LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — In 1980, 8-year-old Brian Ingram found the sole link to the only unsolved airline hijacking in U.S. history buried in the sandy banks of the Columbia River.
Now 36, Ingram hopes to auction the weathered bundle of $20 bills as the FBI launches a new effort to find the unknown hijacker who parachuted into the night after taking over the 1971 Northwest Orient Airlines flight.
“Think about it, it was the biggest manhunt. They never found any clues to this man,” said Ingram, who followed family ties to Arkansas and now lives in Mena, west of Little Rock in the Ouachita Mountains. “The money that I found in 1980 is the only evidence ever linked to this guy that jumped out of the 727 at the altitude that he did with the weather.”
Nine years after the hijacking, Ingram and his family found themselves caught in the story as Ingram scrounged for wood for a campfire along the wavy sand of the Columbia River.
“I took my arm and just kind of was going to smooth out the sand to make a little bed for the firewood,” Ingram said. “When I did, my arm just kind of went over what we thought were paper at first.”
The paper turned out to be three bundles of deteriorated $20 bills. Ingram said the rubber bands around the money “turned to powder” when touched.
The family gathered the money into a bread sack and called the police the next day to offer the serial numbers of the $5,880. The numbers matched the bills given to Cooper.
The discovery propelled the 8-year-old boy into newspapers across the Northwest.
“When I was younger, it was exciting. I was the ugly duckling, but I had more girlfriends after that than I could shake a stick at,” Ingram said, laughing. “I went through the time really realizing the historics on the case. … People are going to know about it, read about it, really for a long time, forever.”
A court forced Ingram to split the find with the airline’s insurance company, which put up the ransom. Now, Ingram said he wants to sell his two envelopes with scraps as small as pennies, along with the 13 half-bills and nearly 20 full bills he owns.
Ingram would like to hold onto at least one of the bills for his family and maybe offer one to the Smithsonian or another museum. However, the independent flooring installer knows the auction could raise enough to put a child through college.
Ingram’s plans come as the FBI announced a new effort to solve the hijacking. The bureau says it found DNA evidence on the clip-on tie Cooper wore. However, Steve Frazier, a spokesman for the FBI’s Little Rock field office, said local agents had no plans to look again at Ingram’s $20 bills.
The latest bulletin from the FBI points out how Cooper likely wasn’t an expert skydiver and probably perished after jumping into the howling, 200 mph winds wearing only loafers and a trench coat. But Ingram would like to believe otherwise.
“I like the idea he’s off on some Caribbean island, which he didn’t take off with enough money to be able to do something like that,” he said. He’s “laughing at this whole thing, going, ‘I made off with the loot but the kid got the joy of it.’ “
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