You're listening to the second and final part of Unexplained, Season seven, episode twenty two. Jumping into Legend. Before Northwest Orient Airlines Flight three oh five had even made it safely to the ground, the FBI launched what would become one of its longest, most rigorous, and most frustrating investigations of all time. When the plane landed in Reno and agents began sweeping the scene of so called Dan Cooper's crime,
they were initially optimistic. Despite the effort to cover his tracks, the man had left behind plenty of evidence to get started with, including ding a clip on tie, an ash tray full of cigarette butts, and more than sixty sets of fingerprints, not to mention all the eye witnesses. And although they didn't know exactly where the so called Cooper had parachuted out of the plane, they could make an
educated guess. Assuming he jumped shortly after sending Tina into the cockpit, they estimated that he would have landed somewhere in the Cascade Mountains in either southern Washington or northern Oregon.
That said, it was impossible to know the jets' air speed at the moment the man jumped, what direction the wind was blowing, or how long he'd spent in freefall before activating his parachute as soon as the sun rose on that Thanksgiving Day in nineteen seventy one, police and federal agents began scouring the forests in the area on foot and by helicopter. The search went on for days, slow down by dense fog, and ultimately turned up nothing
at all. The so called Cooper, his parachute, and his bag of money had all vanished without a trace, about three thousand miles east of Reno in Washington, d C. The Bureau began creating a profile of the hijacker. The science of criminal profiling was still in its nascent stages in nineteen seventy one. The FBI's Behavioral Science Unit wouldn't be formally established until the following year, but it was
ideal for a situation like this. Profiling means extrapolating an unknown criminal's personality traits by analyzing the crimes they've committed. The more information an investigator has about their methods and behavior, the more useful of profile is likely to be. And thanks to the number of people Cooper interacted with during his heist, the Feds had plenty to go on. They
interviewed the whole flight crew and multiple passengers. Unsurprisingly, it was Tina Mucklow and Florence Shaffner, the two flight attendants who'd spent the most time with the hijacker, who had the best insights. From those interviews, they established the following The man was probably local to the Washington area because
he'd recognized the city of Tacoma from the air. He possibly had a background in the Air Force because he'd said something about the drive time between the airport and a local Air Force base, and he was likely in dire financial straits. Why else commit such an audacious, high risk crime for money, they thought Based on his mannerisms, vocabulary, and behavior. They also figured he was probably of above average intelligence, and all of the eyewitnesses gave similar physical descriptions.
The apparent Cooper was a man in his mid forties, around five foot ten, with a high hairline of black hair and an olive complexion. Armed with this detailed profile, investigators began questioning potential suspects. The authorities referred to the hijacker as Dan Cooper because that was the name he'd given when he purchased his plane ticket. Soon after the event, Portland police found a local man with the name D. B.
Cooper who had a minor criminal record. This man was eliminated as a suspect almost immediately, but in a roundabout way, his police interview became an important part of the saga. A local reporter, rushing to meet his deadline for the evening paper, accidentally reported the sou SPEC's name as the one used by the hijacker, and so it was from that point on that our enigmatic sunglass wearing hijacker came
to be known as the mythic dB Cooper. As the days passed and the story gathered more and more coverage, the dB Cooper mythology only grew. Normally, hijackers were not considered heroes, but there was something different about this one. People were fascinated by him. This seemingly ordinary man in a pressed suit, who hijacked a plane without resorting to any physical violence, successfully extorted two hundred thousand dollars from the Feds and then vanished, like James Bond, into the
night with his fortune. However, investigators were not optimistic about his fate. In fact, it was acknowledged from the very start that they might well be looking for a dead man. Logically, it was unlikely that Cooper could have survived his jump. For a start, it's likely that he had no skydiving experience. Aside from requesting that they weren't military great, he gave no other instructions as to what kind of parachutes he
