D. B. Cooper

• 1. Introduction

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  A man who gave his name as Dan Cooper walked up to the Northwest Orient Airlines counter at Portland International Airport on the 24th of November 1971, which was Thanksgiving Eve. He paid cash for a one-way ticket on Flight 305. The trip was a 30-minute hop north to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Nothing about the purchase stood out.

  By the end of that evening, the Boeing 727 he boarded would be the scene of a hijacking that has never been solved. The name on the ticket is not the name the world now uses for him. That second name came from a mistake. So who was he? Did he survive a jump into the night over the forests of Southwest Washington? What became of the ransom money? And why did the FBI work the case for 45 years without an answer?

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• 2. The Note and the Ransom

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  Seat 18-E, in the last row of the cabin, was where Cooper settled in, and his first order was a bourbon and 7-Up. Eyewitnesses later described a man in his mid-40s with dark hair and brown eyes. He wore a business suit, a white shirt, a thin black tie, a black raincoat and brown shoes. He carried a black attaché case and a brown paper bag. Counting Cooper, 36 passengers were aboard. The crew numbered six: Captain William A. Scott, First Officer William "Bill" J. Rataczak, flight engineer Harold E. Anderson, and flight attendants Alice Hancock, Tina Mucklow and Florence Schaffner.

  The flight left Portland on schedule at 2:50 pm. Soon afterward, Cooper handed a note to Schaffner, who sat in the jump seat directly behind him. She assumed it held a lonely businessman's phone number and dropped it unopened into her purse. Cooper leaned toward her and whispered, "Miss, you'd better look at that note. I have a bomb." The note was printed in neat capital letters with a felt-tip pen. It said he had a bomb in his briefcase and wanted her to sit beside him.

  Schaffner sat down and quietly asked to see the device. Inside the case she saw a large cylindrical battery wired to two rows of four red cylinders. She took them for dynamite. Cooper closed the case and told her what he wanted.

  Captain Scott kept Schaffner in the cockpit to take notes and relayed the demands to Northwest flight operations in Minnesota. Cooper wanted $200,000 in a knapsack by 5:00 pm, in "negotiable American currency". He also wanted two front parachutes and two back parachutes. Asking for two sets implied he might take a hostage with him, which discouraged anyone from handing over useless equipment.

  Mucklow took the seat beside Cooper to act as go-between. Through her he added terms. Fuel trucks must meet the plane in Seattle, and passengers must stay seated while she carried the money aboard. The parachutes would come last, and the passengers would go free once he held the cash. Scott alerted air traffic control, which called the Seattle police and the FBI. The passengers were told only of a "minor mechanical difficulty". Northwest president Donald Nyrop approved the payment and ordered every employee to comply.

  For about two hours the jet circled Puget Sound while officials gathered the money and equipment. Cooper kept Mucklow at his side. Looking out the window, he remarked, "Looks like Tacoma down there." When she said the parachutes were coming from McChord Air Force Base, he correctly noted it sat only a 20-minute drive from Sea-Tac. Mucklow later said he was not nervous, and that he seemed rather nice and was neither cruel nor nasty.

  She asked why he had chosen Northwest. He laughed and said, "It's not because I have a grudge against your airline, it's just because I have a grudge." When she mentioned living in Minneapolis, he called Minnesota "very nice country." When she asked where he was from, he grew upset and would not answer. He offered her a cigarette. She had quit, but she accepted it.

  A passenger in a cowboy hat nearly disturbed the calm. Passenger George Labissoniere told the FBI that the man pressed Mucklow about the delay and ignored Cooper's irritated order to sit down until Labissoniere talked him back to his seat. Mucklow remembered it differently. In her version, the man was bored and wanted something to read, so he took a copy of The New Yorker and left. Cooper warned that if the man was a sky marshal, he wanted no more of that. She assured him none were aboard. The FBI never interviewed the man, and he was never identified.

  The ransom came from Seattle First National Bank. It was 10,000 unmarked $20 bills, just as Cooper had specified, and the bag weighed about 19 lb. Most of the bills carried serial numbers beginning with L, which marked them as issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. The FBI photographed the stack on microfilm. Seattle police tracked down all four parachutes locally.

