cover of episode 23: D.B. Cooper | Red Thread

23: D.B. Cooper | Red Thread

2024/6/14
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The rear air stairs begin to creak open with an unsettling mechanical rattling. Suddenly air tears into the interior of the in-motion aircraft creating a roaring vacuum. Loose papers are ripped from the inside and flutter rapidly into the dark abyss. A man stands at the threshold between the creature comforts inside the aircraft and the vast emptiness outside. Rain, high winds, storms and the unknown wait just one step beyond the ramp.

The man's hand checks his pockets, then his waist where the prizes born from his heist are found. Cloth bags full of $20 banknotes weigh on his hips, promising to drag him down to the earth below. With the cool confidence of a man sure of his own victory, he stepped beyond and found his fall. The air rushed up to meet him, tearing at his skin, the rain from the store becoming needles piercing.

He fell through the storm for what felt an eternity, into an empty darkness where nothing could be guaranteed to be perceived. Eventually, through timing his descent, the man lifts his hand through the resistance fighting his every motion and finds the ripcord of the parachute he had draped himself in before departing the plane. Pulling this would ensure his safety.

His hand latched onto the cord. He let himself smile, knowing that he had outwitted everyone every step of the way. He was moments away from gliding to safety, with hundreds of thousands of dollars and no real evidence left behind to tie his identity to the crime. In other words, the perfect heist. With all his might, he yanked the ripcord and…

Nothing. Again and again he yanked, and yet nothing changed. He had expected to slow down, to be dragged upwards by the deployment of the chute, and yet nothing. That's because

Well, that's because he's wearing a training dummy parachute and capable of deploying a chute. And this is the red thread. How does he get into that situation? That's what we're going to be finding out in this episode of the red thread. To be fair, that's not like guaranteed. That's just my head canon of what happened. I like how the theories worked in to be like, what happened to DB Cooper? Well, he's dead.

Thank you all for watching the Red Thread. Next. Well, he's not. Jackson never explicitly said that he died and met his maker. He could have survived the fall. Yeah, he could have survived a free fall. That's true. I'm sure.

There have been situations where people have survived those free falls. Yeah, there was that flight attendant who survived like a 10,000, but she broke every bone in her body. I mean, that's a trade to make. I would break every single bone in my body. It is certainly a trade to make, yeah. If it has to be between that and death, yeah, trade the bones.

So, actually, just a random question, because I feel like one of you would have to know. If you break every single bone in your body, is it like a cumulative pain that adds up, or is it just... Well, if you're lucky...

If you're lucky, you also lose the nerves. But I imagine it's just like incapable of feeling everything at once. Yeah, that's what I would feel. There's probably like a threshold where if you break every bone in your body, you actually feel amazing. Like it just you feel so good. You've just gone so far over the pain threshold that you're just like, you know what? I feel fucking great. You know, that's the plot of the Hellraiser movie. So you may be on. That's true.

Well, I would assume that you don't feel the pain immediately, right? Due to the adrenaline, maybe? I don't know. I feel like every bone in your body you probably feel immediately. Exploding, yeah. Probably exceeds damage resistance. Oh no, let's find out, Jackson. You go. You have scoliosis, so you're the least valuable as far as bones go. Yeah.

All right. So, DB Cooper, big episode. One of my favorite stories to come from like air heists and things of that caliber. I know Charlie is well-versed in DB Cooper lore because you watched a, I think it was Lemonose video on it, right? Yep. And it's an incredible breakdown. Incredible video. Yeah.

Definitely going to be far better than anything in this episode, so highly recommend all of you go check out that video after this. It's going to be the shortest red thread ever. It's just going to be go watch Lemino. A link to Lemino's video. How about you, Isaiah? I remember covering the story back on

i think it was the conspiracy theory iceberg no it was the unsolved true crime iceberg that's what it was yeah it would have to be there's no real like big conspiracy surrounding db kufa right i mean there there's some in the idea that he was like um that that he was found but it was a cover-up because he had like experimental tech or something like that i mean there's like there's fun conspiracies made of it but no real ones um

Yeah, it was on the Unsolved True Crime Iceberg, and it will forever stick with me because in the intro I accidentally referred to him, and maybe even in the text, as B.D. Cooper. So people have never let me live that down, as they should. I deserve to be bullied for it. But no, I'm familiar with the story. Yeah.

I don't know. I mean, obviously he was never found. I don't know if that means he died somewhere, got away. Uh, but I think it's incredibly fascinating. The only successful airline hijacking, at least depending on what you consider success, uh,

Or I guess not really a hijacking, more of a stick up, you know? Yeah, I think there was. So I was going to contest that for a second, but then I guess most of the people who do pull off those heists are captured. So it's not really successful at that point. So this is successful in the fact that we don't know who D.Va is. He's never been caught, yeah. Yeah, just theories.

Okay. So before we start, big thank you to everyone watching. The show is doing phenomenal. Really good. It's actually improving week after week in terms of engagement and stuff. So big thank you to everyone. Big thank you if you're watching on any of the platforms like iTunes, Spotify or the YouTube channel. And also thank you for people that rate it and stuff like that.

We also have a document linked in the description of each episode. I say this every single time because a lot of work goes into it. So I like to make sure that people can go find it if they want to interact with that document and see the research and look at the pictures and stuff that we've collated. So you can do that. The link is in the description.

And also just a big thank you to the sponsors of this episode, ZocDoc and HelloFresh, more from them later on. But that's going to do it for show notes and notes of that sort. Now we can get into DB Cooper. Let's begin where it all started, with the hijacking. Since we don't know anything about DB Cooper the man, we can't give you the normal synopsis of his X-Men origin story or anything. We can only start with the actual event.

So it happened on November 24th of 1971 when a man casually walked to the Northwest Orient Airlines counter in Portland, Oregon, and purchased a one-way fare on flight 305 to Seattle, Washington.

He paid with cash. He was described as nondescript, appearing to be in his mid-40s, Caucasian man, medium olive skin tone, around six feet tall with dark hair and brown eyes. He wore a dark suit, and when he boarded the plane, he wore dark sunglasses. The name Dan Cooper was used on the ticket. Dan Cooper is actually the main character in a comic book series about a Canadian military...

about a Canadian military flying pilot that was written in French, implying that Dan Cooper may have been a French-speaking Canadian. This idea is further supported by the fact the pilot relayed a request asking for negotiable American currency. However, it is unknown if the pilot was relaying the request verbatim or was specifying on his own accord. Yeah, so that's referring... We're jumping ahead a little bit here, but that's referring to the pilot...

relaying information, the negotiation from Dan Cooper on the flight to the authorities. He specified that Dan Cooper wanted negotiable American currency, which would be, I guess, an odd thing for if he was an American to say, to specify that. So that kind of leads a bit of like, you know, supporting evidence to the fact that Dan Cooper, the guy that we're talking about, may have been Canadian.

Dan boarded the Boeing 727-100, which took off at 2.50 p.m. Airport security was an entirely different concept in the 70s, with identification not being as rigorously enforced as it is today. It was trivial to basically board a flight under an alias. It wasn't until several high-profile hijackings in the early 1970s, including the 1972 hijacking of Southern Airways Flight 49, that the Boeing 727-100 was able to board.

that the U.S. government began to implement more comprehensive security measures leading to the formation of the Federal Aviation Administration's Civil Aviation Security Division. What a fucking mouthful. Yeah, that is such a long name. FASASDA. There you go.

So do they still exist in that capacity, this aviation security division? I'll look it up, but I bet they've been replaced by TSA for all of that. Yeah, I assume after 9-11 it all changed again. It's wild how many hijackings it took for them to be like, alright, maybe we should at least give a cursory glance. Yeah.

Not just hijacking as well, like actual just plane bombings and stuff of that sort. How many just like massive, massive events like that happened because you could just board a plane without really checking your luggage or...

without you know giving correct names or showing identification it's actually like baffling to me that that ever was like there i can't imagine a world where it's not like not we're not stuck in a tsa line or whatever yeah there were several plane attacks where all the authorities looked at each other like what can you do you know yeah it's a shame just the law of the land we can't govern planes

When I looked it up, it just keeps bringing up general FAA. So I'm guessing maybe they just rolled it all in under the Federal Aviation Administration. Probably. Yeah, maybe. In many ways, we have Dan Cooper and many other trailblazers to thank for the annoying long lines at the airport.

Thanks, Dan. Quirky little sentence in there, Jackson. That's not quirky. Hey, it's not quirky. It's not that quirky. It's got a little pizzazz to it. It's got some Tumblr twang to it. It's got some I'm 16 and my parents don't understand. 14 of this is deep. Mm-hmm.

Dan Cooper sat at the rear of the aircraft in the middle of the three seats on the right side of the aircraft and ordered a bourbon and soda at takeoff, which he paired with a cigarette. There was nothing immediately unusual about Dan Cooper. He blended in with the other 36 passengers aboard the aircraft. However, it just passed 3 p.m. He handed a nearby stewardess, Florence, Florence Schaefer Schaffner, a note.

