On the plane, he donned a pair of dark sunglasses, ordered a whiskey, lit up a cigarette and coolly handed the stewardess a note. In capital letters, it read: I HAVE A BOMB IN MY BRIEFCASE. I WILL USE IT IF NECESSARY. I WANT YOU TO SIT NEXT TO ME. YOU ARE BEING HIJACKED.
What happened next would ensure Cooper a place in the pantheon of American folk heroes. He asked the stewardess to relay the following request to the captain: he wanted $200,000 and four parachutes, and in return, he’d allow 36 people to leave the aircraft when the plane landed in Seattle. The FBI organised the swap, and when the plane was sky-bound again, with just the pilot, co-pilot, one stewardess and Cooper on board, his instructions were to head for Mexico, maintaining an altitude under 10,000 feet. Then, somewhere over the lower Cascade mountains, 25 miles north west of Portland, Cooper released the plane’s aft stairs, stepped out, and, with one of the parachutes strapped to his back, jumped into the stormy night and was never seen or heard from again.
Forty years on from Cooper’s gutsy spectacle, I’ve come to the Pacific Northwest to find out about America’s only unsolved hijacking – one that the FBI still considers open and which it is, understandably, still very keen to solve.
Back in 1971, a reporter working for one of the wire services misheard the name of the hijacker, and ever since then he has been referred to as DB Cooper, rather than Dan. Over the past 40 years there have been more than 1,000 Cooper suspects, several deathbed confessions, a film (starring Robert Duvall), and – to my count – 17 books. The latest, Skyjack: The Hunt for DB Cooper, is out next month. As one person told me, Cooper is the Bigfoot of the Pacific Northwest. He is an enigma and a huge subculture has sprung up devoted to sleuthing his story. There’s even an annual celebration held in his honour in the tiny hamlet of Ariel, Washington, nestled in the rolling hills north east of Portland, now known as “Cooper Country”. And it is in Ariel that I begin my journey.
By the time military helicopters were scrambled, on November 24 1971, to search the land north of Portland for a 6ft tall Caucasian man weighing 170 to 175 pounds, DB Cooper was long gone – presumably packing away his parachute and trudging through mud and rain to make his escape. And before officers at the Clark County Sheriff’s office had decided to put a pin in a map near Ariel, regulars at the tiny hamlet’s only bar were sinking their final beers of the evening, unaware what was happening nearby.
Dona Elliott, the Tavern’s owner, says some of the drinkers there that night spotted a man walking up the road from nearby Lake Merwin. I can testify that there’s not much around here – just farmland, rolling hills and a highway that disappears into the Cascades – and unsurprisingly, the Tavern’s patrons wondered who on Earth would be walking alone outside on such a gruesome night.
The Tavern, a small wooden building built in the Twenties that sits on the corner of a pine-fringed road, is closed on Mondays, but Dona, now 74, has opened up just for me. It has become an unofficial Cooper repository: there’s a parachute (not the real one, obviously) pinned to the ceiling, newspaper clippings on every wall and a map showing the route the plance took near the bar.
Each year at its “DB Cooper Day” celebration, which has been going since 1973, old-timers reminisce, Cooper sleuths discuss their ideas and conspiracy theorists – and there are many – attempt a few conversions.
Inside, it smells of dogs and wood fire. A huge deer head fixed to the wall stares at me as I pull up a chair. Dona sits beside me, sipping from a water bottle, and thumbing a scrapbook full of more Cooper news stories. Of the numerous books on Cooper, she says she “hasn’t read one yet that’s accurate”. In fact, to my amusement, Dona doesn’t even think Cooper landed in Ariel at all. Someone clever enough to plan such an audacious heist, she says, would have jumped near Portland airport “because they would have never looked for him there”. Despite the proprietor’s misgivings, the DB Cooper party continues each year. One regular even bore an uncanny resemblance to the artist’s sketch that the FBI released of Cooper (which some people also thought looked like Bing Crosby), but Dona assures me “they checked him out thoroughly”. I ask why the story is so big still, 40 years on, and she suddenly becomes animated. “Because the government's always screwing us over and finally somebody got ‘em back.”
Read more at The Telegraph
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