  At 5:46 pm Flight 305 landed at Sea-Tac, and Scott parked on a partly lit runway away from the terminal. Cooper allowed only one airline representative to approach. Northwest's Seattle operations manager, Al Lee, took the job. He changed into civilian clothes so Cooper would not mistake his uniform for a police officer's. Mucklow went down the front stairs, collected the bag, and carried it past the seated passengers to the last row. Cooper then agreed to release them.

  As they filed off, Cooper inspected the cash. Mucklow, hoping to ease the tension, joked that she would like some of it. He handed her a packet. She returned it immediately and explained that company policy forbade gratuities. She said he had already tried to tip all three attendants from his own pocket, and each had declined for the same reason.

  Mucklow then made three trips outside to bring the parachutes aboard. Schaffner asked to fetch her purse from a compartment behind his seat, and Cooper told her he would not bite. When Hancock asked whether the attendants could leave, he answered, "Whatever you girls would like." Hancock and Schaffner walked off the plane. Mucklow handed him printed instructions for the parachutes, but he said he did not need them.

  Refueling dragged on. A second fuel truck came, then a third. Mucklow said Cooper complained that the money had arrived in a cloth bag instead of the knapsack he ordered. Using a pocket knife, he cut the canopy out of one reserve parachute and stuffed some of the bills into its empty bag. An official from the Federal Aviation Administration asked for a face-to-face meeting aboard the plane. Cooper refused. Growing impatient, he said, "This shouldn't take so long...let's get this show on the road."

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• 3. The Open Stairs

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  The flight plan Cooper gave the cockpit pointed southeast toward Mexico City. He wanted the slowest speed the jet could hold without stalling, about 100 knots, at no more than 10,000 feet. The landing gear was to stay down, the wing flaps set at 15 degrees, and the cabin left unpressurized. Rataczak warned that this configuration cut the range to roughly 1,000 miles, so a second fuel stop would be needed before Mexico. Cooper and the crew settled on Reno-Tahoe International Airport.

  Cooper also wanted the rear exit door open and the airstair extended during takeoff. Northwest officials objected on safety grounds. His reply was, "It can be done, do it." Then he relented and promised to lower the stairs himself once the plane was airborne. He insisted Mucklow stay aboard to assist.

  Around 7:40 pm Flight 305 took off with only five people on board: Cooper, Mucklow, Scott, Rataczak and Anderson. Two F-106 fighters from McChord Air Force Base followed, along with a Lockheed T-33 trainer pulled off an unrelated Air National Guard mission. All three flew S-shaped patterns to stay behind the slow 727 and out of Cooper's view.

  Soon after takeoff, Cooper told Mucklow to lower the aft airstair. She said she feared being sucked out of the aircraft. The crew suggested she come forward for an emergency rope to tie herself to a seat. Cooper did not want her going up front or the crew coming back. She then asked him to cut some cord from a parachute for a safety line. Instead he told her to go to the cockpit, close the curtain between coach and first class, and not return.

  Before she left, Mucklow begged, "Please, please take the bomb with you." He replied that he would either disarm it or take it along. As she turned to close the curtain, she saw him standing in the aisle, tying what looked like the money bag around his waist. Four to five minutes had passed since takeoff. She was the last person to see him.

  At about 8:00 pm a cockpit warning light showed the airstair had come down. Scott and Rataczak asked over the intercom whether Cooper needed help. He declined. The crew felt their ears pop as the cabin pressure dropped. At roughly 8:13 pm the tail section suddenly pitched upward, and the pilots had to trim the jet back to level flight. Rataczak told the FBI this happened near Portland's northern suburbs.

  The crew could not tell whether Cooper was still aboard. Mucklow used the intercom to warn him that Reno was near and the stairs had to go up for landing. She repeated the request through the final approach and never received a reply. At 11:02 pm the plane touched down in Reno with the airstair still deployed. FBI agents, state troopers, sheriff's deputies and Reno police formed a perimeter but kept their distance, fearing the bomb. Scott searched the cabin and confirmed Cooper was gone. An FBI bomb squad spent 30 minutes before declaring the cabin safe.

