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- [00:01]
Carter Roy
Hi, listeners. Before we dive into today's episode of Murder True Crime Stories, I want to take a brief moment to tell you about a show from Crime House's sister studio, Rewind that I know you'll love. It's called Government that Doesn't Suck, hosted by Professors Lindsey Cormack and Greg Jackson from History that Doesn't Suck. Ever wonder how the weather forecast on your phone is so accurate? Or how your mail still gets across the country for less than a dollar? Or who actually built the highway you drove on this morning? Each episode tells the surprising story of an American institution that you'll never look at the same way again. Listen to and follow Government that Doesn't Suck every other Monday on Apple podcasts and Spotify. Or watch video episodes on YouTube. This is crime house. Think about what it's like to get on a plane. You shuffle down the aisle with a bunch of strangers. You find your seat, stow your bag and buckle in. A flight attendant runs through the safety demonstration. The drink cart starts rattling down the aisle. And the whole time you don't really question any of it. You trust that the crew has everything handled. And you trust that the stranger sitting next to you is exactly who they appear to be. Just another person trying to get somewhere. On the afternoon before Thanksgiving in 1971, a polite middle aged man in a business suit boarded a short flight from Portland to Seattle. He ordered a drink. He lit a cigarette. He looked like every other tired traveler heading home for the holiday. But somewhere over the wilderness of southwestern Washington, that ordinary looking man lowered the back staircase of a Boeing 727 and jumped out with 200 grand strapped to his body. The plane landed safely. Everyone on board survived, and the man simply vanished. But how do you jump out of a plane with fighter jets on your tail and just disappear? Over 50 years later? We have more questions than answers. This is the mystery of D.B.
- [02:35]
Jimmy Uso
cooper.
- [02:45]
Carter Roy
People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. But you don't always know which part you're on. Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon. And we don't always get to know the real ending. I'm Carter Roy and this is True Crime Stories, a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes come out every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper look. Thank you for being part of the Crime House community. Please rate, review and follow the show and for early ad free access to every episode. Subscribe to Crime House. Plus you'll get part one and part two at the same time, plus exclusive bonus content. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or tap try free on the Murder True Crime Story show page on Apple Podcasts. Welcome back to another episode of Murder Mystery Fridays, where I'm covering cases with questions that I can't get out of my head. The ones where the evidence points in multiple directions and every theory feels like a possibility. Remember, these episodes are also on YouTube with full video Today's story is about a man who called himself Dan Cooper. On the day before Thanksgiving in 1971, he he boarded a short flight from Portland to Seattle in a neat business suit, carrying a briefcase. By the end of the night, he'd hijacked the plane, parachuted out the back over Washington state and walked away with $200,000. He was never found. In the decades since, this case has been pulled apart by the FBI, by documentary crews, by amateur scientists, and by armchair detectives all over the Internet. And yet the question at the center still hasn't budged. Either Dan Cooper pulled off the perfect crime and slipped away clean, or he died in that fall, alone in the dark and his bones are still out there in the trees. But no one has ever been able to prove which. All that and more coming up. Look, we all hit points in life where anxiety, depression or ADHD feel like a lot more than just a rough patch. I have been there, and honestly, sometimes standard self help tools or talk therapy aren't the total answer. We need a little more. If you need a deeper level of care, Talk Iatry connects you with real virtual psychiatry. The this isn't a therapy app. It's a 100% online psychiatry practice providing comprehensive evaluations, diagnoses, and ongoing medication management for conditions like adhd, anxiety, and more. You're actually seeing a medical provider who takes the time to understand what you're going through and build a personalized treatment plan. Plus, they accept major insurers, meaning you can use your existing insurance instead of paying massive out of network costs. Getting started is incredibly simple. You just complete a short online assessment, get matched with clinicians who fit your specific needs, and schedule your first virtual visit in days rather than months. Head to tokyetry.com mtcs to complete the short assessment and get matched with an in network psychiatrist in just a few minutes. That's talkiotry.com MTCs to get matched in minutes.
