Speaker 1: Hey everybody. Chuck here with another call for guests for
Speaker 1: Movie Crush, my new show debuting November three, where I
Speaker 1: sit down with famous people to talk about their all
Speaker 1: time favorite movie. So if you are a secret celebrity listener,
Speaker 1: get in touch with me at movie Crush at how
Speaker 1: stuff Works dot com, especially if you happen to be
Speaker 1: filming in Atlanta, where our studios are, because in person
Speaker 1: is always best, but we can always do it remotely
Speaker 1: with partner studios. All right, Thanks a lot, and look
Speaker 1: out for Movie Crush November three. Hey, friends, this is Chuck.
Speaker 1: Just wanted to intro this show really quickly because it
Speaker 1: is from the archive. It's a live show that we
Speaker 1: did on our tour last year, all about the mysterious
Speaker 1: disappearance of sky jacker d B. Cooper. And this was
Speaker 1: recorded live in Seattle, Washington at the Neptune Theater and
Speaker 1: it was one of the best shows on the tour
Speaker 1: and we hope you enjoy it. And keep in mind
Speaker 1: this is recorded before we found out more recent news
Speaker 1: about the dB Cooper case, so that stuff has happened
Speaker 1: since then. But please to enjoy, Welcome to stuff you
Speaker 1: should know from How Stuff Works dot com hey, and
Speaker 1: welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W.
Speaker 1: Chuck Bryant, and we are here live at the Beautiful
Speaker 1: Neptune Theater and beautiful Seattle and beautiful Washington. Thank you guys, phenomenal.
Speaker 1: I'm already a sweaty mess, so that must mean we're
Speaker 1: on stage. We're off to a great start. That must
Speaker 1: mean I'm awake or yeah, I sweat my sleep too,
Speaker 1: big time gross, I'm always wiping his brows. What movie
Speaker 1: we're gonna watch tonight in the hotel? Is a spy
Speaker 1: out yet? And we can leave the seat up on
Speaker 1: the toilet? I don't. I don't do that. I don't
Speaker 1: either because I pee sitting down because I'm forty five
Speaker 1: years old. Do you really well, yeah, I might as
Speaker 1: well get into it. Um, what do you do too?
Speaker 1: Why we never talked about this? I started being sitting
Speaker 1: down during the middle of the night, Get up because
Speaker 1: if it just makes sense, because you don't want to
Speaker 1: wake up too much and you don't want to like
Speaker 1: make a mess. And then I think I just hit
Speaker 1: a certain an age where I was like, it's just
Speaker 1: nicer to sit down. I don't need to prove anything
Speaker 1: to anyone. Huh, you landed your lady, You're all set.
Speaker 1: I stand when I pee off my deck at night,
Speaker 1: I don't do that. I live in a condo complex.
Speaker 1: They it's not good man. I feel like an enormous weight.
Speaker 1: It's just been lifted off. I can't believe that you're
Speaker 1: not even forty years old yet and you pee sitting down.
Speaker 1: Let's let's start the podcast. Are there other guys out
Speaker 1: there that peace sitting down? All right? We're starting a movement, baby,
Speaker 1: it's right. Your ladies will appreciate it. Oddly, I pooped
Speaker 1: standing up. This is so off. The rails are like
Speaker 1: like in in conversation. Let's be sitting there talking to him.
Speaker 1: You're like, you're pooping right now, aren't you. It's like
Speaker 1: it's more efficient this way. I get more done. We
Speaker 1: should probably start over. We should. We're gonna get off
Speaker 1: stage and come back out. I can't believe what we've
Speaker 1: been talking about here this evening already. Okay, let's I'll
Speaker 1: just take it down the notch all right. Uh so
Speaker 1: we're podcasting. We're about to start podcasting. I think I
Speaker 1: already started the podcast. Oh god, which means that's gonna
Speaker 1: be on like the thing we That's why I said
Speaker 1: we should start over. The stays here everybody, it's all
Speaker 1: our secret, right, Okay, Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. We are
Speaker 1: live here at the beautiful Neptune Theater in Seattle, Washington.
Speaker 1: M hmm, man, times two's better. It's an in joke.
Speaker 1: People will be like even better than what h really m.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of there's more crossover between our fans
Speaker 1: and Howard Stern than our fans and Mariners fans. I think, boy,
Speaker 1: there's a venn diagram out there that's uh confusing me already. Okay,
Speaker 1: so Chuck, yes, this is a little bit of history.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna go back in the way back machine.
Speaker 1: That's right, Dud's if you listen to the PR Live podcast,
Speaker 1: you know that, like the way back Machine is a
Speaker 1: mad scenario stif settled down. They heard that live. Yeah
Speaker 1: that was a good one too. There are PR professionals
Speaker 1: here because they emailed me today. Yeah, I can tell
Speaker 1: the PR professional So we're going back to a cold, stormy, rainy,
Speaker 1: pretty nasty Thanksgiving Eve in and the story begins at
Speaker 1: p d X Portland Airport and a man walked into
Speaker 1: pd X, took a picture of his shoe on the carpet,
Speaker 1: and then walked along to the Northwest Orient Airlines ticket
Speaker 1: desk and he walked up and he said, Hi, I
Speaker 1: am really interested in finding more about flight three oh five,
Speaker 1: the flight to Seattle. Would that happen to be a
Speaker 1: Boeing seven seven Dash one hundred airplane that you guys
Speaker 1: are gonna fly on that route? And the ticket agment, Yes,
Speaker 1: as a matter of fact, it is. And the man
Speaker 1: said that it's fantastic. Here's my twenty dollars one ticket
Speaker 1: please for a one way ticket between Portland's and Seattle
Speaker 1: aboard flight three oh five. And she was like, that's
Speaker 1: a weird question, but I guess he's very specific about
Speaker 1: what kind of plane he likes to fly on. Plus
Speaker 1: it's one and I'm in no position to publicly question
Speaker 1: a man, so I'll just go along with this. It's
Speaker 1: very true, and it was twenty dollars for that flight.
Speaker 1: This is a very seventies podcast, so uh. They handed
Speaker 1: him as little ticket voucher and said, just filled this out, sir. Uh.
Speaker 1: Don't need the C I D because it's nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 1: All right, just tell us who you are or whoever
Speaker 1: you want us to think you are. And he wrote
Speaker 1: down in big block letters in a red ink pin,
Speaker 1: Dan Cooper, if you know where we're going with this song.
Speaker 1: So the Bowing seven Dash one hundred is every single
Speaker 1: person in this room knows is a smallish plane. It's
Speaker 1: not the biggest planet in the Bowing fleet's not the
Speaker 1: smallest either, but it's the only one that had an
Speaker 1: aft staircase. Right, And this particular flight flying aboard this
Speaker 1: Bowing seven seven Dash one flight three oh five had
Speaker 1: a crew of five aboard it. There was Captain William Scott,
Speaker 1: not Sewan William Scott. We figured out later on that
Speaker 1: would have made zero sense had he had a former
Speaker 1: life in the seventies as an airline pilot. UH CO
Speaker 1: pilot Robert Radazak. There's a se in there for those
Speaker 1: of you who like that kind of thing. Um and uh.
Speaker 1: There were three flight attendants. There's a head flight attendant
Speaker 1: who was named Alice Hancock, right, and then too, I
Speaker 1: guess regular flight attendants. Tina mcclough, who's a hero of
Speaker 1: ours and Florence Shafterer, I think they called him stewarts
Speaker 1: Is back then, to be fair. But we're forward thinking guys,
Speaker 1: so we're gonna go ahead and say flight AT's ended.
Speaker 1: We don't use the sport you just make well, never mind,
Speaker 1: never mind, We've done quite enough extraneous stuff, right, No,
Speaker 1: So Dan Cooper gets on the plane. There's thirty seven
Speaker 1: other passengers because again it was the seventies, they didn't
Speaker 1: overbook flights back then, and say I'm sorry you bought
Speaker 1: a ticket, but you really can't fly on this flight.
Speaker 1: Thirty seven passengers, pretty empty, and Dan Cooper seats sits
Speaker 1: in seat eighteen. C uh. They for him up a
Speaker 1: bourbon and seven up and he lights up a cigarettette
Speaker 1: because this ninety one you can smoke on planes. And uh,
Speaker 1: he looked to be about in his mid forties. He was,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of look like the men of the time,
Speaker 1: which is to say, you either looked by seventy one,
Speaker 1: either looked a little more like Don Draper kind of
Speaker 1: holding on to that fifties look, or you look like
Speaker 1: Charles Manson. He looked a little more like Don Draper.
Speaker 1: Had the suit, had the skinny tie, and then we
Speaker 1: should talk a little bit about the suit. The suit
Speaker 1: was a russet colored suit, which was like that weird
Speaker 1: burgundy brown color that's potato colored it right, And it
Speaker 1: just so happened that he was wearing this suit during
Speaker 1: the one six month period in history where you could
Speaker 1: wear that color suit out in public, So he was okay.
Speaker 1: And then his skinny tie was a clip on from J. C. Penny.
Speaker 1: That's right. He had a imitation Mother of Pearl type in.
Speaker 1: He had an overcoat, he had a hat, he had
Speaker 1: a bag like a briefcase, and he had these black
Speaker 1: corn rim sunglasses. Um, dark kind of olive skin. Would
Speaker 1: you say? They call him swarthy, which I think is
Speaker 1: like stewardess that's been phased out, you know what I mean?
Speaker 1: I thought swarthy. I thought that was like a sea captain.
Speaker 1: I'm sure there were swarthy sea captains because yeah, because
Speaker 1: they're out in the sun, so they ended up getting
Speaker 1: olive skinned. That's uh rugged, Okay, you're thinking of the
Speaker 1: Gordon's fisherman. Oh right, Oh, he was swarthy. He swarthy
Speaker 1: as h so uh he had h he had this
Speaker 1: kind of dark wavy hair, um and other than that,
Speaker 1: he was just sort of an unremarkable dude. He wanted
Speaker 1: to blend in right. Well, yeah, okay, so this guy's
Speaker 1: sitting in a teen C. He's being unremarkable aside from
Speaker 1: wearing the sunglasses. He's smoking with his left hand. She
Speaker 1: has nothing to do with anything, but we just kind
Speaker 1: of wanted to show off how much research we've done
Speaker 1: on this. And uh, when Florence Shaffner, the flight attendant
Speaker 1: working his area, comes over, um and gives him his
Speaker 1: bourbon and I think seven up right, yeah, Um, he
Speaker 1: hands her a note and to Florence Shaffner, she was
Speaker 1: twenty three, she was very pretty. She was at the
Speaker 1: time a stewardess, and um, this happened to her all
Speaker 1: the time, like businessmen drinking sevens and sevens like pastor
Speaker 1: notes and hit on her all the time. So when
Speaker 1: this guy in a ten C, Dan Cooper handed her
Speaker 1: a note, she took the note and just put it
Speaker 1: in her flight apron without looking at it, and turned
Speaker 1: and walked away with all the other notes. Yeah from
Speaker 1: all the men who wanted to rescue her from her
Speaker 1: life come away with swarthy and so Dan Cooper sees
Speaker 1: us and he goes, miss, uh, you may want to
Speaker 1: have a look at that note. I have a bomb.
Speaker 1: I think you know where we're going with this, TB. Cooper.
