. So the FBI is like, read a serial number, and he reads one and they're like read us. Another reads another, and they're like that's dB Cooper money and Ingram's father's like, what did you say?

And they're like nothing.

So the FBI gets their hands on it, and actually we should say it turns out they let little Brian Ingram take some of the money. Three thousand dollars of this money.

Actually yea later on they returned a little not bad, right, right? And you want to know what's even better? In two thousand and eight, little Brian Ingram sold that money on eBay for thirty seven grand.

Right, yeah, take that, father. So the thing is, this money showed up in a place where it should not have been. It showed up twenty miles south of Aeriel, Washington, in another river. So they were looking here in the Lewis River, right, everybody knows Lewis River, Aeriel, Washington. Here, Tina Barr's down here just a little south of Vancouver. Is my geography, my air geography right of Vancouver, Washington. Everybody Vancouver, Washington. That is it? Like this, that's even

Said, FBI has a hydrologist, right.

I'm retainer him knows Bach got ahold of him. And the guy was like, so this stuff's only been exposed to the elements for a year, even though it was found what nine years after the robbery? Right? Yeah, and it got here one of two ways, the guy said, So the Columbia River flooded in nineteen seventy four, Yes, and it was also dredged in like nineteen seventy seven, So one of those two probably got this yere, but no one's ever said conclusively how it ended up where it was.

So it did, Yeah, there you go, I got it.

It would be another twenty eight years before any more clues turned up, so that's a very long wait. In two thousand and eight, just eight short years ago, some kids were playing on there was it their own land in Amboy, h little south of Ariel.

Anyone from Amboy.

No, I suspected, not are we in Washington? Okay, yeah, but nobody's from Amboy.

We got more response in Birmingham, No about Amboy.

Yeah, They're like, we like the sound of that.

So these kids were playing in the woods on their property and they said, oh, look at there, there's a parachute. And they start pulling out this parachute for like an hour.

It's like a magic trick. And they finally get to the end of.

The parachute and they run and show Paw and they say, Paw, I found a parachute in the woods.

What should we do? Right?

And Paw recognize that this is the most exciting thing that ever.

Happened in Amboy, Washington.

Called the cops, who called the Seattle police, who called the FBI, and the FBI did something smart. They're like, well, you know, who would know if this was dbe Cooper's parachute? Good old Earl Costy's right, he's not dead yet, not dead yet, oh too soon.

That's a good he's not dead yet.

That's a celebratory None of us are dead yet, right.

That's a good, good way of looking at it, Chuck, good save way to find the silver lining.

So Earl Cossi looked at this thing and he was.

Like, no, yeah, he said, I'm sorry. He said, uh, Cooper, shoot was nylon. That's clearly silk.

A good try, Yeah, he said, this is I know who shoot this is actually Yeah, it turns out that back in nineteen forty five, a jet pilot named Floyd Walling bailed out of his coarse air jet that was going down and parachuted out in the woods around Amboy Washington, right, which isn't too far from aerial And it wasn't Cooper's shoot. You guys all remember when they found that parachute right like two thousand and eight.

It wasn't that long ago.

It was a big deal and it wasn't his shoot, but it did suggest that possibly he could have made it because Floyd Walling had and he walked out of the woods in terrible weather, just like dB Cooper would have had to. So it kind of shined the light on the whole thing again.

Yeah, it kind of kicks some interest up.

So over the years, there have been many, many, many, many suspects, like we're talking over a thousand. The FBI won't even say how many suspects they've had. Or weirdly, people confessing to be dB Cooper. It's one of those strange things that people do where they claim to be something that will send you to prison.

Well a lot of them are already in prison, but they're in worse prison and hoping to go to a good prison.

No, it's true.

Apparently state prisoners will try to confess to federal crimes because the cinnamon buns are better in federal prison.

I was thinking cinnamon bust, were you really?

Yep, that's because there's cinnamon buns in our green room.

Yeah, well no.

We've mentioned that in the prison. That's like a commodity in prison, right, cinnamon buns.

Yeah, it's like currency.

Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, all right, cinnamon buns and cigarettes.

We know.

So there's a very famous sketch.

If you go home, before you get on YouTube and look at the first three minutes of that terrible movie, which you definitely need to do, just Google, get on the Googles and type in dB Cooper sketch. There's a very singular famous sketch of dB Cooper.