- [06:26]
Quince Brand Representative 1
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- [06:37]
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- [06:48]
Quince Brand Representative 1
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- [07:12]
Quince Brand Representative 2
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- [07:23]
Quince Brand Representative 1
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- [07:28]
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- [07:42]
Carter Roy
Quinns.com Crimesof In 1971, flying was a different world. You could walk up to an airport counter, buy a ticket with cash and step onto a plane without anyone checking your name or looking in your bag. There were no metal detectors, no X ray machines, no security lines at all. You didn't even have to buy your ticket ahead of time. And here's the part that's even harder to imagine. Hijackings were almost routine in the late 60s and early 70s. They were happening constantly. Between 1968 and 1972, more than 130 planes were hijacked in the United States alone. It was so common that the country had almost stopped paying attention. Now that's the world a man calling himself Dan Cooper stepped into on Wednesday, November 24, 1971. It was the day before Thanksgiving and one of the busiest travel days of the year. Sometime before 2:30 in the afternoon, he walked up to the counter for Northwest Orient Airlines at the Portland International Airport in Oregon. Northwest Orient is gone today. It eventually became Northwest Airlines and later merged into Delta, but in 1971 it was a major carrier. The man bought a one way ticket on Flight 305, a short hop north to Seattle. It cost him $20 and he paid in cash. On the voucher he signed a name in careful block letters. Dan Cooper. If you'd been standing in line behind him, you wouldn't have looked twice. He appeared to be in his mid-40s. He had on a dark business suit, a white shirt and a skinny black clip on tie from J.C. penney. It was held in place with a fake pearl tie pin. He wore dark loafers and carried an overcoat and a briefcase. He he had an olive complexion and dark hair combed into neat waves. The one slightly strange thing about him was that he kept his horned rimmed sunglasses on even indoors. But if anything should have raised a flag, it was when he bought the ticket. Cooper asked the agent whether the plane was a Boeing 727. The agent told him it was and thought nothing of it. Around 2:30pm or so, Cooper boarded the flight and took a seat near the back of the plane. The trip to Seattle was only supposed to take about 30 minutes. There were six crew members working that day. Up front you had the captain William Scott, the first officer, William Radizzak, and the flight engineer Harold Anderson. In the cabin there were three flight attendants, Alice Hancock, Florence Schaffner and 22 year old Tina Mucklow, who was the newest hire on the crew. When Cooper settled in, he ordered a bourbon and soda and started chain smoking. Because in 1971 you could still light up right there in your seat and I want to stay with that crew for a second because they're the heart of this story. This was a Twin Cities based team starting what should have been four or five days of routine holiday flying. As the passengers came aboard in the gathering rain, Tina Mucklow was working the galley, icing glasses, doing the small invisible things that make a flight feel ordinary. None of them knew that the quiet man in the back row was about to put all of their lives in his hands. And none of them knew that the way they handled the next few hours would be the only reason everyone on that plane live to tell the tale. The plane took off at 2:50pm and a few minutes into the climb, Cooper handed Florence Schaffner a note. Now here's a detail that tells you everything about the era. Flight attendants back then were treated more like flight decorations than crew members. They got hit on constantly. So when this man passed Florence a folded note, she just talked it away without reading it. She figured it was some guy slipping her his phone number. It probably wasn't even the first note she'd gotten that day. But Cooper leaned over and told her she really should look at it. So she did, and it said, I have a bomb in my briefcase. I want you to sit beside me. Florence sat down, and Cooper opened the briefcase just enough for her to see. Inside there were wires, a large battery, and what looked like several red sticks of dynamite. He told her that all he had to do was connect one wire to the right spot, and everyone