Speaker 1: You know, we when we were coming here today, we're like,
Speaker 1: how we're really rolling the dice. It's entirely possible that
Speaker 1: everyone here had the dB Cooper case drilled into them
Speaker 1: from like third grade on. That's not the cases didn't
Speaker 1: study in classes. I told that to you, me and you.
Speaker 1: He was like, that's so dumb. She's like, the do
Speaker 1: you know everything about the burning of Atlanta? And I
Speaker 1: said no, And she's like, no, no, you don't, And
Speaker 1: they don't know everything about dB Cooper. And I went
Speaker 1: back to sleep. So this was um not the first
Speaker 1: commercial airplane hijacking. It actually the first one was in
Speaker 1: and remarkably um between nineteen, just three years earlier. In
Speaker 1: the time dB Cooper hijacked this plane, there were one
Speaker 1: hundred commercial hijackings in three years. Yeah, so this is
Speaker 1: not new. It was not new, but I remember, like
Speaker 1: if anyone here grew up in like the seventies and stuff,
Speaker 1: it was a thing like planes got hijacked all the
Speaker 1: time because you could bring guns and bombs on planes
Speaker 1: and you didn't need I D. No one cared, and
Speaker 1: we were like, hmm, this is weird. Yeah, that's pretty
Speaker 1: much where the FBI was at the time. And by
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy one they were just starting to like get
Speaker 1: hip to the idea of hijackings being a problem. And
Speaker 1: so their first idea was, well, we'll put an air
Speaker 1: marshal on every flight. And then they looked at the
Speaker 1: schedule of flights in the United States and they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: this may have been a bad idea, but it was
Speaker 1: a fine idea. If everyone, if like a third of
Speaker 1: the population of the United States where air marshals, and yeah,
Speaker 1: it was a good idea. It's a good idea. One
Speaker 1: of every like three hundred flights with a right right
Speaker 1: and the other two open for hijacking. Right. So this
Speaker 1: was they figured out after a few years, like the
Speaker 1: logistics of American air trap. Hoover's idea. By the way,
Speaker 1: he was still in charge of the FBI. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: he'd been there for about fifty years, right, So his
Speaker 1: idea was airon Marshall's didn't work, um, but they were
Speaker 1: still trying it. There was no air marshal on flight
Speaker 1: three oh, five, the dB Cooper hijacking flight. Yeah, they're
Speaker 1: like Portland to Seattle. Maybe we should put like three
Speaker 1: air marshals on that one, right, And I mean it
Speaker 1: made sense that there would not be an air marshal
Speaker 1: on that flight because most high jackings were crazed lone
Speaker 1: gunman with a handgun who wanted to be taken to
Speaker 1: Cuba for political reasons. Basically, no one flying from PDX
Speaker 1: to c Tech wanted to be taken to Cuba, so
Speaker 1: there was no reason for an air marshal to be
Speaker 1: on the flight. It was a pretty good bet to
Speaker 1: not have an air marshal on. They just didn't expect B. B.
Speaker 1: Cooper because he was a pretty novel person. The idea
Speaker 1: of a single guy taking control of a flight for
Speaker 1: money with a bomb that was new and like our
Speaker 1: whole conception of mad bomber hijacking a flight comes from D. B.
Speaker 1: Cooper and sunny bonus character and airplane too. This is
Speaker 1: actually I did a little more research between nine and
Speaker 1: seventy nine. It's literally referred to as the Golden age
Speaker 1: of sky chacking. I was talking to Josh, It's like,
Speaker 1: I didn't know that you could have I thought a
Speaker 1: golden age was about something good. I didn't know you
Speaker 1: could have the golden age of dysentery the good old days.
Speaker 1: It was good for the hijackers because they could get
Speaker 1: away with it no problem. Maybe that's who wrote that,
Speaker 1: the Golden age of skuyjacking man. Alright, so, uh, Floren Schaffner,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. Shaffer reads the note and she says, uh,
Speaker 1: you know what, give me our Cooper says, you know what,
Speaker 1: give me that note back, which is a very key
Speaker 1: thing because that means they won't have a sample of
Speaker 1: his handwriting. So he asked for the note back, and
Speaker 1: from that point on he uh did not converse like
Speaker 1: everything else. He had them right down to take to
Speaker 1: the captain so they would have no more like physical
Speaker 1: evidence of his handwriting. Yeah. The only handwriting sample he
Speaker 1: had was that ticket duplicate and it was in block letters,
Speaker 1: which he went like this. So she sits down and
Speaker 1: she says, uh, you know, I want to know that
Speaker 1: this is legit, this is for real. Can I can
Speaker 1: I like get a look at that bomb that you're
Speaker 1: talking about? Makes sense? And he shows her, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he gives her look. Peak he opened her his bag
Speaker 1: just enough and she went to put her fingers in
Speaker 1: any stamped shot and she went just like pretty woman. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh, but she sees what you know, she sees
Speaker 1: red sticks of dynamite and a battery and and I
Speaker 1: guess presumably like an alarm clock with two two bells
Speaker 1: on it. Right, it's got like a skull and cross boones.
Speaker 1: It's like he says, you die or something. Electrical tape
Speaker 1: is all around it. Because he watched a lot of cartoons.
Speaker 1: He knows how to make a bomb. Well, she I
Speaker 1: mean she bought it clearly. Um, she saw the bomb
Speaker 1: and she uh took down a note. He said, take
Speaker 1: this down. I have a ransom demand. He said, I
Speaker 1: want two hundred thousand dollars by five pm in cash.
Speaker 1: Put it in a knapsack. I want two back parachutes
Speaker 1: and two front parachutes when we land. I want a
Speaker 1: fuel truck ready to refuel. No funny stuff. We're all
Speaker 1: do the job, which is that was tough talk. In again,
Speaker 1: he watched a lot of cartoons. And that's what you
Speaker 1: say when you mean business. Uh, that roughly is about
Speaker 1: one point two million dollars today. Um, I think it's
Speaker 1: a little low. If you're gonna go through a skyjacking.
Speaker 1: It's a lot of work for a million. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: would have said, like, if you're gonna ask for two
Speaker 1: d grand asked for three hundred or four hundred, that's
Speaker 1: just me. I'm no skyjacker. So this is it turns
Speaker 1: out to be the only threat that Dan Cooper makes
Speaker 1: during the entire ordeal. He he is this very first
Speaker 1: note that he gave up. So from that point on,
Speaker 1: like I said, he dictated everything else, so they could
Speaker 1: just pass notes back and forth. And aside from a
Speaker 1: couple of conversations with the pilots on the cockpit phone
Speaker 1: from the rear of the plane to the cockpit, uh,
Speaker 1: they didn't have any interaction the pilots whatsoever with Dan Cooper.
Speaker 1: So they were like almost no help whatsoever during the investigation. Right,
Speaker 1: and then the fact that he asked for two parachutes
Speaker 1: was a stroke of brilliant because it did show his
Speaker 1: hand to the FBI that he was going to jump
Speaker 1: out of the plane with the ransom money. But it
Speaker 1: also said FBI, I'm probably going to make a hostage
Speaker 1: jump with me, so don't tamper with any of these parachutes,
Speaker 1: which if the FBI had would have been murder. But
Speaker 1: we're talking about Jagre Hoover's FBI, so they may have
Speaker 1: they may have tried just that. So it's pretty smart
Speaker 1: that he asked for two pair because they didn't know
Speaker 1: what he was gonna do, That's right. So Shaffner takes
Speaker 1: that ransom note, gives it to Alice Hancock. She takes
Speaker 1: it over to the pilot and the co pilot and uh,
Speaker 1: well what did they do? Josh? You do a great pilot?
Speaker 1: They called c Tech Airport and staid, uh, seat Tech,
Speaker 1: we just wanna advise you. In a bit of a
Speaker 1: fiddlesticks we got going on, Sonny Bono was taken control
Speaker 1: of the planets dollars in negotiable American currency PM negotiable
Speaker 1: American currency. Yeah, it's a very weird thing to ask
Speaker 1: for it, it was. And so set Act was like,
Speaker 1: we should probably call the cops, and the cops said
Speaker 1: we should probably call the FBI. Well yeah, this was
Speaker 1: the Seattle Police Department. In one They're like no, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: we we don't deal with things like this. They're like, wait, wait,
Speaker 1: this guy doesn't want to go to Cuba. We don't understand,
Speaker 1: Like we're literally waiting for John Rambo to wander through town, right,
Speaker 1: so we can harass them just ten more years. Wait,
Speaker 1: that was Oregon, though, wasn't it? Okay? Pretty close? That
Speaker 1: joke will kill tomorrow night. Yeah, man, Rambo joke, remember it. So, um,
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, like there's all this crazy energy
Speaker 1: going on down on the ground, right, So the FBI
Speaker 1: comes in and um, they're they're trying to get the
Speaker 1: money together. Um, They're like, you, we have an hour.
Speaker 1: You gotta give us more time. It's like, now you
Speaker 1: can't have more time. They're like, Okay, that's fine, we'll
Speaker 1: get all this stuff together. You guys are gonna have
Speaker 1: to stay up there until we get everything ready for you.
Speaker 1: So the plane is circling Sea Tack, and they told
Speaker 1: the passengers that, um, the plane was experiencing mechanical problems,
Speaker 1: which I would have had a problem hearing, you know,
Speaker 1: it wouldn't have Like I think they could have thought
Speaker 1: that through a little more. It's it's coxperiencing mechanical problems.
Speaker 1: So we're just gonna keep flying and to stay aloft.
Speaker 1: See what happens. Captain Scott as a gambling man so
Speaker 1: everyone was drinking and smoking cigarettes, so they didn't care.
Speaker 1: They were hooking up in the bathroom. If it had
Speaker 1: been Chuck, you would have been like, I told you,
Speaker 1: we should have driven. It's nothing. Could have been to Portland.
Speaker 1: So they had to circle for an hour, and they
Speaker 1: ended up telling the passengers, we just need to burn
Speaker 1: off some gas and everything will be fine. Right, and
Speaker 1: the passengers apparently we're totally unaware that they've been hijacked.
Speaker 1: That's how cool Cooper was, right, But one passenger later said,
Speaker 1: I had a pretty good feeling we've been hijacked. And
Speaker 1: the press ball was like, shut up, get off the
Speaker 1: day it was that next person. Um, so I was
Speaker 1: at that game. Yeah, I was at that game seven.
Speaker 1: It was all right, he's that dude, you know any
Speaker 1: remarkable event. Yeah, I was there. It was it was
Speaker 1: I knew it was a hijacking. You really had me
Speaker 1: stumped there for a second. I'm role playing games seven.
Speaker 1: So C Tech is circling right there, circling, circling an hour,
Speaker 1: killing time, but just burning off gas, and um Florence
Speaker 1: Shaffner is has gone away to take the note to
Speaker 1: Alice Handcocky takes notes to the cockpit. She's on the
Speaker 1: relay team basically now, um and um dB Cooper says, well,
Speaker 1: Dan Cooper says, hey, Tina McLoud, why don't you sit
Speaker 1: beside me for a while. And she did, and she
Speaker 1: ended up kind of taking a bit of a seat
Speaker 1: in history, if you will feel allow us that terrible analogy. Um.
