← America's Most Infamous Crimes with Katie Ring
America's Most Infamous Crimes with Katie Ring
D.B. Cooper: How A Child Found His Money Nine Years Later Pt. 2
00:28:09
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- [00:02]
Katie Ring
Hi. We have some exciting news. Crime House plus and Murder True Crime Stories are celebrating America's 250th by dropping a four part limited series on the crimes that built America. These are the crimes and cases that gave us Miranda rights, sparked criminal profiling, and a murder that built America's missing children movement. Follow Murder True Crime Stories for a new episode every Monday leading up to July 4th. Or you can listen to all of them right now with Crime House Plus. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of the show's page.
- [00:45]
Crime House Host
This is Crime House.
- [00:48]
Katie Ring
On a cold November night in 1971, a man known as D.B. cooper jumped out of a plane with $200,000 in cash and he was never seen again. The FBI had a tie, a strand of hair, and cigarette butts with no fingerprints. That was it. For years, the investigation inched forward. Tips came in by the thousands. Suspects were investigated and cleared. The case became a cultural obsession. And then nine years after the hijacking, an eight year old boy digging a fire pit on the bank of the Columbia river pulled three rotting bundles of 20 $20 bills out of the sand. The serial numbers matched, the money was real, and it raised more questions than answers. Today I'll tell you about the hunt for DB Cooper and how the investigation slowly started to close in on One name. Every crime tells a story about the people involved, the system that tried to stop it, and the nation that couldn't look away. Some cases are so shocking, so deeply woven into who we are, that decades later, we're still asking, how did this happen? I'm Katie Ring and this is America's Most Infamous Crimes. Every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, I'll take you deep into cases that have a lasting imprint on society and still haunt us. Today, I want to thank you for being part of the Crime House community. Please rate, review and follow America's Most infamous crimes wherever you get your podcasts and to get all episodes at once ad free. Subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. Before I get started, please be advised that this episode contains descriptions of a hijacking and the threat of violence. So please listen with care. This is the second of our three episode series on DB Cooper. Today I'm going to follow the FBI's attempts to find him after he jumped out of a plane flying over Washington State. I'll break down the physical evidence. The authorities had to work with the copycat hijacking that briefly looked like the biggest break in the case and the years of dead ends until a child found something in the sand that nobody expected.
- [02:59]
Crime House Host
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- [04:15]
Katie Ring
before I dive back into the story, let's recap what we know so far. On November 24, 1971, a man known as Dan Cooper, later shortened to D.B. hijacked a plane flying from Portland to Seattle. When they landed, the authorities handed over four parachutes and $200,000 in cash, as requested. Then, after the plane took back off, he jumped out over a stretch of wilderness in Washington state called the Dark Divide. Once the plane landed in Reno, FBI agents swarmed in to search for evidence. But Cooper had planned ahead and he didn't leave much behind. Here's what they found. Cooper's tie, the clip he'd used to fasten it to his shirt, and two parachutes. In terms of forensic evidence, there were cigarette butts, a possible strand or two of hair on the headrest, some prints on a bourbon glass, and an In Flight magazine that may or may have not belonged to Cooper. That was essentially it. No weapon other than Cooper's potential briefcase bomb, which he had taken with him. He grabbed the note he had written, too, so that couldn't be analyzed. They couldn't confirm his fingerprints or his name, since Dan Cooper was an alias. He'd also paid for the ticket in cash and wrote with block letters, making it hard to determine any kind of handwriting. But this case was too big to let go. So the FBI went with what they had, which wasn't much. Their best piece of evidence was the tie, so it became everything to them. And the closer they looked, the more confusing it got. If he did leave it on purpose, the question is, why would someone take off their tie right before jumping out of an airplane? He had one hand committed to the briefcase bomb and the other one to the money bag. He'd have to at least put one of them down to take off the tie. Sure, he could have been worried that it would flap in his face when he jumped, but considering that he was jumping into a cold rainstorm over miles of wilderness, you'd think that would be the least of his worries. Maybe it flew off on accident. Maybe he purposely left it behind. Or maybe it didn't even belong to him. But in the years following, no one has come forward to claim it. So I think it's safe to say that it was his and so did the FBI. For decades, it was just another piece of the D.B. cooper mystery. But 36 years later, it finally gave us some insight into his identity. In 2007, a team of amateur researchers and forensic scientists finally got access to the tie through a collaboration with the FBI. And when they sent it to a laboratory for analysis, they found something genuinely surprising. Most of the particles found on the tie could be traced to the matches he used to light his