wanted exactly. The set he received were rudimentary, with no ability to maneuver them, meaning he had no control over where he ended up. He'd also jumped into a densely wooded area in complete darkness in two hundred mile per hour wind on a foggy night when visibility couldn't have been worse, and he'd done it all wildly underdressed in only a suit, a thin trench coat, and a pair of loafers. The man also hadn't given the crew through any specific flight path to follow, beyond telling them to
aim for Mexico City and fly low. If he'd had a detailed plan in mind for his landing or an accomplice waiting for him on the ground, it's likely he would have been far more specific. In fact, many FBI agents believed that the man probably never even got his parachute open because the cold would have been paralyzing. Meanwhile, the search continued, expanding into the Columbia River between Washington and Oregon, but no body was found, and eventually they
stopped looking for one. In the first five years after the hijacking, the FBI considered more than eight hundred suspects in its effort to identify D. B. Cooper. Many of them were ruled out quickly for a variety of reasons. Some had reliable alibis, others didn't match the physical description provided by eyewitnesses, and some were eliminated through the use
of early DNA analysis extrapolated from Cooper's clipon tie. One of the most compelling suspects, however, emerged only five months after the hijacking in the spring of nineteen seventy two. On April seventh, nineteen seventy two, in Denver, Colorado, a man going by the name James Johnson with the slim face and high hairline similar to the so called dB
Cooper bordered the United Airlines flight to Los Angeles. Twenty minutes after the plane took off, a flight attendant noticed that the man was holding what appeared to be a hand grenade. When confronted, Johnson pulled out a pistol and gave a note to the flight attendant demanding five hundred thousand dollars in cash and four parachutes in return, for which he would let the planes eighty four other passengers go. The plane was diverted to San Francisco, where Johnson received
his ransom and duly released the passengers. Just like the Cooper hijacking, Johnson insisted the flight crews stay on board and take him back into the air. It was a near identical crime, except that Johnson had more than doubled Cooper's pay day, and once the plane took off again,
another key difference emerged. Johnson gave the pilots a very specific flight path to follow, telling them to climb to an altitude of sixteen thousand feet and then follow a path which would take them over a specific region of Utah. He then sent all flight crew into the cockpit, took his ransom, and parachuted out at the back of the plane using a set of aft stairs that opened up from under the aircraft. Unlike Cooper, Johnson had clearly planned
his getaway. Ironically, this actually made the authority's job a lot easier. On top of the fingerprints and handwriting sample he'd left behind, they knew he likely had ties to the area. Two days after the hijacking, Johnson was arrested at his home in the city of Provo in Utah, mere miles from where he'd landed. Only the man wasn't called James Johnson, but Richard Floyd McCoy, a thirty year
old Vietnam veteran originally from North Carolina. When police busted his home, they found the half a million dollars of ransom money still in his possession. It was an open and shutcase, and McCoy was soon found guilty and sentenced to forty five years behind bars. But some people, including members of law enforcement, were convinced that McCoy was not a mere copycat criminal. They believed that he was D. B. Cooper.
The theory went like this, After carrying out the original hijacking, McCoy had become cocky, His notoriety had gone to his head and greed took over. He started wishing he'd ask for a bigger ransom. After all, they'd handed over the two hundred thousand dollars with no hesitation, and so buoyed by his success the first time, around, he went back for another piece of the pie. Despite the neatness of McCoy as a fit for dB Cooper, the more the
FBI looked into the possibility, the less credible became. For one thing, despite the high hairline, McCoy didn't match the physical description of Cooper in any other way. For another, he had a solid alibi for the night of the Cooper hijacking. He'd been in Las Vegas on that day and at home with his family enjoying Thanksgiving dinner the day after. After serving two years of his sentence in nineteen seventy four, Richard McCoy escaped from prison alongside several
fellow inmates and went on the run. Three months later, he was tracked down and subsequently killed in a shootout with law enforcement. When Nicholas O'Hara, the FBI agent who fired the fatal shot, spoke to the media soon after, he insisted that, contrary to what most of his colleagues believed, when he shot Richard McCoy, he also shot D. B. Cooper.