Speaker 1: And she sat down and she got She spent a
Speaker 1: lot of time with Dan Cooper and they ended up chatting,
Speaker 1: and she said Dan Cooper kept a level head during
Speaker 1: a very tense situation, like the whole time. And they
Speaker 1: chatted about things like Tina muck claus home state, which
Speaker 1: was Minnesota. They talked about a nearby Air Force base
Speaker 1: and how long it took to drive to Sea Tach.
Speaker 1: It was like twenty minutes or something. You guys can
Speaker 1: actually probably guess the air force base. We don't know,
Speaker 1: uh that one. And then um they also at one
Speaker 1: point he looked out the window and he said, it
Speaker 1: looks like we're over Tacoma. So all this would indicate
Speaker 1: a lot to the FBI later on, right that this
Speaker 1: guy was maybe a local. Yeah, I'm kind of curious,
Speaker 1: could anyone here recognize Tacoma from an airplane from an
Speaker 1: airplane airplane? Do they have a huge like field cut
Speaker 1: out of grass that says Tacoma corn. What are they saying?
Speaker 1: I think they're saying coin. Yeah, the smell. Oh boy,
Speaker 1: I knew that. I knew this would go over well. Here.
Speaker 1: By the way, we didn't mention they diverted all the
Speaker 1: other flights away from from Sea Tech at the time
Speaker 1: because they wanted that to be the only plane in
Speaker 1: the area. And to me, the most remarkable part of
Speaker 1: this whole story is one of the other planes in
Speaker 1: the air. The dude, the pilot, gets on and tells
Speaker 1: everyone else on that plane what's going on. Well, he
Speaker 1: like he patched into the calm link between flight three
Speaker 1: oh five and Sea Tech for the listening enjoyment of
Speaker 1: the passengers on his flight. It's insane. It's like, I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: we're delayed, but here's what's going on on another flight nearby.
Speaker 1: All right, just sit back and listen to the Tulsa
Speaker 1: tones of a sky jacking again. It was the seventies.
Speaker 1: Everyone's drinking. They're like, this is remarkable, thank you, thank god,
Speaker 1: it's not us. Everything's better when you're drinking, all right,
Speaker 1: So he recognizes Tacoma, which apparently everyone in this room
Speaker 1: could do. Right. We were impressed by that, but it's
Speaker 1: nothing occasionally, went I suppose like Tacoma. Uh so all
Speaker 1: of these are sort of clues. Though. If you recognized Tacoma,
Speaker 1: he knew about the air Force space, that clearly maybe
Speaker 1: the guy's kind of from the area might be a clue.
Speaker 1: Later on, so uh much law at this point asked
Speaker 1: Dan Cooper. She said, do you have a grudge against
Speaker 1: our airline, sir? And he said, no, ma'am, I don't
Speaker 1: have a grudge against your airline. I just have a
Speaker 1: grudge critic right. She was like, yeah, like they did.
Speaker 1: So back on the ground, the FBI is like going crazy,
Speaker 1: The local cops are going crazy. Everybody's going crazy trying
Speaker 1: to get two grand and cash together. It turns out
Speaker 1: that was the easiest part of this whole thing. So
Speaker 1: Northwest orients UM president at the time, Donald Nyrop Any
Speaker 1: Nye Rops in the house. He would have been in Minnesota.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, yeah, but I'm convinced that someone in here
Speaker 1: is going to be related to someone in this story.
Speaker 1: Oh I am too, Yeah, I am waiting for somebody's
Speaker 1: saying and be like that's a lie, or for someone
Speaker 1: to stand up and say I am DVI Cooper, that
Speaker 1: would be amazing. We'd have to come up with a
Speaker 1: different show tomorrow or just bring him along and here
Speaker 1: he is everybody. So Donald ny rop Um, the president
Speaker 1: of Northwest Orient, He's like, yeah, sure, we'll totally pay that.
Speaker 1: We have a huge um insurance policy on this kind
Speaker 1: of thing. Um Apparently Northwest had to pay like twenty
Speaker 1: grand and their insurance company hit out a hundred eight
Speaker 1: Graham and they tapped c First Bank, which had a
Speaker 1: downtown branch, And in this downtown branch they had a
Speaker 1: really great idea. They had stacks of twenty dollar bills
Speaker 1: in varying amounts so that it looked like a nervous
Speaker 1: teller ran into the back and like put some twenties
Speaker 1: together in the event of a bank robbery, right, and
Speaker 1: then would come out and be like, here you go,
Speaker 1: a bank robber. You're getting off scott free. But it
Speaker 1: turns out that every serial number on every one of
Speaker 1: those twenties have been recorded. So it worked for bank robberies,
Speaker 1: worked just as well for sky jackings as well, so
Speaker 1: they had the money. No problems. The parachutes were just
Speaker 1: very difficulty. That was actually the harder part. Uh. Back
Speaker 1: in the big recreational sky diving craze had not yet
Speaker 1: taken hold. That happened here and there. But the manager
Speaker 1: at s tax said, I got a guy, don't you worry. Um,
Speaker 1: he's got an operation called Seattle Sky Sports and its aqua.
Speaker 1: Anybody from missuah shout out, why do you call it
Speaker 1: Seattle sky Sports? That did they mooch off of Seattle? Yeah,
Speaker 1: off of the teet of Seattle. He's like, I got
Speaker 1: a guy. His name is Earl Cossi, and uh he
Speaker 1: agreed to help. Um. Little side note, Earl Cossi uh
Speaker 1: was actually murdered three years ago. Yeah, apparently has room down.
Speaker 1: We're all having too much fun. Uh. He got killed
Speaker 1: by a blow to the head in his garage. But
Speaker 1: apparently you know some cooperists that are still active today
Speaker 1: on the internet. You know these conspiracy dudes that his
Speaker 1: everyone did it. I love that. Everybody. See, you can
Speaker 1: all be conspiracy there, get out your hat, um, although
Speaker 1: women can't be because they're too smart. It's always guys.
Speaker 1: Did you know so? Earl coss He was killed, but
Speaker 1: they think it has nothing to do with it, even
Speaker 1: though coopers are like, are you sure they're trying to
Speaker 1: silence a man exactly? So Toss was pretty great, very
Speaker 1: well timed. So Cassie called his his operation into the
Speaker 1: to the dude working there and said, hey, can you
Speaker 1: get together these parachutes and need two fronts and two backs?
Speaker 1: The guy said, sure, bro, and h in his haste,
Speaker 1: he packs three regular shoots, well, not three regular he
Speaker 1: packs one military shoot, two regular shoots, and one thing
Speaker 1: that I still don't understand called a dummy shoot that
Speaker 1: doesn't open. So, like, if you were working at Seattle
Speaker 1: Sky Sports and um, you get really really sick of
Speaker 1: having to fold up the whole parachute every time somebody
Speaker 1: was training the throwing out the pilot shoot, which is
Speaker 1: just the little shoot that comes out first and pulls
Speaker 1: the bigger shoot out. Right, if all you're trying to
Speaker 1: do is throw that part out, you don't need the
Speaker 1: bigger shoot. So if you're an employee at Seattle Sky
Speaker 1: Sports in ISQua, you may have the idea they should
Speaker 1: just so the bigger part shut. There should be no
Speaker 1: parachute that has like the most important part sown shut. Right,
Speaker 1: I think we can. But this is the thing, and
Speaker 1: they're called dummy shoots. The thing is everybody's like, oh,
Speaker 1: we gotta covered. Let's just put a big X on
Speaker 1: it and everybody will know it's a dummy shoot. So
Speaker 1: that one of these dummy shoots made it into the
Speaker 1: four shoots that were delivered to D. B. Cooper. So
Speaker 1: the money and the shoots go in a cop car
Speaker 1: and the does a donuts getting out like in front
Speaker 1: of the plane and gets out and stands outside and
Speaker 1: um waits for the plane to land, I should say.
Speaker 1: So when they get everything together, they let flight three
Speaker 1: oh five no that they've come and get it basically,
Speaker 1: and um they prepare to land and dB Cooper does
Speaker 1: something very smart. Yeah he uh, he said, you know what,
Speaker 1: I bet you there's gonna be snipers on the ground
Speaker 1: because I've seen a movie or two. I've seen Black
Speaker 1: Sunday anyone. No, didn't they come out like five or
Speaker 1: six years later? Maybe Actually I have to look that up,
Speaker 1: and I think there was seventy. You know this all right?
Speaker 1: He said, I have a dream about a movie one
Speaker 1: day that would be called Black Sunday, and there's gonna
Speaker 1: be snipers at that airport. So, um, have everybody put
Speaker 1: the shades down on the windows. They're all drunk, they
Speaker 1: don't care, they won't ask any questions. And so they
Speaker 1: did so, which turned out to be a pretty good
Speaker 1: move because there were in fact snipers exactly. So the
Speaker 1: plane lands and um, no one's allowed to get off yet. Uh.
Speaker 1: Cooper says, hey, Tina, give me a solid go out
Speaker 1: and get the money and the shoots and come back
Speaker 1: with them. Okay, then we can let the passengers off,
Speaker 1: and Mucloud leaves the plane. And at this point, and
Speaker 1: this is one of the first reasons why Tina Mukloud
Speaker 1: was one of our heroes. Um, once she's off the plane,
Speaker 1: she could have been like so long jumps seeing hell, um,
Speaker 1: which may have been a little harsh. Had she said
Speaker 1: that with an earshot of somebody in this hostage situation,
Speaker 1: she could have thought it. Her actions could have said
Speaker 1: as much. She didn't. She got the shoots, she got
Speaker 1: the money, and she essentially traded herself for the hostages
Speaker 1: and went back on the plane. That's metal. Chuck would
Speaker 1: have said out loud, see you in hell flight three
Speaker 1: oh five. I would have walked straight to baggage claim
Speaker 1: and or the ground transportation and said take me to
Speaker 1: cousin I because I need some loose leaf tea. Good
Speaker 1: good luck with the skuy jacking. Yeah, but she came back,
Speaker 1: come back, So she traded herself for these hostages and UM.
Speaker 1: The hostages were allowed to leave, and so too were
Speaker 1: Alice Hancock and Florence Shaffner. Um. They the rest of
Speaker 1: the crew is basically like, there's no reason for you
Speaker 1: to stay here, so go. So it was down to Um,
Speaker 1: Shaffner and Cooper, and then in the UM cockpit Red
Speaker 1: AzaC and h Scott, right and Scott and Dzac repaid
Speaker 1: Tina muckloud by staying themselves there. There was a rope
Speaker 1: ladder actually that they could have climbed out of. They
Speaker 1: had almost no interaction whatsoever with dB Cooper. They could
Speaker 1: have at their leisure, they could have put on bathing
Speaker 1: suits and climbed out this rope ladder and laid on
Speaker 1: the tarmac for a while and then gone to the
Speaker 1: safety of like the FBI barricade. And they didn't. They
Speaker 1: stuck around and they like, we're like, we're gonna see
Speaker 1: this hijacking through. Yeah, in my uh like in my
Speaker 1: comedic mind's eye, I see them getting out on the
Speaker 1: rope swing. Rope ladder. That's different. Rope swing. That would
Speaker 1: be amazing. They may have like like a tire swing
Speaker 1: on brother, they get up on the rope ladder. Tina
Speaker 1: muck Law never comes back in DV. Cooper's just sitting
Speaker 1: on the plane by himself. He's like, Oh, it happened again?
