Month: October 2019

Chapter Seven: The Mysterious D. B. Cooper

Sorry for the slightly late post, fellow spook-sleuths; in the stress and chaos of the past week, updating you on the weird tomfoolery that went down in the past totally slipped my mind. But I am here now, and I would kick myself if I let this whole semester go by without discussing one of my favorite historical mysteries: the strange hijacking and disappearance of the great mystery man D. B. Cooper.

As I’ve said in the past, you might have heard of this story before. It’s been popular for decades, but a lot of different true-crime documentaries, videos, and series have covered this event; I know that because I’ve watched several, hoping some new details or insight might be provided. But it really is a dead end.

On November 24, 1971, a nondescript man boarded a normal, routine flight from Portland, Oregon bound toward Seattle, Washington. The man appeared to be in his 40’s, wearing a white shirt and a black tie, and carrying a briefcase. The man purchased his plane ticket using all cash under the name Dan Cooper. As he waited for the flight to take off, he ordered a drink: bourbon and soda. A while later, just after 3 pm, the man passed a stewardess who had been walking by a note directing her to sit next to him. After she complied, the man opened his briefcase to reveal to the stewardess what looked to be a bomb – red sticks and colored wires.

In order to avoid detonating the bomb, according to the man, the stewardess was to take note of his demands, take them to the captain of the plane, and follow the instructions. He requested four parachutes, and, most notably, $200,000 in cash. In 20 dollar bills.

The flight eventually landed in Seattle, though delayed (the original and normal flight would have only taken about 30 minutes, but did not arrive until around 5:30) due to the amount of time it took to acquire the money Cooper demanded. When the flight landed, Cooper exchanging the 30 or so passengers on board for the money and the parachutes. Then, he directed the pilot to fly south toward Mexico. A few hours later, around 8 pm, he did the seemingly unthinkable: he parachuted from the moving plane with the ransom money. The pilots and the plane were able to safely land afterwards, but with no other details or contact, the man who called himself Dan Cooper was seemingly lost forever.

There’s a lot of things that are unclear in this case: who is Dan Cooper (which is, shockingly, not this man’s real name)? What was his motivation? Where did he land? Did he survive his jump? If he did, how did he manage to use or spend the money without detection? How has he managed to escape undetected, despite massive amounts of investigation, to this very day?

Basically the only physical evidence left behind was Dan Cooper’s black clip-on tie, which he removed before parachuting from the plane for unknown reasons. The tie was able to eventually provide a DNA sample, but it matched nothing in existing databases and no identified suspects. With no other leads to go off of, this evidence is basically useless; without something or someone to compare it to, it remains another element of confusion.

A leading theory is that D.B. Cooper (a name given to him by press and media coverage) did not survive his fall from the plane. The parachutes he used were not steerable, and he jumped into a very wooded area at night time. Seemingly adding to this theory was a 1980 discovery by a young boy of a washed-up, rotting paper bag filled with about 5k in dollar bills with serial numbers that matched those that had been acquired by Cooper. The rest of the bills, as well as any remains or other items of Cooper, have not been found.

There are some suspects in the case, but only about less than 2 dozen were actually seriously investigated. There have also been numerous confessions from members of the public claiming to be Cooper, but none of them have led to any serious conclusion or produced reliable evidence to suggest the validity of the claims. So, with nothing more to go off of than the eyewitness reports and descriptions of those on the flight that day, as well as the rotting money and the somewhat useless DNA evidence, it’s no wonder this case has gone cold. And, as the years go on, it seems to become more and more unlikely that we ever will truly know who D.B. Cooper was.

 

Chapter Six: The Black Dahlia

Los Angeles, 1947

 

This story is a little more grisly than the others I’ve written about in the past. It’s a fairly graphic and disturbing crime, but I will do my best to keep it as readable as possible – that means not including any of the gruesome images found at the crime scene. But if you’re curious, you can find them all (and no judgement from me, because I’ve done the same) with a quick Google search. But, as you’ll see, it’s intense stuff. Just a disclaimer.

