The Skyjacker That Got Away: D.B. Cooper (Full Episode) | Undercover History

he was the first man in u.s history to hijack a plane for ransom he left out of a commercial jet with a parachute two hundred thousand dollars and was never seen again dead or alive the mystery has frustrated the fbi for nearly forty years i think he was just a sleazy rotten criminal but has given the public a lasting legend [Applause] who was d.b cooper did he survive now for the first time new scientific evidence could finally help unravel the mystery of d.b cooper [Music] it's the eve of thanksgiving and people around the country are traveling to get home [Music] in portland oregon a man under the name of dan cooper pays 20 for the 245 flight to seattle tacoma flight 305 is one of the shortest journeys on northwest orient schedules just a half an hour in normal conditions [Music] there are no security or identity checks on domestic flights so in 1971 it was possible to board an airplane carrying a gun carrying a bomb carrying knives carrying weapons nobody checked you could just get on and go as dan cooper did the slim man in his mid-40s is wearing mirrored sunglasses and dressed like a typical businessman [Music] he takes his seat at the back of the plane okay [Music] on takeoff the man hands florence an envelope at first she thinks he's flirting but his insistent gaze persuades her to open the envelope the note reads miss i have a bomb here and would like you to sit by me the shocked stewardess asks the man if he's serious she calls her colleague tina muklow inside the hijacker's briefcase he reveals what appears to be a bomb he holds the bare ends of two wires threatening to blow up the plane unless his demands are met [Music] [Applause] [Music] the hijacking is relayed to the control tower northwest orient and the fbi are alerted the dispatcher told me that there had been a hijacking of a northwest airliner at the portland airport and to get their pronto meanwhile cooper makes his demands he wants 200 000 placed in a knapsack he also wants four parachutes two main back shoots and two safety front shoots the terrified attendant takes both notes forward to the captain later cooper will demand these notes back northwest orient quickly agrees to the demands fbi agents contact sea first bank in seattle the bank provides money with pre-recorded serial numbers the man calling himself dan cooper seems calm sipping his bourbon while smoking his way through nearly half a pack of raleigh cigarettes later florence shaffner would even say that the man seemed rather nice finally the ransom money and parachutes arrive at the airport copy brand 305. [Music] cooper insists that they taxi to a remote part of the runway [Music] [Music] cooper failed to specify the denomination of the ransom money and the two hundred thousand dollars is made up of twenty dollar bills it weighs 23 pounds [Music] the passengers still unaware of the threat are released along with two attendants including florence shafter the rest of the flight crew remains captive the plane is refueled and cleared for takeoff the hijacker demands that they fly at 10 000 feet with landing gear and flaps down the plane speed will be limited to around 200 miles per hour he wants to fly to mexico city tina we cannot make it to mexico but there's not enough fuel on board we can't make it to mexico city it's too far the captain offers reno or phoenix [Music] the autopilot is set on flight path victor 23 which allows for low altitude flying meanwhile two air force jets shadow the plane but they can't maintain such a low speed and have to circle around the hijacked plane cooper orders tina muklow to join her colleagues in the cockpit tina notices that cooper is tying something around his waist she thinks he's attaching the bag of money to himself [Music] captain i have an indication of the aft stairway door has been opened the warning light indicates that the rear door and stairs have been deployed a boeing 727 is one of the only commercial planes with rear stairs in 1971 there's nothing to stop them being deployed during flight the crew are terrified that cooper will jump then detonate the bomb still on board [Music] uh captain we're losing pressure we are losing cabin pressure exactly what happens next has been in debate for nearly 40 years the only clear thing is that dan cooper was never seen or heard from again today the fbi is recruiting the public to help catch the thief applying new technology to old evidence and even recreating the jump in the hope of finally discovering the fate of d.b cooper in the seattle office of the fbi special agent larry carr is taking a new look at the case of d.b cooper this is the only hijacking in the united states that has been unsolved we have very long memories in the fbi uh and we like to be 100 successful so we're determined to do the best we can to solve the case agent carr is for the first time in fbi history recruiting the help of the public these citizen sleuths have offered their services for free in the hope of finally solving the mystery of d.b cooper paleontologist tom k could soon uncover new secrets from cooper's tie left on board microscopic fibers