Speaker 1: Is he typing? Oh No, that's sorry. I didn't know
Speaker 1: they had a rope ladder. That's crazy. Sure, every airplane
Speaker 1: has a rope ladder in the car. Wake up, old cheats.
Speaker 1: So the f a A actually had a their chief
Speaker 1: psychiatrist on the ground and this dude does a quick analysis,
Speaker 1: you know, like let me do one of those movie
Speaker 1: readings of who this guy is and what's gonna happen.
Speaker 1: And he says, you know what's gonna happen is you're
Speaker 1: gonna give this guy the money in the parachutes. You're
Speaker 1: gonna go up there in the plane. He's gonna jump
Speaker 1: out and blow up the plane. Uh, and just let
Speaker 1: everyone know that, right, he's gonna force pilot and co
Speaker 1: pilot that this is what's coming. Right, He's gonna force
Speaker 1: Muckloud to jump with him and then blow up the
Speaker 1: plane afterward. Right, but yeah, make sure that, make sure
Speaker 1: the cockpit knows. And then he added, and he probably
Speaker 1: has some sort of fixation on longer than usual nipples,
Speaker 1: So make sure he's not exposed to those, because he
Speaker 1: has some sort of fetish based on his experience with
Speaker 1: his mother. Because the ones psychoanalysts for the f A, Hey,
Speaker 1: if I had done that in a German accident, it
Speaker 1: would have sunk in even faster. Yeah, did you tell
Speaker 1: them that? Make sure you tell him that. Guys said,
Speaker 1: all right, I'm gonna go ahead and say now what
Speaker 1: I'm gonna say in like an hour backstage? That was amazing,
Speaker 1: Thank you. I thought that's not where you're gonna say. Actually,
Speaker 1: I didn't didn't see that one coming. You got me
Speaker 1: m when you Yeah, I had no idea where you
Speaker 1: were going. Literally you said longer than usual nipples, and
Speaker 1: I went in my head, I went, am, I is
Speaker 1: this happening like Josh Josh am I stole in Atlanta
Speaker 1: that it is the trip in my sleep? Yeah, pure gold, buddy,
Speaker 1: thank you? To where are we? I am so throwing own?
Speaker 1: So we said Cooper was cool, right head he was.
Speaker 1: He was so cool he ordered food for the crew
Speaker 1: during the refueling process. Yeah, it's a nice, nice guy.
Speaker 1: You want to know who else is cool is Tina Mucklaw.
Speaker 1: Because once they released the passengers and they got the
Speaker 1: money on board, she sat back down and he offered
Speaker 1: her a couple of the stacks of money and she said, well,
Speaker 1: you go ahead and say it, no tipping aloud, smooth again.
Speaker 1: Had it been me, well, first of all, I would
Speaker 1: have been an uncle likes by then. But if I
Speaker 1: was dumb enough to get back on I would be like, yeah,
Speaker 1: get pay it for just two stacks of bills. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what gives jerk? I want half? She's she's amazing. So
Speaker 1: the planes being refueled, he passed along a request, very
Speaker 1: specific request for what's to happen when they go to
Speaker 1: take off. He said, I want to take off with
Speaker 1: that f staircase that I know is back there down
Speaker 1: in the jump off the plane position. And they said
Speaker 1: you can't take off with the plane. Uh, you can't
Speaker 1: take off with the door down. And he said, well
Speaker 1: can you check on that? Are you sure? And they said, no,
Speaker 1: you can't do that, and he said, are you super
Speaker 1: sure and they said, no, you can't do that. He said,
Speaker 1: all right, and they said, oh, but once you're up there,
Speaker 1: you can totally lower it and jump out. And he said, well,
Speaker 1: why didn't we just start there? Because that's really the
Speaker 1: only thing that mattered. He's like, fine, fine, And then
Speaker 1: the pilot's like, well, where do you want to go?
Speaker 1: And Dan Cooper says, Mexico City, let's say. And the
Speaker 1: pilot goes, well, that's that's kind of far. We're gonna
Speaker 1: have to refuel is Reno, okay, And Dan Cooper goes,
Speaker 1: I don't know how I can get this across anymore. Clearly,
Speaker 1: I'm jumping out of the plane the next time we
Speaker 1: go up find wherever you want? Just fine southward. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So they refuel the plane. And the only time Dan
Speaker 1: Cooper gets a little a little ruffled is when it
Speaker 1: takes a little long for his liking, and he says,
Speaker 1: it shouldn't take this long. Let's get the show on
Speaker 1: the road, right. He picked up for one of the
Speaker 1: few times he picked up the cockpit or the cabin
Speaker 1: and cockpit phone and said, let's get the show on
Speaker 1: the road. I would have screamed it and like ship
Speaker 1: the phone and then hit myself in the head with
Speaker 1: it and then just started crying and been like it's
Speaker 1: never gonna work. This is never gonna work. I think
Speaker 1: as well established we'd be the worst guy and hostages. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just getting no, I don't want any part of it.
Speaker 1: He also gives some instructions on how to fly the plane,
Speaker 1: which is getting really specific. He said, don't go any
Speaker 1: higher than ten thou fet uh. Set your wing flaps
Speaker 1: at fifteen degrees, which apparently we learned as an angle
Speaker 1: that only the seven to seven one could position those
Speaker 1: wing flaps, which everyone in this room knows because it's
Speaker 1: a bowing And he said, don't go any faster than
Speaker 1: a hundred ninety miles per hour two knots uh. So
Speaker 1: that means they're gonna be flying slow and low, like
Speaker 1: you're cooking ribs or jumping off a plane, because that
Speaker 1: means the cabin is at pressurized and that means when
Speaker 1: you open that door, you're not just gonna suck everything out.
Speaker 1: It's still skydivable mm hmm. Yeah, oh that's the terminology. Okay,
Speaker 1: So Cooper had some problems right. He had specifically asked
Speaker 1: for a knapsack, and the FEDS had given him the
Speaker 1: two in a bank bag, which, as we all know,
Speaker 1: is a very unwieldy, clumsy bag. Right, it's like a
Speaker 1: canvas bag. There's nothing to it. What do you like
Speaker 1: tuck it under your arm? What are you supposed to
Speaker 1: do with that? Right? So he's like, well, I need
Speaker 1: to make a handle for this thing. All harvest one
Speaker 1: of these parachutes for its rigging, and he chose the
Speaker 1: pink one, which the pink one was actually the best
Speaker 1: one of all of them, yeah, because it was the
Speaker 1: dummy shoot, the military shoot, and then is that we're
Speaker 1: gonna call it the medium shoot. And then the pink one,
Speaker 1: which was like Josh, is the best one. So he
Speaker 1: cuts the stuff loose, he makes a handle for it.
Speaker 1: Things are happening. At this point. They moved to the
Speaker 1: rear of the plane hen Tina muck Law, and he says,
Speaker 1: you know, I think I need help lowering the staircase.
Speaker 1: So she goes back there with him. She's a little
Speaker 1: freaked out at this point. She was common cool, but
Speaker 1: like it's go time, and she thinks she's gonna get
Speaker 1: sucked out rightfully, So because she didn't understand the physics
Speaker 1: of you know, the plane being that low and that slow.
Speaker 1: She did another physics. I am still freaked out a staircase.
Speaker 1: Why don't I mention physics exactly? So she gets back
Speaker 1: there and he said, she said, can I at least
Speaker 1: have some of that rope so I can tie myself
Speaker 1: to the interior of this plane? Like that's how helpful
Speaker 1: she was. She's like, just let me lash myself to
Speaker 1: the plane. Let me help myself, right, I just spit
Speaker 1: like all the way across it. I spit earlier. It's okay, good.
Speaker 1: You should learn to say throws up like in Vegas.
Speaker 1: That's what I was just talking. Yeah, man, weird instinct.
Speaker 1: Oh my god. Except well, never mind. So she asked
Speaker 1: for some rope to lash herself in, and he goes,
Speaker 1: at this point, you know what, never mind, He literally
Speaker 1: like this is the quote. He goes, never mind, never mind.
Speaker 1: He said, you know what, you just go back up
Speaker 1: to the cockpit and you see that first class curtain.
Speaker 1: Just don't come any further back. I got it from there.
Speaker 1: He turns back around and looks, and then he turns
Speaker 1: back around to where she was, and he just sees
Speaker 1: like a pile of dust to where she was just standing.
Speaker 1: She was like in the cockpit all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: and so it's go time in the cockpit. Two pm.
Speaker 1: The little light comes on that says a door ajar,
Speaker 1: I guess and uh. They said that. The pilots are
Speaker 1: like Tina, like mus A call back one more time.
Speaker 1: He's like, no, you can't call him, and they're like, no, really,
Speaker 1: we should call. We can totally call him, like the
Speaker 1: f A shrink said like he might blow us up.
Speaker 1: He said some other weird stuff too, but he said,
Speaker 1: like he's gonna blow us up. We should really butter
Speaker 1: this guy up. And we could have left on that
Speaker 1: rope swing and we stayed because of you rope ladder. Ye,
Speaker 1: So they call, they do call, and the pilots like
Speaker 1: ring ring ring, Ring Ring Ring, Yes, ring ring, you
Speaker 1: let her ring a couple of times, ring ring ring U.
Speaker 1: Dan Cooper, hijacker, Mr Cooper, we want to make sure
Speaker 1: your play is as comfortable as possible. There anything we
Speaker 1: can do to help you back there to make your
Speaker 1: hijacking more successful, sir, no, click, I know it's kind
Speaker 1: of rude, he said, no, hung up, And then at
Speaker 1: twelve pm the crew felt the plane kind of jiggle
Speaker 1: a little bit, as if someone had jumped off the
Speaker 1: rear of it, and they said, Tina, go check, we're
Speaker 1: flying the plane. She's like, wait a minute. Only one
Speaker 1: of you was flying, you know. It takes both of us,
Speaker 1: you don't know. And that's it. So from the moment
Speaker 1: that Tina muck Law left shut that first class curtain, nobody,
Speaker 1: to anyone's knowledge, ever saw Dan Cooper again. But that's
Speaker 1: not the end of the show. No, it's not. So
Speaker 1: there was a man hunt, right, so Dan Cooper had
Speaker 1: pretty clearly signaled his intentions that he was going to
Speaker 1: jump off the back of the seven. The FBI was like,
Speaker 1: we need to scramble some jets. Let's get some fighter
Speaker 1: jets that are in the area. We're gonna scramble them
Speaker 1: to go follow the seven. What is the scrambling? I
Speaker 1: never get that. It's like like go I know, but
Speaker 1: that it just sounds it sounds chaotic like they're scrambling.
Speaker 1: I think that's I think that's the point. Like people
Speaker 1: are suposed to run around and bump into each other
Speaker 1: and fall out and then get up and get in
Speaker 1: their jets and fly off scrambling. That's classics renamed. It
Speaker 1: would be like, activate the jets. That's not bad, that's
Speaker 1: not bad at all. Scramble the jets. It sounds desperate.
Speaker 1: You're right, the jets. So either However, the jets were
Speaker 1: brought into this picture. Um, there was a problem with them,
Speaker 1: and that they were way too fast for the seven,
Speaker 1: which is putzing along and a d Then all of
Speaker 1: a sudden there's a jet that yeah, and then the
Speaker 1: next one comes and they're like, what are we gonna do, Well,
Speaker 1: we'll stick a helicopter on them. This is like Goldilocks.