  The F-106 pilots had seen no one leave the 727, and their radar picked up no open parachute. The T-33 crew never made visual contact with the jet at all. A figure dropping through cloud into a moonless night, over ground with no lights, would have been nearly impossible to spot. Only Cooper knew how long he fell before pulling the ripcord.

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• 4. Hunting the Drop Zone

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  James Long of The Oregon Journal was racing a deadline when he wrote the hijacker's name as "D. B. Cooper" instead of "Dan Cooper". Clyde Jabin of United Press International republished the error, other outlets repeated it, and the wrong name stuck. Portland police, wondering whether the hijacker had used his real name, found and interviewed a local resident named D. B. Cooper. He had a minor police record and was quickly eliminated.

  On the 6th of December 1971, twelve days after the hijacking, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover approved the use of an SR-71 Blackbird to retrace the flight path and photograph it. The aircraft flew five times. Poor visibility defeated every attempt. In a separate experiment, agents flew the same 727 in the same configuration and pushed a 200 lb sled out of the aft airstair. It reproduced the upward tail motion and brief pressure change the crew had felt at 8:13 pm.

  The first estimates placed Cooper's landing a few miles southeast of Ariel, Washington, on the southernmost reach of Mount St. Helens. That put him near Lake Merwin, a reservoir formed by a dam on the Lewis River. Searchers concentrated on Clark and Cowlitz counties. FBI agents and sheriff's deputies combed the forest on foot and by helicopter, searched farmhouses door to door, and ran patrol boats on Lake Merwin and neighboring Yale Lake. Oregon Army National Guard aircraft scanned the whole route from Seattle to Reno, known in aviation terms as Victor 23 and in most Cooper books as Vector 23. They sighted broken treetops and objects resembling parachute canopies, but nothing connected to the hijacking.

  After the spring thaw of 1972, FBI agents joined about 200 soldiers from Fort Lewis, along with Air Force personnel, National Guardsmen and civilian volunteers. They searched Clark and Cowlitz counties for 18 days in March and another 18 days in April. The marine-salvage firm Electronic Explorations Company sent a submarine into the 200 ft depths of Lake Merwin. Two local women stumbled on a skeleton in an abandoned structure in Clark County. It was identified as Barbara Ann Derry, a teenager believed to have been abducted and murdered weeks earlier by a suspected serial killer, Warren Forrest. The search as a whole turned up no significant evidence about the hijacking.

  Early computer projections put the drop zone between the Lewis River dam to the north and the town of Battle Ground to the south. In March 1972, after a joint investigation with Northwest and the Air Force, the FBI decided Cooper had probably jumped over La Center, Washington. Later analysis showed the first estimates were wrong. Captain Scott, who had flown by hand because of Cooper's speed and altitude demands, determined the path ran farther east. Continental Airlines pilot Tom Bohan, flying four minutes behind Flight 305, supplied more data. He pointed out that the FBI's calculations used an incorrectly recorded wind direction.

  The recalculations pointed to the Washougal River watershed. In 1986, FBI agent Ralph Himmelsbach wrote, "I have to confess, if I were going to look for Cooper... I would head for the Washougal." The valley was searched again and again. Nothing traceable to the hijacking emerged. The FBI believes any remaining physical clues were probably destroyed in the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens.

  In 2019 the FBI released a report on a grocery store burglary near Heisson, Washington, about three hours after Cooper jumped. Heisson lay inside the drop zone Northwest had calculated. The burglar took only survival items, such as beef jerky and gloves. But the report also noted military-type boots with a ridged sole, while Cooper had been described in slip-on shoes.

  The hijacking changed air travel regardless. Cooper's crime, and several copycat hijackings in the year after, prompted immediate and major upgrades to security. Metal detectors went into airports and baggage inspection became mandatory. Passengers who paid cash for tickets on the day of departure drew extra scrutiny.

  On the 8th of July 2016 the FBI announced it was suspending active investigation, citing the need to put its people on more urgent priorities. The 66-volume case file from 45 years of work is preserved at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., and on the FBI website, open to the public. The crime remains the only documented unsolved case of air piracy in commercial aviation history. Local field offices would still accept legitimate physical evidence, but only evidence related specifically to the parachutes or the ransom money.