might prove where he lived we're hoping this will put us on the trail from where cooper came from but first the team scrutinizes every detail of the original investigation by the time the hijacked plane landed in reno dozens of agents were already on the case nobody believed that he was going to jump and the fact that the plane arrived in reno and he was not on it was surprising to everybody all that was recovered from the plane was a black tie and tie pin a sports parachute and an open safety chute plus cooper's cigarette butts the glass heat handled is mixed up with others and never identified everything else it seems dan cooper has taken with him the ransom notes the homemade bomb and the money have all disappeared overnight an fbi composite sketch is drawn from witness statements [Music] boeing aviation experts calculate dan cooper's drop zone the plane was on autopilot so the exact flight path is known [Music] but exactly when did dan cooper jump agents pour over the captain's report the most likely moment is when the pressure change was reported at around 8 10. [Music] factoring in the strong westerly winds creates a huge search area of 28 square miles at first light on thanksgiving 1971 just outside ariel washington one of the biggest manhunts in u.s history begins [Music] [Music] helicopters and spotter planes assist scores of fbi agents and national guardsmen the military got involved with a number of troops and the fbi had 30 to 40 agents involved in the search for weeks the team combs the forests and farmlands around ariel but find nothing dead or alive dan cooper has seemingly vanished when he got on a plane in portland oregon last night he was just another passenger who gave his name as d.a cooper but today after hijacking a northwest airlines jet ransoming the passengers in seattle then making a getaway by parachute somewhere between there and reno nevada the description on one wire service master criminal in one newspaper the hijacker is mistakenly named d.b cooper we corrected him and told him the guy's name was dan cooper but db is catchier than dan so the name stuck with him forever initially the fbi concludes that the hijacker was probably an experienced parachutist the fact that he did jump certainly says that he is someone who is much more familiar with aircraft and with parachuting than the average person agents check records of hundreds of ex-paratroopers and pilots in the hope of finding their man then a breakthrough [Music] an almost identical skyjacking convinces the fbi that d.b cooper has struck again on april 7 1972 a man under the alias james johnson hijacks a united airlines boeing 727 he demands half a million dollars four parachutes and leaps out from the aft stairs somewhere over utah the hijacker might have gotten away with it had he not previously boasted to an acquaintance he claimed that he could have done the db cooper heist but would have asked for half a million dollars on a tip the fbi storms the home of richard mccoy an ex-vietnam pilot married with two small children in a cupboard they find a jumpsuit and a duffel bag filled with half a million dollars mccoy is arrested on suspicion of both hijackings but the fbi finds no evidence to connect mccoy with the cooper crime mccoy's picture was shown to the witnesses that had interaction with db cooper and said no that's not him mccoy is found guilty of the united hijacking and sentenced to 45 years in state penitentiary but the fact that he survived the leap from a commercial plane adds to growing opinion that d.v cooper also lived on then in 1980 after almost a decade of dead ends a major [Music] breakthrough on february 7th brian ingram and his father dwayne collect firewood on the banks of the columbia river suddenly brian feels something buried in the sand when i come across the the edge of it it's like you know well let me get this out of the way what is this junk you know pulling it up out of there and then it's like wait a minute what the heck do we have here the young boy uncovers three bundles of moldy cash with the rubber bands still intact the father and son turn it into the fbi some of the bills are impossible to identify but most in the middle of the bundle are legible the serial numbers are checked against the money stolen by dan cooper it's a match fifty eight hundred dollars from the original two hundred thousand dollar ransom money but the new find confuses the fbi the money was outside of the area that we felt was the the search area so how it got there was something that we puzzled a little bit over and of course didn't have an answer to [Music] the money is found more than 20 miles from dan cooper's drop zone and in the opposite direction from where the wind was blowing [Music] to add to the confusion geologists determine that the money is sitting above an area dredged in 1974 it means that the bundles of cash arrived at least three years after the hijacking in 1971. the chances of it taking so long to travel via river seem implausible many people jump to the conclusion that cooper returned to bury the money perhaps to provoke the fbi after digging up a huge area the fbi finds no more money and no further clues