Speaker 1: The helicopter was too slow. Seven twenty seven just puts
Speaker 1: in along. People are going and trying to catch up,
Speaker 1: nothing happening. They should have scrambled the seventh when he's
Speaker 1: oven and just followed right behind. It makes sense. Alights
Speaker 1: on Ryant, so they're scrambling. The point is nobody saw
Speaker 1: Dan Cooper jump when he jumped, So they used the
Speaker 1: eight twelve pm oscillation to kind of figure out where
Speaker 1: they should start looking, and they zeroed in on a
Speaker 1: place called Ariel, Washington near the Lewis River. Anybody from
Speaker 1: Ariel good because we got jokes. Nobody from Ariel. Anyone
Speaker 1: ever heard of the Lewis River. Okay, so they get them,
Speaker 1: they get this man hunt going. They're combing, they're they're
Speaker 1: scrambling and combing. Those are the two things you do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was here in the FBI. It was a massive
Speaker 1: man hunt too. There's like a thousand troops and cops
Speaker 1: combing this area. Yeah, no one from Seattle p D.
Speaker 1: Of course, they were just sitting around Stone, hanging out
Speaker 1: in Nissequa, waiting for Rambo. Here's another fun fact. There
Speaker 1: was a millionaire, a local millionaire who we don't know.
Speaker 1: Do you know the name? No, I've looked. If anybody knows,
Speaker 1: just stand up and say it with dignity. It was
Speaker 1: on It was on the news. So this local millionaire says,
Speaker 1: you know what, that's near Lake Merwin, and I'm going
Speaker 1: to rent a submarine because I'm a millionaire and that's
Speaker 1: you know where. Yeah, I don't work, I'm a millionaire.
Speaker 1: He got a submarine and he trolled the depths of
Speaker 1: Lake Merwin. He said he rented a small submarine because
Speaker 1: he's not an extravagant local million now seems ostentatious. The
Speaker 1: hydraulics on it who needs that in a submarine? Does
Speaker 1: it have a metal detector, which would not have helped
Speaker 1: because it was cash bills. So you'd make a great
Speaker 1: local millionaire. I would if only. Uh. The other weird
Speaker 1: thing that happened was the UM the c I A
Speaker 1: got involved, which is a little bit strange, and they
Speaker 1: scrambled the SR seventy one Blackbird, right, They scrambled it
Speaker 1: several times. Yeah, that it was almost over easy. Terrible.
Speaker 1: It doesn't even make sense because once you scramble it, it
Speaker 1: it can't be over easy. Terrible joke, Chuck, that's what
Speaker 1: I says. Rebound, rebound, Is this really happening? Did you
Speaker 1: talk about long nipples? All? Right? The SR seventy one
Speaker 1: Blackbird was at the time super secret. We all know
Speaker 1: about it now, but at the time it was very secret,
Speaker 1: and it was kind of a big deal to get
Speaker 1: this thing up in the air. So especially multiple times,
Speaker 1: like one time, it's like, your dad is the head
Speaker 1: of c I A and you're the head of Seattle
Speaker 1: p D, so you can make it happen maybe once, right,
Speaker 1: multiple times. That's weird that the SR seventy one was scrambled. Right.
Speaker 1: The FBI is very studious and likes to do a
Speaker 1: lot of obvious stuff. So they interviewed everybody in the
Speaker 1: area with the last name of Cooper, which there's like
Speaker 1: a square one. This is like square negative five. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: sure you no, it's negative five. I looked it out,
Speaker 1: so you look up all the Coopers in the area.
Speaker 1: And at this point they have a press conference. And
Speaker 1: if you've noticed, we've been calling this dude Dan Cooper
Speaker 1: the whole time, because up until this time he was
Speaker 1: just Dan Cooper. So they have a press conference and
Speaker 1: there's sort of I don't think we know who messed
Speaker 1: it up, right, okay, either a file clerk or a
Speaker 1: cop talking in front of a reporter, either you, P
Speaker 1: I or AP, depending on who you ask, And they
Speaker 1: were saying like, what Cooper could could have done something
Speaker 1: like this, And somebody said, well, there's a Dane Cooper
Speaker 1: who's a cat burglar in the area. That's that's a
Speaker 1: terrible suggestion. Cat burglar does not go to hijacker, you know,
Speaker 1: And um, this reporter was like, what a scoop and
Speaker 1: hit the wire with cops looking for dB Cooper. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he said, d B Cooper. Did I say Dan Cooper?
Speaker 1: A little part of my brain was like, you just said, Dan,
Speaker 1: let's start over. So a cop was talking in front
Speaker 1: of an AP reporter and they said, what Cooper do
Speaker 1: you know could have done this? And the cops said, well,
Speaker 1: there's this d D B Cooper. What did you just say.
Speaker 1: Did you say a D. Cooper? I said, there's a
Speaker 1: dB Cooper I got at that time. He's a cat burglar.
Speaker 1: And the reporter said, this is hitting the wire, and
Speaker 1: he reported that the cops were looking for a dB
Speaker 1: and it just changed from that point on. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: he was never DV. Cooper. It was literally a mistake.
Speaker 1: So that's why we all know him as DV. Cooper today.
Speaker 1: And the FBI actually a little smart, believe it or not,
Speaker 1: and they said, you know what, let's keep it that way.
Speaker 1: That way we'll know if any tips come in on
Speaker 1: a Dan Cooper will know it's a hot lead. So
Speaker 1: it actually ended up kind of working in their favor,
Speaker 1: and anytime a tip like that came in, like the
Speaker 1: office prankster would come in with the facts of me,
Speaker 1: like hot lead, hot lead. It was like a joker
Speaker 1: around the Portland office. Everybody loves Richard h and this
Speaker 1: will This will come up later too, when it comes
Speaker 1: time to solve the crime that they Later on, the
Speaker 1: FBI learned that there was a comic book in the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties about a Dan Cooper who was a Canadian
Speaker 1: jet pilot. And it was a Belgian comment which is
Speaker 1: a little weird, but it was you know, that was
Speaker 1: literally a Dan Cooper who jumped out of planes and
Speaker 1: comic book form exactly could be a clue. And that's
Speaker 1: a niche comic, right, So it would printed in Belgium
Speaker 1: in the French about a Canadian fighter pilot. All they
Speaker 1: had to do was find like the ten people who
Speaker 1: knew of that comic, be like, what'd you do? We
Speaker 1: know it was one of you. And so the FBI
Speaker 1: had a pretty clear belief, very openly stated belief that B. B.
Speaker 1: Cooper died in the jump. It was just the line
Speaker 1: that they took right off the bat there, like there's
Speaker 1: no way this guy survived, and um, the he wasn't
Speaker 1: the lead agent on the case, but he became the
Speaker 1: most famous agent. Ralph Himmel's Bach Any Himmel's box in
Speaker 1: the house. Now you're a liar, liar, So Himmel's Boch.
Speaker 1: Like I said, he wasn't the lead agent, but he
Speaker 1: was out of the Seattle office, and he became the
Speaker 1: most famous agent associated with it. And um, he actually
Speaker 1: gave the case. It's the official name nor Jack, which
Speaker 1: is stupid any Northwest Jack sky Jack right, but removed
Speaker 1: the sea. It's just called the dB Cooper case, you know,
Speaker 1: or Hi Steven better. So he self published a book
Speaker 1: in six about the case. And Himmel's Box said he
Speaker 1: thinks that dB Cooper didn't even get a shoot open,
Speaker 1: that he plunged to his death and hit the forest
Speaker 1: floor with such impact that he basically was buried immediately
Speaker 1: with the parachute still attached, and maybe even the money.
Speaker 1: And uh, that was Himmel's Box. Take that. Excuse me?
Speaker 1: Are you gonna get that? I would realized it wasn't
Speaker 1: its twist off, and then I realized I had my
Speaker 1: lighter from the loose leaf tea place nice going. You
Speaker 1: just saw the some of Chuck's college education. So Cooper
Speaker 1: had jumped from the plane. Did he live? Did he not?
Speaker 1: The odds are against him in a lot of ways. Outside.
Speaker 1: The temperature that night was twenty degrees fahrenheit. Um, hey,
Speaker 1: we're in America, man, Yeah, you're right, twenty degrees USA.
Speaker 1: At ten thousand feet it was negative seven degrees uh,
Speaker 1: and he was going a hundred and ninety miles an hour.
Speaker 1: There was freezing rain. It was there was like a
Speaker 1: quarter crescent or not a quarter crescent, a crescent moon.
Speaker 1: Those are two different things, crescent moon and the sky.
Speaker 1: But it was cloudy and rainy, so there's probably was
Speaker 1: zero light. It's freezing. He's ten thousand feet. He's not
Speaker 1: dressed for the occasion. No, he's wearing loafers. He's wearing
Speaker 1: an overcoat. He's got this he doesn't have this knapsack,
Speaker 1: so he's fashioned this weird kind of knapsack with his
Speaker 1: pink rope. Plus plus the area's jumping out into. He's
Speaker 1: playing at ten thousand feet over the cascades. Some of
Speaker 1: the cascades, as you guys know, are higher than ten
Speaker 1: thousand feet, very dangerous jump. And there's a lot of
Speaker 1: pointy trees. I mean, the point is in my rights
Speaker 1: yet and all the point is trees around Plus Despite
Speaker 1: what the f A A guy said, the f A psychiatrist,
Speaker 1: he did not leave the bomb to be detonated after
Speaker 1: he jumped off. He took it with him. Bank bag bomb,
Speaker 1: overcoat loafers. Parachute was my dB. And by the way,
Speaker 1: the FBI later on they interte interviewed monk lock Or
Speaker 1: who was the one who saw Yeah, Schaffter saw the
Speaker 1: bomb like you just didn't. And she said, yeah, you
Speaker 1: know these red sticks taped together and they went, huh,
Speaker 1: that wasn't dynamite. Dynamite isn't red. You've seen too many cartoons.
Speaker 1: Dynamite is tan. Road flares are red. So it was
Speaker 1: more than likely a fake bomb with an alarm clock
Speaker 1: and road flayers. Plus D B. Cooper did not help
Speaker 1: his cause by his choice of parachutes, right he um,
Speaker 1: he's so. He chose a military shoot as his main shoot.
Speaker 1: It was not a great shoot. The rip cord wasn't
Speaker 1: as easily accessed as the recreational shoots, and once it
Speaker 1: deployed you can't steer it very well. It was not
Speaker 1: the best choice. Even worse was his choice of the
Speaker 1: dummy shoot for his front reserve shoot. He took the
Speaker 1: best shoot and gutted it to make a handle for
Speaker 1: the bank bag, left the second best shoot, and chose
Speaker 1: the two worst shoots to jump out with right, So
Speaker 1: I didn't know you couldn't steer a military shoot, but
Speaker 1: it makes sense. Yeah, they're just like, go for it, Pale,
Speaker 1: because if I was in the military, I would steer.