The murder-mystery of the Black Dahlia is one of the most famous in recent history, mostly because of the horrendous state her remains were discovered in and the media sensation surrounding her death as a result. To this day, who the culprit is remains a mystery. The FBI even has a whole page dedicated to this case; you’ve probably at least heard the phrase “black dahlia” at some point.

The woman pictured above is Elizabeth Short, – also known as the Black Dahlia – age twenty-two at the time of her death. Elizabeth, an aspiring actress, lived with and did some housework for a French family in Los Angeles at the time of her death. She had ended up there after years of struggling to find work, partying, and trying to find a husband in a couple of men – all of which ended in heartbreak. Her beauty was, to many, striking; she lived a life like many other young women looking to make a name for themselves. The last person to see her alive was a man named Robert Manley, whom she had been having a brief love affair with – after a night spent together in a hotel, Manley left for an appointment. He later dropped her off at a different hotel, where she was to meet her sister, but did not stay to wait for the sister to show up. The last thing he saw of Elizabeth was her making phone calls in the hotel lobby.

She was then missing for six days.

On the morning of January 15, a housewife named Betty Bersinger was out for a walk to a shoe repair shop with her three-year-old daughter. The pair passed many vacant lots, and Bersinger noticed something white amongst the weeds and grass in one of them. Initially dismissing it as litter, upon closer inspection she believed it to be a mannequin that someone had tossed out. It struck her as strange, as the mannequin had apparently been severed in half. Bersinger began to walk away, but was drawn back to the mannequin – which she quickly discovered was not a mannequin at all, but instead the mutilated body of a young woman. She fled the scene with her daughter to a nearby house, where she immediately called the police.

Officers arrived on the scene within a few minutes. The state that the body was in was abysmal. Elizabeth had indeed been severed in half cleanly at the waist (perhaps suggesting a killer with medical knowledge), and her limbs had been apparently posed – arms raised over her shoulders with her legs spread – to make her appear seductive. She was naked with several cuts and abrasions across her body, including cuts from the corners of her mouth that extended to each of her ears, almost like a sick and crude smile. She had rope marks on her wrists, ankles, and neck that suggested that she had been tied up for an extended period of time. Notably, there was no blood on her body or on the ground underneath her, like she had been cleaned and killed elsewhere, then dropped in the vacant lot to be discovered. Her cause of death was determined to be due to brain damage and lacerations to her face, leading to hemorrhage and shock. Most of her other injuries, including the severing, were thus concluded to have occurred postmortem.

News spread of the discovery fairly quickly, and the crime scene was quickly contaminated and disrupted by dozens of civilians and reporters. Elizabeth was able to be identified from fingerprints lifted from her remains at the scene. Though it was clear who the victim was, what wasn’t was who was responsible for such a horrific and merciless crime.

Investigators believed that the killer had been someone close to Elizabeth, due to the extremely brutal way she was killed and the fact that her body was left to be discovered and gawked at by the public. Several men in Elizabeth’s life were suspects, most of them ruled out due to strong alibis, including Robert Manley (the last man to see her alive). Elizabeth’s shoe and bag were found in a trash can not far from the lot her body had been discovered, leading investigators to believe that the killer was within walking distance of the place her remains were found. Much like the Jack the Ripper case, letters that were apparently from the killer were sent to the LAPD, as well as important documents (like Elizabeth’s security card), but they had all been rinsed with gasoline to prevent the lifting of any fingerprints. Since there were a lot of false leads and hoaxes, both from letters and calls, police were often led down meaningless roads that led to little to no real evidence or progress in the case. Without any real leads or physical evidence, the case went cold. It still is to this day.

There are some popular suspects, though. If you want to read a bit about them, click here for a nice summary of each. But as for who actually did it? We don’t know. And we probably never will.