nine years after the hijacking the case remains unsolved today this sleepy town of just a few hundred people is the mecca of the legend of d.b cooper here at the general store every year since 1974 a party is held in cooper's honor on the saturday after thanksgiving people from all over the country come to pay tribute to the man they believe got away with it [Music] [Applause] he put ariel washington on the map he can you imagine how ballsy it is to jump out of a 727 in a rainstorm at night wearing loafers that's one tough ass dude to this day i think he's still alive i think the devi cooper is sitting on the beach in mexico drinking and having a good time yes truthfully you're not d.b cooper right i ain't gonna tell nobody nothing my name is dan cooper i wish okay where's all that money honey over the years the story of d.b cooper has grown to almost mythic status he's inspired books songs documentaries movies and even aviation regulations [Applause] 1971 was the era of vietnam and civil rights protests it generated a mood of distrust towards authority people tended to root for people who would strike out against authority d.b cooper to that extent was a excellent symbol d.b cooper was a modern-day pirate of the sky and in a way he he did something an act that was so daredevil that he became a fixture in the collective imagination of the country this was not a common hoodlum he dressed in a business suit he had an attache case he drank bourbon he was to those degrees gentlemanly the way that james bond was a gentleman secret agent d.b cooper attempted to be a gentleman thief who was dan cooper gentleman thief or violent criminal despite evidence to the contrary some of cooper's old adversaries in the fbi would like to believe he is nothing but a common criminal he probably was just another old khan he talked like an old khan he used filthy language he was of an age that he had probably lived a life of crime and he was a loser but there's little in witness statements to support himmelsbach's claims some stories in the media portrayed cooper as a chain smoker and a drinker it's an image that larry carr thinks is wrong i don't believe db cooper was a drinker hardly at all you would think that someone that was going to be in a very stressful situation would certainly have more than one drink if he was a drinker and certainly would have smoked many many more cigarettes than just the eight that he did carr finds a profile of the typical raleigh cigarette smoker he was upscale and well educated likewise carr finds that bourbon and 7up was popular with a sophisticated crowd in the 70s if cooper was a gentleman thief money wasn't his only motive at one point in the flight tina muklow asked cooper why he'd picked on northwest orient he replied it's not that i have a grudge against your airline i just have a grudge [Music] it's these conflicting portraits that have kept the legend alive we don't know if he lives or if he dies that adds to the mystery [Music] it's like having a novel without a final chapter we want to know how it turns out over the years the fbi have interviewed over a thousand suspects but finding cooper has always eluded them [Music] then in 2007 a new suspect emerges that seems particularly credible [Music] the source is a new york private investigator skip porteous porteous has been contacted by a man claiming to know the identity of d.b cooper i asked him what's this all about and he said i know who d.b cooper was and i said how do you know that and he said well i grew up with him he was my brother porteous finds a number of parallels between new suspect kenneth christensen and d.b cooper at the time of the cooper hijacking kenneth christensen was a flight attendant for northwest orient airlines he knew the planes and he knew the schedules [Music] in the early 70s christensen has some grievance over redundancies and pay cuts [Music] at the time he's making around 150 a week just a year after the 1971 skyjack christensen purchases a large south washington house in cash it's a huge amount to have saved from his modest paycheck christensen like cooper is a bourbon drinker and a regular smoker there's also a resemblance to the sketch of dan cooper [Music] schaffner is shown christensen's photograph she said it looks more like d.b cooper than any other photo she's ever seen but this evidence has not convinced the fbi he never admitted that he was dan cooper it's just a relative saying i think he's dan cooper with nothing to show that he possibly is dan cooper stories like christensen have kept the legend of db cooper alive for decades now the daring jump will be recreated in the hope of discovering if cooper survived [Music] today all the evidence from the cooper case fits into this small box the open parachute and pack the tie and tie pin the plane ticket and samples of the recovered money are all that remains now the case is being re-examined in the hope that modern police methods can reveal new clues [Music] paleontologist tom k is lending his services to the investigation and has become the lead citizen scientist his examination of the tie reveals a new secret small particles of pollen pollen means that this is