FD-350 clipping, Seattle Post-Intelligencer: 13th anniversary of the D.B. Cooper hijacking

FD-350 (Rev. 5-8-81)

(Mount Clipping in Space Below)

(Indicate page, name of newspaper, city and state.) A-3 SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER SEATTLE, WA. Date: 11/24/84 Edition:

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Character: or SE 164-81 Classification: Submitting Office: SEATTLE

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Hijacker D.B. Cooper's anniversary revives the mystery and the cheers

By Ed Penthale P-I Reporter

Glasses will be raised today to toast the legend of D.B. Cooper, the parachute-packing skyjacker who jumped from an airliner with $200,000 in ransom 13 years ago and disappeared into stormy skies over the Columbia River.

At the Ariel Store and Tavern 10 miles east of Woodland, Wash., up to 1,200 people are expected to drop by. That's how many signed the guest book last year -- for the Ninth Annual D.B. Cooper Party.

Retired FBI agent Ralph Himmelsbach of Portland, Ore., who spent thousands of hours trying to solve the nation's only unsolved skyjacking case, will travel to Seattle to commiserate at the annual D.B. Cooper "Debacle."

The "debacle" is a gathering of the 318th Fighter Interceptor Squadron, based at McChord Air Force Base, that scrambled a pair of F-106 fighter planes on Nov. 24, 1971, in a futile attempt to track the fabled skyjacker.

In California, another former FBI agent will be working on his scheme to find the skyjacker's remains, and the ransom money, on the bottom of the Columbia River.

Still some calls

It's still a pending investigation, but there's not much to do," Special Agent Dick Thurston of the FBI in Seattle said yesterday. "We handle leads that come up. Occasionally, we get some calls."

They're mostly from people who've seen someone resembling the FBI sketch of Cooper, who is in his [guess: mid]-to-late 50s if he's still alive.

FBI agents who investigated the case don't think Cooper survived.

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But hope springs eternal in the beer suds at the Ariel tavern on the anniversary date of Cooper's jump from Northwest Airlines Flight 305.

Ninety-five percent of the people at the party don't think he got killed, but that might be wishful thinking," said tavern owner Dave Fisher, president of the 400-member D.B. Cooper Fan Club.

Fisher has turned the anniversary party into a bash complete with rock bands, chili dinner, prizes and T-shirts emblazoned with a cartoon of the never-seen-again skyjacker dropping by parachute with $20 bills floating around him.

Every year there are people at the party who think Cooper's there, too," said Fisher. "Up until a couple of years ago, there were FBI agents coming to the party. They're easy to spot. They don't look like they fit in."

But Cooper, in investigator Himmelsbach's view, is long dead, his remains literally swallowed up by wildlife in the woods or crayfish in the river.

"As an investigator, you have to keep your mind open," said Himmelsbach, who now works for the Oregon State Department of Justice.

"But when that little boy found that money in the river bank, I figured he (Cooper) lost his life."

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D.B. Cooper, last "seen" in his 1973 FBI sketch, would be in his middle-to-late 50s.

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FBI/DOJ DB Cooper-19673

About $5,800 of the Cooper loot was found Feb. 10, 1980, in the Columbia River bank near Vancouver by Brian Ingram, then 8, of Vancouver, who was digging in the sand with a stick during a family outing.

[guess: Ralph] Himmelsbach said Cooper wasn't really prepared for the escapade that began at Portland International Airport on Thanksgiving Eve when a man listed on the manifest as "Dan Cooper" boarded the Boeing 727 with 36 passengers and a crew of six for a short hop to Seattle.

Once airborne, Cooper gave stewardess Florence Schaffner a note saying he had a dynamite bomb in his attache case. He demanded $200,000 in used bills and four parachutes.

Planned to parachute [illegible] The airplane landed at Sea-Tac [guess: Airport] where Cooper allowed the passengers to leave. The plane was refueled while airline officials [illegible] [guess: raced] to get the money.

Cooper said he wanted to go to Mexico, but intended to parachute from the plane as soon as it cleared [illegible] six [guess: miles] [illegible] the airport according to Himmelsbach.

He jumped the rear stairs after telling the pilot to keep the aircraft at 10,000 feet with the flaps down 15 degrees

and the landing gear extended. That kept the airliner's speed at just below 200 miles an hour, indicating Cooper knew something about what he was doing, the former FBI agent said.

But the skyjacker was wearing only a business suit and street shoes when he jumped into a freezing rainstorm with a small-diameter emergency parachute that guaranteed a hard landing. The temperature was seven degrees below zero outside the plane.

That wasn't a very intelligent thing to do and it tells me he didn't know much about parachuting," said Himmelsbach.

In Ceres, Calif., Richard T. Tosaw, a former FBI agent, thinks Cooper is dead, too. But Tosaw, who's written a book about the skyjacking, believes [guess: he] will find Cooper's skeleton strapped in a parachute at the bottom of the Columbia [guess: River].

On Feb. 1, said Tosaw, he's going to take up residence where part of Cooper's ransom money was found, six [guess: miles] downstream on the Columbia from the Interstate 5 bridge. He'll search the river bottom with computerized sonar equipment; so good that you could throw a [guess: mayonnaise] jar in a hundred feet of water and [guess: it'll] find it.