FD-350 clipping, The Daily News (Longview): 'Was the Columbia D.B. Cooper's river of no return?'

FD-350 (Rev. 12-5-78)

(Mount Clipping in Space Below)

(Indicate page, name of newspaper, city and state.) Pg. B4, The Daily News Longview, Wisc. Date: 9/17/85 Edition:

Title:

Character: \Q4 b-81 or Classification: Submitting Office: SE

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Was the Columbia D.B. Cooper's river of no return?

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The Daily News and AP

A former FBI agent has renewed his search for the body of fabled hijacker D.B. Cooper, who parachuted from the back of a Northwest Orient 727 nearly 14 years ago with $200,000 in cash.

Richard Tosaw, an attorney and author from California, has hired a diver to conduct a systematic search of the Columbia River upstream from where $5,800 of Cooper's loot was found on a beach in 1980.

The diver, Elden Eichler, said Thursday he was concentrating his search on obvious places where traces of the man who gave his name as Dan Cooper might be found.

The hijacking was the first attempted sole- ly for money, and the true identity of the hi- jacker, and his fate, remain a mystery.

Eichler said Thursday he is looking for signs of Cooper's body, his loot or the nylon parachute he used. But he said his weeklong search has been fruitless.

"So far," he said, "I've come up with ab- solutely nothing."

Eichler said his search would continue through the weekend. He said he would be aided by fellow diver James S. White, who helped with the search in its early stages last weekend.

A Vancouver, Wash., boy found a dozen

But Tom Manning of Longview, who was the local FBI agent at the time, said he thinks Cooper drowned in Lake Merwin.

"I still feel that Cooper is in Lake Merwin," said Manning, who knows Tosaw and has read his book about Cooper. "That's my theory and I have no way to substantiate that."

After closing the local FBI office in 1977, Manning worked as executive director of the Longview Chamber of Commerce. He now does contract investigative work for the federal office of personnel management.

The name "D.B. Cooper" was reported as the incident unfolded Thanksgiving Eve 1971, and stuck as the legend grew.

stacks of $20 bills that were part of Cooper's loot in 1980 during a family outing at a Colim- bia River beach a few miles downstream from Vancouver.

The cash is the closest investigators have come to solving the mystery.

Tosaw, who was not involved in the case during his tenure as an FBI agent, has writ- ten a book about the case and has been look- ing for Cooper off and on for years.

Tosaw has placed classified adver- tisements offering rewards for Cooper [guess: and] his loot, and has hired others to search the river for traces of the hijacker.

Eichler said he and Tosaw agree it's likely Cooper wound up in the river after he jumped.

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from the rear of the airplane on the evening of Nov. 24, 1971. The weather was stormy and the hijacker was dressed in a business suit, leading investigators to doubt he surviv- ed the ordeal.

Cooper passed a note to the pilot, threaten- ing to set off a bomb if his demands were not met, shortly after the airplane took off from Portland.

He released the passengers and two crew members in Seattle and took four parachutes and the $200,000 aboard. He then ordered the airplane to Reno, Nev.

When the airplane landed in Reno, Cooper and his loot were gone.

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DB Cooper-19751