MENA, Ark. – An Arkansas man hopes to auction off some frayed $20 bills that he says could bring him thousands of dollars.
Brian Ingram, 34, a Mena carpenter, says he was the boy on a family outing 15 years ago in Washington state who found money stolen by legendary hijacker D.B. Cooper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported Sunday.
Cooper hijacked a Northwest Orient Airlines flight from Portland, Ore., in 1971, and parachuted out with $200,000 in ransom money. His fate remains unknown.
Ingram says he has 17 of the bills plus torn pieces and is working with an attorney to auction off some of them through Sothebys in New York.
“It’s time to make a sale,” says Ingram, who has a wife and three children. “I want to invest for our future.”
Ingram says that when he was 8, he found three bundles of bills “with rubber bands still on them” in the sand along the Columbia River. He says he was on an outing Feb. 10, 1980, with his family near their home in Vancouver, Wash., and he was raking the sand to build a fire. In all, he found $5,880, he says.
“At the time, it was ‘Wow. This is nice,’ ” Ingram says.
His father, Dwayne Ingram, contacted the police and was asked to supply a few of the bills’ serial numbers. The numbers linked the bills to the hijacking and police instructed the Ingrams to contact the FBI in Seattle, which was heading the investigation, Brian Ingram says.
The federal agents told the Ingrams they would have to part with the money because it was evidence in the Cooper case. But Ingram’s parents battled with the government in federal court to keep the money, he says. In the end, the FBI kept 13 or 14 bills; the rest of the money was divided between the airline’s insurance company and himself, Ingram said.
In the hijacking, a man who identified himself as Dan Cooper boarded a plane headed for Seattle on Nov. 24, 1971, told the crew once the plane was in the air that he had a bomb and demanded $200,000 and parachutes. When the plane landed at Seattle, he released the passengers in exchange for the money and ordered the pilot to fly toward Mexico. While in the air, Cooper apparently then jumped from the rear stairway of the plane.
The jumper later became known as D.B. Cooper after authorities questioned and then released a man named Daniel B. Cooper. That man was cleared but the name stuck.
Ingram’s family moved to Oklahoma when he was 13. He served in the Army for three years after high school, then moved to Mena about 12 years ago. He says he’s kept the bills locked in a bank safe deposit box.
Over the years, Ingram shied away from telling people that he was the boy who found some ransom money. “It was like, ‘Yeah, right,’ ” he says of the reactions he got.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
