FBI closes books on legendary D.B. Cooper skyjacking of 1971
The unsolved investigation of the 1971 hijacking of a Seattle-bound airliner and the disappearance of the enigmatic, dapper suspect dubbed D.B. Cooper has officially closed.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has announced that it was closing the case, reasoning that its crime-fighting resources would be better used elsewhere.
The decision on the case of D.B. Cooper, a moniker given to the skyjacker by the media after he vanished, ensured the saga would likely endure as one of America’s great unsolved mysteries.
It began on Nov. 24, 1971 when a dark-haired man who called himself Dan Cooper, dressed in a business suit and tie and believed to be in his mid-40s.
The supposed “Dan Cooper’’ boarded a Northwest Orient Airlines flight in Portland, Oregon bound for Seattle.
After take-off, the man handed a flight attendant a note claiming he had a bomb in his briefcase and opened it to show a mass of wires and red sticks, according to the FBI’s account of the incident.
The aircraft safely landed in Seattle, where the man freed 36 passengers in exchange for 200,000 dollars in cash from the airline and four parachutes.
The man, however, kept several crew members aboard as the plane took off again, ordered this time to fly to Mexico City.
At some point during that flight, at an altitude of about 10,000 feet (1.9 miles), the man executed one of the most flamboyant getaways in criminal history.
He leapt out of the back of the jetliner into the night with a parachute and the ransom money.
Whether Cooper survived the jump over a rugged, wooded landscape somewhere between Seattle and Reno, Nevada, had never been confirmed, neither had his true identity been established.
“Evidence obtained during the course of the investigation will now be preserved for historical purposes at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C.,’’ the agency said.
That evidence includes the hijacker’s black tie and a crumbling package of 20 dollar bills matching the ransom money’s serial numbers, unearthed by a young boy from a sandbar along the Columbia River in 1980.
The FBI, decades after it had interviewed hundreds of people pursued a new lead in 2011 when it compared DNA from a woman who claimed to be D.B. Cooper’s niece to the suspect’s tie.
There was no match, an FBI spokesman said at the time.