She ignored it at first, assuming it was a flirtatious note, not entirely uncommon to receive at the time, and put it in her jacket pocket. But Dan Cooper leaned over and insisted she read it. I have a bomb in my briefcase. I want you to sit next to me. Well, hey, maybe that was still flirting. We don't know for sure what the intentions were just yet. That could have been a cheesy pickup line. That's how I met my wife. Yeah, this is the 70s. Riz was different back then. Yeah.

Florence did as he asked, Dan showing her the apparent bomb that was in the briefcase. Oh, never mind. Dan Cooper also had written two demands. He wanted $200,000 in $20 bills, four parachutes, so two primary and two reserved, and a fuel truck on standby when landing in Seattle to refuel the plane. This was written with a clear warning, no funny stuff.

Other than a kiss on the cheek, perhaps, if we're getting really flirty. Other than a brief game of patty cake on our way out. The rest of the plane was alerted after the sounds of rampant making out and touching going on in the back. And moaning from DB Cooper.

Florence Schaffner made her way to the cockpit, informing the other crew members and the pilots on the situation and the note, which Dan Cooper kept assumably so it couldn't be used as evidence in the future. Florence stayed in the cockpit with another flight attendant, Tina.

oh wow sorry i didn't scroll down far enough i thought you just put her first name tina like we're all supposed to know her we're all friends with tina yeah this is when we introduced tina a red thread staple we all know tina tina how's it going welcome back tina everywhere you look everywhere oh is she i don't know if she's still alive maybe i should have invited her on the show because she does play a prominent part that would have been huge

I'm sure she's not tired of talking about D.B. Cooper. Dude, imagine your entire life is wrapped up in a controversy like this, and that's all your life is really known for, is just like you were a part of this heist almost. Or you were a part of the heist. The only thing you can do after this is to become a hijacker yourself. Yeah, one-up him. Take the lessons you learned. She's like the protege of Dan Cooper. It could be even better. It's the rule of two from the Sith.

Oh, let's go. We're not even doing Star Wars references now. We're just doing the same reference. It's just the same reference each time. Yeah, and the audience won't get tired of it. Duh. It's a good reference.

Florence stayed in the cockpit with another flight attendant, Tina Mucklow, taking her place beside Dan Cooper. Tina would relay information between him and the crew in the cockpit, and she would stay here for the rest of the hijacking. That's kind of fucked up, right? That Florence was like, hey, Tina, go out there and sit next to him. I'm going to stay in the cockpit. Like, she just skedaddled and made, like, who drew the shortest stick there, right? Like, is that how it was done? Because you're going to be sitting next to a live bomb, or at least you think it's a live bomb.

If anything happens, Tina, wrap yourself around the bomb. You can save us. Oh, just smother it, yeah.

They then relayed this message to Seattle-Tacoma Airport Air Traffic Control, which then went to Northwest Orient Airlines President Donald Nyrop, I can't remember how to say his name, and the police, who authorized the demands to be met. The other passengers on the plane were unaware of what was happening. With the plane unable to land until the police had arrived at the airport with the money, parachutes, and fuel, the pilots kept the plane in a loop in the air. Passengers were informed over the speakers that due to mechanical issues, they would not be landing for a while.

Do you guys know how common this is that they actually authorize the demands to be met? I was always under the assumption that they don't do that.

Well, that whole we don't negotiate with terrorists things is not usually a domestic position they take. Oh, right. It's like foreign adversaries. Yeah, it's much harder to do on our own soil because if he does detonate that bomb, I mean, they... It would be pretty embarrassing. There'd be a huge uproar. It's just like meet his demands and then catch him after the fact. Keep everybody safe. You have an obligation to the citizens. Yeah, fair enough.

Tina Mucklow later commented on Dan Cooper's demeanor while she was next to him on the flight. Firstly, he was not nervous, and she even said that he did not seem to be nasty or cruel, but rather nice. He also appeared to be familiar with the terrain below them, looking out the window and saying, looks like Tacoma down there. I like how Tina Mucklow was there for about 20 minutes and already got Stockholm Syndrome and actually likes him and stuff. This guy was super nice.

When told that the parachutes were on their way to the airport from McCord's Air Force Base, he also knew exactly where that was, correctly knowing it was a 20-minute drive from the airport, hinting at possible military experience. See, but I never really agreed with that. You don't need to have military experience to just know maps. Like, he could just be familiar. Like, he'd know the route.

He knew where the plane was going to be going. Like he could have easily just looked at everything on the map prior to going. It's due to it being an Air Force base though, like a military installation. Yeah. But I mean, Air Force bases are public knowledge, like where they're located. So you could still just find that and know like relative to where that is to the plane or to the airport.

But when you're doing, when you're like planning a heist and stuff, which is when I would assume you're looking at all the maps, would you like, what would be the point of like checking out where the Air Force base is? Timing. So you could know the timing of everything. Okay, I have exactly this amount of time from making this demand if they're going to meet it, that it'll be about a 20 minute drive. So I should expect like 20 minutes for this and that. I feel like that'd be the most important part.

Yeah. Okay. I guess it's due to the combination of him having like a skydiving experience and stuff like that. He seemed, I think it was described as him seeming like a military type individual. Yeah. And a lot of the suspects that we go into eventually do have military experience. It's definitely possible. I just don't think this leads me to believe that he had military experience. Yeah. It's fair enough.

Tina asked Dan Cooper why he hijacked this specific plane. He laughed in response to her question and said, it's not because I have a grudge against your airlines. It's just because I have a grudge. This plane, which is kind of a badass line. That's a pretty hard quote. Yeah, that's a quote.

That's an old timer. Smoking his cigarette, drinking his bourbon and coke. I'm glad he robbed this plane. And he got away with it and survived. Yep, he's still out there. He's next heist. This plane was just at the right place in the right time for what he wanted. Dan Cooper and Tina Mucklow continued to chat, but he became upset at her when she asked him where he was from.

She was trying to learn more. She was like falling in love. So where can I meet you after this, after the flight lands? There's actually a small conflicting report on an interaction with a man nicknamed the cowboy on this flight. While the plane was circling, awaiting the call to land, a passenger named George...

Robert Labissinaire reported that he went to the bathroom, the one located at the rear of the plane behind Dan Cooper multiple times. One time in particular, he was blocked on the way by a man wearing a cowboy hat. This man was asking Tina Mucklow what the mechanical issues with the plane were and why they were so delayed.

George noted that at first, Dan Cooper was amused by this interaction, but it quickly turned into annoyance and he demanded the man leave them and go back to his seat, but the cowboy ignored him and continued to interrogate Tina until eventually he was convinced to return to his seat. But Tina had a different recollection of events, saying the bored passenger asked her for magazines, which were in an area behind where she and Dan Cooper were sitting.

She showed the passenger where they were, helping him choose the New Yorker before heading back to their seats. Dan Cooper was not pleased, telling Tina that, "...if that had been a sky marshal, I don't want any more of that." She told him there weren't any sky marshals on the plane and that had been the end of it. The cowboy had never been interviewed by the police or FBI.

Yeah. Why not, huh? Suspicious. Very suspicious. I don't know. I don't know if I trust that first guy, George Labasanere. Who needs to go, like, who goes to the plane bathroom several times on one flight? That seems egregious.

It's a pretty short flight, right? It was only like a few hours. It is, yeah. And there's always that guy who makes you get up. He makes you stand in the aisle awkwardly while he gets in and out. So to do that multiple times, I think he's a liar in whatever he's saying. I think he just wanted some drama. He comes up to the police. He's like, oh, actually, I saw a cowboy hat and I think that there was something there. I'm very important. You should look at me. So is the implication to this kind of thread that...

It was like a two-person job and the Sky Marshal was part of it or what? I mean, not the Sky Marshal, sorry, the cowboy was part of it. What is the actual implication to this? No, I think the implication there is that someone may have been suspicious that something was going wrong with the plane. And when the flight attendant was like, no, nothing's wrong. Go back to your seat that Cooper was getting mad at it. Okay.

After two hours of circling in the air, at 5.24 p.m., a message was sent to the pilots that the parachutes and money had arrived at the airport, and around 20 minutes later, the plane landed in a remote section of the tarmac far away from the main airport or other aircrafts.

Dan Cooper insisted that only one person was to bring the money to the plane, which ended up being Al Lee, the Northwest Orient Seattle operations manager. Concerned that Dan Cooper might mistake his outfit for a police uniform, he changed into casual clothing and then approached the aircraft. Tina was instructed to collect the ransom, leaving through the front door, collecting the money and parachutes off of Al Lee, and then carrying it all back in the pa- all back in past the pa- Jesus. And then carrying it all back, past the-

Pass the passengers to Dan Cooper. He agreed to let the passengers go, looking over the money as they quickly boarded off the plane. The air was thick with tension and Tina, in an attempt to relieve some of it, joked with Dan Cooper if she could have a bit of the money. To her surprise, he began to hand her a stack of bills and agreed. Which is fire. This guy is actually so cool. He's like the modern day Robin Hood, basically it sounds like.