Speaker 1: I would be like, well, how do we go over here? Instead,
Speaker 1: let's see a lot of guns down there, Let's take
Speaker 1: it this way. So they just drop you, apparently, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I guess you know what they're doing. Though, So
Speaker 1: some other theories, because it's Washington, believe it or not,
Speaker 1: some people actually posited that he was eaten by sasquatch
Speaker 1: with a straight face. I mean, let's be honest, how
Speaker 1: many of you in here we're thinking the same thing. Uh.
Speaker 1: Some other people say, well, he was clearly burned up
Speaker 1: by the jet exhaust, because when you come down the
Speaker 1: stairs of a seven seven, the rear jet engines right
Speaker 1: in front of you, and it would have been seven
Speaker 1: eight hundred degrees right there. Um. But the FBI conducted
Speaker 1: a test right afterward where they took a seven seven
Speaker 1: up and they took a two hundred pounds sled a
Speaker 1: two hundred pound prison victim. Right, he was condemned. Don't
Speaker 1: worry about it, it's fine, And uh, they said and
Speaker 1: threw it off, and they found that the two pound
Speaker 1: sled uh that's the euphemism, I guess now went straight down,
Speaker 1: so it didn't come in contact in any way with
Speaker 1: the jet exhaust. So it kind of did away with
Speaker 1: this idea that he burned up. Well, it was kind
Speaker 1: of good news bad news though, because what it did do,
Speaker 1: at least was it mimic that same oscillation. So they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know what, it was the exact same thing happened
Speaker 1: when we were in the air, So that twelve pm
Speaker 1: jump time, like it was probably right on the money,
Speaker 1: so we know probably where he might have ended. Right,
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of questions remaining, right, and um,
Speaker 1: there were some clues left behind. The thing that that
Speaker 1: really kind of confounded the FBI at first was that
Speaker 1: they combed the area where they were looking for him,
Speaker 1: with like a thousand people just combing this area, the
Speaker 1: SR seventy one blackbirds circling around looking. They didn't find anything.
Speaker 1: He had left a couple of things on board the plane, right,
Speaker 1: He left his clip on tie, which was the second
Speaker 1: biggest secret that night. Uh. Hell, that's what you do
Speaker 1: before you jump out, you know, you you take it
Speaker 1: off and there was a clip on all along. You
Speaker 1: unbuttoned that button. Then you're like, I'm out of here.
Speaker 1: All right? He left the eight cigarette butts of his
Speaker 1: Rawley brand cigarettes. He smoked eight over five hours, and
Speaker 1: all eight butts have since been lost. Right, Um, they
Speaker 1: found a hair on the headrest. Um. They The thing
Speaker 1: is the FBI traded in fingerprints. That was their big
Speaker 1: thing at the time, and Dan Cooper had been very
Speaker 1: smart to not leave a single print on any of
Speaker 1: the cigarette butts. Yeah. True, but there was fingerprints on
Speaker 1: the in flight guess sky Mall magazine? Yeah, r I
Speaker 1: p s guy mall. What do you mean it's not around,
Speaker 1: it's gone. Yeah, it's sky Malls gone. Did you guys
Speaker 1: not know this? No way, it's yeah, that's why I
Speaker 1: said I know, But I just, uh, I don't know
Speaker 1: where am I going to get my putting green that
Speaker 1: doubles as a cat feeder? My friend, you can just
Speaker 1: go to front Gate because front has everything everyone needs.
Speaker 1: What's that funk they advertised in Skymall, But they have
Speaker 1: stores too. I don't even know where I am right now.
Speaker 1: That's uncle, Like, what year is it? No? So it
Speaker 1: would be seven years before any trace of the hijacking,
Speaker 1: any real clue turned up, and it was in there
Speaker 1: were some hunters in Oregon hunting animals. I guess, right,
Speaker 1: unless it was the most dangerous game. You don't know.
Speaker 1: It's Oregon, you never know. There are less civilized people
Speaker 1: than we have here. Uh. They found a plastic and
Speaker 1: strung action placard showing how to lower the f staircase
Speaker 1: in the woods. So this is like a really good clue.
Speaker 1: It was, but it didn't. It didn't lead to anything new. Well,
Speaker 1: it was from flight three oh five, which was I
Speaker 1: guess I'm saying it was cool. It was cool, like
Speaker 1: if you were the hunter, you'd be like, I'm keeping this,
Speaker 1: but um, it was on the flight path. So it
Speaker 1: didn't generate any new leads, but it generated a lot
Speaker 1: of renewed interest in the case because, believe it or not,
Speaker 1: the dB Cooper case it kind of fall into the
Speaker 1: wayside in the last like seven years. People just didn't
Speaker 1: think much about it anymore, right exactly, So it was
Speaker 1: like a dime a dozen't But all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: everybody's like, we got to make a movie. Who's the
Speaker 1: biggest movie star We've got Tree Williams make him as
Speaker 1: dB Cooper and that's what they did. Has anyone ever
Speaker 1: seen in the pursuit of DV Cooper? No, that's right, everybody,
Speaker 1: God bless you, seatt all smart town chunk. I figured
Speaker 1: here like somebody, but as it was a local thing,
Speaker 1: very very bad movie was made several starring Treat Williams
Speaker 1: and Robert duval Right, whose mom needed surgery at the
Speaker 1: time the layoff. So here's what well, First of all,
Speaker 1: if you want to know how big a piece of
Speaker 1: garbage this movie is, it had three directors, And if
Speaker 1: you know anything about filmmaking, if you have more than
Speaker 1: one director, it's probably a really bad movie for one
Speaker 1: reason or another. But has three, then it's guaranteed to
Speaker 1: be bad. But all you need to do is go
Speaker 1: home tonight when you get back to your to your
Speaker 1: house boats a qua. Does anyone here live on a
Speaker 1: houseboat now? Because I was gonna ask if I could
Speaker 1: come stay over because those things are awesome. That was
Speaker 1: just sleepless in Seattle. You've seen that too many times?
Speaker 1: Oh no, they exist, uh, Because I tried to stay
Speaker 1: in an AIRB and B actually before I came here
Speaker 1: on the house yeah, I totally did, and I ended
Speaker 1: up in some stupid hotel downtown. Go home to your
Speaker 1: YouTube's type in Pursuit of dB Cooper and watch the
Speaker 1: first three minutes, because this movie literally starts with the
Speaker 1: point from where DV Cooper jumps out of the back
Speaker 1: of the plane. It starts from the point where we
Speaker 1: know nothing else that happened is literally fictional from that
Speaker 1: point slogan on the movie posters fact sch Max. So
Speaker 1: it starts with the pursuit of dB Cooper and has
Speaker 1: Robert Duvald the names all come up and all that,
Speaker 1: and it's got a juice heart plane. It's like wang
Speaker 1: wang wang wang wang wang wang wog and uh treat Williams.
Speaker 1: It's a terrible voice voiceover recording. You just hear. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And he jumps off the thing because that's what you do.
Speaker 1: And he jumped off a plane and your sky jagging.
Speaker 1: He parachutes down in the night and the night and
Speaker 1: he catches through some trees and lands and then just
Speaker 1: this really little sad yeah, who everything was sad about
Speaker 1: that and tree Williams gets on the on the ground
Speaker 1: and he and he takes out a cigar and he
Speaker 1: takes out a lighter, because that's what you do to
Speaker 1: when you successfully landed after Scott jacking. He doesn't like
Speaker 1: the lighter though. He rips open the money bag. He
Speaker 1: takes out a hundred dollar bill and he lights that
Speaker 1: and then he uses that to light a cigar. And
Speaker 1: that is how that movie opens. And it goes downhill
Speaker 1: from there. And Robert daval Is, he's just you can
Speaker 1: tell when he starts every scene. Let's do it. It's
Speaker 1: so bad, but I do encourage you. It was mean
Speaker 1: when I was a kid and it came out. It
Speaker 1: was like we got HBO on my street, and it
Speaker 1: was a really big deal when we got Cable and HBO.
Speaker 1: So I would literally watch any movie that came out.
Speaker 1: It was like Crull, that's a hey, Cull was okay,
Speaker 1: great movie, Pursuit of D. B. Cooper. Why not? I
Speaker 1: was not exposed to that. I think my mother shielded
Speaker 1: me from that movie. Good for you, mom. Watch the
Speaker 1: first two minutes on your chuck. So, um, we're still
Speaker 1: talking about the placard, weren't we? No, no, no, All right,
Speaker 1: well we'll go to nineteen eighty was the first real
Speaker 1: good clue turns up in Night Right this is a
Speaker 1: big clue, big clue. So there's a young lad named
Speaker 1: Brian Ingram, he was eight, I think at the time,
Speaker 1: and his family was camping on Tina Bar. Are you
Speaker 1: guys familiar with Tina Bar? Do you guys know what
Speaker 1: that is? The Columbia Columbia River. We're so are we
Speaker 1: correct and understanding that you would just call it an
Speaker 1: island not a bar? Okay? All right? So Tina Island
Speaker 1: everywhere else. The Ingram family was camping, and Brian Ingram
Speaker 1: was fashioning a fire pit for his family. Oh, father
Speaker 1: is going to love this fire pit. He'll be proud
Speaker 1: of me. Yet, Oh father, why don't you love me?
Speaker 1: And as he's as he's like, is he's going like
Speaker 1: this to the sand, poor a little eight year old.
Speaker 1: He turns up a stack of bills, several stacks of
Speaker 1: bills actually um three and these stacks of bills total
Speaker 1: eighty dollars, and he's like, father, Father, Father takes those
Speaker 1: and uh starts looking at him and he's like, we
Speaker 1: should probably call the police. So they go and call
Speaker 1: the police. And again they call the Seattle Police, which
Speaker 1: evidently all they do is forward calls to the FBI.
Speaker 1: They're like, Seattle p D. Please hold. So the FBI
Speaker 1: is like, read a serial number, and he reads one
Speaker 1: and they're like me, just another, reads another, and they're
Speaker 1: like that's dB Cooper money. And Ingram's father's like what
Speaker 1: did you say? And they're like nothing. So the FBI
Speaker 1: gets their hands on it, and actually we should say
Speaker 1: it turns out they they let little Brian Ingram, um
Speaker 1: take some of the money. Three thousand dollars of this money.
Speaker 1: Actually later on they returned a little not bad, right, uh?
Speaker 1: And you want to know what's even better? In two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight, little Brian Ingram sold that money on
Speaker 1: eBay for thirty seven grand right, yeah, take that, father.
Speaker 1: So the thing is this money showed up in a
Speaker 1: place where it should not have been. Um, it showed
Speaker 1: up twenty miles south of Aerial Wash Shington, in another river.
Speaker 1: So they were looking here in the Lewis River, right,
Speaker 1: everybody knows Lewis River, Ariel Washington. Here, Tina Bars down
Speaker 1: here just a little south of Vancouver. Is my geography,
Speaker 1: my air geography, right a Vancouver, Washington. Everybody Vancouver Washington?
Speaker 1: Is that is it like this? That's even more amazing
Speaker 1: this is what I suspected, and I looked it up
Speaker 1: on Google maps and they're like, what do you mean,
Speaker 1: Tina bar Josh. So I wasn't able to conclusively find it,
Speaker 1: but I did have this idea that it somehow ended
Speaker 1: up above it and the an FBI hydrologists looked at
Speaker 1: this money said, FBI has a hydrologist. I'm retainer. Himmel's
Speaker 1: Bach got ahold of him. And um. The guy was like,
Speaker 1: so this stuff has only been exposed to the elements
Speaker 1: for a year, even though it was found what nine
Speaker 1: years after the robbery, right, and it got here one
Speaker 1: of two ways, the guy said, So the Columbia River
Speaker 1: flooded in uh and it was also dredged in like
Speaker 1: ninety seven, So one of those two probably got this here,
Speaker 1: but no one's ever said conclusively how it ended up
Speaker 1: where it was. So, yeah, there you go, I got it.