where this tie was in the spring not in november when he jumped if we could track the species of pollen and these species are rare enough it could tell us where he came from there are thousands of varieties of pollen if the right one is identified it could add a vital piece to a complex puzzle but the most promising evidence remains the three bundles of ransom money found on the riverbank it's the only piece of the puzzle we have of what might have happened after he left the plane so it tells its own story if carr and his team determine how the money got there and when it could help answer the most important question did cooper survive in 1980 the fbi concluded that the money was sitting above a dredge layer and must have arrived after 1974. it led many to believe that dan cooper returned to bury the money but tom k is convinced that the money came out of the river and wasn't buried by human hands [Music] tom and his team visit the banks of the columbia river where the bundles of cash were found agent carr joins them using land measurements gps satellite and archive photographs the team make a major new discovery they find the dredging of 1974 stopped 150 feet away from where the money was found so we believe now that the dredging sands did not interfere with the original burial of the money and that the money got buried there within a few months after cooper's daring jump if the money was not buried by cooper and came out of the river within a few months how did it travel over 20 miles from the drop zone the new evidence points to one conclusion the only transport method that makes any sense is via water did the bag of money land in a nearby river was it still attached to dan cooper did the hijacker have the skills to complete his mission back in 1971 the fbi spent thousands of man-hours looking for a suspect with aviation and skydiving expertise but found nothing now larry carr thinks they might have got it wrong when we started breaking down the actual events of the night the choices he made it started defining someone different than that picture [Music] dan cooper had brought no specialist clothing to make the daring night jump [Music] and because he failed to specify the denomination of the ransom money he carried extra weight [Music] that's 20 pounds of money attached to him if he had asked for hundreds he would have had around five pounds of money a huge difference but yet he didn't make those requests the man who packed the two main parachutes in 1971 is convinced that dan cooper was not a skydiver [Music] on that night i provided two parachutes one of them being an nb8 which is the one i'm wearing and the other was a pioneer sport parachute [Music] he chose the nv8 and i don't know why the nba8 is very uncomfortable will open much harder the rip cord is very flat it's mixed in with a harness so he couldn't probably even find the rip cord much was against cooper that november night visibility was poor the wind factor was well below freezing and cooper had no goggles or gloves why in the world would a guy jump with an nb8 at night going out of a 727 not knowing where he's getting out didn't make any sense to me on board the hijacked plane the parachutes were delivered with a set of instructions dan cooper told tina muklow he wouldn't need them this detail convinced many that cooper was an experienced parachutist i think that there's a lot of good reasons to think that he's still alive you can find parachute experts out there who said that they can make those jumps professional skydiver troy hartman agrees to a simulation test jump he is dressed as witnesses described dan cooper [Music] a 23 pound weight is added in a front pack and he is asked to tumble to simulate the disorientation that cooper might have felt in the dark but cooper's worst enemy can't be simulated the cold numerous times i've had the problem of of not being able to get a good grip on the handle because it's cold you start to panic you start to do things faster than you would in normal conditions troy remains convinced that cooper knew enough to open his chute in its absolute simplest form you need to pull a handle and that old gear was designed to allow the parachute to come out even if you're tumbling so i definitely think he got a parachute open but even if dan cooper deployed his shoot did he survive the landing the mystery of db cooper has fascinated people and frustrated the fbi for nearly 40 years scientist tom k believes the three bundles of ransom money provide the best clue to solving cooper's fate apart from the fifty eight hundred dollars found on the riverbank none of the other bills were ever found in circulation tom is convinced that the bag of money all two hundred thousand dollars of it must have traveled by river to where the three stacks of money were found the three bundles couldn't have traveled independently yet ended up in the same place on the sandbar this tells us that the bank bag was involved in the transport it could have split open close to the sandbar thereby increasing the odds that three out of the hundred bundles of cash would have ended up together in the same place if the bank bag ended up in the river then