Well, I mean, he's robbing from probably like the banks will probably pass that. Like what happens to the money that he steals? Does that come from us or people in general? I don't know. Actually, that's a really good question. Well, they can't just take it from us. So I doubt it's coming from like regular citizens. It has to come from somewhere though.

I'm not sure how that works. The government has a constant reservoir of terrorist demand money. Well, no, actually, you joke, but I think banks do or are meant to. I think they're meant to have a stockpile of money that they can do that kind of stuff with in case stuff like that happens. I think, but still, I don't know.

So she quickly backtracked, denying the offer, but he continued to offer her and other crew members money as some sort of tip. They repeat to him that the airline had a policy where they couldn't accept tips to stop him from offering. They were getting annoyed. He shrugs his shoulders. Suit yourself. More money for me.

After all passengers exited the plane, there were only six crew members and Dan Cooper left on board. Dan Cooper made Tina get the parachutes, which took her three trips to bring to the rear of the plane. During this, the other flight attendants dared to ask Dan Cooper if they could leave. He replied with a casual tone saying, whatever you girls would like, and even joked to Florence Schaffner when she asked to grab her purse, which was near to where he was, that I won't bite you.

I don't remember this part. I love how jovial he is and friendly to everyone basically. Whatever you ladies want to do. It's a fine evening. Does a bear shit in the woods, toots?

You know, we joked last time about, you know, Jack the Ripper being Charlie, but this might actually be Charlie. Yeah, this sounds like me. Whatever you girls would like, I won't bite. That's his catchphrase. It's funny if you imagine him standing back there like the long hair and the white t-shirt like, yeah, whatever you want. I don't know. Whatever you want. Yeah, just get him with that like sultry tone. Yep. As he's about to jump off the plane. Well, that's about it. See you.

Along with the parachutes, Tina had also brought the instructions along with them, offering the paper to Dan Cooper, which he refused, not needing them, leading many to believe that he had experience with parachutes. Or he's just a fucking idiot. Or he was illiterate. Yeah. He needed it in picture format. Yeah, he might have just been an idiot. That won't help me. I can't read no ways. What?

I don't need instructions where I'm going. Fucking kills himself. Yeah. She's suicidal. The coolest hijacker ever. I won't be needing that, miss.

Yeah.

but challenging. Any slight misunderstanding extended the process even longer. While refueling, they also needed to ensure that the plane was prepared for flight for Dan Cooper's demands on the subsequent configuration. He wanted the plane to fly to Mexico City at the most minimal speed possible without causing the plane to stall. It also had to be at a low altitude, landing gear deployed, wing flaps lowered, cabin unpressurized, and the aft stairs lowered.

I don't believe it. No, while all this was going on, Dan Cooper was in the back just partying, basically, with all the flight attendants, I think. Yeah.

He was chilling. They're passing mini bottles around. They're just getting into the drinks. He smuggled some blunts on board as well. He's just having a great time. The refueling process took around two hours and Dan Cooper was informed that in order for the plane to reach Mexico City, a second refueling would be necessary. Dan Cooper was already becoming irritated with the amount of time this refueling process was taking, but agreed on Reno-Tahoe International Airport being the refueling stop.

Hmm. I don't know if his objective was to jump out of the plane, which it sounded like, which was why he wanted the parachutes and stuff. Why did he even choose Mexico city?

Uh, probably like terrain. He probably charted this course as like a safe one to jump out over would be my guess. So he knew exactly where along that route to jump out. That would be my guess. Yes. Yeah. Okay. That would make sense. All right. Real quick before we get, get onto the jump. Um, just a quick word from our sponsors.

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And now back in, Isaiah, would you like to take the jump? Absolutely. So it's about to get good. Yeah, I'm excited. The plane took off at 740 p.m. with five people on board. Dan Cooper, Tina Mucklow, Captain Scott, First Officer. I read that as Rat Attack. What is his name? I'm calling him Rat Attack. Officer Rat Attack and Flight Engineer Anderson.

They were trailed by two F-106 fighter planes and a Lockheed T-33 trainer who kept back in an S position out of view. On the plane, Dan Cooper instructed Tina to open the aft staircase, but...

He hesitated out of fear of her being sucked out of the aircraft. Aww. He's grown feelings for them. He cares about the people on board by the sounds of it. Also, why was Tina even there? I get why the captain and the people flying the planes needed to be there, but why was Tina left behind? That's pretty fucked up, isn't it? It is pretty fucked up.

I guarantee you it's kind of like everyone left and then she was like, but I've been, you know, keeping everything safe the whole time. It's like micro Stockholm syndrome happening all at once. I joked about that, but over the course of two hours, I doubt it. Well, not actual Stockholm syndrome. He probably insisted she stay and, you know, she's afraid to go against his demands or whatever. And realistically, like, I will continue to make jokes about how Dan, how cool DB Cooper is and stuff, but realistically...

regardless of how much care he demonstrates here, they're only in this situation because of him. Because of his greed. Because of his greed, yeah.

If Tina was to get sucked out of the plane and die there, it would be because of his selfish actions. She was not in danger of that before he decided to show up with a bomb on an airplane. But that being said, I will now go back to talking about how cool he is. Well, we can do that because luckily everyone left this. Everyone made it. Well, yes. Apart from Dan Cooper. Realistically, Cooper probably didn't want his theft to get trumped up to a murder charge. Yeah.

Oh, I mean, surely, like, stealing this much money and doing this kind of, like, air hijacking probably would land you, like, 50 years in prison anyway. Yeah, but if you kill someone, then you're not coming out of jail, you know? Yeah, and also maybe he just genuinely didn't want to kill people, maybe. Yeah, who knows? I don't know. In the end, he told her he would do it himself and told Tina to go to the cockpit and lock the door behind her.

The Boeing 727 staircase door design made it impossible to open the door when the plane was in flight and the cabin pressurized. Dan Cooper knew this and also was aware of the outflow valve which could depressurize the cabin as long as the plane is not above 12,000 feet altitude. The design on the door was also ideal for what Dan Cooper wanted to do as the door opened in, not out. If it opened outwards with the speed of the plane was traveling, it would have made it impossible to open.

This showed an impressive amount of mechanical knowledge and preparedness that Dan Cooper had for the heist. Yeah, I don't know if that, again, speaks to military-level knowledge, but he definitely knew about the plane. I don't think it's military-level knowledge. I think it's just something that you can find as a civilian and learn about. Well, he could have worked for an airline and worked around these planes as well, I guess.

When making his demands, Dan Cooper had wanted the money delivered to him in a knapsack, but instead it was brought in a cloth bag. This posed a problem on how he was going to carry the money with him. Improvising, he ended up using one of the reverse parachute bags. Tina asked Dan Cooper before she left to take the bomb with him, and he reassured her that he would either take it or disarm it.

The last person who saw Dan Cooper was Tina as she made her way to the cockpit, turning around to close the curtains between economy and first class. Still can't stop herself from like doing the stewardess thing. Yeah, doing the stewardess. Yeah. She saw him attempting to tie what she thinks was the bag of money around his waist. Then she entered the cockpit.

I think it's interesting. I was like, oh, I'll take it with me or disarm it. Don't you worry, toots. Now get yourself up to that cockpit. I love the word toots. You say toots anytime I'll laugh. I promise you. I'm going to call my wife that today and see how mad she gets.

There's a Twitter post that they're divorced. Six hours later, we see that. What's the YouTube thing? It's like, we have decided to part ways. We're still on good terms, though. Yeah, we're still on good terms. And I replied like, Charlie, this had nothing to do with the toots. Don't put it in a video. The crew had no way of seeing what Dan Cooper was doing as the plane had no security cameras and no windows or peepholes to look through.

A warning light came on in the cockpit around 8 p.m., signaling to the crew that the door was open. Over the speakers, they asked Dan Cooper if he needed any help, which he shouted in response and irritated, no. I could do it myself. I don't need help.

A few minutes later, they experienced an unusual vibration. The crew thought this was Dan Cooper lowering the staircase and jumping, but they didn't want to risk leaving the cockpit to check and stayed put until landing. The pilot managed to land the plane safely with only minor damage to the aircraft upon landing, mainly on the lowered stairs. They called out in case Dan Cooper was still there, but heard nothing back.

tentatively they open the door to find him gone there's a future like a you know a universe out there where dan cooper is still in the back of that plane they land he's just sitting in his middle seat rats i forgot that would happen i forgot we were landing eventually miscalculation the classic blunder this is how they got epstein you know yeah

Um, so yeah, basically he jumped out at some point along the path. It's pretty hard to determine where exactly or when during the flight path he did jump out due to that. Obviously no one being able to see it. Um, and the, the, what do you call it? The off staircase of the plane was lowered for a long amount of time. So he could have jumped out at any given time. Really? Um, probably did that on purpose. So they went to exactly where he jumped out at.