cigarettes, along with other common metals. But one set of particles stood out. Pure, unalloyed titanium. And let's slow down for a second to talk about that, because it could be huge for this case. Unalloyed titanium, meaning titanium that hasn't been mixed or combined with any other material, is not something you'd encounter in everyday life. In 1971, it was a specialty material used for a few specific industrial applications, most notably in aerospace. Considering how much Cooper seemed to know about the plane he'd hijacked, the the researchers concluded that he'd spent time in a facility that processed titanium for the aerospace or defense industry. Maybe a manufacturer or a plant somewhere that worked with that raw material. If that's true, it could be a major clue in his identity, which is huge because a lot of other evidence has been mishandled over the years. At some point, the FBI reportedly lost, or at least couldn't account for, the hair sample or the cigarette butts. Basically, all of the evidence that could have been used for DNA testing was gone, which left them with only the tie. Although later, down the road, they were able to get some trace DNA samples from it. But before we get into that, let's rewind a bit. Because another major piece of evidence wasn't what Cooper left behind, but what he took with him. The money. Remember, the bills used to put the payment together were chosen because they'd be easy to track. So every bank and business in the country was on high alert for that money. But months after Cooper disappeared, that money never turned up. Either he knew better than to spend it, or he was dead and that cash was buried somewhere with him. Or maybe it was for another reason entirely. Maybe Cooper lost that money and he decided to try again. Because five months after DB Cooper vanished, someone tried to do the same thing. On April 7, 1972, a man boarded United Airlines Flight 855 in Denver, Colorado. His name, or at least the name he used anyway, was James Johnson. He was carrying a briefcase, and midway through the flight, he took out a note and told the crew he had a bomb. Like D.B. cooper, he requested four parachutes. But this time, he asked for $500,000 in cash. He wanted to fly to San Francisco, pick up the money, and then jump from the plane somewhere over the Utah desert. The parallels to the Cooper case were impossible to miss. So you can understand why the authorities thought he was taking another bite of the apple. And just like the first time around, the hijacker got what he asked for. Then he jumped somewhere over the Utah wilderness with a bag of money and a parachute. But this time, the story didn't end there. Foreigners.
- [09:55]
Crime House Host
It's Carter Roy, host of Murder True Crime Stories. I wanted to let you know that Crime House plus and Murder True Crime Stories are celebrating America's 250th by dropping a four part limited series on the crimes that built America. These are the crimes and cases that gave us Miranda rights, sparked criminal profiling, and a murder that built America's missing children movement. Follow Murder True Crime Stories for a new episode every Monday leading up to July 4th. Or you can binge all of them right now ad free with Crime House Plus. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, tap Try free at the top of this show's page.
- [10:40]
Katie Ring
Foreign. Calling himself James Johnson recreated DB Cooper's crime just five months after the first one. The authorities understandably wondered if both hijackings had been committed by the same guy. And just like the original version, Johnson had jumped over a stretch of wilderness that would be hard to search. But this time, it was a lot simpler. 48 hours after the hijacking Police in Provo, Utah, named Richard Floyd McCoy, Jr. As a suspect. They'd caught onto him after a motorist told them about a hitchhiker who'd been walking along a rural road in a jumpsuit carrying a duffel bag. McCoy was 29 years old, a Sunday school teacher, a university student, and a trained military paratrooper who'd served in Vietnam. Not only that, but at the time of his arrest, he was an active member of the Utah National Guard, which had been deployed to help search for the hijacker. In other words, if Richard McCoy was James Johnson, he was literally chasing himself. When investigators searched his home, they found the jumpsuit and the duffel bag with 499, $970,000 in cash inside. Whether or not McCoy was also D.B. cooper, it seems to seems like he was trying to be careful with the money. But this time, it didn't save him. McCoy was convicted of air piracy and sentenced to 45 years in federal prison. But his escapades weren't over yet, because he barely served any of it. In 1974, McCoy pulled one more rabbit out of his hat when he escaped from Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary. But his luck ran out after that. Shortly after his escape, McCoy was killed in a shootout with FBI agents in Virginia Beach. His chapter closed quickly and violently. But the question of whether Richard McCoy and D.B. cooper were the same person still lingered. The similarities between the two cases were impossible to ignore. It wasn't just that both times, the hijacker had demanded huge sums of cash and four parachutes. It was also that both hijackings involved the same aircraft type, a Boeing 727. Richard McCoy's military background, his paratrooper training, and his comfort jumping at night into remote terrain all fit the profile investigators had built for Cooper. And then there was the tie element. Considering that McCoy was in the National Guard, it's possible he came into