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• 5. A Tie and Its Particles

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  Agents lifted 66 latent fingerprints from inside the plane, yet four items tied directly to Cooper. Those were a black clip-on tie, a mother-of-pearl tie clip, a hair from his headrest, and eight filter-tipped Raleigh cigarette butts from the armrest ashtray. The tie lay on seat 18-E. The FBI learned it had been sold exclusively by JCPenney department stores before being discontinued in 1968.

  By late 2007 the bureau had built a partial DNA profile from samples found on the tie in 2001. FBI Special Agent Fred Gutt cautioned that it was "difficult to draw firm conclusions from these samples." The FBI acknowledged that nothing linked Cooper to the source of the DNA.

  The other items fared worse. The limb hair was destroyed after the FBI laboratory judged it too featureless to be useful. The brown head hair was preserved on a microscope slide for future comparison. When the FBI tried to build a DNA profile in 2002, it discovered the hair had been lost. The cigarette butts yielded no fingerprints and went back to the Las Vegas field office. When the FBI sought DNA from them in 1998, it learned they had been destroyed there.

  In March 2009 a group of citizen sleuths began re-examining the case with GPS, satellite imagery and other technology unavailable in 1971. Calling itself the Cooper Research Team, the group included paleontologist Tom Kaye of the Burke Museum in Seattle, scientific illustrator Carol Abraczinskas, computer scientist Sean Christo and metallurgist Alan Stone. They learned little about the ransom or the landing zone. But they found and identified hundreds of organic and metallic particles on the tie.

  Under an electron microscope they identified Lycopodium spores, likely from a pharmaceutical source. They also found particles of unalloyed titanium, bismuth, antimony, cerium, strontium sulfide, aluminum and titanium-antimony alloys. The mix suggested Cooper may have worked for Boeing or another aeronautical firm, at a chemical plant or at a metal fabrication facility. Kaye considered the pure titanium most significant. In the 1970s it was extremely rare and specialized, used in aircraft fabrication or by chemical companies storing corrosive substances.

  Cerium and strontium sulfide were used by Boeing's supersonic transport project and by Portland factories that made cathode ray tubes, such as Teledyne and Tektronix. Researcher Eric Ulis has speculated that the titanium-antimony alloys connect to Rem-Cru Titanium Inc., a metals manufacturer and Boeing contractor.

  Parachute rigger Earl Cossey packed all four parachutes brought to Cooper. The two reserves came from a skydiving school, and the two mains came from a local pilot, Norman Hayden. Cossey described the mains as emergency bailout rigs, much like military parachutes. They opened the instant the ripcord was pulled and could not be steered.

  When the jet landed in Reno, agents found one reserve and one main parachute left behind. The reserve had been opened and had three shroud lines cut out. The main was intact. It was a Model NB6, short for Navy Backpack 6, and it is now on display at the Washington State Historical Society Museum.

  One reserve given to Cooper was a dummy. Its canopy was sewn shut for classroom demonstrations, so students could practice pulling a ripcord on a packed parachute without it deploying. That dummy never turned up on the plane. FBI agents took this as a sign that Cooper was not an experienced jumper, since a veteran would have recognized it. Within days the FBI also revealed that neither harness had the D-rings needed to clip on a reserve. What became of the dummy is unknown. Cossey guessed that Cooper used its empty container as an extra money bag.

  In November 1978 a deer hunter found a Boeing 727 instruction placard for lowering the aft airstair. It lay near a logging road about 13 miles east of Castle Rock, Washington, north of Lake Merwin but within the basic path of Flight 305.

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• 6. The Twenty-Dollar Bills

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  One month after the hijacking, the FBI sent lists of the ransom serial numbers to financial institutions, casinos, racetracks, businesses handling large amounts of cash, and law-enforcement agencies around the world. Northwest offered a reward of 15 percent of any money recovered, up to $25,000. In early 1972 Attorney General John N. Mitchell released the serial numbers to the public. Two men used counterfeit $20 bills printed with Cooper serial numbers to swindle $30,000 from Newsweek reporter Karl Fleming, who was promised an interview with a man falsely presented as the hijacker.