Yeah, pretty smart. Upon starting the investigation, the police found Dan Cooper's black clip-on tie, the tie clip, two of the four parachutes, cigarette butts in the armrest ashtray, and 66 fingerprints found across the interior of the plane.

The investigation was difficult from the start. The crew didn't see Dan Cooper jump out of the plane and neither did the planes following them. He vanished into the night. Maybe he like fucking just smashed into one of the planes behind him. Just absolutely demolished. He got bug splattered over the front of it. Um...

People may be wondering why D.B. Cooper is used interchangeably with Dan Cooper. The man used the fake name Dan Cooper to buy the plane ticket, and when the police later investigated possible suspects, one of them interviewed was a D.B. Cooper living in Portland. While having a minor police record, D.B. Cooper was eliminated as a suspect from the case.

But a reporter for the Oregon Journal, James Long, caught the story and contacted someone he knew from Western Airlines, who then contacted someone he knew from Northwest Airlines. He was secretly on the line while the two men from the airlines talked about what was going on, but the connection wasn't good and he couldn't hear them well.

Somehow, James Long heard the name DB, which went into his article and went worldwide. Suddenly, everyone knew the hijacker as DB Cooper. The journalists and the police tried to correct the mistake once it was made evident, but by this point, DB Cooper had become the more recognizable name. Essentially, DB Cooper is a name created by the press.

Ultimately, it matters very little concerning Dan Cooper was likely an alias anyway, and DB Cooper may as well have been the alias for all intents and purposes. Yeah, so... I didn't know that. That's interesting. Yeah, people think of this as DB Cooper, but Dan Cooper was really the only name used by the hijacker. It's just unfortunate that a man named DB Cooper was one of the prime suspects within the first few days of the investigation, but...

Like I said, he was pretty quickly ruled out by the police as a suspect, like extremely quickly due to alibis and stuff like that. So it couldn't have been him. So D.B. Cooper, the title of this episode is pretty much fundamentally a lie. He was never D.B. Cooper, really. He's always been Dan Cooper. Like you said, though, it's also just not that important to be honest. It's not really. It's just, I don't know. I think it sounds cooler anyway. It does sound cooler.

I'm fine with continuing to call him DB Cooper. I'm fine with it. I mean, what's he going to do, object? He's fucking dead. I mean, it'd be pretty funny if he just used his legal name and the police show up at his house and he's like, oh, yeah, I should have thought of that one. Damn, I should have made something up. Fuck. What a disaster. DB Cooper has too much honor. Good thing that by the rule of two, my apprentice will...

be better than I am an honorable plane hijacker I should have done something a little bit more dastardly but it's just not in me it was difficult to precisely know where DB Cooper landed no one saw him exit the plane and no one knew definitively where he had departed from the back compartment of the plane

DB Cooper never specified what route to take on their way to Reno. He didn't even want the pilot to file a flight plan before takeoff as he was growing impatient and agitated. This resulted in the pilot flying along an air path called Victor 23, leading investigators to believe he most likely jumped around 40 kilometers north of Portland.

Even knowing this, narrowing down where Cooper landed was incredibly difficult. The terrain of the area was rugged and dense with forest wilderness alongside stormy and cold weather with poor visibility, making the search efforts difficult to conduct.

The money they gave to D.B. Cooper was from the Seattle First National Bank. This goes along with what you were saying, Jackson.

Most banks had a large amount of cash in reserve for these sorts of situations so that the money could be grabbed quickly and the serial numbers were already documented to track the cash. Seattle First National Bank was no different, with the money given to Cooper taken from their reserve. Serial numbers were distributed to other banks and made public so people could check their $20 notes and hopefully track down the money to the source. Oh man.

Could you check $20 notes now and see if it had ever touched DB Cooper's hand? Like, imagine if you've got one of the $20 notes now. You can still, like, they're still serialized. Yeah, you could check that. Maybe you've got one. Everyone at home, check your $20 notes right now. Everyone check your $20 bills, yeah. See if it was ever used by DB Cooper. And then sell it for $13.

And try to remember where you got that $20 note from, that specific $20 note from, and we'll track it back multiple decades. Oh, no. I knew I shouldn't have taken the money from the man in the parachute. He walks around like that to this day, like suit, glasses, parachute on. Yeah. I just can't comprehend how this would even create an outcome where you find the person who stole it, just due to how often money changes hands and stuff.

I couldn't imagine the investigation and finding out where the money came from. He's got $200,000, so ideally he's going to do something with it. Maybe whatever he does with it will pop up. Even if it was something small, or comparatively small, like he used the money to buy a house, right? Maybe a bank in Kansas or whatever would recognize the money. Yeah, but I mean, I assume a criminal like this does the standard criminal thing and launders it, right? I mean, probably. I would assume.

Pretty difficult. However, but even with rewards and incentives, no one ever came forward with any information. However, after the DB Cooper hijacking, a series of letters reported to have written by DB Cooper were sent to various newspapers and media outlets. They contained taunting messages, cryptic references, and sometimes codes.

The first letter arrived five days after the flight and was received by the Seattle Times. It was signed by D.B. Cooper, who claimed responsibility for the hijacking, insisting that he had left no fingerprints and that the authorities were wasting their time looking for him. Several more letters arrived at various other newspaper organizations across December 1971 and March of 1972.

While they didn't contain any breakthroughs, they did include various ciphers and cryptid codes. The FBI had never officially confirmed that any of the letters were from the real D.B. Cooper. Wait, is cryptid a word? No, it's supposed to be cryptic. Yeah, cryptic. Why am I writing cryptid like cryptids? I know where you want to be. I know where your mind's at. We haven't done a cryptid episode in a while. It's getting to Jackson. It hasn't been that long. When was the Jersey Devil? It was like a month ago, maybe?

Jackson needs two a month to live we know this I don't know it's weird it's weird the cryptid episodes are the ones that perform the worst on the red thread but they're also like people seem to like them the most as well so it's very confusing it's called dedication it's called dedication Jackson yeah

They never confirmed that any of the letters were from the real D.B. Cooper, as there was no definitive evidence linking them to the hijacker. In fact, these are considered to be highly unlikely to be from the hijacker, as he used the name D.B. Cooper, which was the name given to him by the press before the first letter arrived, when in actuality, he had used the name Dan Cooper during the heist. While this doesn't rule the letters out as being authentic, it is more likely that they are a hoax orchestrated by any number of bored people following along with the investigation.

Yeah, I'll read this note out real quick. So this is one of the notes, just one of the notes. I only took the fifth letter note because I don't really believe in their authenticity.

But I'll read it out anyway. Did he hear me from the start? Yeah, he's in the call right now, actually. Jesus.

My life has been out of... Wait, my life has been one of hate, turmoil, hunger, and more hate. This seemed to be the fastest and most profitable way to gain a few fast grains of peace of mind. To be fair, he doesn't... Like, the attitude he had on the plane didn't seem like one of someone who was living a life of hate. From all accounts, he sounded like a pretty friendly dude. Yeah. I mean, this is also written very awfully. Like, I don't think this guy would have written this...

If you're reading this, I'm already dead. That kind of shit. I don't blame people for hating me for what I've done, nor do I blame anybody for wanting me to be caught and punished, though this can never happen. Here are some, underlined, not all of the things working against the authorities. I'm not a boasting man. Isn't this a boast in of itself? Yeah. Okay. I left no fingerprints. He did. I wore a toupee.

Okay. I wore putty makeup. Surely someone would see him wearing putty makeup. Surely someone would make that distinction. Yeah. This doesn't sound right at all. They could add- Flight attendant never mentioned he had like clown face paint on the whole time. Fucking Play-Doh on his face, like a really long pointy nose and stuff like that. Big rubbery eyebrows.

They could add or subtract from the composite a hundred times and not come up with an accurate description and we both know it. I've come and gone on several airline flights already and I'm not holed up in some obscure backwards town. Neither am I a psychopathic killer. As a matter of fact, I've never even received a speeding ticket. Thank you for your attention, DB Cooper. I do like the idea of this guy just not being a career criminal or anything, never committing a crime before in his life and he just does this. There is something kind of cool about...

Someone who's only got 14 months to live and then going out like this. I don't know. Kind of cool. I don't think any of these letters are him. DB Cooper doesn't strike me as someone who wanted... Obviously, he was cool, as discussed. But it doesn't strike me as someone who was a serial criminal who was looking to play along with the press or stuff like that. It looks like he just robbed some money and got away with it. I don't think these letters are him.

Nope, definitely not. It sounds like the guy was just making stuff up too. He heard about DB Cooper in the news. So he's like, I was wearing a toupee and putty makeup even though he's balding and had a thin face and none of that makes sense. And he left a ton of fingerprints. What are you talking about? Yeah. Why would you do this though? I mean, I get that it's fun and people still do it to this day. Have you met internet trolls nowadays? Imagine them pre-internet.