Speaker 1: It would be another twenty eight years before any more
Speaker 1: clues turned up, So that's a very long wait. In
Speaker 1: two thousand and eight, just eight short years ago, some
Speaker 1: kids we're playing on there was it their own land
Speaker 1: in Amboy, little south of Ariel. Anyone from Amboy, No,
Speaker 1: I suspected not are we in Washington? Okay, yeah, but
Speaker 1: nobody's from am Boy. We got more response in Birmingham.
Speaker 1: No about Amboy. Yeah, they're like, we're like the sound
Speaker 1: of that. So these kids were playing in the woods
Speaker 1: on their property and they said, oh, look at there,
Speaker 1: there's a parachute and they start pulling out this parachute
Speaker 1: for like an hour. It's like a magic trick. And
Speaker 1: they finally get to the end of the parachute and
Speaker 1: they run and show Pa and then they say, Paw,
Speaker 1: I found a parachute in the woods. What should we do? Right?
Speaker 1: And Paul recognize that this is the most exciting thing
Speaker 1: that ever happened in Amboy. Washington called the cops, who
Speaker 1: called the Seattle police, who called the FBI, and the
Speaker 1: FBI did something smart. They're like, well, you know who
Speaker 1: would know if this was dB Cooper's parachute. Good old
Speaker 1: Earl Costi, it's right, he's not dead yet, not dead yet.
Speaker 1: M oh too soon. That's a good he's not dead yet.
Speaker 1: That's the celebratory None of us are dead yet, right,
Speaker 1: that's a good, good way of looking at it, Chuck,
Speaker 1: good way to find the silver lining. So Earl Cossie
Speaker 1: looked at this thing and he was like yeah, he said,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. He said, uh, Poper, shoot was nylon. That's
Speaker 1: clearly silk. Good try, Yeah, he said, this is I
Speaker 1: know who shoot this is. Actually it turns out that
Speaker 1: back in a jet pilot named Floyd Walling bailed out
Speaker 1: of his course air jet that was going down and
Speaker 1: parachuted out in the woods around Amboy Washington, right, which
Speaker 1: isn't too far from Arial And it wasn't Cooper's shoot.
Speaker 1: You guys all remember when they found that parachute right
Speaker 1: like two thousand and eight. It wasn't that long ago.
Speaker 1: It was a big deal, um, and it wasn't his shoot,
Speaker 1: but it did suggest that possibly he could have made
Speaker 1: it because Floyd Walling had and he walked out of
Speaker 1: the woods and terrible weather, just like debe Cooper would
Speaker 1: have had to. So it kind of um shined a
Speaker 1: light on the whole thing again. Yeah, it kind of
Speaker 1: kicks some interest up. So um. Over the years, there
Speaker 1: have been many, many, many, many suspects, like we're talking
Speaker 1: over a thousand. The FBI won't even say how many
Speaker 1: suspects they've had, or weirdly, people confessing to be dB Cooper.
Speaker 1: It's one of those strange things that people do where
Speaker 1: they claim to be something that will send you to prison. Well,
Speaker 1: a lot of them are already in prison, but they're
Speaker 1: in worse prison and hoping to go to a good prison. No,
Speaker 1: it's true. Apparently state prisoners will try to confess to
Speaker 1: federal crimes because the cinnamon buns are better in federal prison.
Speaker 1: I was thinking, cinnamon bun. That's because there's cinnamon buns
Speaker 1: in our green room. Well, now we've mentioned that in
Speaker 1: the prisons. That's like a commodity in prison, right, cinnamon buns. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like currency. Yeah, yeah, alright, cinnamon buns and cigarettes.
Speaker 1: We know. So there's a very famous sketch. If you
Speaker 1: go home, before you get on YouTube and look at
Speaker 1: the first three minutes of that terrible movie, which you
Speaker 1: definitely need to do, just Google, get on the Google's
Speaker 1: and and type in dB Cooper sketch. There's a very
Speaker 1: singular amos sketch of DV Cooper. It looks like n Spacey,
Speaker 1: It looks a lot like Kevin Spacey, yeah, or Don
Speaker 1: Draper as Kevin Spacey. It would be Kevin Spacey is
Speaker 1: Don Draper, Yeah, yeah, sure. So if you go home
Speaker 1: and look at that, it's like, you know, I got
Speaker 1: this kind of shortier guy, looks like he's sort of
Speaker 1: from the fifties or sixties. It's got the hair, he's
Speaker 1: got the sunglasses on, and the tie, the skinny tie.
Speaker 1: And that's the only sketch that they have of dB
Speaker 1: Cooper that they got from the flight attendants, specifically Tina
Speaker 1: muck Law, because she spent like five hours right next
Speaker 1: to the dude. Um. She incidentally was really messed up
Speaker 1: after this, understandably, and she went to be a nun
Speaker 1: in Oregon in the nineteen eighties, which is a little weird.
Speaker 1: I didn't know they had convinced in Oregon. There's a
Speaker 1: convent right over in the app there's a comment behind
Speaker 1: us right now. But even worse than that, the mother superior,
Speaker 1: in an article I read at the convent, said she'd
Speaker 1: never really fit in here. I'm not. If you're a
Speaker 1: mother superior, that's a mother inferior. If you ask me,
Speaker 1: you know, good one. So sorry, you go ahead, you
Speaker 1: all right, If you look at some of the behavior
Speaker 1: that Cooper displayed, you're gonna turn up some clues. And
Speaker 1: that's what that fbida, is it kind of examine what happened. Um,
Speaker 1: he chose a military shoot, which could mean one of
Speaker 1: two things. Either he was former military, which you could
Speaker 1: narrow it down, or it could mean he has no
Speaker 1: idea what he's doing when it comes to jumping out
Speaker 1: of a plane, right, And the choice of that dummy
Speaker 1: shoot would definitely suggest that, because even recreational skydivers say, like,
Speaker 1: even if you're just a military parachutist, you're gonna see
Speaker 1: a huge X on a parachute and instinctively shy away
Speaker 1: from that parachute. You know, I thought it stood for
Speaker 1: extreme right. So there's a lot of people say, I
Speaker 1: think he probably is ex military, had some like parachuting experience,
Speaker 1: probably a paratrooper or something like that. Yeah, A lot
Speaker 1: of people point to the idea that, um, he knew
Speaker 1: a lot about the plane. He knew about the wing
Speaker 1: flap degree that it could go to, he knew about altitude.
Speaker 1: A lot of the witnesses later on said that, um,
Speaker 1: he clearly was very much aware of what was going
Speaker 1: on in the cabin. He just knew the plane very much.
Speaker 1: So a lot of other people say this guy was
Speaker 1: probably an airline employee, maybe even a pilot actually based
Speaker 1: on the altitude and stuff that he gave him to fly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and one of the weird things that he knew was
Speaker 1: that had an F staircase that you could lower and
Speaker 1: jump out of. Because this wasn't common knowledge at the time,
Speaker 1: Apparently a small group of people knew this. You were
Speaker 1: either an employee of Boeing or you may have been
Speaker 1: in the c I A. Because in the Vietnam War
Speaker 1: we actually used the seven over Cambodia, which is where
Speaker 1: we were not supposed to be, and they lowered that
Speaker 1: F staircase of seven seven to drop supplies. You can't
Speaker 1: steer but go well. And then there's the whole thing
Speaker 1: with the s R. Seventy one Blackbird. So a lot
Speaker 1: of cooper is still say that he might have been
Speaker 1: secretly a member of the CIA, and he knew about
Speaker 1: the A staircase, he knew about the or the blackbird
Speaker 1: was scrambled, so they had like some skin in the game.
Speaker 1: So a lot of suspects have come and gone and
Speaker 1: come back and stayed over the years. Um the FBI
Speaker 1: says about it, well, they won't say, but a lot
Speaker 1: of people say about a thousand like Chuck said, But
Speaker 1: one of the first ones to emerge was a dude
Speaker 1: named Richard McCoy and um in February of nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 1: I think, four months after the dB Cooper heist, Richard
Speaker 1: McCoy hijacked uh sight and he asked for five hundred
Speaker 1: thousand dollars in cash and he parachuted successfully out the
Speaker 1: back over Utah. Right. Yeah, so a lot of people
Speaker 1: say that's pretty similar. Maybe that was Stevie Cooper. Well
Speaker 1: in five grand, that to me, that makes sense, like
Speaker 1: worked out fine. I should have asked for more to
Speaker 1: begin with, So let me try it again again. It
Speaker 1: turns out that he was a Green Beret in Vietnam,
Speaker 1: so that sort of fits with the whole profile. Uh.
Speaker 1: He looked a little bit like the sketch of Dan
Speaker 1: Cooper and a little bit. Yeah, he was twenty nine
Speaker 1: years old, so he was much younger than Cooper, but
Speaker 1: he didn't look twenty nine. I'll say that he looked
Speaker 1: much older than that. He looked more like uh Don
Speaker 1: Draper than Charles Manson. I'll say that. Uh. So this
Speaker 1: guy gets caught actually after pulling off this high initially
Speaker 1: and he goes to prison, and he makes a fake
Speaker 1: gun out of dental plaster from the dentist in the prison,
Speaker 1: and he takes the truck by force and literally crashes
Speaker 1: through the front gate of the prison and escapes and
Speaker 1: is later killed in a shootout by cops. Which is
Speaker 1: Richard McCoy knew how to live, he did and die
Speaker 1: uh and his family would later go on to say,
Speaker 1: actually he was at home in Thanksgiving. Uh, so it
Speaker 1: probably wasn't him, right, good suspect though, Suspect number two
Speaker 1: his named Dwayne Webber. This is my guy. I like.
Speaker 1: This guy is fine, but I don't like him, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean. So, Dwayne Webber was a career criminal,
Speaker 1: and the definition of a career criminal is one where
Speaker 1: you and your alias have both done time in prison,
Speaker 1: and he and his alias had done a combined sixteen years. Right. So,
Speaker 1: he was on his deathbed and his wife Joe came
Speaker 1: around and said, how you doing. It's like, while I'm
Speaker 1: still dying, I have a confession for you. I'd like
Speaker 1: you to hear. Um, I am Dane Cooper. And Joe's like,
Speaker 1: I don't know who that is, and Dwayne blows up.
Speaker 1: They have a fight on his death, it never speak
Speaker 1: of it again, and he dies nine days later. So
Speaker 1: Joe starts poking around after that. She's like, who is
Speaker 1: this Dan Cooper? Which is a legitimate question after experience
Speaker 1: like that that she went through, I would say so.
Speaker 1: And she finds out via Internet this is that Dan
Speaker 1: Cooper was dB Cooper, and she said, you know what,
Speaker 1: I think that he was telling the truth. I think
Speaker 1: he was dB Cooper because you know what, I remember
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy nine, we were on a vacation. We
Speaker 1: were on a car trip. We were kind of right
Speaker 1: around the area where the hijacking i'm sorry, where the
Speaker 1: landing supposedly took place, and my husband stopped the car
Speaker 1: and just pointed and said, you know what, that's where D. B.