on the plane would die. Then he told her to get out a pen and write down what he wanted. His demands were specific. He wanted $200,000 in $20 bills, four parachutes, two for the back, two for the front, and a fuel truck standing by to refuel the plane the second they landed in Seattle. He wanted it all ready and waiting so he wouldn't have to sit on the tarmac. He told her, basically, do exactly as I say, or I'll blow up the plane. Florence wrote it down. Then Cooper sent her up to the cockpit to deliver the message to the pilots. And here's where you start to see how careful this man was. When Florence came back from the cockpit, Cooper asked her to hand the original note back. And just like that, he made it disappear. That note could have been the thing that cracked the whole case open. A handwriting sample, a fingerprint, a real lead. Instead, it was gone. By now, Florence had been sent up to the cockpit to stay with the pilots. So a different flight attendant took her place beside Cooper. Tina Mucklow. From that point on, Tina was his only point of contact, the bridge between the man in the back of the plane and the crew up front. And what strikes me about Tina is how composed she was. She was 22 years old, sitting next to a man with what looked like a live bomb. And she just handled it. She kept him calm. She kept herself calm. At one point, she even asked him, almost conversationally, whether he had some kind of grudge against the airline. Cooper told her, quote, I don't have a grudge against your airline, miss. I just have a grudge. While all of this was happening in the back, the crew up front had quietly alerted the authorities. The pilots radioed ahead to Seattle Tacoma International Airport, or SeaTac, and SeaTac called the FBI. And suddenly, a whole lot of people on the ground were scrambling to pull together 200 grand and four parachutes in the span of an afternoon. Meanwhile, the 36 passengers had no idea any of this was going on. The pilot got on the intercom and told them there was a minor mechanical issue. He said they'd need to circle for a while to burn off some fuel and that everyone should move toward the front of the plane because the crew stayed so calm. The passengers stayed calm down 2, nobody panicked. Most of them just figured it was a routine delay. But it wasn't a delay. The plane was circling because the people on the ground needed time. A local bank pulled together the ransom $10,020 bills. But before handing it over, they photographed every single bill and recorded all the serial numbers on microfilm. Banks did this in case of robberies. It worked just as well for hijacking. If that money ever turned up again, they'd know the parachutes were trickier. But the manager at sea tac knew someone connected to a local skydiving operation who agreed to provide for chutes. Except in the chaos, somebody made a mistake. That's almost hard to believe. One of the chutes they grabbed was a training dummy, A reserve chute that had been deliberately sewn shut so it couldn't open. Those are always marked with a big x for exactly this reason. But somehow it ended up in the pile anyway. The plane circled Seattle for about two hours, and finally, at 5:39 in the evening, Flight 305 touched down at sea Taco. When the plane landed, there were snipers in position watching it. But Cooper seemed to sense them almost immediately. He told the flight attendants to pull all the window shades down. He had the money and parachutes delivered to the plane and sent Tina out to collect them and bring them to him. She could have stayed safe on the ground at that point. Nobody would have blamed her. But she walked the ransom and the chutes back up the stairs to a man with a bomb, because she decided her job was to keep everyone else alive. Once Cooper had what he wanted, he let the 36 passengers go, along with two of the flight attendants, Florence and Alice. And you can measure how well that crew did their jobs by what happened next. After everyone was off the plane, one of the passengers actually walked back on board to grab something he'd forgotten. That's how calm they'd kept everyone. The passengers were so unbothered that when they finally stepped off into a terminal swarming with reporters and police, a lot of them learned for the very first time that they'd just been hijacked. But Cooper wasn't finished. He still had the cockpit crew, one flight attendant, $200,000 in cash, and four parachutes. And he had one last instruction for the pilots, the one that would turn this hijacking into something no one had ever pulled off.
