FD-350 clipping: 'Finally, a fact is added to Cooper' by Steve Johnston, Seattle Times

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

(Mount Clipping in Space Below)

(Indicate page, name of newspaper, city and state.) p. B1 Seattle Times Seattle, Wa.

Date: 2/13/80 Edition: Final

Title: NORJAK

Character: or Classification: 164-81 [guess: 164-81]

Submitting Office: Seattle

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Finally, a fact is added to Cooper saga

by Steve Johnston Times staff reporter

Passengers on Flight 305 remembered the man as a quiet-spoken sort wearing a dark brown suit. He took the last seat on the right-hand side of the Northwest Orient Airline's flight out of Portland heading for Seattle.

The only thing unusual about the man was that he wore sun glasses, unusual because it was a rainy day on November 24, 1971, a day before Thanksgiving.

The man checked aboard the Boeing 727 under the name of "Dan Cooper" in Portland, the last leg of the flight that had started in Washington, D.C.

By the time the plane finally set down in Reno several hours later, the man who became known as "D.B. Cooper" was gone, along with $200,000 in $20 bills, two parachutes and a briefcase which Cooper told the stewardess contained a bomb.

Somewhere in Southwest Washington, D.B. Cooper had bailed out at 10,000 feet into dark storm clouds and into history. He would remain to this day the only hijacker in the United States ever to escape arrest.

Over the last seven years, the F.B.I. has questioned more than 1,000 possible suspects, chased down thousands of leads and heard from hundreds of people who claim either to be Cooper or, to know his whereabouts.

But it took an 8-year-old Vancouver, Wash., boy to uncover the only piece of concrete evidence that Cooper really did bail out into the dense forest of Southwest Washington.

Until Brian Ingram dug up 12 packets of $20 bills while on a picnic with his family along the Columbia River, law-enforcement officers only assumed D.B. Cooper jumped over Southwest Washington. The plane's recorder showed a "low pressure bump" at 8:11 p.m. near Woodland, and when the plane landed in Reno, the hijacker couldn't be found.

Hundreds of searchers spread out over the area around Woodland, hoping either to find the body or the money or just a piece of the parachute dangling from a tree. Most parachute experts consulted at the time agreed it would be almost impossible for Cooper to survive the plunge.

But within days of the hijacking, the legend of D.B. Cooper started to build. People started to talk about him as a modern-day Robin Hood. They admired the daring, the planning and the execution of the jump.

Slowly but surely, the reports of encounters with Cooper started to come out. A man in Woodland said someone knocked at his back door on November 24 about the time Cooper would have landed, but he didn't answer. Other people started turning in friends who looked like Cooper, in hopes of collecting the $25,000 reward.

Then the stories started to appear. The now defunct Seattle Flag ran several pages of purported interview with Cooper, and two Kitsap County men were arrested for selling a fake interview with Cooper to a former contributing editor of Newsweek for $30,000.

Five months ago, two Tacoma men said they had talked with D.B. Cooper, who, they said, was living in Puyallup. The man told them that the money was buried under a pile of garbage at the Puyallup dump.

Mostly, however, people just have had fun with the D.B. Cooper story. T-shirts with the picture of D.B. Cooper in his sunglasses and bearing the legend, "D.B. Cooper, Where Are You?" became popular, and there even was a song written about him.

The residents of Ariel, Cowlitz County, near where Cooper supposedly bailed out, started holding an annual "D.B. Cooper Day" to commemorate the event. The festival, called the "Cooper Caper," featured buffalo stew and sky divers and attracted more than 800 people. But not, apparently, D.B. Cooper.

As for the two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents who have been on the case since it began, they say they believe D.B. Cooper probably died the night he went out the plane.

"It is my personal opinion that he is dead," said Joseph O'Connell, who has retired. "He jumped out of a plane at 10,000 feet on a cold, raw night and he jumped in an area densely populated with Douglas fir and ponderosa pine."

Ralph Himmelsbach, Portland F.B.I. agent who is to retire [guess: February] [illegible], [guess: ruary] 29, said he was "del[illegible] about the money being found. He said the find reduced the chances of Cooper ever being found alive to "less than 50-50."

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SUB E [stamp] EB 15 1980 FBI - SEATTLE FOI/DoJ

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SUBS: B,E,A,M

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DB Cooper-27442 b6 b7C