Part 54, page 198

Transcript

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ARTICLE REMOVED FROM NoV. [guess: Corning] No. Co. Nov. Y4, 74

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The Skyjacker Who Got Away

D.B. Cooper a Legend 3 Years After Caper

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — It has been three years since the skyjacker called D.B. Cooper parachuted from a Northwest Airlines jet with $200,000 in ransom money and wrote himself into the folklore of the Pacific Northwest.

Two more and he'll be home free — if he's alive.

"The federal statute of limitations on that crime is five years," said Sidney Lezak, U.S. attorney in Portland.

According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, Cooper is the only person ever to hijack a domestic airliner who has not been killed or brought to justice.

"We know nothing more about him today than we did at 11 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 24, 1971," says Julius Mattson, special agent in charge of the Portland FBI office. "I just wish we had something to go on. We don't have a thing. Just a big zero."

Those are the events of that Thanksgiving Eve as authorities reconstructed them:

A man who gave his name as Dan Cooper bought a one-way ticket at Portland International Airport to Seattle aboard Northwest Airlines flight 305 which originated in Washington, D.C.

No antihijacking measures were in operation as the 36 passengers boarded the Boeing 727 for the 25-minute flight.

In the air, Cooper handed stewardess Tina Mucklow a note saying he had a bomb. Following Cooper's orders, Miss Mucklow sat beside him and wrote down instructions to the pilot.

He wanted 10,000 $20 bills to be delivered to him at Seattle in a laundry sack, along with two sets of parachutes. Otherwise, he would blow up the plane, he said.

Airline officials and FBI agents complied and Cooper allowed the passengers and two of the three stewardesses to disembark at Seattle.

Then he ordered the plane to fly south to Reno, Nev., at 200 miles per hour, at 10,000 feet, flaps down. The crew was to stay in the cockpit.

After takeoff from Seattle, a red light flashed in the cockpit indicating the plane's rear boarding ramp had been unlatched.

Nothing was heard from Cooper for about 20 minutes. At 8:10 p.m., as the plane crossed the Lewis River in southwestern Washington, Capt. William Scott thought the skyjacker was having trouble with the ramp and called back over the plane's interphone:

"Anything we can do for you?"

There was no answer.

Another light flashed showing the ramp was fully extended. A few seconds later Cooper came back on the interphone: "No."

That was the last ever heard of him.

When the plane landed in Reno, the rear ramp was down and Cooper was gone. The 21-pound sack of money was gone. One set of parachutes was gone. The skyjacker, who had carefully reclaimed his note to the stewardess, had left no fingerprints.

Authorities pinpointed Cooper's jump point near Woodland, Wash. The little town was transformed into a bustling command post for a small army of newsmen, FBI agents, police and soldiers from Ft. Lewis, Wash.

With planes, helicopters, jeeps and track dogs, they combed the vast, densely wooded region northeast of Woodland. The skyjacker had left the plane clad only in a light business suit and street shoes. He parachuted into the blackness of a raging thunderstorm, into a 200 m.p.h. wind and 7-degrees-below-zero temperatures.

He could not have survived, the police reasoned. They were simply looking for a body and a bag of money and that could wait until the spring thaw. A week later, the searchers went home.

Cooper soon became a legend in the Northwest. A hit recording lauded him as a Robin Hood who beat the establishment. T-shirts bearing his name sold by the thousands.

Then, late in March 1972, 300 soldiers combed the thawing terrain for 18 days and found not a trace of Dan Cooper or his bag of money.

Mattson says the FBI is still actively searching for Cooper.

"I just wish we had a development, something to go on," he says.

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DB Cooper-23127

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