- [18:56]
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- [20:16]
Lindsey Cormack
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- [20:48]
Carter Roy
Let me set the scene again. It's the evening of November 24, 1971. Flight 305 has landed at SeaTac. Cooper has his $200,000 and his four parachutes. He's released the passengers and two of the flight attendants, but he's kept a small crew on board. The two pilots, the flight engineer and flight attendant, Tina Mucklow. And he's got a destination in Mexico City. There was just one problem. Mexico City was more than 2,000 miles away, and the plane couldn't make it that far without refueling. So the crew talked him into refueling along the way, with a first stop in Reno, Nevada. But then, as they were getting ready to take off again, Cooper started giving the very specific instructions. And this is where you really start to wonder who this guy was. Remember that question Cooper asked at the ticket counter whether the plane was a Boeing 727? Here's why that mattered. The 727 had a feature most planes didn't. A staircase at the very back of the aircraft called an aft airstair that could be lowered from inside. Cooper wanted to take off with that back staircase already down. The pilot told him that was impossible and checked with Boeing's engineers to be sure. They confirmed it. You couldn't take off with the stairs down, but you could lower them once the plane was in the air. But here's the thing. Cooper already knew that. It was the whole reason he'd chosen a 727 in the first place. He wasn't learning anything from the pilots. He was just making sure they understood exactly what this plane could do. Then he got on the cabin phone and laid out his demands for the flight itself. He wanted the plane to fly low and slow around 10,000ft, with the wing flap set to 15 degrees at no more than 200 knots. To put that in plain terms, he was telling the pilots how to set the plane up so a person could survive opening a door and stepping out into the sky. He knew that at 10,000ft, the cabin wouldn't need to be pressurized, so opening the back of the plane wouldn't be a catastrophe. He knew the flaps and the speed would keep things stable enough to jump, but the pilot didn't even think the plane could fly that slow. Cooper told him it could, and he was right. So I want to be clear about what this means. This was not some lucky guy who got handed a parachute and hoped for the best. Whoever this was understood the mechanics of a Boeing 727 well enough to turn it into an escape vehicle. He either had aviation training or he'd done an enormous amount of homework. And it's part of why, to this day, people argue about whether this was some kind of inside job. And there were a couple of other wrinkles. Before takeoff, Cooper had asked for the money in a backpack, but it showed up in a canvas bank bag. So he took out a knife he'd apparently had on him the whole time, cut some of the cords off one of the parachutes, and rigged up a way to strap the money to himself. And that detail, is important, too. By cutting up a parachute for cord, and by never asking anyone to jump with him, it became pretty clear that Cooper never intended to take any hostages with him. The four chutes weren't, because he had four people in mind asking for extras was strategic. If he'd only asked for one, the FBI might have handed him a sabotage chute and let him fall to his death. By demanding four and making them think innocent hostages might be wearing them, he guaranteed they couldn't risk tampering with any of them. It was frankly brilliant. Around 7:40 that night, Flight 305 took off from SeaTac, this time headed south toward Reno. What Cooper didn't know was that the military had scrambled fighter jets to trail the plane, hanging back far enough that he wouldn't spot them out a window. Shortly after takeoff, Cooper told Tina Mucklow to go up to the cockpit and stay there. She did, and that was the last time anyone saw him. At 7:42, a warning light came on in the cockpit. The aft staircase had been opened. The crew called back to the cabin to ask if Cooper needed help. He said a single word, no. Then he hung up. And then, about 8:13pm the crew felt it. A sudden change in the plane, a little bump in the cabin pressure. It was the feeling of the aircraft adjusting to a shift in weight. It was Cooper stepping off the staircase into the night. And the conditions couldn't have been worse. It was raining hard. The plane was still moving at a couple hundred miles an hour through thick clouds. Cooper was wearing a business suit, an overcoat, and loafers, and he was carrying the bank bag full of cash and the briefcase with a supposed bomb. The crew, meanwhile, flew on to Reno and landed safely. Nobody was hurt. By the next morning, Thanksgiving Day, 1971, the whole country was talking about it, and the reaction was not what you'd expect. People didn't hate this guy. If anything, they were impressed. Nobody had been hurt. The crew was safe. The passengers were home for the holiday, and this mysterious man in a suit had outsmarted an airline, the FBI, the military, and walked away with a fortune. One man interviewed on the news called him one of the slickest characters to ever walk the earth. People wrote songs about him. They printed T shirts. He became a kind of folk hero, the guy who stuck it to the system and got away with it. There's even a piece of trivia buried in the name he'd signed his ticket, Dan Cooper. But during