He's back!

FBI gave ‘citizen sleuths’ special access to D.B. Cooper files to help solve mystery

National Post Staff
November 25, 2011

Forty years after his daring flight into criminal history the identity of mysterious hijacker-parachutist “D.B. Cooper” remains one of the great unsolved crimes of our time.

New clues about the unidentified man who got away with a $200,000 ransom — or died trying — have led an FBI-backed team of “citizen sleuths” to conclude that he may have been a military-trained, French-Canadian factory manager or chemical engineer, probably from outside of Quebec. Undated handout of the cover of 1960s-era French-language comic book featuring the character Dan Cooper, a Royal Canadian Air Froce test pilot who battles enemies on earth and in space.

The potential Canadian connection to one of the FBI’s most famous cold cases was first raised in 2009, when the U.S. agency revealed that Cooper appeared to have fashioned his identity and modus operandi from a 1960s-era, French-language comic book about a Royal Canadian Air Force test pilot and space traveller named Dan Cooper.

Now, the Cooper Research Team, headed by three civilian investigators who have had “special access” to FBI evidence files since 2009, is scheduled to discuss its probe of the case at a 40th anniversary D.B. Cooper symposium on Saturday in Portland.

The informally deputized investigators, who were invited to analyze the Cooper mystery by Seattle-based FBI agent Larry Carr, are Tom Kaye, a paleontologist at Seattle’s Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, Illinois-based metallurgical engineer Alan Stone and University of Chicago scientific illustrator Carol Abraczinskas.

“It’s a great mystery. What happened to this guy? The last thing we knew, he had $200,000 and bailed out of the back of a 727. And from there, we don’t know,” said Carr in this YouTube video embedded on the FBI’s website.


According to files archived by the FBI, some people applauded Cooper’s caper as heroic, which a sociology professor at the time referred to as the Robin Hood syndrome.

“We all like adventure stories,” said Dr. Otto Larsen in an archived report. “That hijacker took the greatest ultimate risk. He showed real heroic features — mystery, drama, romanticism, a high degree of skill and all the necessities for the perfect crime. This man was neither political nor neurotic. His motive was simply $200,000 and people can understand that.”

In 1971, months before Cooper bought his ticket for the fabled flight, The Daily Telegraph ran an article about a man describing himself as “Mr. Brown,” who hoaxed Australia’s Qantas Airline into paying 235,000 pounds in ransom money after a bomb threat, according to an FBI report dated December 8, 1971. The description of the unidentified suspect were believed to be remarkably similar to sketches of D.B. Cooper.The Cooper case was revived in 2006 when the FBI used the 35th anniversary of the hijacking to retell the story of what it calls “one of our greatest unsolved mysteries.”

Carr later released composite sketches of the suspect and photos of key evidence collected during the original investigation, inviting the public to send in fresh clues to help solve the mystery.

The man calling himself Dan Cooper had claimed, during an afternoon flight between Portland and Seattle, to a have a bomb in his briefcase. When the plane landed in Seattle, 36 passengers were released after the hijacker received $200,000 in cash and four parachutes.

He then ordered the plane’s flight crew to take off for Mexico and — at an unknown location south of Seattle — the man parachuted from a rear door of the jet.

Carr and other experts have stated that it’s unlikely Cooper survived the nighttime jump over rugged land in a driving rain.

But the suspect’s body has never been found. In 1980, along the Columbia River in southwest Washington state, a boy found a rotting package of $5,800 in $20 bills that matched the serial numbers of the ransom money.

With files from Postmedia News