Part 96, page 15

Transcript

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NW hijacker, $200,000 vanishes 'Dan Cooper's' fate still a mystery

By LEVERETT RICHARDS of The Oregonian staff

Dan Cooper, where are you?

Nobody knows. The fate of this first high-jumping hijacker remains one of the most baffling mysteries on the books. After two years of intensive searching, the FBI says it hasn't a single clue of any kind.

"We really know nothing more today than we did 11 p.m., Wednesday Nov. 24, 1971," Julius Mattson, FBI special agent in charge at Portland, said this week.

When the man called Cooper parachuted from the rear of a Boeing 727 somewhere south of Woodland, Wash., sometime after 8:10 p.m. that dark and stormy night he simply vanished. So did the $200,000 in $20 bills that he carried in a laundry bag.

The FBI doesn't even know if Dan Cooper ever existed. That's the name he gave when he bought a one-way ticket to Seattle at Northwest Airlines' ticket counter in Portland from Dennis Lysne about an hour before he boarded NWA's Flight 305. (The name D. B. Cooper was an error never corrected by most of the press.)

The rest is history, and mystery. At Seattle he took 10,000 $20 bills and two sets of parachutes. He opened the rear door of the Boeing 727 soon after takeoff, which caused a red light to come on in the cockpit.

Nothing was heard from him until 8:10 p.m. when the plane was just crossing the Lewis River near Woodland. William Scott thought the hijacker was having trouble with the stairs and asked him on the interphone, "Anything we can do for you?"

Then the light came on indicating the stairs were fully extended. A few seconds later the hijacker came on the interphone and said, "No."

That's the last the crew heard from him. Crewmen thought he was still aboard when they landed at Reno, Nev., with the stairs partly extended about 10:30 p.m. But he wasn't. Neither was the money nor one set of parachutes.

There was no transmitter on the parachute Cooper used. That device was invented later. Yet the FBI, using Northwest Airlines computers, concluded Cooper had jumped immediately after answering the interphone. They figured the heavy wind from a winter storm would have blown him to the vicinity of Ariel near Lake Merwin.

Late in March, 1972, 300 soldiers from Ft. Lewis combed the area on foot and with helicopters for 18 days, without finding a trace of Cooper, "although we did find a body and cleared up a local murder," Mattson said.

Air Force paramedics say Cooper had little chance of surviving. He was clad only in a business suit and street shoes, which probably would have been snapped off his feet by the opening shock of the parachute at 200 miles an hour.

He apparently didn't know his route of flight or elevation, and could have had no idea where he was.

He would have had to fall through two layers of storm clouds into a black night.

Cooper apparently did wear gloves. No fingerprints were found on the airplane and he carefully reclaimed his hijack note from the flight crew.

In fact, the FBI doesn't know to this day if there ever was a Dan Cooper. Hundreds of people reported they knew the man after seeing the posters put out by the FBI.

"We investigate every report and so far have proved that the various men reported to be Cooper could not have been the man who hijacked Flight 305," Mattson said.

"We have no physical evidence to go on except the $20 bills. We have circulated the numbers on all 10,000 of them far and wide, but no one has ever turned up," Mattson said.

But the Cooper case is not closed, "not by any means,"

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Reports are still being investigated, Mattson said.

Are you satisfied he is not hanging from a tree somewhere in the Ariel area?

"No," said Mattson, "the terrain is just too rugged in a couple of places to be thoroughly searched on the ground, although we have gone over it by helicopter.

"And there is still the possibility he may have landed in Lake Merwin, which is too deep to drag and too deep for skin divers to search. Besides its 30 miles long and nearly a mile wide."

FBI open-minded

What is the FBI's guess as to his fate?

"We are keeping an open mind, for lack of evidence either way -- that he is alive or dead," Mattson concluded.

The whole route of Flight 305 from Woodland south to Red Bluff and direct to Reno, Nev., has been "substantially searched" without finding a clue of any kind, Mattson said.

"But we are still working as hard on the case now as we were two years ago."

Northwest Airlines, which offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to the solution of the mystery last fall has cancelled the reward, a spokesman in Minneapolis said.

Cooper's coup -- although it may have cost his life -- was followed by a rash of similar hijackings, until the rear door of the 727s were locked in flight. There hasn't been a domestic hijacking of any kind, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, in the past year.

The Cooper hijacking is the only one unsolved to this day, Benjamin Davis Jr., assistant secretary of Transportation, says.

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MYSTERY MAN -- FBI is still looking for man called Dan Cooper on second anniversary of hijacking of airliner. He was middle-aged, of middle height, with swarthy complexion, dressed in brown suit, white shirt, black tie and raincoat.

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