a press conference, a reporter misheard law enforcement and called him DB Cooper. People like the sound of DB Better, and the name stuck. But for the FBI, none of that mattered. They had a crime to solve. And they started with the one place they knew for certain Cooper had been. The plane. The trouble was, he'd barely left anything on It. The first thing they found was his tie. For some reason, before he jumped, he'd unclipped that skinny black JCPenney tie and dropped it on a seat, along with a tie pin on its face. It wasn't much to go on, just a mass produced clip on you could buy anywhere. And this was the early 70s, long before DNA testing existed. But the FBI held onto it. Then there were the two parachutes he'd left behind. And here's where. For all his expertise on the airplane, Cooper made one baffling mistake. Of the two chutes he took with him, one was a good military parachute. The other was that sewn shut training dummy with the big X on it. The one that couldn't open. For a man who got everything else exactly right, that's a strange thing to get wrong. Some people think it means he wasn't the expert he seemed. Others think it's simpler than that. He'd already cut up one chute for cord, so he just grabbed whatever was left. There were a few smaller things, too. Cooper had chained, smoked, ate cigarettes. But the FBI couldn't pull a single fingerprint off any of the butts. There was a strand of hair on his headrest. There were also some prints on a bourbon glass and an in flight magazine. But the FBI could never confirm those were Cooper's. Too many other people had been through that cabin. So tally it up. No note. He took it back. No handwriting. He'd printed his fake name in block letters. No usable prints. No clear photo. The pilots had never even spoken to him face to face. And the flight attendants had been so focused on keeping everyone calm that to them, he'd just been one more quiet passenger. The most wanted man in America had pulled off the crime of the century and left almost nothing of himself behind on that plane. So if the plane was a dead end, that left the one place no one had searched yet. The ground where he came down. The hardest part was figuring out where that even was. Working backward from the plane's flight path, its speed, and the exact moment the crew felt him jump, the FBI calculated a rough drop zone. They thought he'd landed in a remote stretch of southwestern Washington near the Lewis river, around a tiny community called Ariel. It's a heavily wooded, hard to reach area near the Cascade Mountain range. The search was enormous. More than a thousand law enforcement officers and military troops eventually combed the area. There were planes overhead and at least one helicopter. But the slow, low route Cooper had forced the pilots to fly made him nearly impossible to track from the air. In the end, they didn't find anything. No body, no parachute, no money, no trace of him at all. That absence is its own kind of clue. Packing a parachute is genuinely hard. It's a real skill. If Cooper landed in that storm, gathered his gear, and walked out of those woods without leaving a single sign, that points to someone with serious training and serious nerve. But it's just as likely that there was no sign of him because he never survived the fall. And that left everyone with the same impossible question. Did Dan Cooper walk out of those woods alive? A rich man who'd beaten the airline, the FBI, and the US Military ordered the fall. Kill him, and his body is still out there somewhere, hidden under all those trees.
- [32:18]
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- [33:32]
Carter Roy
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- [34:01]
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- [34:08]
Carter Roy
On the night of November 24, 1971, the man who called himself Dan Cooper parachuted out of Flight 305 and vanished into the wilderness of southwestern Washington. The biggest manhunt the region had ever seen. Turned up nothing. No body, no parachute, no sign of him at all. And after those first frantic weeks, the case went cold. It would stay that way for years. In 1978, a deer hunter came across a plastic placard out in the woods. The printed instructions for lowering the aft stairs of a 727 lying right along Flight 305's flight path. But it led nowhere. Then, on February 10, 1980, almost nine years to the day after Cooper jumped, the case got its biggest break ever. It was all thanks to an 8 year old boy. A boy named Brian Ingram was on a family trip along the Columbia river, which runs along the border between Washington and Oregon. The family had stopped at a sandy stretch of bank called Tina Bar on the Washington side, a few miles downriver from Portland. Brian was smoothing out the sand to build a campfire when his hand hit something just under the surface. It was three deteriorating bundles of $20 bills still held together with rubber bands, about $5,800 in all. His family thought it might be counterfeit at first, so they turned it over to the FBI. And when investigators checked the serial numbers against that micro film from 1971, they matched. This was Cooper's ransom money. It was the first hard piece of physical evidence to surface outside the plane in nine years. The FBI has called it the best lead they ever got. And more than four decades later, it might still be. But here is the maddening part. Instead of solving the mystery, that money only deepened it. Tina Bar