whatever happened to cooper the money he risked his life to steal was never spent [Music] but how exactly did the bag of money end up in the water tom examines the flight path and timing of the jump recorded at approximately 8 10. at this point he's directly over the lewis river if the bank bag which was being flailed by 200 mile an hour winds detached from cooper it would have fallen directly below into the lewis river the lewis river is around 300 feet wide with a fast current and rapids it's possible that the money bag could make its way downstream but dan cooper was protecting the money with his life and with 30 feet of parachute cord could have secured the bag if cooper did secure the bag and managed to deploy his shoe where would he have landed his chosen parachute the nb8 unlike the sport chute is not maneuverable [Music] it would take him wherever the winds blew tom k believes that whatever altitude cooper deployed the westerly winds would carry him directly to his worst nightmare water from our calculations we can determine that if cooper pulled his parachute right away he would have had a long drift and likely ended up in lake merwin if he waited and pulled a couple thousand feet above the ground he would have ended up in the lewis river lake merwin is a huge dam which spills directly into the lewis river the low cloud cover and the non-maneuverable parachute would have given cooper little if any chance of changing course with near freezing temperatures the water would have been cold cold enough to kill [Music] when db cooper hit the water like we believe he did he would have only had a matter of minutes in that type of cold water to get off on shore at that point remember he was laden with 20 pounds of money he had a harness and he had a long parachute attached to him at this point so we think that his odds of survival would have been very low he used the poor choice of equipment the conditions were horrible and the fact that we haven't found anything really leads me to believe that he died that night [Music] the semi-buoyant body would have moved down the fast running river some 20 miles to the columbia the three bundles of ransom cash were found just a few miles from where the louis and columbia rivers meet [Music] but there's a catch these few miles are upriver against its natural flow [Music] tom k offers a rational explanation at the time the columbia river was one of the busiest shipping lanes in north america we believe it's possible that cooper's body and the money became snagged up on one of these ships propellers and it moved upstream with the ship at some point the violence of this ripped open the bank bag and spilled out the money [Music] three of the hundred bundles subsequently found their way onto the shore before being covered by the shifting sands but if this is true what happened to cooper's body looked at the currents and these tell us that within a few days the columbia river is going to suck up your body and spit it out into the ocean so db cooper may be at the bottom of the ocean at this point and we would never ever be able to come up with this body after nearly four decades tom k offers the first comprehensive theory of what might have happened to dan cooper but dead or alive the identity of the hijacker remains a mystery larry carr believes he might have a new lead a european comic book hero of the 1960s is a fearless pilot called dan cooper the dashing hero carries out brave missions including parachuting from planes it's possible that the skyjacker was a fan of the comic and used the alias for his crime maybe someone that never even thought of their relative as being dan cooper but disappeared in 1971 and they're searching in the attic and also they find these comic books uh from dan cooper i mean that would be huge but tom k knows what evidence they will need to convince people that the legendary dan cooper died that night well really what it's going to take to solve the db cooper case is d.b cooper's body it's kind of like bigfoot you know you can come up with lots of evidence until you have a dead body you really haven't solved the case while probability now points to db cooper's death without hard evidence many people today still believe that he survived i say there's a good possibility that dan cooper survived the jump and is out there the legend of d.b cooper has it that he was a gentleman thief that he stole 200 000 without hurting anyone and leapt into the darkness and into history whatever the truth it is not the end of the story it's more like a new beginning to solving the mystery of d.b cooper [Music] you

Channel: National Geographic

Views: 1,475,369

Keywords: national geographic, nat geo, natgeo, animals, wildlife, science, explore, discover, survival, nature, culture, documentary, perpetual planet nat geo, photography, Skyjacker, That Got Away, D.B. Cooper, hijacker, Dan Cooper, plane, hijacking case, unsolved mystery, nat geo 101, d. b. cooper, d.b. cooper unsolved mysteries, d.b. cooper hijacking, db cooper documentary 2022, d. b. cooper videos, D. b. cooper solved

Id: nKu_3kp_EIY

Length: 44min 23sec (2663 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 12 2022