McCoy remains a popular suspect among the fiicionados of the Cooper case, but he's far from the only one in the autumn of nineteen seventy one, residents of a leafy New Jersey suburb began to notice something strange in their neighborhood. Walking past a large Victorian mansion on a road called Hillside Avenue, they saw that all of the lights had been left on, and they stayed that way for weeks, day and night, until finally, one by one, they began
to flicker out. At first, neighbors assumed that the List family was away on vacation. John List, the father, had told his children school that they'd be taking a trip to visit their grandmother in North Carolina. He'd stopped the mail, milk, and newspaper deliveries. The only thing he'd forgotten to do, it seemed, was turn out the lights. But something still didn't feel right. In early December, when darkness had finally
fallen inside the List house, somebody contacted the police. As Officer George se Lesnik walked up the driveway, he heard the faint sound of organ music emanating from inside the supposedly empty house. Unease coiled in his stomach. George entered the home through an open side window, then turned on his torch and began to look around, picking up the eerie strains of the organ music. Tiptoeing quietly through the house, he followed it to its source in the living room.
It was coming from an automatic record player that had been left on, playing the same solemn dirge on an endless loop through loudspeakers. As he moved from the living room into a vast ballroom, the bright beam of light from George's torch illuminated a grisly scene. Four bodies, one woman, one teenage girl, and two teenage boys, placed carefully on top of sleeping bags, were lined up beside the wall.
They were later identified as forty five year old Helen List, sixteen year old Patricia List, fifteen year old John List Junior, and thirteen year old Frederick List. Later in the search, George and his fellow officers discovered a fifth victim, eighty four year old Alma List, mother of John, whose body had been left in a third floor attic. All five had been shot dead. John List, the father, was the only family member who fate was unclear, but not for long.
On the desk in Liszt's study, the police found a five page letter addressed to his long time pastor. It was a detailed and chillingly calm confession, in which List described how he'd planned out the slaughter of his entire family. He wrote about his financial woes and justified the murders by claiming that he'd been trying to save his family's souls. It may seem cowardly to have shot them from behind, he wrote, but I didn't want any of them to know, even at the last second, that I had to do
this to them. He ended the letter with an unrepentant sign off, p s. Mother is in the hallway in the attic, third floor. She was too heavy to move. There was no sign of List himself anywhere, and detectives soon realized with horror that he had almost a full month's head start. By now he could be anywhere. It was on November ninth, nineteen seventy one, after months of meticulous planning, John Liszt walked into the kitchen of his New Jersey mansion and fatally shot his wife in the
back of the head. He then went up to the converted attic where his mother lived and shot her in the face, just above the left eye. Then he waited for two of his children to return home from school and shot them each in turn, before lining up their bodies in the ballroom next to their mother. Incredibly, John Liszt then made himself some lunch, then traveled to watch John Junior play a game of soccer before taking him
back home and shooting him too. It was two weeks after the List murders on the other side of the country that a desperate man calling himself Dan Cooper hijacked a plane for ransom money before disappearing into the night. Once the horrific details of the List family murders came out, it didn't take long for the FBI's D B. Cooper Task Force to identify a possible link. Liszt had been in deep financial difficulty. He'd long had trouble holding down a job and was struggling to pay the mortgage on
the family's sprawling mansion. In his confession letter, he claimed he was close to bankruptcy and crippled by shame, had killed his family to supposedly save them from having to live in ruin. The FBI didn't know much about Cooper, but they did think he was motivated by money and evidently seemed hell bent on disappearing. Unlike Richard mc coy, List was a close match to the physical description and
police sketch of Cooper. He'd gone missing two weeks before the hijacking, meaning he had no alibi, and after what he'd done to his family, he also fit the bill in terms of having nothing to lose. But despite a nationwide man hunt during which his face was plastered all over front pages and television news coverage, List was nowhere to be found. As the years passed, his trail went cold,
along with that of D. B. Cooper. In the spring of nineteen eighty nine, almost twenty years later, the story of the List family murders was broadcast on the TV show America's Most Wanted. The episode included an age progressed approximation of what List would probably look like in the present day. A woman in Richmond, Virginia, called in with a tip the suspect bore a striking resemblance to her neighbor, who went by the name Robert Clark. The authorities soon
confirmed that it was indeed John Liszt. He'd been living as Robert Clarke in Virginia for close to two decades, enjoying a quiet, suburban existence with a new wife who knew nothing about his past. He was promptly arrested, extradited back to New Jersey, and charged with the murders of
his wife, mother, and three children. Although he clung to his charade for a while, Liszt eventually admitted his true identity and confessed to his crimes, but when the FBI questioned him about the d B. Cooper hijacking, he insisted that it wasn't him. Liszt was found guilty and all five counts of murder and sentenced to five consecutive life sentences. He died behind bars in two thousand and eight at
the age of eighty two. The speculation that List was Cooper has never entirely faded, but no clear evidence ever turned up to implicate him in the hijacking, and the
FBI no longer considers him a suspect. Richard mc coy and John List are just two of the hundreds of suspects who have been investigated in relation to the D B. Cooper mystery over the years, but despite all of the resources and manpower that went into the search, no truly compelling lead suspect ever emerged, and no arrest was ever made. Whoever Cooper was, he changed the face of air travel forever.
