Speaker 1: You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast.
Speaker 2: My name is Bill Thomas. I'm a writer, consulting, producer,
and now podcaster. I am now trying to use my
experience as the brother of a murder victim to help
other victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book
on the unsolved Colonial Parkway murders, and I'm the co
administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together with
Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 3: My name is Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 4: I'm a writer, a researcher, a teacher, and a victim's advocate,
as well as the social media manager and co administrator
for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner
in crime, Bill Thomas.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Mind Over Murderer. I'm Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 2: And I'm Bill Thomas, and I've been.
Speaker 3: Listening to the sultry sounds of my podcast partner singing
three Dog Night as we are about to head on
the air. Would you like to sing a couple of bars, mister.
Speaker 2: Thomas, No, No, I don't think so. I wouldn't want
to embarrass myself. That was really a private Kristin Dilly
only concert.
Speaker 3: We do request that anybody who comes to Crime Con
or any other live event, please ask mister Thomas to
sing a couple of bars of whatever happens to be
running through his head, and you too can get the
Bill Thomas Unplugged experience.
Speaker 2: There was a reason for that, though, because we were
discussing the case of D. B. Cooper and you had
pointed out that D. B. Cooper looks a lot like
Carry Grant in the movie north By Northwest, which led
to a discussion of favorite Hitchcock films, and then that
led to a discussion of Tippy Hedron, a one of
the heroines of Hitchcock films, and that then led to
you telling me that Tippy Hedron, who will be one
hundred this year, Is that true?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: I think so, has an animal sanctuary called Shambala. Yep,
And that got me singing the Three Dog Night song.
We're on the road to Shambala. I know this is
a bit of a tease, but I'm actually not going
to sing the song because no one wants to hear
Bill Thomas sing.
Speaker 3: But everybody does want to hear you podcast, So you're
batting at least fifty percent there, because everybody likes the
Bill Thomas Drive time Radio voice.
Speaker 2: You have a fine voice yourself, Kristen, And why don't
you kick off this here podcast by telling us a
little bit more about what we're going to be talking about.
Speaker 3: Well, after much enthusiasm about this case from our listeners,
we finally decided it was time to cover the only
unsolved commercial hijacking or probably more accurately, skyjacking in history,
and that is the case of d. D. Cooper, who
you were interested to learn that's not.
Speaker 2: Actually his No, this really surprised me, and I have
to thank you for your as usual outstanding research. D B.
Cooper is a misnomer. He never referred to himself as
D B. Cooper.
Speaker 3: That's right. He referred to himself as Dan Cooper, but
the media offered some misinformation, and as so often happens,
it became a part of legend and lore and history,
and so now we call it the D. B. Cooper case.
But D. B. Cooper was never actually the guy's name.
It was Dan Cooper.
Speaker 2: So what did Dan Cooper aka D B. Cooper get
himself up to here?
Speaker 3: Dan Cooper decided it would be a great idea to
skyjack a plane. So on Thanksgiving Eve, on flight three
oh five, which was bound for Seattle from Portland, Oregon,
Dan Cooper gave a note to a stewardess which demanded
two hundred thousand dollars in four parachutes. He indicated that
he had a bomb on him, which of course would
get anybody's attention, and after a number of hijinks, he
jumped out of the plane and parachuted to freedom, taking
the money with him. Sounds a little bit like a
modern day Robin Hood.
Speaker 2: And two hundred thousand dollars doesn't sound like a lot
of money, but it was a fair amount of money
back then in nineteen seventy one. One of the things
I always thought was fascinating, and this case has interested
me since I was a kid, was that at the time,
that particular aircraft allowed them to lower a rear set
of steps. And I don't know if our listeners have
ever been on a plane like this where at the
tail a set of stairs could be lowered, and then
sometimes if you were exiting onto the tarmac, as they say,
you would go down these rear stairs. Apparently, what he
did was he had the stairs lowered while he was
in flight. He allegedly jumped out of the plane from
the rear set of stairs. They later changed the design
so you couldn't open those stairs in flight.
Speaker 3: And that's actually one of the interesting sort of lasting
impressions on history that this case has made. Before we
get into the basics of the case, though you had
said that you were familiar with the case already, where
did you hear about the case.
Speaker 2: Of course, I'm old enough to remember this happening when
I was a kid. It was all over the newspapers
and television, and I remember we went to the library
a lot when I was a kid, the school library
and the town library, and I remember reading articles with
not necessarily photographs, but drawings really of how he might
have gotten away with this, like how he lowered the
stairs and avoided the jet blast that would have injured
someone or maybe even killed them, That the rear stairs
allowed him to jump out and get below where the
exhaust would be coming out of the jets as the
plane was flying. I remember being completely fascinated by this case.
We talked about this a little bit off air, the
idea that Dan Cooper he didn't hurt anyone, he didn't
commit any acts of violence. He made threats obviously, and
he showed the flight attendant something that may or may
not have been a bomb, but he almost took on
a mythic quality like a folk hero because he had
stolen money from the man. Yes, but he hadn't heard
anyone doing it.
Speaker 3: It is a case that I was not familiar with
until I was browsing the stacks in our local library
a couple of years back. I was going through the
true crime section, of course, and I saw a really
wonderful book that is an excellent resource on the case
by Jeffrey Gray, called Skyjack, and I figured this sounds interesting.