Speaker 1: Cooper walked out of the woods, which is a weird
Speaker 1: thing to say on vacation, very weird thing to say.
Speaker 1: It's even weirder that she didn't say, what the hell
Speaker 1: are you talking about? Yeah, agreed, there's another story. Later on,
Speaker 1: they were on another vacation. This is the same vacation.
Speaker 1: Oh it's the same one. All right. We'll just call
Speaker 1: this the communication vacation, the non communication vacation because They
Speaker 1: clearly didn't talk to one another because he stopped over
Speaker 1: the Columbia River on a bridge, literally stops on a bridge,
Speaker 1: gets out of the car, goes to the back, opens
Speaker 1: the trunk, and it's just gone for like ten minutes,
Speaker 1: gets back in the car and they just drive on
Speaker 1: and she doesn't say anything. I know you me, you
Speaker 1: would have been like, why did you take your foot off?
Speaker 1: The guess that would have been family would have had
Speaker 1: three questions on why we stots on a bridge and
Speaker 1: I opened the trunk. Not Joe, Not Joe. So a
Speaker 1: lot of people still like Dwayne Webber, but he's actually
Speaker 1: the FBI said, no, that's not the guy. We ruled
Speaker 1: him out with d n A. Right, Yes, the next
Speaker 1: guy is my guy, Kenny Christensen. That's right. He was
Speaker 1: a pretty well like suspect for a while. He um
Speaker 1: keeping with the series of family members outing their family
Speaker 1: as d B. Cooper, which actually supports the family motto
Speaker 1: that I was brought up with never trust family. It's
Speaker 1: a proud Clark tradition. So his brother Lyle Actually this
Speaker 1: gets a little weird. He outed him as a suspect
Speaker 1: and an effort to get the screenwriter Nora Fron Sleepless
Speaker 1: in Seattle, right, didn't you see that coming? He tried
Speaker 1: to get Nora Ephron to write a movie about dB
Speaker 1: Cooper via his brother being the main suspect. And he, weirdly,
Speaker 1: I guess he didn't have an agent. He hired a
Speaker 1: private investigator to get him in touch with Nora Evron.
Speaker 1: Very strange. But he championed his own brother as the
Speaker 1: main suspect or outed him, that's another way to put it,
Speaker 1: for sure. And um, a guy named Jeoffrey Gray. Really
Speaker 1: great article in New York Magazine if you guys are
Speaker 1: interested about this particular guy. But um, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of similarities between DBI Cooper and Kenny Christiansen. For one,
Speaker 1: he he looks a lot like him right off the bat.
Speaker 1: He was a purser for Northwest Orient Airlines. That's a
Speaker 1: big deal. Former paratrooper. He was quiet, He smoked cigarettes,
Speaker 1: he drank bourbon, lived in the area where the hijacking
Speaker 1: took place, which is to say around here. And um,
Speaker 1: and I think two thousand eleven, Jeffrey Gray, the guy
Speaker 1: who wrote that New York Magazine article, got in touch
Speaker 1: with Florence Shaffner and said what about this guy? And
Speaker 1: Florence Schaffner said, I think he may be onto something here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And like Dwayne Weber, Kenney Christensen on his deathbed tried
Speaker 1: to make a confession to his brother Lyle. He he said,
Speaker 1: I have something really important to tell you, but I'm
Speaker 1: not sure if I can if I can say this,
Speaker 1: and Lyle said, no, no, no, I don't want to
Speaker 1: hear it. Did you guys know that you cannot hear
Speaker 1: a deathbed confession? Well, not only that, but I want
Speaker 1: nothing more than to hear a deathbed confession. I would
Speaker 1: be dying. I would be like, oh my god, Dish, yes,
Speaker 1: what do you have to say? But he was like, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: I don't want to want to hear what you gotta say.
Speaker 1: Just go ahead and die and on top of him
Speaker 1: until he stopped squirming. Here this pillow will make you comfortable.
Speaker 1: You sleep now, brother, What is going on with these people?
Speaker 1: Did you just do the Buffalo bill voice? Okay, that
Speaker 1: was coincidental. Who else do we have? L? D. Cooper
Speaker 1: a little on the nose with the name. He lived
Speaker 1: in the area too. Yeah, and he was also outed
Speaker 1: by a family member. Keeping with the Clark family tradition.
Speaker 1: This time it was his niece. Uh. And she said,
Speaker 1: you know what I remember. This is in two thousand eleven.
Speaker 1: This is not too long ago. She said, you know what,
Speaker 1: I remember back in Thanksgiving, just like it was yesterday,
Speaker 1: and Uncle l. D. Showed up bruised and bleeding for dinner.
Speaker 1: But he was euphoric, which was weird. And I'm just
Speaker 1: now mentioning this all right. And what she she said,
Speaker 1: by the way, she had a book coming out simultaneously.
Speaker 1: What did she say that she overheard because this is
Speaker 1: where she loses Chuck and me. Well, yeah, she said, Uh,
Speaker 1: he went to talk to h he was my uncle
Speaker 1: and went to talk to my dad, and they were
Speaker 1: I overheard them in the hallway, say we did it.
Speaker 1: Our money problems are over. We hijacked the plane. The
Speaker 1: book by Simon and Schuster on sale now and your
Speaker 1: local airport. But there were a few things. Uh, it
Speaker 1: wasn't totally out of the blue. Um. He was an
Speaker 1: engineer at Boeing, was yeah. But they were in on
Speaker 1: it together because we hijack the plane. He's a silent partner. Uh.
Speaker 1: And weirdly, he remember those Dan Cooper comic books. He
Speaker 1: was one of the ten people on the planet that
Speaker 1: was a fan of the Dan Cooper that's a little weird.
Speaker 1: That's pretty good. The weird thing is is he didn't
Speaker 1: have any experienced skydiving, which a lot of people say, well,
Speaker 1: it's just too insane to think that somebody who never
Speaker 1: skydive before did their first sky dive during a heist
Speaker 1: out of a seven seven. But the people who knew L. D.
Speaker 1: Cooper say, no, he was just crazy enough to do
Speaker 1: something like that. And you can make a case that
Speaker 1: that actually explains the choice of the dummy shoot the truth,
Speaker 1: that's right, and the military shoot even Yeah. Alright, so
Speaker 1: the legacy of D. B. Cooper to this day, the
Speaker 1: heist remains the only unsolved airline hijacking in the history
Speaker 1: of the world in America. In America, really are there
Speaker 1: other ones? Yeah, I'm only standing behind America. Okay, yeah, right.
Speaker 1: Every year, if you go to the Aerial Store in
Speaker 1: Tavern in Ariel, Washington, you can go to the dB
Speaker 1: Cooper Days Festival. Yeah. Have you guys, has anyone ever
Speaker 1: been to that? We should all let's go right now,
Speaker 1: We're gonna meet up this Thanksgiving. You can win a
Speaker 1: dB Cooper lookalike contests. If you look like Kevin Spacey, yes,
Speaker 1: or Charles Manson or Don Dreber, which none of us do. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm talking about you and me look like Justin Bieber.
Speaker 1: I look like a eight Justin Bieber. I just to
Speaker 1: put out my tooth. That's how I lost it. I
Speaker 1: broke it on Justin Bieber's pliable though. You can go
Speaker 1: to that and when the contest. There have been songs
Speaker 1: over the years. There was that terrible movie. There've been
Speaker 1: countless TV reenactments and dramatizations, unsolved mysteries in my right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: everybody see that one. You can watch that on the
Speaker 1: YouTube too. Uh. And there are many many cooperist websites,
Speaker 1: most notably one called drop zone dot com. And drop
Speaker 1: Zone actually used to be a recreational skydiving site until
Speaker 1: he got mostly taken over by dB Cooper aficionados. They
Speaker 1: hijacked the website did as a matter of fact, And
Speaker 1: this site is like so hot for Cooper Sluice that
Speaker 1: a guy named Secret started posting on it and he
Speaker 1: seemed to have a lot of information about the dB
Speaker 1: Cooper case that people didn't know about. And it turned
Speaker 1: out that these Cooper sluice were so good they unmasked
Speaker 1: the secret guy as the new agent in charge of
Speaker 1: the dB Cooper case, Larry Carr, who was posting secretly
Speaker 1: as secret on the drop zone boards. That's how good
Speaker 1: these people are. He's like, no, I'm not, yes you are. No,
Speaker 1: I'm not, yes you are. You are. He's like, okay,
Speaker 1: I am. You can go on YouTube. Boy, you got
Speaker 1: you got a lot of YouTube and den people. You
Speaker 1: can go on YouTube as well and and look up
Speaker 1: Larry Carr. And for many many years they kept all
Speaker 1: this evidence sort of under wraps, and you can look
Speaker 1: ut videos. Now Larry Carr said, you know what we
Speaker 1: should do the modern ages. Here we have the YouTube's
Speaker 1: and we can let everyone see this evidence. Even though
Speaker 1: I think it's kind of funny that the FBI's official
Speaker 1: things like no, he totally died. No one told Larry
Speaker 1: car that, yeah, you know, because he's let's make a
Speaker 1: YouTube video. Let's show everyone that the skinny tie. All
Speaker 1: the kids are into it. Now he shows the clip
Speaker 1: on tie. You can see all the you can see
Speaker 1: the money, the clip on tie, all this evidence. Hoping
Speaker 1: for a lead, and he oversaw a DNA evidence actually
Speaker 1: being removed from the tie. They found three people's profiles.
Speaker 1: They also found and we don't even know but pure
Speaker 1: titanium and impatience pollen. Hopefully that will eventually crack the case.
Speaker 1: But it made every but he just be like, what
Speaker 1: we thought we had a handle on this impatience pollen?
Speaker 1: Where did that come from? So? UM, bring us all
Speaker 1: with my friends. Thank you the Cooper heist. It changed
Speaker 1: America forever, right, DeBie Cooper is the reason we all
Speaker 1: started walking through metal detector shortly afterward. He's the reason. Seriously,
Speaker 1: he's the reason that the airlines were given the right
Speaker 1: to search your bags before you get on one of
Speaker 1: their planes. Um, and they apparently reinstituted the death penalty
Speaker 1: for hijacking. I don't know when they took it off.
Speaker 1: Was it like c ships being hijacked? And then I
Speaker 1: don't either. But the I think the coolest outcome of
Speaker 1: this whole thing was if you look at a Bowing
Speaker 1: seven seven they still make them airplane. If you look
Speaker 1: at that a staircase in the back, there's a white
Speaker 1: paddle that holds the stairs closed. Pretty smart. You can't
Speaker 1: open the a staircase midflight because you have to go
Speaker 1: outside and pull the paddle down, and then the astaircase
Speaker 1: will open. And it's a pretty smart, easy solution to
Speaker 1: a pretty complex case. And they call that little white
Speaker 1: paddle a Cooper vein. That's right, and that is the
Speaker 1: story of dB Cooper and that is our show. Goodnight Seattle,
Speaker 1: goodnight everyone. Thank you for more on this and thousands
Speaker 1: of other topics. Is that how stuff works? Dot com