(FD-350), Seattle Times, 'Finally, a fact is added to Cooper'

(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 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 re- membered 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 Port- land 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 start- ed 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 para- chutes and a briefcase which Coo- per told the stewardess contained a bomb.

Somewhere in Southwest Wash- ington, 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 hi- jacker 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 Van- couver, 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 pic- nic with his family along the Co- lumbia River, law-enforcement of- ficers only assumed D.B. Cooper jumped over Southwest Washing- ton. 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 Wood- land, hoping either to find the body or the money or just a piece of the parachute dangling from a tree. Most parachute experts con- sulted at the time agreed it would be almost impossible for Cooper to survive the plunge.

But within days of the hijack- ing, 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 ex- ecution 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 start- ed turning in friends who looked like Cooper, in hopes of collecting the $25,000 reward.

Then the stories started to ap- pear. The now defunct Seattle Flag ran several pages of purport- ed interview with Cooper, and two

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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 popu- lar, and there even was a song written about him.

The residents of Ariel, Cowlitz County, near where Cooper sup- posedly bailed out, started holding an annual "D.B. Cooper Day" to commemorate the event. The fes- tival, 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'Con- nell, 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 Feb- ruary 29, said he was "del[ighted] 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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