Yeah, yeah, true. But it's like the FBI could very probably easily find where this letter came from if they believed it to be authentic or cared enough to, you know, backtrack it. And then you're probably in trouble for, you know, fucking up an investigation. A lot of risk.

Oh, wait. Oh, yeah. I was reading. I forgot. Yeah. He was so stunned by your statement. I was like, wow. All right. That was cool. Thank you. That was a lot. Good point. You need a lot to chew on there. Man, I can't believe Charlie did this. Moving ahead now to 1980, nine years after the heist, eight-year-old Brian Ingram. Wait, what? What is this? Like, time jump, like, Scorsese. Yeah.

Hold on. Okay, we're in the investigation. And now, okay, it's 1989 years later. An eight-year-old boy named Brian Ingram. To be fair, nothing really happened in the investigation in those nine years. It's like I imagine in my head, like when you wrote this, Jackson, it's like 1980s music starts playing and it like the cameras panning down says like nine years later and it's like a boy. Yeah, it's really dramatic.

I'm here with you. I feel I catch the vibe. So nine years later, eight year old Brian Ingram was out with his dad building a campfire by the Colombian River at a spot called Tina Bar. Tina, Tina, look at that. Coincidence? I think not. He was running his hands along the sand when he felt something strange. Quote from Brian says, I took my arm and raked it along the sand and then I felt something fluffed up in the sand.

What Brian found was $5,800 in $20 bills in three bundles that when checked had the same serial numbers as the money given to DB Cooper. I can't believe that.

Eight-year-old Brian Ingram was D.B. Cooper. He reincarnated immediately. He died and then was reincarnated as eight-year-old Brian Ingram. Yeah, he fell directly out of the plane and died there. And he was born as a child who feels compelled to go back to that place. What? So...

he buried the implication here is that he buried this money here at Tina bar. Do you think he did that specifically for Tina to find? Maybe he was like, no, I don't, I don't know about that. So it says that the money was found in the sand. Right. And from what we know, he jumped out of a plane with the money strapped into like a reserve parachute. Right. So that probably did a bad job at holding it all together. And,

And once he hits the ground, assuming he lived, he needs to get out of there quickly. So maybe some money had just come loose and he had to ditch it. Oh, right. I thought you meant he hit the ground so hard and money went flying off in different directions. Yeah, like when Sonic gets hit in the game and the rings fly out. That's why the money's found in different parts of the country. Yeah, it's like...

It's like a you know, Modern Warfare 2 when you get a headshot how like money flies out of their head. Yeah. It's like that. He hits the ground like a hell trooper, like a hell diver. Money flies everywhere. It's so funny.

The notes were not in good shape and pretty disintegrated. The FBI kept 13 notes as evidence, but Brian got to keep the rest. What? Yeah, how does that happen? No way. This is the most small town cop thing I've ever heard. It's like, we found the money for investigation, but you little Brian, here's $5,400. Doesn't that money still belong to the bank, though? Like, they gave it away?

Yeah, it was stolen money. I assume it's no longer legal Tinder because of how disintegrated it was. Yeah, true. And it says that Brian later sold them at an auction for $37,000. Whoa! What? And the guy that bought it at the auction was D.B. Cooper.

The money back. Who got the money? I don't know. It was this man in a parachute. He's never taken it off. He's never taken it off. A portion of the money was now found, but it had been discovered 27 kilometers from where the supposed drop zone was. It was impossible for the money to have simply washed up here as the river was running in the opposite direction. This probably meant the initial drop zone area was wrong.

It's possible that D.B. Cooper could have also landed near a different river in a different area that did flow the correct way towards where the 5800 was found. It could have also naturally landed in that area when D.B. Cooper jumped, depending on exactly where the aircraft was when he made the leap of faith.

strangely the rubber bands around the bundles of money were also perfectly intact when the rubber bands were proven unable to withstand the elements for even just a year well that's probably because they were they were buried yeah um also i like so here a kid found it and was like oh look i found money how do you think there's a possibility someone else was hiking through the area before then and was like oh 40 bucks cool you know

Just pocketed it and moved on. Oh, like a lot more money around the area just scattered kind of. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Potentially. Maybe if someone found $5,000, they would have reported it. But if I saw 20 bucks on the ground, I wouldn't think anything of it. I'd be like, oh, look, $20. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. This is really the final evidence based update on the case in terms of investigation.

The FBI's investigation, codenamed Norjack, man, that's such a cool name, for Northwest hijacking, turned up very little. You know what? Say what you want about the CIA, the FBI, stuff like that, but they come up with the coolest codenames. Do they have a PR department that does that or marketing dudes? They're all based on something tangential to the case. When we talk about the... I'm losing his name. The Antarctica guy.

you know who I mean we just covered him Richard something I think it was sure anyway like that was Operation High Jump no no no it was Richard Bird wasn't it Bird oh yeah yeah yeah that's it Admiral Bird but no like Operation High Jump is I guess because maybe there was like like some kind of air jump involved or whatever I don't know but anyway they come up with cool names Norjack's awesome

In the 1980s to 2010s, the FBI continued to investigate tips, including several deathbed confessions, but nothing has been proven and nothing has been really exciting. In 2016, the FBI officially suspended the active investigation of the case, stating that the allocation of resources were better spent on more pressing priorities. I mean, yeah, duh, you know. There was one clue away. We almost had them.

Many theories surround the case with the FBI mostly believing Cooper did not survive the jump. However, there are some key theories and suspects to potentially explore. That is what the government does all the time. If they can't catch someone, they're like, well, that's because they actually weren't there to be caught.

Yeah, they're dead. We could only not catch them if catching was impossible. So therefore they cannot be catched. Since we've kind of run out of evidence to actually discuss, we're just going to go over suspects now. The most prominent suspects as well as some other theories. Like, do you guys believe that he survived?

Or do you think he died? No, I think he's dead. I don't think he made it. I think he went kaput. I think he slammed to the ground faster than anyone's ever slammed into the ground. Yeah, I love the idea. It's kind of like that scene in The Other Guys where they aim for the bushes and they jump off the building and die. That's kind of how I picture this unfolded in reality, to be honest. He's like, all right, it was nice meeting you, ladies. I'm out. He jumps out and then they just hear like a...

At like maybe 20 seconds later and he just splats on the ground. But then we have to ask like why like they didn't find any body or anything. Well in the Lamino video if I remember correctly the reason why the body would have been so hard to find is because of like there was a river down below and it would have carried the body and been very difficult to like find where that would have fed to.

I'd have to double check but I think that was in the Lamino video I want to believe he made it Logistic I mean obviously this guy was very well planned out right Like he had planned out you know the path of the airplane what to say to the airplane It wouldn't be beyond reason that he had some kind of pickup waiting on him you know Hmm

But I don't know how you would signal on a plane jump that you never designate the direction it's going. Because this was, you know, 71. It's not like they had cell phones. I don't know. It's also... Like, he also did it in the pitch dark, basically. And during a storm. So those conditions...

were probably even if he was experienced right those are pretty rough conditions to be skydiving in yeah i personally think that he just died um i mean yeah he probably did but it is cool it is definitely cool yeah i want to believe as well i'm gonna i'm gonna hold out hope

So we're going to go over the suspects now and we'll kind of do them one by one. We'll take turns doing the suspects, I think, because there's quite a lot of them. The police have had over 900 suspects in the D.B. Cooper case. So we're going to go over some of them as well as go over the popular theories. And I'm going to start with Kenneth Christensen, which I think might be like the favorite currently in terms of like what people believe. Most.

So Kenneth Christensen worked for Northwest Airlines. He wasn't really considered a suspect until 2003 when his brother, Lyle Christensen, was watching a documentary on D.B. Cooper and strongly believed it had been Kenneth, which is wild to go 30 years as this mysterious figure and then be dobbed in by your own family, snitched on by your own family. That's fucked up. He's like, by Jove, that's my brother. Yeah.

at the same time like I've known people who like have had family who were involved in crime and after that family members dead they've been like yeah this was actually them and it's kind of in my opinion it's kind of cool because it's like what he's not going to get in trouble for it anymore and it's like yeah remember all that stuff this was him this is how good he was at hiding it you know so I could see it

Yeah, I could see it, definitely. At this point, Kenneth had passed away around eight years earlier, but that didn't stop Lyle from remembering a pivotal conversation shared between the two of them. I think the conversation took place near when Kenneth had passed away. Lyle claims that his brother had once said to him that, quote, there is something you should know, but I cannot tell you. And that was it. That was all. That was what led Lyle to believing that Kenneth was a... Holy shit. Yeah.

What if it was just something stupid like he was just coming out of the closet or some dumb shit. I slept with your wife before you two were married. Yeah, something just completely innocuous but he immediately went to this guy's DB Cooper. Yeah, it's like his brother and his wife have clearly been having an affair and he's like, oh my gosh, he's DB Cooper.

His family had also found over $200,000 in his bank account after he died and was unsure where it came from. It was later discovered that this was from selling land. He unsuccessfully...

