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Mystery surrounding D.B. Cooper keeps sleuths on the trail

By Les Blumenthal | The News Tribune • Published April 20, 2009

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WASHINGTON – It's the coldest of cold cases.

While a team of citizen sleuths, with the help of the FBI, have turned up some tantalizing new clues, the fate of D.B. Cooper after he jumped out of a hijacked airplane with a parachute and $200,000 in cash nearly 38 years ago might never be known.

Over the years, Cooper has become a folk hero in the Northwest, the subject of movies, songs and Internet chat rooms. He is the only person in U.S. history to hijack a domestic airliner and get away with it. The hijacking led to the first of the tough security procedures for passengers boarding planes that are now standard at airports.

The informal team of detectives includes a fossil hunter who works with the Burke Museum of Natural History in Seattle, a well-known scientific illustrator, an Egyptologist who speaks 12 languages, a metallurgist and an Arkansas man who discovered $5,800 of the loot in $20 bills while throwing a Frisbee on the banks of the Columbia River when he was 8 years old.

"We are looking down every rabbit hole," said Tom Kaye, a paleontologist who spends part of his time searching for dinosaur bones in Wyoming and the rest staring through an electron microscope at particles lifted from a black J.C. Penny tie that Cooper left behind on the plane.

The team is scouring a French comic book series that featured a Royal Canadian Air Force test pilot named Dan Cooper. The comics were popular in France and French-speaking Canada at the time of the hijacking, leading to speculation that Cooper borrowed the name of the fictional comic book hero. Cooper used the name Dan Cooper when he purchased his ticket for Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305. The media, mistakenly, dubbed him D.B.

The team also spent several days along the Columbia River using satellite maps and global positioning systems to try to locate the exact spot where the money was found.

Though no one knows for sure, it's thought the money was washed downstream more than 20 miles from where Cooper might have landed in southwestern Washington. Kaye and his team believe the money reached the Columbia River sandbar where it was found just months after the hijacking. Previously it was thought it took several years.