Part 9, page 209

Transcript

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

(Mount Clipping in Space Below)

[indicate page, name of paper, city and state.] [San Diego] Union, San Diego, Ca.; A-16 Date: Fri., 2/15/80 Edition: Home

Title: D. B. COOPER

Character: or Classification: 164-91 Submitting Office: San Diego

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Search For Hijacking Money May Be Halted After Today

VANCOUVER, Wash. (AP) — The search along a Columbia River beach for more money from the D.B. Cooper hijacking eight years ago probably will be suspended after today, FBI officials said yesterday.

Meanwhile, the FBI said a geologist concluded that several thousand dollars found Sunday by an 8-year-old boy on a family picnic was deposited on the beach in the past year or two.

FBI agents continued to dig for more of the $200,000 that Cooper took with him when he bailed out of a plane on Thanksgiving Eve in 1971.

The search began Tuesday along the river's north shore, about three miles southwest of downtown Vancouver. Additional scraps of money were found on Wednesday.

A man whose passenger list was signed "Dan Cooper" left a Northwest Airlines plane that was bound for Reno from Seattle after he displayed what appeared to be a bomb and obtained a package of $20 bills and three parachutes.

FBI agents believed he left the plane, during a storm, about 20 miles northeast of where the crumbled and weathered bills were found.

It is the nation's only unsolved hijacking.

"We'll work today and tomorrow and probably knock it off and bring my troops back up here and reassess the situation," said Jack Pringle, assistant agent in charge of the Seattle office which took over the search operations.

"Some of the area is inaccessible and there's no way we can search the whole river," Pringle said.

He said geologist Leonard Palmer of Portland State University concluded that the dredging operation in 1974 did not put the money onto the beach, because the bills were found above clay deposits put on the banks by the dredge.

Brian Ingram, when scooping out a place for a campfire, found the money, tied together by rubber bands in three clumps, under a thin layer of sand.

The bills were matched to the Cooper loot by serial numbers.

The FBI speculated the bills could have washed into the Columbia from a tributary and were studying flood records.

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164-91-173 SEARCHED ... INDEXED SERIALIZED ... FILED FF [date illegible] FBI—SAN DIEGO [routing/initials illegible] FBI/00[?]

DB Cooper-918