FD-350 clipping, UPI Woodland, Wash., re treasure hunters searching for Cooper ransom money
Document date 27 November 1971
Report a problem
Email this to [email protected]
Id: Cooper-Part-77:393-394
Subject: Cooper Files: Cooper-Part-77:393-394 Document: FD-350 clipping, UPI Woodland, Wash., re treasure hunters searching for Cooper ransom money Id: Cooper-Part-77:393-394 Page: https://cooper.theunsolved.net/documents/Cooper-Part-77%3A393-394 What is wrong (title, date, type, which pages belong together, copies)? What does the scan show?
A person reads every report. Corrections are made by hand, to the data — titles, dates, names, which pages belong together — never to the scans, and they can take a while to appear.
FBI 164-81, Vault Part 77 pp. 393–394 (DB Cooper-33787–33788), News clipping, dated 27 Nov 1971 — cooper.theunsolved.net/documents/Cooper-Part-77%3A393-394
FD-350 (Rev. 7-16-63)
---
'71 'Gold Rush' on for Hijack Loot
WOODLAND, Wash. (UPI) — A parade of autos, pickup trucks and motorcycles wound through the rolling foothills of the Cascade Mountains Friday, carrying peo- ple seeking a fortune that might never be found.
No one readily admitted he was looking for some or all of the $200,000 ransom a hijacker collected Thanksgiv- ing Eve before he bailed out somewhere between Seattle and Reno, Nev.
In fact, although the FBI was using the southwest Washington foothills as their operations base in searching for the hijacker, they were merely working on a hunch— no solid evidence — that he had bailed out in the area.
BUT THEY CAME anyway, 1971-style gold rushers tempted by the lure of easy money and undaunted by the long odds against their success.
In a gas station, three Portland area girls home from college for the Thanksgiving holidays admitted they en- tertained fantasies of finding the hijacker's loot.
One girl identified herself only as Anita. She and her two companions had driven to this area "just to have a look around."
"You start thinking about it," Anita said, "and you re- alize maybe he didn't live through the fall and there's $200,000 sitting all alone in the woods."
Would she turn it in? Anita smiled.
"IT WOULD BE tempting to keep it," she said, "even if they offered a reward for its return."
A young farmer in a battered pickup truck stopped at a combination gas station-general store at one of the many crossroads in the search area.
As he manned the gas pump himself, his two children smiled and waved from the cab of the pickup. At first his story was that he was "headed into battleground for a few things at the grocery store."
But as the conversation covered the hijacking and the unusually heavy traffic on the north Clark County roads,
---
(Indicate page, name of newspaper, city and state.)
1 St. Paul Dispatch — St. Paul, Minn.
Date: Nov. 27, 1971 Edition: Evening Author: Editor: H.G. Burnham Jr. Title:
Character: or Classification: Submitting Office: Minneapolis
☐ Being Investigated
---
[illegible] SEARCH SERIAL [illegible] [guess: 13] / 2 9 1971
b6 b7C
---
DB Cooper-33787
[…]his talk turned to "what a man could do with that kind of money."
HE REMOVED AN old rag from the cab, carefully wiped some spilled gas from the side of the truck and commented how "even a good Christian man" would be tempted to keep the money.
"A lot of people in Clark County are having to go on welfare because they lost jobs," he said, "and a man could buy himself a pretty nice farm with that kind of money . . . even if he had to go to Australia."
Some of those who weren't driving the rural roads looking for money, are rooting for the hijacker.
"THAT GUY IS SMART," a waitress said. "He's probably in Mexico laughing about all these federal agents looking all over Washington for him."
Even a deputy sheriff taking part in the search said[,] "You can't help but admire the guy."
---
DB Cooper-33788