is more than 20 miles from the drop zone near Ariel, and it's along a completely different river. So how did Cooper's money end up there? The FBI brought in a geologist to figure that out. And the theories got complicated fast. Maybe the cache washed down a chain of smaller rivers into the Columbia. Maybe it landed there when the river was dredged in the mid-1970s. Maybe a flood carried it. To this day, no one can fully explain how that money got from wherever Cooper jumped, to where a little boy dug it up. As for Brian, there was a long legal fight over who the cash even belonged to. The Ingram family, the FBI, and the airline's insurance company all had a claim. In the end, a court let Brian keep a share of it. In 2008, he sold 15 of the fragile bills at auction for more than $37,000. And the money wasn't the only thing pointing away from that original search zone. The agent who chased this case longer than anyone eventually doubted it, too. His name was Ralph Himmelsbach, and he'd been on Cooper from the very first night. He even flew his own small plane over the suspected drop zone day after day, looking for any sign of where Cooper might have come down. Years later, after he retired, Himmelsbach sat down with Captain Scott, the pilot of Flight 305. And that conversation convinced him they'd searched the wrong place entirely. He came to believe the real landing zone was about 40 miles east of where they'd looked. So between the money turning up to the southwest and Himmelsbach pointing east, the honest truth was that nobody really knew where cooperation Cooper had come down. But Himmelsbach also landed on a darker conclusion. He didn't believe anyone could have survived that jump at all. He thought Cooper probably never even got his chute open, that his body was out there somewhere, buried by the impact on the forest floor. But the missing body cut both ways. To a lot of people, the fact that Cooper was never found meant he had survived. And in 2008, we nearly got proof. That year, some kids on a farm near Amboy, Washington, spotted fabric sticking out of the ground. It was a buried parachute. And for a moment, hope shot up that it was Cooper's. It wasn't. The man who'd supplied his chutes to Cooper back in 1971 took one look and said no. His were nylon. This one was silk and a lot older. It had apparently come from a plane that went down back in 1945. But that specific case included a detail that kept the survival theory going. The pilot had reportedly bailed out in weather a lot like Cooper's, and lived. And if Cooper did get away, it left the biggest question of all. Who was he? Over the years, the FBI worked through a long list of men who might have been the hijacker, hundreds of them. There was a man whose family came forward in 2011 because he'd shown up to Thanksgiving in 1971 bruised and bloodied. But he didn't seem to have the skills necessary to pull off this kind of stunt. And nothing came of it. There was Kenneth Christiansen, a former paratrooper and Northwest Airlines employee with parachuting experience and an alleged deathbed confession. He fit in a lot of ways, but investigators eventually ruled him out, too. But there's one suspect who has never really gone away. And in the last few years, he's come roaring back. His name was Richard Floyd McCoy II. If that name rings a bell, here's why. Just five months after the Cooper hijacking, in April of 1972, McCoy pulled off a nearly identical crime. He hijacked a United Airlines flight out of Denver, demanded four parachutes and $500,000, then bailed out of the back of the plane in midair. It's almost a carbon copy of the Cooper job. McCoy was arrested within days with a jumpsuit and a duffel bag stuffed with the ransom. And Here's a wild McCoy was reportedly on Utah National Guard duty, flying one of the helicopters, searching for the hijacker, meaning he was searching for himself. But once he was eventually caught, he was sent to prison and escaped. Then, in 1974, he was killed in a shootout with the FBI. For years, McCoy was a leading suspect. Even with problems in the theory, his fingerprints didn't match the ones on that bourbon glass. But then again, the FBI was never sure those prints were Cooper's to begin with. Then, recently, the McCoy theory got a jolt of new life. After McCoy's widow died in 2020, his two grown children, Shantae and Richard III, came forward. They said they'd found an old parachute and a skydiving logbook on the family's property, and they believed their father was D.B. cooper. They brought it to an aviation expert and YouTuber named Dan Grider, who'd spent years on the case. Greider became convinced the parachute rig was the real thing. In 2023, Greider and McCoy's son met with FBI agents in Virginia and handed over the parachute and the logbook. McCoy's son also gave a DNA sample. And according to Greider, the FBI began trying to match McCoy's DNA against the DNA left on Cooper's tie. Which brings us all the way back to that cheap clip on tie. For decades, it just sat in an evidence Vault. But in 2017, the FBI cooperated with a team of amateur scientists called the Citizen Sleuths, led by paleontologist Tom Kay, who ran it through a lab. And they found something interesting. There were tiny particles clinging to the fabric, and among them, traces of pure titanium. That mattered, because in the early 1970s, pure, unalloyed titanium was rare. It turned up in only a handful of places. Chemical plants, metal fabrication shops, and the