The FBI’s search for notorious skyjacker D.B. Cooper started from the moment he boarded Northwest Orient Flight 305 on November 24, 1971, parachuted into the night, and disappeared with $200,000, never to be seen again. And according to a treasure trove of 472 newly released FBI documents, that search was exhaustive for at least the next few years, with the Bureau investigating and ruling out hundreds of suspects.
The FBI’s Vault, or Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) library, houses a horde of previously sealed or long-buried files on notable persons of interest. While Cooper’s file in the vault was already thousands of pages deep, on March 5, the FBI dumped a massive new dossier with hundreds of previously unseen memos and notes about the search for the “armed and dangerous” UNSUB—the unidentified subject of an investigation—in the FBI’s NORJAK (Northwest Hijacking) case.
According to the new pages in Cooper’s file, the list of potential suspects ran deep, with names added to the list thanks to letters and tips from the public, often based on past conversations, personal knowledge of someone’s parachuting skills, or even just because of an oddly timed injury. The suspects also included a never-ending stream of former bank robbers, those with high-level parachuting training, and even regular citizens with the last name Cooper.
The memos and the search stretched across the country, from Albuquerque to Buffalo, and Honolulu to Portland.
The D.B. Cooper cold case remains the only unsolved commercial airline hijacking in history. On that fateful Thanksgiving Eve flight, the man who called himself Dan Cooper (the media misreported the name as D.B., which stuck), paid $18.52 cash for a one-way ticket to Portland and boarded his flight without offering up identification due to a lack of regulations at the time.
Carrying just a briefcase and paper sack, Cooper passed a note to a flight attendant seated behind him halfway through the flight and whispered that she better look at the note since he had a bomb. Cooper opened his briefcase to reveal what appeared to be a bomb and then relayed his demands of $200,000, multiple parachutes, and a refueling truck on the ready in Seattle so he could take off again, bound for Mexico City.
The demands were met, and the planned 30-minute flight turned into two hours of circling the Puget Sound as crews readied on the ground. The airliner’s 35 passengers were released, along with some of the crew, and Cooper negotiated the specifics of the flight path and plane setup—he required a set speed, flap angle, and plenty more—before he took off again with four crew on board.
Somewhere still over Washington, Cooper then opened the rear staircase and parachuted from the plane, but the exact location and timing is unknown. Immediate searches yielded no evidence, and over the years, experts have been unable to determine an exact search area due to the multiple variables involved in the night jump.
One of the only real pieces of evidence Cooper left was a $1.49 clip-on tie from JCPenney, which the FBI holds. In recent years, amateur sleuths have sued the government for access to the DNA and the particles left on the tie, to no avail.
The 472 newly released pages show the extent to which the FBI went to find and eliminate suspects. One suspect was eliminated because he was too bald, and another was ruled out due to a “pot belly.” The pages indicate the FBI also used a deep resource of driver’s license photos to check off suspects, cross-referencing ID pictures with the sketch of the UNSUB given by witnesses.
The memos, which are heavily redacted, show that FBI agents from across the country routinely caught up with Northwest Orient crew and staff to show them photographs. After serving a subpoena on one suspect in Bremerton, Washington, Kitsap County Sheriff’s officers ruled him out because they “did not think that he looked old enough to be the subject Norjack.” A man named Alvin Earle Cooper, meanwhile, was ruled out because his photograph was “not identical with UNSUB in this case,” prompting no further investigation.
Plenty of suspects were eliminated simply because they were determined to not be in the Pacific Northwest at the time of the 1971 skyjacking. One suspect was in Los Angeles, another was a former bank robber who had called in sick to his Albuquerque place of employment for the two days following the hijacking, and another was incarcerated near Sacramento at the time of the incident on a narcotics charge.
The FBI investigated a Pittsburgh suspect with ties to the Portland area because an acquaintance said that following the hijacking, the man walked with a noticeable limp due to a sprained ankle, and had both wrists. While he fit the description of the UNSUB, the Bureau ultimately ruled him out.
The FBI was also especially interested in suspects with links to aviation and parachutes. The Bureau spent pages of memos especially discussing Seattle-area pilot Jay Whiteford, who was turned down for an aerial photography business loan, and Charles Whittaker, who was known to have taken skydiving school in San Diego. Both were ultimately ruled out.
The FBI sent letters and memos to banks and financial institutions asking them to immediately “report any suspicious or unusual financial transactions concerning twenty-dollar federal reserve notes.”
And in a fun Easter egg, one of the 472 newly declassified pages contains a single letter sent from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to Washington Senator Henry Jackson thanking him for his letter with (redacted) suggestions on the Cooper case.
While the FBI officially redirected resources that were previously allocated to the D.B. Cooper case to other investigative priorities in 2016, recent investigations have come from a network of sleuths enamored with the case, including a potential lost parachute and the search for DNA clues that could have been left on Cooper’s tie.