It looks like Kevin Spacey.

It looks a lot like Kevin Spacey.

Yeah, or Don Draper again.

As Kevin Spacey.

I think it would be Kevin Spacey as Don Draper. Yeah, yeah, sure.

So if you go home and look at that, it's like, you know, got this kind of shortiar guy looks like he's sort.

Of from the fifties or sixties.

It's got the hair, he's got the sunglasses on, and the tie, the skinny tie, and that this is the only sketch that they have of dB Cooper that they got from the flight attendant, specifically Tina Mucklaw, because she spent like five hours right next to the dude. She incidentally was really messed up after this, understandably, and she went to be a nun in Oregon in the nineteen eighties, which is a little weird. I didn't know they had convents in Oregon.

Sure, comments everywhere, convents everywhere.

There's a convent right over in the alley.

Here's a comment behind us right now. But even worse than that, the mother superior, in an article I read at the convent, said she never really fit in here. Oh, you're not supposed to. If you're a mother superior, that's a mother inferior. If you ask me, you know, good one.

So sorry, you go ahead, all right.

If you look at some of the behavior that Cooper displayed, you're going to turn up some clues.

And that's what the FBI does.

It kind of examine what happened he chose a military shoot, which could mean one of two things. Either he was former military, which could narrow it down, or it could mean he has no idea what he's doing when it comes to jumping out of a plane.

Right, And the choice of that dummy choot would definitely suggest that, because even recreational skydivers say, like, even if you're just a military parachutist, you're going to see a huge X on a parachute and instinctively shy away from that parachute.

You know, I thought it stood for extreme.

Right, mountain dew extreme.

So there's a lot of people say, I think he probably is ex military, had some like parachuting experience, probably a paratrooper or something like that. Yeah, A lot of people point to the idea that he knew a lot about the plane. He knew about the wing flap degree that it could go to, he knew about altitude. A lot of the witnesses later on said that he clearly was very much aware of what was going on in the cabin.

He just knew the plane very much.

So a lot of other people say this guy was probably an airline employee, maybe even a pilot actually, based on the altitude and stuff that he gave him to fly.

Yeah, and one of the weird things that he knew was that the seven twenty seven one hundred had an af staircase that you could lower and jump out of. Because this wasn't common knowledge at the time, Apparently a small.

Group of people knew this.

You were either in an employee of Boeing or you may have been in the CIA, because in the Vietnam War, we actually used the seven twenty seven over Cambodia, which is where we were not supposed to be, and they lowered that aft staircase of the seven twenty seven to drop supplies.

It's a go you can't steer but go well.

And then there's the whole thing with the SR seventy one Blackbird. So a lot of cooperists still say that he might have been secretly a member of the CIA, right because he knew about the aft staircase, He knew about the or the blackbird was scrambled, so they had like some skin in the game, right.

So a lot of suspects have come and gone and come back and stayed over the years. The FBI says about it, well, they won't say, but a lot of people say about a thousand, like Chuck said. But one of the first ones to emerge was a dude named Richard McCoy. And in February of nineteen seventy two, I think, four months after the dB Cooper heist, Richard McCoy hijacked a seven to twenty seven to one hundred flight and he asked for five hundred thousand dollars in cash, and

Well in five.

Hundred grand, that to me that makes sense, Like two hundred grand worked out fine, right, I should have asked for more to begin with.

Right, So let me try it again, Try it again.

It turns out that he was a Green Beret in Vietnam, so that sort of fits with the whole profile. He looked a little bit like the sketch of Dan Cooper and.

A little bit.

Yeah, he was twenty nine years old, so he was much younger than but he didn't look twenty nine.

I'll say that he looked much older than that.

True.

He looked more like Don Draper than Charles Manson. I'll say that absolutely. So this guy gets caught actually after pulling off this, he initially and he goes to prison and he makes a fake gun out of dental plaster from the dentist in the prison, and he takes the truck by force and literally crashes through the front gate of the prison and escapes and is later killed in a shootout by cops.

Which is to say Richard McCoy knew how to live.

He did.

And die, and his family would later go on to say, actually, he was at home in Thanksgiving nineteen seventy one, so it probably wasn't him, right, good suspect.

Though, Suspect number two is named Dwayne Weber.

This is your guy.

No, this isn't No, this isn't my guy.

I like this guy.

