Part 62, page 212

Transcript

The scan is the source; the transcript is machine-generated from it.

(Indicate page, name of newspaper, city and state.) A-1 HERALD EXAMINER LOS ANGELES, CA Date: 12/16/79 Edition: Sunday Latest

Title: NEWS FOCUS

Character: or Cri.

Classifi[cation]: b6 Submitting Office: Los Angeles b7C

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Search for 1971 hijacker leads to mysterious ex-con

The year was 1971. It was a dark, stormy Thanksgiving Eve in Portland, Ore., and at the busy Portland International Airport, everyone seemed to want to be somewhere else this night, preferably with family and loved ones preparing for the next day's feast. A middle-age man, dressed in a black suit, white shirt and thin black tie and wearing a hat, walked up to the Northwest Airlines counter. The man, who was about 6 feet tall and of medium build and carried a briefcase, gave his name as Dan Cooper and paid cash for a one-way ticket on Flight 305 to Seattle. The ticket agent punched the wrong key and the name came out "D.B. Cooper" A few minutes after takeoff, the misnamed passenger handed a stewardess a note threatening to blow up the plane with a hidden bomb if he didn't receive $200,000 cash and four parachutes. The plane went to Seattle, where an FBI agent brought the ransom to the cabin door and handed it to a stewardess. Then, as the plane continued on toward Reno, Nev., with its rear door open, as the hijacker had instructed, D.B. Cooper jumped into the night — and became a legend in American crime. The massive manhunt that began the next day in the mountainous terrain that Cooper jumped into was only the beginning. In the eight years since the famous incident, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has expended thousands of man-hours tracking down leads on some 900 suspects. Yet, the official line is still that an unknown man hijacked Flight 305 that night and probably died in the parachute jump — though his body, the chutes and the money were never found in the wild, uninhabited Cascade Mountains.

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But that may not be what happened. There is at least some evidence that D.B. Cooper was an ex-con named Byron "Jack" Coffelt who survived the jump and escaped. The FBI and various media outlets have spent considerable time investigating the Coffelt-Cooper connection, yet his story [guess: has] never before been published.

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SEARCHED___INDEXED___ SERIALIZED___FILED___ DEC 20 1979 FBI — LOS ANGELES

ORIGINAL TO THE BUREAU FBI/DOJ

DB Cooper-25919

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164-497-1010