There's a mysterious $200,000. It came from business expenses and opportunities. They just really wanted to be him. His family hates Kenneth. He unsuccessfully tried to contact the FBI. When that failed, he turned... How can you be unsuccessful in trying to contact the FBI with these tips? That's how bad you are. That's how bad you are at it. Surely it's not that hard, right?

Uh, I honestly, I don't know. In 2003, I know now that with the internet and, you know, employees, there's a ton of like tip lines you can call and stuff like that. But I don't, I don't know about three. Hmm.

So when that failed, he turned to private investigator Skip Porteous. I don't know if that's a real name or not. Skip would later go on to release a book called, quote, Into the Blast, The True Story of D.B. Cooper, which outlines why he thought Kenneth Christensen was D.B. Cooper.

Kenneth had been a paratrooper in the army from 1944 to 1945, meaning he had experience with parachutes. Even after he was deployed and stationed in Japan in 1945, he still did training jumps for the following years. When he left the army, he went on to work as a laborer for Northwest Orient, stationed at the airline's Far East stopover on Shemya Island. This path led him to becoming a flight attendant, then a purser, being someone who managed money and orders and such on board.

A lot of this path lined up with the experience DB Cooper had, but Cooper and Kenneth didn't exactly match in appearance. Kenneth was shorter and thinner and balding.

He could have been wearing a wig, though. We don't know for sure. A toupee. He did say in the letter that we believe is fake that he was wearing a toupee. Beyond just this, Christensen was known to have an interest in skydiving and had a habit of buying and reading books on the subject, aligning with the profile of someone who would be comfortable with the parachute jump DB Cooper made. So what do you think about that, guys? You sold? That...

It's hard to deny some of those facts. He likes books about skydiving and his family and he made money. He made $200,000 from land sales. I mean, like, if you were this guy's brother and you heard all this, you'd be like, huh, that kind of reminds me of my brother. But to go, there's nothing conclusive, obviously. If I was this guy's brother and he accused me of being DB Cooper from a documentary, I'm mad. I'm just mad at him. Yeah, you could have put together yourself.

Yeah. He's sitting on the couch watching. He's like, Sarah, get in here. Come on. I can't believe it. Scroll up to the picture of D.B. Cooper, the composite picture by the FBI and the picture of Kenneth Christensen. What do you guys think? I mean, they look similar. Similar enough to you guys to be believable? They're not one for one, but I mean, I could see how someone would see the guy on the right and then think of the guy on the left.

Yeah. I can definitely get that. Yeah.

I'll take Robert. Yeah, you take Robert. Robert Rackstraw. He was an ex-pilot. He served in the Army as part of the helicopter crew and more in the Vietnam War. After he became a suspect for check fraud in 1977, he fled to Iran but was later detained and deported back to the U.S. where he faced charges of check kiting. It's a form of financial fraud that takes advantage of the time period when a check is deposited and when the bank funds are actually transferred.

And being in possession of explosives. He was arrested and then later acquitted for the apparent murder of his stepdad and then later arrested again months later when he was out on bail for attempting to fake his own death.

He sent a Mayday call out that he was over the Monterey Bay and he was going to jump out. But he was found in California where he faced more charges of forging federal pilot certificates. This guy's a fucking maniac. He's a lunatic. Yeah, this guy is a loose cannon. First guy to ever get the death penalty for forgery.

This time period created so many of these stories. You don't see this as much these days. Because now these guys are just like crypto scammers. It's not nearly as cool. There's such easier ways to steal money now. I also just think we're generally stupider. So these kind of things wouldn't even cross the minds of people. Also, like this guy is probably intelligent, right? Well, no, but he had to be a little more creative than a lot of the criminals. Yeah.

In 1971, Robert was 28, much younger than what D.B. Cooper was described as, although many thought they did resemble each other. He had experience with parachutes, military training, a criminal record, and also an uncle named John Cooper, who was a skydiver. In 1979, he was eliminated as a suspect. The reason why he was eliminated was that there was just no evidence linking him to the hijacking. Simple enough.

Even so, he went on to be featured as a suspect on the History Channel in 2016 and was the main suspect in the book, The Last Master Outlaw. Master Outlaw? Are you fucking kidding me? This guy's not a master. He fucking jumped out of a plane and died. He's like the worst possible outlaw. This is the best we have to offer. Yeah.

I've never seen Charlie and DB Cooper in a room together for one. So let's think about that. And also, Charlie, for someone who has suspicious connections to Cooper, is real adamant to prove that the guy died.

And we shouldn't look for him anymore. Well, if I could brew be died, I'd want like a reward for it. I've got my eye on you, Mr. Cooper, and that suspicious $200,000 you used to kickstart a YouTube career. Oh, shit. Yeah, Charlie, before YouTube, he was like, I need to make $200,000. I know what I'll do. I'll go back in time and hijack an airplane. It's genius. They'll never suspect it.

So the book was written by Thomas J. Colbert and Tim Sizzolzi. And Thomas Colbert was pretty convinced that Robert was Cooper and was even part of a volunteer group of investigators that while searching the Pacific Northwest came across what they alleged is decades old parachute strap. And a year later, followed by a piece of foam, they believe to be part of the parachute backpack.

They also reported having a letter of confession written in 1971. The letters purportedly from D.B. Cooper contained taunting messages to the authorities and the media along with cryptic codes and puzzles. You wrote cryptid again, you fucking imbecile. So it wasn't a mistake the first time I see. He did it on purpose.

Wow.

On the nose there. That's evidence in my eyes. Isn't Dan Cooper like a CNN anchor or something? Anderson Cooper. Anderson Cooper. Close. When shown pictures of Robert, crew from the hijacked flight didn't recognize him and didn't see any similarities between him and D.B. Cooper. But when a reporter asked Robert if he would...

But when a reporter asked Robert if he would DB Cooper, I don't know what that's meant to mean. What is that even supposed to mean, Jackson? I think it's supposed to say if he was DB Cooper. Oh yeah, maybe if he was DB Cooper, he said, I wouldn't discount myself. This is likely a joke, obviously. And he would consistently deny being DB Cooper until he died in 2019.

Well, wait, I wouldn't discount myself. Sounds like something D.B. Cooper would have said on the plane. Like that's in line with his kind of attitude, that kind of cool, those cool lines. I guess. There have also been interesting reports to come out from his death file from the police where they reported that he looked like the sketches and believed that he could have been capable of committing the hijacking in an apparent conflicting statement from the flight crew and key witnesses.

However, the FBI has never confirmed the letters were from D.B. Cooper, nor have they validated Colbert's decoding methods or conclusions. The authenticity of the letters are debated. Yeah, people don't really believe that the letters in the first place were real. And people don't believe that Colbert's decoding of those letters is like legitimate in any kind of way. Like the FBI doesn't believe it. The police don't believe it. They don't see the evidence there.

I'm going to go take a pee-pee Cooper real quick. I'll be right back. All right. You can take Richard McCoy Jr. All right. I shall now go on to Richard. Will this be him? Let's find out. Yeah. I will say, I think the picture looks the most like him. Wait, let me. Yeah. Wait, what about the last guy? Robert Rackstraw? No, I don't really see the Robert Rackstraw. No, he looks like too strong jawed. He also just looks too young. Yeah, I agree.

Richard McCoy Jr. was an Army veteran doing two tours of duty in Vietnam. Here, he worked as a demolition expert and also as a helicopter pilot. After this, he was a warrant officer at the Utah National Guard and had wanted to become a state trooper. To round this up, he was also into skydiving, so he had a lot of experience around bombs and parachutes, which made him a prime suspect for being D.B. Cooper.

But most notably, a year after the D.B. Cooper hijacking, Richard performed a copycat plane hijack. On April the 7th of 1972, Richard boarded a Boeing 727 in Colorado. Same plane. He had what appeared to be a hand grenade, which would later turn out to be a paperweight and an unloaded gun.

He gave the pilot a specific flight plan that he wanted them to follow. Very similar to D.B. Cooper, Richard demanded four parachutes and half a million dollars in cash and exited the plane by the aft stairs and jumped from the plane. There are other similarities too, both using a fake name and they both used the phrase no funny stuff in their letters, but Richard had actually left behind the note he had written instructions on and his fingerprints were over a magazine he had been holding.

It didn't take long for the police to find Richard. In fact, it only took two days. The authorities were tipped off by a motorist who picked up an unusual hijacker. Unusual. Unusual. Okay, that's what that tripped me up. Picked up an unusual hijacker who was wearing a jumpsuit and was talking about pulling off a hijacking.

When the police searched his house, Richard was actually on National Guard duty. He was flying one of the helicopters that was searching for the hijacker. He was searching for himself. So not only did he steal the money, he was making money searching for himself. I mean, I assume you make money while you're on National Guard duty, right? Yeah, yeah. That's great. He was making money searching for himself. That is so fucking funny.