  In early 1973, with the money still missing, The Oregon Journal reprinted the serial numbers and offered $1,000 to the first person to turn in a ransom bill. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer matched it with a $5,000 offer. Both stayed open until Thanksgiving 1974. Several near matches were reported, but no genuine bill surfaced. In 1975 Northwest's insurer, Global Indemnity Co., obeyed an order from the Minnesota Supreme Court and paid the airline's $180,000 claim.

  Then, on the 10th of February 1980, eight-year-old Brian Ingram was on a family outing at a Columbia River beachfront called Tina Bar, about 9 miles downstream from Vancouver, Washington. He was raking the sandy bank to prepare a campfire when he uncovered three packets of $20 bills worth about $5,800. Long exposure had disintegrated the paper, but rubber bands still held the bundles together. FBI technicians confirmed the cash was part of the ransom. Two packets held 100 bills each and the third held 90, all in the same order in which they had been given to Cooper.

  The discovery raised more questions than it answered. Early experts assumed the bundled bills had washed into the Columbia from one of its tributaries. A hydrologist from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers observed that the bills had broken down in a rounded way and matted together. He took this to mean river action had deposited them, rather than someone burying them. That favored a landing near the Washougal River, which joins the Columbia upstream of Tina Bar, over Lake Merwin or the Lewis River.

  The floating theory could not explain the 10 bills missing from one packet. Nor could it explain why three packets stayed together after parting from the rest. Himmelsbach wrote that floating bundles would have washed ashore "within a couple of years" of the hijacking, or the rubber bands would have rotted away. The geology disagreed too. Portland State University geologist Leonard Palmer found two distinct layers of sand and sediment between the clay left by an Army Corps dredging operation in 1974 and the sand layer holding the bills. That suggested the bills arrived long after the dredging.

  In 1986, after protracted negotiations, the recovered bills were divided equally between Ingram and Northwest's insurer, Royal Globe Insurance. The FBI kept 14 examples as evidence. In 2008 Ingram sold 15 of his bills at auction for about $37,000. The Columbia River money remains the only confirmed physical evidence from the hijacking found outside the aircraft.

  In late 2020, an analysis of diatoms on the bills added a twist. Only species that bloom in spring were present. That indicated the bundles entered the water at least several months after the hijacking, and were not submerged or buried dry in November 1971.

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• 7. The Profile and the Odds

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  The first sketch of Cooper, released on the 28th of November 1971, earned a joking nickname from the witnesses themselves: "Bing Crosby". It showed a narrow-faced young man, and Schaffner repeatedly told the FBI it was a very poor likeness. A second sketch, Composite B, was completed in late 1972 to fix Cooper's age, skin tone and face shape. Witnesses found it too angry. One flight attendant called it a hoodlum and remembered Cooper as more refined. After adjustments, the FBI finalized a revised Composite B on the 2nd of January 1973. One attendant called it a very close resemblance. In April 1973 the FBI declared it the best likeness it could produce.

  Schaffner and Mucklow, who spent the most time with Cooper, were interviewed on the same night in separate cities. Their descriptions were nearly identical: a man in his mid-forties, 5 ft 10 in to 6 ft 0 in tall, 170 to 180 lb, with olive-toned skin, brown eyes, short combed-back black hair and no discernible accent. University of Oregon student Bill Mitchell sat across from Cooper for the three-hour flight. At 6 ft 2 in himself, Mitchell called Cooper "slight" and put him at 5 ft 9 in to 5 ft 10 in. Passenger Robert Gregory also said 5 ft 9 in, and believed Cooper to be of Mexican American or Native American descent.

  In May 1973 the FBI circulated an eight-page internal profile. It suggested Cooper was a military-trained parachutist and not a sport skydiver, because his age would have made him stand out at a skydiving club and easy to recognize. Witnesses cited an athletic build, so he probably exercised regularly. Because he recognized Tacoma and knew how close McChord was to Sea-Tac, profilers suspected he was an Air Force veteran familiar with Seattle. His vocabulary, planning and use of aviation terms marked him as intelligent and not impulsive, a careful planner who adapted quickly and likely worked alone.

  Himmelsbach argued that people who steal large sums almost always need the money urgently, so Cooper's finances were probably desperate. The FBI considered and dismissed the idea of a thrill seeker. Cooper spilled his only drink and never ordered another, so he was probably not an alcoholic. Counting his cigarettes, the FBI estimated about a pack a day.

