By The Herald Editorial Board
The FBI may have closed its 45-year investigation of D.B. Cooper last week, but all the speculating and theorizing about the hijacker will live on, like Bigfoot, especially in the Northwest.
The mysterious man who called himself Dan Cooper infamously hijacked a passenger plane from Portland to Seattle, where he freed the 36 passengers for $200,000 and parachutes, which he used to escape after he instructed the pilots to head for Mexico. Authorities believe he jumped somewhere between Seattle and Reno. Never to be seen again. But the money was — in 1980, a boy found $5,800 of the $200,000 along the Columbia River in a rotting package. Other than identifying the money, the discovery didn’t aid the FBI in its search of Cooper, or the rest of the ransom money.
Because of the audacity of the crime, and the fact that Cooper was reportedly polite and did not hurt his victims, D.B. Cooper had his admirers from the start. But as hijacking for money eventually faded, to be replaced by hijacking for terrorist purposes, Cooper has become even more a legend. People claimed to know him; people claim to be him. (Like in a deathbed confession.)
The FBI received hundreds of tips, and had looked into 800 suspects by the fifth anniversary of the hijacking, The New York Times reported. To this day, “Hundreds if not more Cooper sleuths continue to harangue the office with their leads,” said Geoffrey Gray, a journalist who has contributed to The Times and who wrote the 2011 book on the investigation, “Skyjack: The Hunt for D.B. Cooper.” The decision by the FBI to reassign the last agent still on the Cooper case “is really an attempt by the bureau to spare the office from irritating calls, wacky emails and more,” Gray said.
Which sounds like conspiracy theories are overtaking any actual real information that might still be out there. If Cooper were alive, he’d be around 90 years old. If he were still alive, he could still be prosecuted, but it’s difficult to imagine that happening. As one the FBI’s greatest unsolved crimes, it will remain one of our cultural touchstones, one that in this day and age is difficult to believe could have ever happened. Buying an one-way airline ticket with cash. Smoking on an airplane. Carrying a bomb (real or not, who knows) in a briefcase right onto the plane. Perhaps Cooper was the ghost of airline hijackings to come. Perhaps not.
Regardless, Dan Cooper’s crazy but well-planned crime has captured the imaginations of generations of Americans. It’s probably fitting that his identity is not known, and likely never will be. So the D.B. Cooper sleuths can forever theorize.
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