aerospace industry. So those particles hinted that Cooper might have worked somewhere like that, maybe even a plant tied to building airplanes. Which would line up with just how much he seemed to know about that. 727. It's a tantalizing detail. But the FBI has always been careful about one thing. They can't even be sure the tie was Cooper's. The plane had been full of passengers who were herded up front, then rushed off in the chaos. So according to the Bureau, there's no way to prove that the tie on that seat belonged to the hijacker and not somebody else. And there's a frustrating wrinkle in the McCoy DNA effort. Somewhere along the way, the FBI apparently lost or got rid of the original hair sample and the cigarette butts from the plane. Some of the most basic biological evidence in the whole case, just gone. People who followed this case were furious about it. Some have wondered whether the hair was simply misplaced and might still turn up someday. Right now, it all comes down to one. Whether the DNA on a tie that may or may not be Cooper's can be matched to a man who's been dead since 1974. Some people are convinced McCoy was Cooper. Others, including retired FBI Special Agent Larry Carr, who ran the case for years, think it's just one more theory from people chasing a famous mystery. He's come out and said he's sure it wasn't McCoy. The case is technically still open. But the FBI stopped actively investigating the Cooper hijacking back in 2016. They said their resources were better spent elsewhere. But they left the door open for any real physical evidence tied to the money or the parachutes. In March of 2025, the Bureau released a stack of old, heavily redacted files documenting their investigation into hundreds of suspects. People hoped for a bombshell. There wasn't one. To this day, it remains the only unsolved hijacking in US History. When I sit with this case, I keep coming back to that dummy parachute with the X on it, because we really don't know what happened. Did he throw it out of the plane to make the plane wobble and throw people off when he jumped, did he take the parachute out of that and use it as a bag? Did he take it with him? Did he put it on accidentally and die? We just don't know. But what we do know is that there are bases, only two possible outcomes. If Cooper survived, then he did something no one else ever has. He knew these planes inside and out. He kept his nerve with a cabin full of lives in his hands, and he jumped into a storm with a fortune strapped to him. And then he walked out of the wilderness and never spent a dollar anyone could trace. Or he didn't survive. Ralph Himmelsbach was Right all along. And the real ending to this story is a lonely one. He fell into the dark over a roadless forest in the freezing rain, and the wilderness swallowed him whole. There was no fortune and no clean getaway. Only a body that was never found and a legend built on top of it. Those are the possibilities. But here's what I don't want to get lost in all the folklore. Because for all the T shirts and the songs and the nickname, there were real people on that plane. There was Florence Schaffner, who opened a stranger's note and found out she was sitting next to a bomb. There were the pilots flying low and slow through a storm with a man in the back who could end them all with a single wire. And there was Tina Mucklow, 22 years old, the newest person on that crew. For hours, she sat beside one of the most dangerous men in America. She lit his cigarettes, carried his ransom up the stairs, and kept 36 strangers so calm that some of them didn't even know they'd been in danger until it was over. Cooper became a legend. But the people who actually got everyone home that night were that crew. They're the reason this is a mystery and not a tragedy. As for the man who set it all in motion, more than 50 years later, we still don't know his name. We don't know if he was a criminal mastermind or a desperate man who got impossibly lucky. We don't know if he's a folk hero or a ghost story. Perhaps the answer is somewhere out there in a patch of forest or in a grave with another name on it. And until then, the man who called himself Dan Cooper stays exactly what he's been since the night he stepped off that staircase out of reach. And maybe that's why, after all this time, we're still telling his story. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder True Crime Stories. Come back next time for the story of a new murder and all the people it affected. True Crime Stories is a Crime House original, powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media, rimehouse on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review and follow True Crime Stories wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your Murder True Crime Stories listening experience, subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. You'll get both parts of every story dropped on Tuesday completely ad free. No waiting for part two plus ad free and early access to every show across Crime House and bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of the Murder True Crime Stories page. We'll be back on Tuesday. True Crime Stories is hosted by me, Carter Roy and is a Crime House original. Powered by Pave Studios, this episode is brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benedon, Natalie Perchovsky, Alyssa Fox, Cassidy Dillon and Russell Nash. Thank you for listening.
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