  Some theorized the alias came from Dan Cooper, a fictional Royal Canadian Air Force test pilot who starred in a popular French-language Belgian comic series. One cover showed him skydiving. The comics were not translated or imported into the United States, so some speculated the hijacker had met them on a tour in Europe and spoke fluent French. The series also circulated in Quebec, which fed talk of a French Canadian, since many Quebecers speak English without an accent. His odd phrase "negotiable American currency" fit a non-U.S. background.

  The FBI believed Cooper planned with specific knowledge of aviation, the terrain and the 727. He chose the last row to watch the cabin, avoid being approached from behind, and stay less conspicuous. The four parachutes forced the assumption that he might bring hostages, which deterred sabotage. A bomb, unlike earlier hijackers' weapons, prevented anyone from rushing him. Before leaving, he demanded back every note written by him or for him. When Mucklow tried to throw away his empty matchbook, he insisted she return it. Yet he left the tie behind.

  The 727 itself was the key. Its aft airstair and the placement of its three engines made it one of the few airliners from which a jump was easy. The 15-degree flap setting let him control speed and altitude without entering the cockpit, where the three pilots could have overpowered him. Rataczak told the FBI that Cooper "displayed a specific knowledge of flying and aircraft in general."

  The deepest secret was this. The airstair could be lowered in flight, and its single switch in the rear of the cabin could not be overridden from the cockpit. The FBI speculated Cooper knew the CIA was using 727s to drop agents and supplies during the Vietnam War. Civilian crews were never told. Mucklow said Cooper put on his parachute as though he did so every day. Larry Carr, who directed the investigative team from 2006 to 2009, did not think Cooper was a paratrooper. He suspected an Air Force cargo loader, who would know parachutes but "not necessarily sufficient knowledge to survive the jump he made."

  The FBI assumed from the start that Cooper died. Carr said: "No experienced parachutist would have jumped in the pitch-black night, in the rain, with a 172 mph wind in his face wearing loafers and a trench coat. It was simply too risky." Cooper brought no helmet and jumped into a 15-degree Fahrenheit wind at 10,000 feet. A paper bag may have held boots, gloves and goggles. He could not have arranged an accomplice, since the route changed and low cloud hid the ground. And the ransom was never spent. Cossey disagreed on the skill needed, saying "anyone who had six or seven practice jumps could accomplish this." FBI agent Richard Tosaw theorized Cooper drowned in the Columbia River. In a 1976 Seattle Times article, an anonymous senior agent said, "I think Cooper made it. I think he slept in his own bed that night."

  Five copycat hijackers jumped in the months after, and all five survived. Martin McNally jumped at night over Indiana with only a reserve chute and no protective gear. He had to be shown how to wear it. His pilot flew 320 knots, nearly twice Cooper's speed, and the wind tore the money bag away. He landed with only scratches and bruises. Frederick Hahneman hijacked a 727 in Pennsylvania and jumped at night into a Honduran jungle. Richard LaPoint hijacked a 727 in Nevada, jumped over Northern Colorado in January wearing trousers, a shirt and cowboy boots, and landed in snow.

  These cases forced Himmelsbach to reconsider. In 2008 he admitted he had first given Cooper a 50 percent chance of survival, then revised it upward. Some investigators now think Cooper lived but lost the ransom during the jump. In November 1976, a Portland grand jury indicted "John Doe, a.k.a. Dan Cooper" in absentia for air piracy and violation of the Hobbs Act. The indictment keeps prosecution possible, should the hijacker ever be apprehended.

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• 8. The Suspects

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  Between 1971 and 2016 the FBI processed more than a thousand serious suspects, among them publicity seekers and deathbed confessors. Theodore Braden Jr. (1928-2007) recorded 911 parachute jumps in his military records. Born in Ohio, he joined the military in 1944 at 16 and served with the 101st Airborne. In the 1960s he led a team in a classified Green Beret unit in Vietnam and taught high-altitude jumping to Project DELTA members. He spent 23 months in Vietnam, then deserted in December 1966 to become a mercenary in the Congo. CIA agents arrested him and returned him for court-martial. He received an honorable discharge in exchange for his silence about the unit.