He's fine, but I don't like him, you know what I mean. Yeah, So, Dwayne Webber was a career criminal, and the definition of a career criminal is one where you and your alias have both done time in prison. Yeah, and he and his alias had done it combined sixteen years. Right. So he was on his deathbed and his wife Joe came around and said, how you doing. It's like while I'm still dying. I have a confession for you. I'd

I would say so.

And she finds out via Internet this is nineteen ninety five that Dan Cooper was Dbe Cooper, and she said, you know what, I think that he was still the truth. I think he was dB Cooper because you know what, I remember in nineteen seventy nine, we were on a vacation.

We were on a car trip.

We were kind of right around the area where the hijacking or I'm sorry, where the landing supposedly took place, and my husband stopped the car and just pointed and said, you know what, that's where dB Cooper walked out of.

The woods, which is a weird thing to say on vacation.

Very weird thing to say.

It's even weirder that she didn't say, what the hell are you talking about.

Yeah, agreed, there's.

Another story later on they were on another vacation.

No, this is the same vacation.

Oh it was the same one. Yeah, yeah, all right.

We'll just call this the communication vacation the non communication vacation, because they clearly didn't talk to one another because he stopped over the Columbia River on a bridge, literally stops on a bridge, gets out of the car, goes to the back, opens the trunk, and it's just gone for like ten minutes, gets back in the car and they just drive on.

Yeah, and she doesn't say anything. I know you me M.

Would have been like, why did you take your foot off?

The guests, yeah, you know what there would have been Emily would have had three hundred questions on why we stops on a bridge and I opened the truck.

Yeah, not Joe, not Joe. Yeah. So a lot of people still like Dwayne Webber, but he's actually the FBI said, no, that's not the guy. We ruled him out with DNA. Right, Yes, the next guy is my guy, Kenny Christiansen Chuckers.

That's right.

He was a pretty well liked suspect for a while. He keeping with the series of family members outing their family as D. B.

Cooper.

Yeah, which actually supports the family motto that I was brought up with. Never trust family.

It's a proud Clark tradition. So his brother lyle. Actually, this gets a little weird. He outed him as a suspect in an effort to get the screenwriter Nora Efron Sleepless in Seattle, Right, Yeah, didn't you see that coming. He tried to get Nora Efron to write a movie about TB. Cooper via his brother being the main suspect. And he, weirdly, I guess he didn't have an agent. He hired a private investigator to get him in touch

Or out at him, that's another way to put it, for sure.

Sure, And a guy named Jeoffrey Gray wrote a really great article in the New York Magazine if you guys are interested about this particular guy. But there's a lot of similarities between D. B. Cooper and Kenny Christiansen. For one, he looks a lot like him right off the bat. He was a purser for Northwest Orient Airlines. That's a

Yeah, And like Dwayne Weber, Kenny Christiansen, on his deathbed, tried to make a confession to his brother Lyle. He said, I have something really important to tell you, but I'm not sure if I can, if I can say this, and Lyle said, no, no, no, I don't want to hear it.

Did you guys know that you can not hear a deathbed confession?

Well, not only that, but I want nothing more than to hear a deathbed confession.

I would be dying. I would be like, oh my god, a dish, Yes, what do you have to say? But he was like, no, no, no, no, I want to hear what you gotta say. Just go ahead and die.

And then he laid on top of him yeah till he stopped scoring.

Here the this pillow will make you comfortable.

You sleep now, brother, what is.

Going on with these people? Did you just do the Buffalo bill voice? No, okay, that was coincidental. Who else do we have? Ld? Cooper? Yeah, a little on the nose with the name.

He lived in the area too.

Yeah, And he was also outed by a family member, keeping with the Clark family tradition. Right this time it was his niece. And she said, you know what I remember. This is in twenty eleven. This is not too long ago. She said, you know what, I remember back in Thanksgiving nineteen seventy one, just like it was yesterday, and Uncle L. D. Showed up bruised and bleeding.

For dinner.

But he was euphoric, which was weird. And I'm just now mentioning this.

All right. And she said, by the way, she had a book coming out simultaneously.

She's everybody where.

Did she say that she overheard because this is where she loses chucking me.

Well, yeah, she said, he went to talk to he was my uncle and went to talk to my dad, and they were overheard them in the hallway say we did it. Our money problems are over. We hijacked the plane. The book by Simon and Schuster on sale now.

