For the first entry NOT about homicide, I’ve picked a doozy. Everything that I’ve written about so far seems so bleak, and the fact that they’ve gone unanswered just adds salt to the wound. For a change, here’s something that doesn’t involve a murder (though it does include a bomb, a plane hijacking, and a quarter of a million dollars).

Police Sketch of Cooper. 1971. “D.B. Cooper Hijacking,” by Federal Bureau of Investigation. FBI, 12 July 2016.

1971: Flight #305 is bound for Seattle, Washington from Portland, Oregon. On his ticket it reads, “D.B. Cooper”, and he boards the flight after paying with cash. He wears a business suit and tie, orders a bourbon and coke, and once the flight takes off, he puts his plan into motion.

Mr. Cooper calls a stewardess over to his seat, and he shows her a note that asks her to sit. He has a bomb on board, and she needs to do exactly as he asks.

She does.

Within his briefcase lies a mass of colored wires. “Take his note to your captain”, he says. Cooper demands four parachutes, $200,000 in twenty-dollar bills, and a re-fueling truck for when the plane lands. They’d be landing in Seattle for fuel for the rest of the trip, south towards Mexico.

Once they landed, the other 36 passengers were released in exchange for the cash. Three crew members and the captain remained as the plane traveled south. Near Reno, Nevada, Cooper made his move:

He jumps.

Never to be seen again.

That’s it.

Whether Cooper survived or not is unknown. Law-enforcement officials in five different planes tailed the jetliner, yet no one witnessed the jump. By using wind speed and free fall data, researchers have found that Cooper landed somewhere on Bachelor Island, an area along the Columbia River in Washington. Near this same river, several twenty-dollar bills have washed up, believed to belong to Cooper. These bills have been the only physical evidence found.

The FBI launched a nation-wide investigation. From the official investigation report, “We’re calling it NORJAK, for Northwest Hijacking, we interviewed hundreds of people, tracked leads across the nation, and scoured the aircraft for evidence. By the five-year anniversary of the hijacking, we’d considered more than 800 suspects and eliminated all but two dozen from consideration.”

D.B. Cooper. 1971. “Was The FBI Wrong About D.B. Cooper’s Infamous Skyjacking? An Amateur Sleuth Thinks So,” by Sharon Lynn Pruitt. Oxygen, NBCUniversal, 28 June 2019.

Evidence suggested that Cooper was not an experienced jumper. His parachute was unable to be steered, he wasn’t dressed for a rough landing (which he most certainly had), and he jumped at night. Many believe he died on impact, though his body and parachute has never (nor will they) been found.

1980 – A young boy finds a wet, rotting package full of twenty-dollar bills ($5,800) that matches the ransom money serial numbers. Again, this is all that’s ever been discovered from the hijacking, and it came nearly ten years later.

For everyone that believes that Cooper never survived, just as many believe he walked away with the cash and got away with it. Leading suspect Richard Floyd McCoy, Jr. was arrested a year after the D.B. Cooper hijacking for hijacking a plane from Denver to Los Angeles after jumping with $500,000. Never officially prosecuted, McCoy died in 1974 after escaping prison and getting into an altercation with pursuing guards. Since, the case has gone cold.

As always, BuzzFeed Unsolved’s video is linked here. Best of luck theory hunting, until next week.