contact with unalloyed titanium at some point. Here's the thing, though. McCoy's family consistently maintained that he was home for Thanksgiving in 1971, which would mean he probably wasn't D.B. cooper. But the circumstantial evidence was compelling enough that some investigators were never fully let go of that theory. However, there was one significant the fingerprints. The FBI had recovered partial prints from the bourbon glass aboard Flight 305, which may or may not have belonged to Cooper. When those prints were compared to McCoy's, they didn't match. But at the same time, the FBI wasn't even sure that those prints were Coopers. Back then, commercial aircraft glasses weren't being sanitized between every flight, so the prints could have belonged to a previous passenger. Which meant that Richard McCoy couldn't be completely ruled out on that alone. But for the time being, the FBI wasn't going after him for the Cooper hijacking. Either there wasn't enough evidence, or they figured that with him dead, he wasn't worth spending more resources on for the next few years. The case didn't go anywhere until 1978, when a hunter in a remote stretch of Washington forest stumbled across an instruction cardinal. It was a technical document showing how to lower the aft staircase on a Boeing 727. The exact mechanism DB Cooper had utilized on the night of his escape. And the manual was found along the flight path of Flight 305. The Hunter's Discovery led to another burst of interest in the case, and it was passed to the FBI. But it didn't lead anywhere. No fingerprints, no connection to any known suspect, and no way of knowing if it had been left there intentionally or if it had simply gotten there by chance. It was another dead end. By the late 1970s, the case had gotten thousands of tips, generated hundreds of suspect files, and produced no viable leads. Officially, the FBI was committed to solving it, but privately, a lot of agents were starting to agree with Ralph Himmelsbach, the lead investigator, who thought could Cooper had died from his jump and that his body was somewhere in the Cascades, slowly absorbed by the forest floor. And then, on a November morning in 1980, almost nine years to the day after the hijacking, an eight year old named Brian Ingram changed everything. Brian was camping with his family along the north shore of the Columbia river near Vancouver, Washington, at a sandy beach area called Tina Barn. He was trying to dig a small fire pit when his hands hit something in the sand. Something that crumbled and fell apart as he pulled it up. It was money. It was rotting, disintegrating, and barely holding together, but it was definitely money. Three bundles of partially decomposed $20 bills bound with rubber bands that had mostly dissolved. Brian's dad took a closer look. He could still make out the serial numbers on some of the bills. So he called the FBI, and when he read off the numbers aloud over the phone, the agent on the other end went quiet for a moment. It was part of the DB Cooper ransom. The three bundles of cash totaled $5,800, less than 3% of the $200,000 total. But it was real, confirmed Cooper. Money from the hijacking. And it was the first physical evidence that had surfaced in nine years. Brian Ingram and his family cooperated fully with investigators. The bills were taken, analyzed and documented. Years later, Brian was allowed to keep $2,950 worth of the recovered bills. And in 2008, he sold 15 of them at an auction for $37,000. But what the money told the investigators was almost as puzzling as the case itself. The money that Brian Ingram found at tina Bar in 1980 was promising, but also puzzling, especially how it got there. Tina Bar, which is along the Columbia river, was more than 20 miles from the Lewis river search zone near Ariel, Washington, which is where investigators thought D.B. cooper might have landed. Now, it's definitely possible that the money could have gotten there naturally. The Columbia river runs downstream from Ariel, which means the money could have, theoretically have traveled there by water. The question is, when did it get there? To answer that, the FBI brought in a scientist who offered two possible explanations. The first, the money had ended up at Tina Bar when the Columbia river was dredged in 1974, and sand taken from the riverbed was dropped along the shoreline there. The second, flooding along The Columbia in 1977 had shifted material from elsewhere and deposited it at that location. Either way, it would place the bills in the river years after the jump, which was consistent with the state of decay when they were found. But there was one thing the scientists couldn't explain. Why only $5,880 of the $200,000 had ended up at Tina Bar. If all of the money had gotten into the river, you would expect more of it to have made the same journey. And then there was a twist. Analysis suggested the money had only been submerged in water for about a year before being found in the sand. Not nine years. So how did it get there? None of it added up cleanly. No body, no parachute, and no other bills were ever found anywhere near Tina Bar or the surrounding area. The discovery of the money breathed new life into the investigation and brought a new wave of public attention to the case. But at the same time, it made the picture murkier. If Cooper had died from the jump and his body was in the wilderness, why was the money showing up on a riverbank more than 20 miles away? And if he'd survived and buried the money, why were only three bundles decomposing in the sand while the rest of it was unaccounted for? Every answer just brought a new question. Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, the case continued generating suspects. The FBI received approximately 1,000 names, investigated hundreds of them seriously, and Ruled them all out. They kept trying, though. And in the mid-1990s, they finally got a break when a man named Duane Weber came to the FBI's attention. After Duane's death in 1995, his wife Jo, came forward with a potential bombshell. According to Joe, when Duane was on his deathbed, he'd grabbed her hand and told her, I'm Dan Cooper. For a few years, Joe kept his confession to herself, not quite sure what to make of it. Then, while watching a documentary about the D.B. cooper case, she recognized details her husband had mentioned. The aft staircase, the route specifics that hadn't been widely reported. So she contacted the FBI. Investigators examined the claim seriously. It turned out that Duane Weber had a criminal history and a background that put him in the right general region during the right general period. He seemed like a viable suspect. But years later, when DNA testing was eventually performed on the tie from the plane, Duane Weber's profile didn't match. So he was ruled out. It was an exciting lead, though. And it wasn't the only one. In 2008, two kids exploring their family's farmland near Amboy, Washington, just a few miles southeast of their original search zone near Ariel, noticed a piece of fabric sticking out of the ground. When their dad called the police, the FBI was brought in. The fabric turned out to be a military parachute, and it had apparently been buried for a while. For a brief electric moment, it seemed like this might be it. But the man who'd originally supplied the four parachutes for the Cooper hijacking was brought in to look at it. And he identified a discrepancy immediately. The parachute his skydiving center had provided was made of nylon. This one was silk. And further investigation dated the parachute to approximately December 1945. A different aircraft, a different era, a different story altogether. It was another dead end, another closed file. But then, in 2011, someone came forward to say that a relative had arrived at their Thanksgiving dinner in 1971, bloodied and bruised, with no explanation. The timing was intriguing, and the FBI looked into it. But nothing in the suspect's background suggested the technical knowledge or physical capability to have executed a mid flight parachute jump. So that lead faded as well. But then there was Kenneth Christensen. His name was first entered into the public conversation a few years earlier, in 2003, when his brother Lyle came forward to a journalist with a story he'd been sitting with for years. Kenneth Christensen had died in 1994. But before he died, Lyle said his brother had pulled him close and said something that Lyle had never been Able to shake. There is something you should know, but I cannot tell you. And now Lyle thought it was that his brother was D.B. cooper. Kenneth Christensen was a former paratrooper who'd served during World War II. After the war, he'd built a career at Northwest Orient Airlines, the same airline Cooper had hijacked. He worked there for decades, first as a mechanic, then as a flight attendant, and eventually as a purser, which is basically the lead attendant. He knew the routes, the aircraft and the crew procedures. He had also flown on 727, so he knew about the aft staircase also. His physical description was consistent with the composite sketches of Cooper. All of complexion, similar age range, similar build. He also lived in Bonney Lake, Washington, near the flight path of Flight 305. And in the years after the hijacking, he bought a house in cash and without any obvious explanation for where the money had come from. Lyle Christensen had gone to the FBI himself, quietly, before ever going to the press. He'd given them everything he had, and they ultimately concluded that Kenneth Christiansen did not match the physical description of Cooper closely enough. Namely that he wasn't tall enough. So Kenneth was never officially named as a suspect. But like Richard McCoy, the circumstantial evidence is. Is definitely compelling. The paratrooper training, the airline knowledge, the house purchase and cash, along with the deathbed non confession that seemed to be reaching towards something he couldn't bring himself to say. It wasn't concrete enough, though. And in 2016, the FBI formally suspended the active investigation into the DB Cooper case. After 45 years, they announced that investigative resources were being redirected towards other priorities. The case wasn't closed, but the FBI wasn't actively working it anymore. The official statement noted that the investigation had been one of the longest and most exhaustive in FBI history. It had produced no confirmed identification, no body, no parachute, and beyond the $5,880 found by an 8 year old at a riverbank, no ransom money. But the story wasn't over, because even as the FBI stood down, something new was happening. Over the years, Richard McCoy's family had kept talking. And in 2020, two of his children came forward with something that hadn't been part of the public record before. A parachute rig they said they'd found in their mother's shed. They said their father was the man who had walked up to the Northwest Orient counter in Portland on November 24, 1971, and signed the name Dan Cooper in block letters. And that claim sent the case back into motion in ways we'll Cover tomorrow. At the end of each episode, I like to take a moment to answer any questions you may have about the case and share my thoughts. So make sure to comment below.