  An October 1967 Ramparts profile by journalist Donald W. Duncan described Braden as having a "secret death wish". At the time of the hijacking he drove a truck for Consolidated Freightways in Vancouver, Washington, near the suspected drop zone. He was investigated but never charged for a $250,000 trucking scam in the early 1970s. A federal grand jury indicted him in 1980 for hauling stolen goods, and he was jailed in the late 1980s. A relative called him "the perfect combination of high intelligence and criminality". At 5 ft 8 in he was shorter than the attendants' account, but that measurement was taken in stocking feet. His dark complexion and build fit the descriptions.

  In 2003 Minnesota resident Lyle Christiansen watched a documentary and became convinced his late brother Kenneth (1926-1994) was Cooper. After the FBI and author Nora Ephron declined to act, he contacted private investigator Skipp Porteous, who published a book on the theory in 2010. Kenneth enlisted in the Army in 1944 and trained as a paratrooper. He joined Northwest in 1954 as a laborer on Shemya Island in the Aleutians and later became a flight attendant and purser based in Seattle. He smoked and liked bourbon, but at 5 ft 8 in and 150 pounds he was shorter and thinner than witnesses described. Schaffner said his photos matched her memory better than other suspects' but could not identify him conclusively. The FBI does not treat him as a prime suspect.

  Jack Coffelt (1917-1975) was a con man and purported government informant. In 1972 he began claiming to be Cooper and tried to sell his story to a Hollywood production company through a former cellmate, James Brown. He said he landed near Mount Hood and lost the ransom. He was reportedly in Portland on the day of the hijacking and had leg injuries consistent with a skydiving mishap. But the FBI found that his account differed from details never made public, and called it a fabrication. Brown kept peddling the tale after Coffelt died, and 60 Minutes considered and rejected it.

  In July 2011 Marla Cooper named her uncle, Lynn Doyle "L. D." Cooper (1931-1999), a leather worker and Korean War veteran. At eight years old, she recalled him and another uncle planning something "very mischievous" with expensive walkie-talkies at her grandmother's house in Sisters, Oregon. The next day Flight 305 was hijacked. The uncles were supposedly turkey hunting, yet L. D. came home in a bloody shirt, blaming an auto accident. She also remembered a Dan Cooper comic tacked to his wall. The FBI found no fingerprints on a guitar strap he made, and his DNA did not match the partial profile from the tie. It added that the tie's source was uncertain.

  Barbara Dayton (1926-2002) was a recreational pilot and University of Washington librarian, born Robert Dayton. After military service she worked with explosives in construction but could not obtain a commercial pilot's license. She had gender reassignment surgery in 1969, believed to be the first in Washington. Dayton claimed she staged the hijacking, presenting as a man, to get back at the airline industry and the FAA. She said the money was hidden in a cistern near Woodburn, Oregon. She later recanted after learning charges could still be brought, and she did not closely match the physical description.

  William Pratt Gossett (1930-2003), a veteran of the Marine Corps, Army and Army Air Force, had jump training and wilderness survival experience. He was known to be obsessed with the case. Lawyer Galen Cook said Gossett once showed his sons a key to a safe deposit box in Vancouver, British Columbia, claiming it held the ransom. The FBI could not place him in the Pacific Northwest at the time. Carr said: "There is not one link to the D. B. Cooper case, other than the statements Gossett made to someone."

  Joe Lakich (1921-2017) was a retired Army major whose daughter Susan Giffe died less than two months before the hijacking, after a botched FBI hostage negotiation. Hostage negotiators studied it for decades as an example of what not to do. The Lakiches sued, and an appeals court ruled the FBI negligent. He became a suspect largely because of the uncommon metals on the tie. He was then a production supervisor at an electronics capacitor factory in Nashville. Some believe the grudge Cooper mentioned to Mucklow was Lakich's anger at the FBI.

  Jason Thomas Langseth (1934-2009) was a skydiver and Marine Corps veteran of the Korean War, born in Texas. FBI investigations of him spanned three decades, which makes him one of the most highly investigated suspects. He first came under the bureau's scrutiny in February 1972, within months of the hijacking.

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