His high profile hijacking, along with the spate of copycat crimes it inspired, forced the airline industry to overhaul its security protocols. The idea of screening passengers for weapons had been floated in Congress a few years earlier, but was shot down for fear that such measures would scare people away from flying. But as hijackings became more and more common, opinions started to shift. The so called Cooper was the
final straw. Beginning in January nineteen seventy three, metal detectors and X ray machines became standard at all US airports, and although ID checks for domestic flights wouldn't be introduced for another couple of decades, new security protocols were introduced for passengers who paid cash for their flight ticket on the day of departure, just as the apparent Cooper did. Airlines so began fitting their planes with a new device which prevented the stairs from being deployed during flight in
order to deter copycat hijackers. In a sign of just what an indelible mark Cooper had left on the industry, this device was known as the Cooper vane. These measures had the desired effect, and the so called Golden age of hijacking ground to a halt immediately, and so too did the hunt for Cooper himself. For close to a decade, the FBI investigated one dead end lead after another, making no real progress. But then in nineteen eighty there was
a break in the case. In the summer of that year, eight year old Brian Ingram was exploring the shores of Oregon's Columbia River during a family holiday, looking for a good spot to build a campfire. As he ran his hand along the ground, he felt something solid, partially buried in the sand. Looking closer, he spotted some kind of package, rotten and fraying, and inside it were three large bundles of twenty dollar bills. Bryan and his father handed the
money to the authorities. They quickly confirmed the serial numbers on the bank notes to be a match for those given to D. B. Cooper. It was a brief moment of hope in a case that most had given up as a lost cause. Sadly, however, the package contained only a small portion of the ransom money, a little under six thousand dollars. Despite an extensive search of the area, nothing else was found, there was still no sign of the mythical Cooper himself, and the presence of the money
offered no further clues about where he ended up. D. B. Cooper remains a compelling enigma. His real name, his history, his motivations, and his fate are all complete unknowns, and yet over the years he became an unlikely folk hero in the US, inspiring movies, books, and even songs. He somehow represented both an every man and a larger than life outlaw, and people found the combination irresistible. They rooted for Cooper, hoping out loud that he'd get away with
every nickel. One person who was not rooting for Cooper, however, was Tina Mucklow, the flight attendant who'd been at his side throughout most of the hijacking. She, more than anybody else, had a front row seat to the kind of man that he was, and in her view, he was a low life. Tina was just twenty two at the time, and she was determined not to let her experience on
board that flight define her. After taking a few weeks off to spend time with her family, she returned to work as a flight attendant, a job she continued until she was thirty. She then entered a monastery, spending several years as a nun before going on to work in social services. For years, she avoided the spotlight, dodging endless phone calls from reporters and amateur sleuths trying to solve
the Cooper case. She wanted no part of it, but in twenty twenty two she finally relented and agreed to feature in a documentary about the hijacking titled NOD If You Understand. Speaking with the UK's Independent newspaper, she reflected on her experience. It has been a sad jo, she said, to think that somebody who was a criminal and put the lives of the crew and the passengers at risk, plus any number of people on the ground, would be
looked at as a hero. In twenty sixteen, the FBI officially announced that it had closed its investigation into the crime. The so called d B. Cooper remains the only unidentified perpetrator of a commercial airline hijacking in US history. This episode was written by Emma Dibton and produced by Richard McLain Smith. Unexplained as an Avy Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClain smith. All other elements of the podcast,
including the music, were also produced by me Richard McClain smith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook, with stories never before featured on the show, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones, and other bookstores. Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own
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