In his house, police found the jumpsuit that the motorist had told them about and a duffel bag filled with $499,970. So it looks like he used 30 bucks. Yeah, he must have paid the motorist, maybe. The guy who gave him a lift. You were joking, though, about him having on his parachute or whatever. But it's very likely that this guy actually was picked up by the motorist while wearing his parachute and stuff. Yeah.

Hey, how's it going? I'm just a cool cat like you looking to get into town with $30. Make you not ask any questions. So funny.

He denied his guilt in the court, but Robert was convicted of the hijacking and received a 45-year sentence. Okay, so far, this guy, I see how he's a suspect because he does the same thing like a year later. But I feel like the image of D.B. Cooper in my head is too cool to do the exact same thing again, only worse. To be fair, not only that, the composite sketch and his face are pretty similar.

I guess. I don't know. Maybe. Maybe. Like, what are the odds? Well, what is, like... Okay, so he does the exact same heist. He gets away with it. Why didn't any of the 60 fingerprints work the first time? I think they degraded. Yeah, I was going to say. Probably just too old. Did anyone try to match those partial fingerprints to this guy's if he's supposed to be the suspect? Because you would think. Yeah, I mean, I assume they ruled it out due to, like, evidence and stuff like that.

He proved to be a problem in prison when he made a fake gun out of dental paste as he had access to the prison's dental office and with other prison inmates escaped on August 10th, 1974 by taking over a garbage truck and running it into the prison gates. All right, maybe this guy is D.P. Cooper. He can't be caged. Two escapees were arrested three days later after a failed bank robbery, but it took police three months to find Richard again.

Wait, who gets out of prison and then three days later are like, okay, we're going to rob a bank. That actually happens a lot. That happens a ton. Yeah. Even in current day, not like a bank per se, but like the second someone gets out of prison, they're like, all right, time to go commit another crime immediately.

There was a very tragic story, actually, I read not long ago about a guy who went to jail for murdering someone's mom, I think it was. He got released like 15 years later and the daughter forgave him, actually invited the guy to like hang out with her so they could be friends or whatever. And he ended up killing her like pretty soon after. Man, this is this is what like unfettered empathy gets you. Like, honestly, why would you ever forgive your mom's killer?

Yeah, I'll never understand that. I won't get on my soapbox about that. I understand forgiving someone in like a personal spiritual sense, right? Of like, I'm not going to live my life with hate. Letting go of it, basically. Exactly. But not being like, okay, let's give you a second chance, you know, around me. Not just that. Let's give you a second chance. You come over. I'll cook you dinner. Let's hang out.

You know, let's forge a connection. There's a difference between turning the other cheek and offering up the other cheek. Yeah. I think. Yeah. I mean, it's sad, though. Definitely. It is sad. It's tragic. It's very tragic. Tried to do like a good thing and was effectively taken advantage of by an evil person. Yeah.

They found him when he returned to his home in Virginia. When he entered the home, he was immediately face-to-face with the police. After a shootout and small car chase, he was arrested again. In 2020, documents relating to D.B. Cooper case were released with the Freedom of Information Act.

In these, it was found that as of late 2004, the FBI hadn't cleared Richard as a suspect in the D.P. Cooper case and were attempting to secretly get a sample of his DNA, but there's nothing further on it than that. Why would they need to secretly get it? Can't they just like get a warrant? Can you get a warrant and like procure his DNA through that?

uh if i so you can there's no laws about passively getting people's dna like you've probably heard stuff about how like investigators will be like oh here drink this right um so you can get your dna on a cup or whatever um

But you do have to get a judge to sign off to actually go ask someone for it. So maybe in 2020, or sorry, as late as 2004, there wasn't a judge willing to sign off on it or the FBI didn't want to escalate to that degree. It was just kind of like, hey, if we could passively get some of his DNA, that would be cool. Yeah, but this guy is pretty substantial, in my opinion, in terms of...

the possibility of him being DB Cooper. So surely a judge would take that if the FBI was like, you know... The only reason then that I could see them not just doing it is they didn't have enough evidence linking him to the actual crime. Yeah. I mean, I'm with you. I would think that this guy did the exact same thing a year later. Like, that seems substantial enough. But...

So far, this is the most likely guy, I think. Yeah. But there's nothing further on it than that. On the other side, Richard was only 29 in 1971, younger than what many thought D.B. Cooper was, mid-40s. I mean, that's not too crazy. There's 20-year-old people that look like they're in their 40s. I've seen several 29-year-old people who look like they're 40, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's very reasonable.

Younger, and the flight crew did not recognize him as the man who hijacked their flight, putting a lot of doubt in many's minds. Yeah, I think this is the most likely so far. I mean, but the flight crew didn't recognize him. That's pretty...

Yeah, but I mean, to be fair, it's that's not a very reliable thing to go on. Like, it doesn't look like the same guy. Tina was sitting next to him and chumming it up for like hours. Yeah, but if so, let's say Jackson, I haven't seen you in a while, but like, let's say someone comes up to me. It's like, is this Jackson Clark?

Actually, this isn't going anywhere because I know you too well. What the fuck? What do you mean you haven't seen me? Is this Jackson Clark? I should have chose someone that I don't see like once a week, actually. Thinking about it now. You don't see me. We don't look at each other. No, we don't. Yeah, but I see you in the videos. Yeah, I get your point, though.

I don't know why you chose me as an example. I don't know why I tried to make it relatable to you personally and it just doesn't work for that. What about my mom? What about my mom? That's a good one. I've never seen her though. That's the problem. That's not true. She's messaged you on Facebook before. Yeah, but it's not like she FaceTimes me. True. As far as you know. Alright. Yeah, fair enough. I don't know where to go with that. I'll take the next one.

Actually, no, Charlie, you can take the next one.

Dwayne Webber, he was a World War II veteran who had a life filled with crime like forgery and theft. He died in 1995 and his wife, Jo Webber, began to look back on all the strange connections that her husband had with the case. Dwayne Webber used to talk in his sleep, talking about leaving fingerprints on a plane. He also suffered from a knee injury that he said happened from jumping out of a plane. Before his death, Dwayne was suffering from kidney disease and he was laying in his bed in his final moments with joy by his side. He looked at her and motioned for her to come close.

This is a quote. He says, come here, come closer. He wanted me about two feet from his face. He says, I have a secret to tell you. I said, what? He says, I'm Dan Cooper. That's more direct than the other family quote that we had previously with, who was it? It was Kenneth Christensen. That's at least straight the point.

Yeah, he gave one little fucking oorah prank on the way out. What is with all these family members dumping them in multiple clout? They are. Well, no, probably some kind of money too, maybe. Oh, they... Selling the story. The dream talking about leaving fingerprints on a plane is so funny. Like he's haunted by it. Oh, fingerprints on the plane. Fuck, oh shit. Joe's like, what was that, honey?

Don't talk to me about it. Nothing. Nothing at all.

Dwayne Webber was investigated, but despite his confession, he was ruled out as a suspect. FBI still had the DNA that was on the clip-on tie in the plane, and it didn't match Dwayne, even though many see a resemblance in their appearance, and some believe the story has credibility. Mostly Joe Weber. She's the only one that believes in it. Do you mind if I do the next one, too, because it's super quick and this guy looks like an alien? That's what I was going to say. This guy looks like a fucking actual alien. Like, creepy.

So the next one is John List, who is another veteran and a convicted murderer. Two weeks before the D.B. Cooper hijacking, John List killed his wife, teenage children, and his mother in New Jersey, and he took out $200,000 from his mother's bank account and ran off.

Due to this timing and the mentality that John List really had nothing to lose, many suspect he could have been the mysterious D.B. Cooper. He was captured and arrested in 1989 where he denied any involvement with the hijacking. With this and no concrete evidence, the FBI stopped considering him a suspect and he died in prison in 2008.

He does kind of. He looks fatter on the right. Like, yeah. I don't know what the middle that those two pictures are. They literally look like aliens. Yeah, it's pretty cool.

I also don't think the guy who stole $200,000 also stole $200,000 from his mom's account. Yeah, well, this guy, John List, killed four or five people, and then he was super friendly on the plane. I don't believe that. I think that's got no weight.

All right. So the next one is William Smith. William Smith was proposed as DB Cooper in 2018 when the Oregonian, I think the Oregonian, that sounds right. Oregonian. Oregonian or whatever. Published an article about him titled new suspect in DB Cooper skyjacking case unearthed by army data analyst FBI stays mom, which means stays quiet. The

The article was written on research done by a data analyst in the army with the findings going to the FBI. William had combat air crew experience and after being discharged, he worked for a transportation company that ended up going bankrupt in 1970. He lost his pension and needed money, leading the article to theorize that this caused him to have a grudge against companies in the transportation industry. At the time, he was in his mid-40s.

And going back to his high school yearbook, it was discovered that someone he knew was killed in World War II who was named Ira Daniel Cooper.