At your local airport.

But there were a few things. It wasn't totally out of the blue. He was an engineer at Boeing.

No, his brother was.

Oh, his brother was, Yeah, but they were in on it together. Sure, right, because we hijacked the plane. Right, he's a silent partner. And weirdly, he remember those Dan Cooper comment books. He was one of the ten people on the planet that was a fan of the Dan Cooper.

That's a little weird, it's pretty good.

The weird thing is is he didn't have any experienced skydiving, which a lot of people say, Oh, it's just too insane to think that somebody who never skydived before did their first sky dive during a heist out of A seven twenty seven. But the people who knew LD Cooper say, no, he was just crazy enough to do something like that. And you can make a case that that actually explains the choice of the dummy shoot.

Tell you the truth, that's right, and the military shoot even Yeah, all right, So the legacy of dB Cooper to this day, the heist remains the only unsolved airline hijacking in the.

History of the world in America. In America? Really are there other ones? Oh yeah, I'm only standing behind America.

Oh okay, I gotcha. Yeah right.

Every year, if you go to the Aerial Store in Tavern in Ariel, Washington, you can go to the dB Cooper Days Festival.

Yeah.

Have you guys? Has anyone ever been to that?

We should all go. Let's go right now, we're going to meet up this Thanksgiving. You can win a dB Cooper Lookalike contest.

If you look like Kevin Spacey yes.

Or Charles Manson er Don Draper, which none of us do. Well, I'm talking about you and me.

I look like Justin Bieber.

I look like I ate Justin Bieber. I had to spit out my tooth. That's how I lost it.

I broke it on Justin Bieber's bones.

They're pliable though.

You can go to that and when the contest. There have been songs over the years. There was that terrible movie. There have been countless TV reenactments and dramatizations.

Unsolved mysteries, am I right?

Yeah? Everybody see that one.

You can watch that on the YouTube too.

Yeah.

And there are many many Cooperist websites, most notably one called drop zone dot com.

And drop Zone actually used to be a recreational skydiving site until it got mostly taken over by dB Cooper ficionados.

They hijacked the website.

He did as a matter of fact, and this site is like so hot for Cooper sluice that a guy named Secret started posting on it and he seemed to have a lot of information about the DBI Cooper case that people didn't know about. And it turned out that these Cooper Sluice were so good they unmasked the Secret guy as the new agent in charge of the dB Cooper case, Larry Carr, who's posting secretly as Secret on the drop zone boards.

That's how good these people are.

He's like, no, I'm not, yes you are. No, I'm not yes you are. You are.

He's like, okay, i am.

You can go on YouTube, boy, you got a lot of YouTube and the night people. You can go on YouTube as well and look up Larry Carr. And for many many years they kept all this evidence sort of under wraps, and you can look up videos. Now Larry Carr said, you know what we should do the modern ages here we have the youtubes and we can let everyone see this evidence, even though I think it's kind of funny that the FBI's official things like, no, he totally died, right, No one told Larry car that. No,

All the kids are into it now.

He shows the clip on tie.

You can see all the you can see the money, the clip on tie, all this evidence, hoping for a.

Lead, and he oversaw DNA evidence actually being removed from the tie. They found three people's profiles. They also found and we don't even know but pure titanium and impatience Pallen. Hopefully that will eventually crack the case. But it made everybody just be like, what we thought we had a handle on this. Impatience Pallen, where did that come from?

So bring us home, my friend.

Thank you.

The Cooper heist it changed America forever, right, dbe Cooper's the reason we all started walking through metal detector shortly afterward, He's the reason.

Seriously, He's the.

Reason that the airlines were given the right to search your bags before you get on one of their planes, and they apparently reinstituted the death penalty for hijacking. I don't know when they took it off. Was it like sea ships being hijacked? And then have no idea? I don't either.

But the.

I think the coolest outcome of this whole thing was if you look at a Boeing seven twenty seven, they still make them airplane. If you look at that aft staircase in the back, there's a white paddle that holds the stairs closed. Pretty smart. You can't open the aft staircase mid flight because you have to go outside and pull the paddle down and then the aft staircase will open. And it's a pretty smart, easy solution to a pretty complex case. And they call that little white paddle a Cooper vein.

That's right, and that is the story of dB Cooper, and that is our show.

Good Night Seattle, good night everyone.

Thank you m

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