- [25:29]
Carter Roy
The McCoy connection. Same guy or really a dedicated copycat?
- [25:33]
Katie Ring
My first gut feeling was that he was a copycat. But there is some evidence we will talk about in tomorrow's episode that could pull me to the other side. But why I think that he might be a copycat is because the hijacking was almost identical. The four parachutes, the Boeing 727, the mid flight jump. McCoy clearly knew the Cooper case in detail, but those were also details that were shared with the public. Personally, I feel like a man who pulled off what DB Cooper did wouldn't replicate his next heist to a T. But again, I could be wrong about that. He also did make some mistakes that Cooper didn't. He got caught within 48 hours. He went home. He was found hitchhiking in his jumpsuit with almost all of the money still on him. If McCoy and Cooper were the same person, you'd expect the second job to be at least as clean as the first. Instead, it was sloppy in ways that the original wasn't really. That suggests to me either a different person or a very different set of circumstances the second time around. What I do find most interesting is that McCoy's own kids came forward to say he was Cooper after his death. But again, was that because their father was clearly, at minimum, a fan of D.B. cooper? Or if he was really D.B. cooper himself, I guess we will never know. Especially because I think that the fact that the fingerprint on the glass didn't match isn't a great reason to rule him out completely.
- [26:58]
Carter Roy
The discovery of the money is one of the most dramatic moments in this case. But what does it actually tell us?
- [27:04]
Katie Ring
This is one of those clues that feels huge and actually creates more uncertainty than it resolves. You have confirmed Cooper money showing up on a riverbank 20 plus miles from the search zone nine years after the jump. With only a fraction of the total, the bills are decomposed, but not completely destroyed. The rubber bands are identifiable. The hydrologist says it was maybe in the water for a year, not nine years. So if Cooper died in the jump and his body landed near the Lewis river, the money could have washed downstream eventually. That's a clean story. But if that's what happened, why is there only $5,880? Why didn't more of it travel down the same path? The alternative, that he survived, buried the money somewhere and a Small portion of it worked its way into the river through some other means is harder to explain, but doesn't require him to be dead. Or maybe he planted or left some money to throw them off his tracks. I watched a few documentaries researching this case, and one thing I found interesting in the Netflix documentary was a guy named Ron Carlson said he was at a party and a drug trafficker named Dick Briggs claimed to be Cooper. Carlson said that Briggs pointed to a hippie looking couple and then pointed to a spot on the north side of the Columbia river and said that they would find some of D.B. cooper's money there. Carlson said that he dismissed him because everyone claimed to be DB Cooper at that point. But then he turned on the TV and saw the same couple that Briggs had pointed to, and their son was the one who had discovered some of Cooper's money in the spot that Briggs had pointed out. The FBI ruled Briggs out as a suspect, so I don't know the validity behind the story, but I do find it interesting. Besides that, I think the money leaves more questions than answers.
- [28:57]
Carter Roy
Of all the suspects we've looked at so far, who do you think is the most compelling?
- [29:01]
Katie Ring
I think one of the most interesting parts of this case is that there are so many potential suspects. We will touch on some tomorrow. But Christensen is definitely a front runner for me. And to me, I think it comes down to the specifics of his background. Being a former paratrooper is one thing, but being a former paratrooper who then spent decades working for the exact airline that was hijacked, working on the exact aircraft type that was used in the heist, in the exact region where the flight operated. That's a very specific combination that matches perfectly with the crime. We also have the house that was purchased in all cash, which might be the reason why the money was never discovered in circulation. The deathbed, near confession. He also looked like the sketches of Cooper, except for his height, which the FBI ultimately ruled him out because of. But personally, I think ruling him out solely by height can be iffy. Eyewitness descriptions of height are notoriously unreliable, especially when the witness is a flight attendant managing a tense situation and never actually stood back to back with the person they're describing. Again, there are a lot of potential suspects, but his background fits in ways that feel substantive rather than circumstantial. And the fact that the FBI investigated and declined to name him publicly doesn't mean that he was cleared. It means that the evidence wasn't conclusive enough to act on. Thanks so much for joining me for this episode. Make sure to rate, review and follow America's most infamous crimes so we can keep building this community together. And to get all episodes at once ad free. Subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. Come back tomorrow for our next episode on DB Cooper.