The article talks about how due to William working for a railroad business, it would be possible for him to find rail tracks on the ground. Wait, what? So because he worked for a railroad business, he could just hunt down any railroad track in the country? I've seen railroads before. I've paved these roads. I can smell them from a mile away. He just puts his ear on the ground and he can track the nearest railroad track at any given place. He starts knocking on the sand. He's like, three miles due east. Yeah.

When looking at a map, wait, sorry. It would be possible for him to find rail tracks on the ground and hop on a train back to the East Coast. When looking at a map, it's reported that no matter where DB Cooper landed, he would be five to seven miles away from rail tracks. It also points out that aluminum chips found on the clip-on tie possibly came from a locomotive maintenance facility. And many think that William has a resemblance to DB Cooper. I mean, they all, everyone thinks that all these guys have a resemblance to DB Cooper.

But the FBI have refused to publicly comment on the tips made about William Smith. Yet again, just no evidence really like combining them. Also, his nose is completely different, like completely different. It is. Yeah.

Alright, so now those are the main suspects that we really could dig into. Now let's wrap up this episode and the DB Cooper kind of expose by going into the theories. Who wants to take the first one? I'll take that. The most likely one. So the most likely theory is that DB Cooper died while parachuting.

So D.B. Cooper was given four parachutes. Two were primary, one of these being a fully functioning sports parachute designed for skydiving, and the other was a military parachute, which was notably older and more difficult to maneuver. The other two parachutes were the reserves, meant to be backups if the primary failed.

One of these was fully functional. The other was not. Accidentally, DB Cooper had been given a training parachute that was unable to be used at all. Why would they do that to this man? I know it was an accident, but it's so fucked up.

Maybe it wasn't an accident. That's a very good way of getting rid of him. Yeah. Oh, maybe that's the conspiracy. Conspiratorial tie into this episode. Maybe they just genuinely gave him like a training parachute like they intended to just to kill him off. Like they meant to kill him. Yeah. This will teach you for stealing from our banking system. Yeah. But then why would they give him three other functioning ones? Yeah. Yeah.

The point of the training parachute is for students to be able to feel the pulling of the ripcord without it deploying. It's basically impossible to deploy. Yeah, it's not coming out. When authorities investigated the craft after the hijacking, two parachutes were found. The newer, easier-to-use primary and the functional reserve, which had the three shroud lines cut to help him carry the money. Wait, hold on. So...

This is on the aircraft. They found the only fine one. Yeah. So the only ones he took. Okay. This all led police to believe that if he did have experience with parachute skydiving or anything of the sort, it wasn't much, but he could have had more experience with the military style parachute explaining why he took that one as he knew how to use it. But why did he take the dummy reserve? And did he use the training one without realizing it wasn't it?

Without realizing it as a primary one. Without using it as a primary one is what I think you mean. If so, D.B. Cooper would not have survived the fall. So you're saying that he took the military one and the fake one and also the working reserve one as a money bag.

uh yeah no yes no wait uh two power no two parachutes were found on the plane on the plane but one of them had been cut had the shroud lines cut to carry the money yeah so i guess he was using the the uh the whatever you call the package not yeah he jumps out of the plane with a military one on him a fake one on him and a broken one for a money bag for the money bag yeah yeah

This is why the FBI almost instinctively believed from the start that D.B. Cooper didn't survive the fall. We originally thought Cooper was an experienced jumper, perhaps even a paratrooper, says Special Agent Carr. We concluded after a few years that this was simply not true. No experienced parachutist would have jumped in the pitch black night in the rain with a 200 mile an hour wind in his face, wearing loafers and a trench coat.

It was simply too risky. He also missed that his reserve chute was only for training and had been sewn shut, something a skilled skydiver would have checked. Oh, yeah. Maybe they were throwing it at him as a test to see if he actually knew about skydiving and stuff. They wanted to test him.

Oh yeah, Mr. Fancy Pants, figure this one out. Mr. I want to rob a plane, here's a parachute. Yeah, that kind of does leave credit to the idea that he wasn't an experienced parachutist. If he genuinely took the one that was sewn shut, surely he would have known if he was someone familiar with parachuting that that was a dummy chute. Yeah.

When DB Cooper jumped from the plane, he was also jumping into terrible weather conditions. There was a rainstorm and extremely strong winds, and the plane was going about 315 kilometers an hour. The military parachute he was using was also non-steerable, meaning he had to let it take him where it took him. And with the weather, darkness, and clouds, DB Cooper probably had no idea where he was going to land or even when to pull the chute.

So it was a non-steering shooter, just literally... If he was using the correct one, let's upround the assumption that he didn't use the training run and was able to use the correct one that he had. It was non-steering, so he literally just floated to wherever it took him, potentially landing in a very dangerous location. So...

I've got a bunch of buddies who did like... They were in like the 82nd and stuff like that. So they did a lot of jumps in the military. And I know that those are particularly low flying planes. But from the jump, I think you wait two seconds. Like from the last time your feet touch the plane before you pull it. And if you were to just free fall, it's like nine seconds till you hit the ground. It is not a long drop at all, right? So...

This plane also wasn't that high off the ground. He did not have a lot of time in the pitch start to figure all of this out, right? Yeah. And let's say the main chute that he was wearing was the bad one, the one that was sewn shut. He then would have had to shift and find the reserve chute and pull that

Yeah, not a lot of time to be able to do those kinds of changes, I assume. The next one is D.V. Cooper survived and was never found or considered. So there are a lot of suspects in the case, but no one was ever charged ever.

It is debatable, but perhaps DB Cooper did have knowledge on the terrain plane and a bit on skydiving, not a lot clearly. So maybe he did survive the fall. Many who believe this look towards ransom money that was found in Tina Bar that we discussed. Considering the pristine rubber bands they were wrapped in, the money very well could have been buried there.

It could have been buried there, which would imply at least the possibility of D.B. Cooper having survived the descent. Also, as an additional piece of circumstantial evidence that supports this theory, no one ever filed a missing persons report matching the description. So if D.B. Cooper did exist and died, he had no loved ones.

No one cared. Well, I feel like it'd be... No, I feel like you'd have to check every missing person's report ever. Because we still don't know where exactly he came from. They checked missing person's reports in the area, but he could have just come from another area spontaneously. I'm sure someone would have noticed a missing report that looked suspiciously like the composite sketch of D.B. Cooper. But there's probably just so many. Yeah, I don't know how many... I'm not going to...

throw out any suggestions on me knowing the exact amount of missing person reports in the 70s. I don't know. I'll conclude with the obvious one here. D.B. Cooper died upon impact, but the money was then discovered and taken.

The buried money can also lead into another theory. D.B. Cooper died, but his body was found and either hidden or destroyed with whoever did it taking the ransom. I like the destroyed word there. Like it was a fucking horcrux or something. Like they hacked his body up or something. They blew it up with tannerite. Yeah.

The terrain he jumped to would have been a fairly easy place to hide a body, and although the area was searched, it was impossible to be thorough. The FBI have officially closed their active investigation towards finding out who D.B. Cooper is, but the case is still active, many enthralled by the theories and possibilities on what could have happened. Will we ever find out who D.B. Cooper is? I like how we're using is as if he's still alive. He's a vampire. He's immortal. You never know.

So what do you guys think? Let's hear the final theories. He died. He's dead. Well, he's dead. He's probably... It's been 50 years. I'm going to... And he was 40 back then. I'm going to go with the man of faith, so to speak, in this one. I think that if he did survive the jump, then it's none of the suspects and we're never going to know who it was. Okay. So you don't think any of the suspects are that enticing? I think if he got away with it, he's not immediately doing the same thing again, but worse. Okay.

Okay. Well, I do like if it is one of the suspects, I do think it is that Richard McCoy guy. He's the most likely. I agree. But I still think it's not him. Yeah. I think that's the most likely. But I also agree that it's just I really think he died. He just hit the ground so hard that the money flew over to Tinnabar and was buried in the impacts like a meteorite. Yahoo!

Yeah, it's like fucking Mario. Yeah, just full speed. Yeah, just full speed because the fucking parachute was unable to be deployed. And so, yeah, I guess the money, if it wasn't... Because if it was... If his body hit the ground, like splatoon in some random location that was hard to find, then the money would have just deteriorated over time.

The only thing that's like slightly confusing is the fact that money was eventually found and that it was buried, which might mean that someone did find the money and then buried it themselves. I don't know. I'm still thinking that he died on impact though. I think that's the most likely. I think so for sure.

Alrighty, that's going to do it for this episode of the Red Thread. Leave your comments below about what you think happened to DB Cooper or if you've got any interesting leads on DB Cooper. Do you have a family member that's on their deathbed confessing to you right now that they were DB Cooper? Let us know. Let us know about it. That's where most of the suspects come from. So let's add some more.

But really just let us know what your thoughts about DB Cooper are. Let us know what your theories are. Really appreciate you guys joining us for this episode and we hope that you're enjoying Red Thread a lot. Yeah. Thank you very much for watching and we'll see you next time. Thanks everyone. Bye bye. Bye bye. Thank you all for watching. Bye. ... ...