Let me pull it, and I was captivated by it.
So after a mention of dB Cooper in a previous episode,
we had posited the quest to our listeners, would y'all
like for us to do an episode on dB Cooper
And the answer was resoundingly yes. So here we are. Boy,
is there a lot to tell about the dB Cooper case.
So this may be more than one episode, but let
me go ahead and start with the basics on the case.
As we said, it was a Northwest orient flight three
to ZHO five bound for Seattle from Portland, Oregon, on
November twenty fourth, nineteen seventy one, and a man named
Dan Cooper sat down in the back of the plane
and told the stewardess that he happened to have a
bomb in his Atta Shay case. The FBI, on its
public website FBI dot gov, has a page of information
on the dB Cooper case, as it does most of
its notorious cases, and it actually includes an interesting gallery
of photos. They're right up on. The case is very sparse.
I guess no surprise there because the FBI has never
solved the dB Cooper case, so I don't suppose that
they would want to highlight the fact that they've never
managed to arrest anybody for it. But the FBI site
is quick to note that the dB portion of dB
Cooper was They called it a myth manufactured by the press.
They said that the guy identified himself as Dan Cooper
when he bought his plane ticket. He did not identify
himself as dB. The FBI site continues to describe dB
Cooper this way. White male, six foot one one seventy
to one seventy five, age mid forties, with olive complexion,
brown eyes, black hair, conventional cut, parted on the left.
He's described as also wearing a business suit with a
white shirt, a black clip on tie that would later
become the source of a lot of forensic investigation, and
then a horn rimmed sunglass. Sounds like a pretty clean
cut business guide.
Speaker 2: Type, Yeah, Soka, nineteen seventy one, so very straight looking
by contemporary standards.
Speaker 3: Now, the first time that I saw this widely circulated
sketch of Dan Cooper, and we'll put a link in
our show notes, he reminded me of the way that
Carrie Grant is dressed in my very favorite Alfred Hitchcock film,
the nineteen fifty nine hit north By Northwest. If you
look at a side by side comparison of Grant in
the film and the dB Cooper suspect sketch, they are
wearing the same hairstyle, the same suit, the same sunglasses.
I immediately wondered whether dB Cooper in nineteen seventy one
could have taken his style cues from Carrie Grant. So
when I was writing up our case notes, I put
a little image putting the two of them side by side,
and I sent it to Bill with our case notes. Bill,
what did you think when you saw both those images
side by side?
Speaker 2: He does look a lot like Carry Grant, and north
By Northwest is my favorite Alfred Hitchcock film as well,
and I had mentioned as an undergrad we had studied
Alfred Hitchcock and so we'd seen fourteen movies. But north
By Northwest is my absolute favorite. And the graphic you
have too of Carry Grant running away in the cornfield
I've ever seen the movie being chased by a suspicious
looking biplane, which is one minute is rup dusting and
the next minute is trying to kill Carry Grant. The
whole thing just made me laugh. And on top of
everything else, he hijacked a Northwest Airlines flight, so it's
a very interesting thing. Maybe it's not a coincidence.
Speaker 3: I'm obviously not the only person who noted those links.
There's a really ex Lynn article on the dB Cooper
Hijack site to his Dbcooper hijack dot com that covers
all of the potential links between the movie and the
real life crime, starting with the fact that they look
very similar, moving on to the fact that Roger Thornhill,
Carry Grant's character walks to an airport and walks past
a line of people standing at the Northwest Orient Airlines
death is the airline that was hijacked. They talk about
the fact that both men drank bourbon. There's a whole
entire list of things. So if you're looking to go
down a dB Cooper rabbit hole, I highly suggest that
one is. It's so funny and it's so interesting, and
it does make you wonder if dB Cooper himself had
been an Alfred Hitchcock fan or a Kerry Grant fan,
or maybe a little bit of both, and decided to
kind of take his cues and design his crime around
this particular character. I think it's a fun idea.
Speaker 2: Dbcooper hijacked dot Com is a site will also include
in our show notes. It's really interesting and Kristen's clearly
been down some of these rabbit holes in researching this
episode of Mind Over Murder.
Speaker 3: I would say I've done at least at least twelve
fourteen hours of research on this over the last couple
of days here, and it's very interesting. So yeah, highly
recommend just everything that you can find about dB Cooper,
but we will put the best sites and the best
sources and reporting in our show notes. I do want
to mention something in another thing that I know Bill
thought was a little funny. I relied really heavily on
some excellent reporting from Popular Mechanics, of all magazines, they
did a number of really great recent stuff on dB Cooper,
and they had some of the best reporting out there.
Speaker 2: I was surprised by something. First of all, I used
to read Popular Mechanics when I was a kid. I
was very surprised. There are very recent articles from twenty
twenty three, twenty four all about dB Cooper, and I
just hadn't realized that in the popular imagination there was
still an interest in this case, which is what more
than fifty years ago.
Speaker 3: There is still so much here, And I think it
goes to this sort of popular idea of this is
a mysterious, interesting, cool kind of criminal. He's not a
serial killer, he is not something really distasteful. He's a
guy who pulled off what is I think, a pretty cool,
largely victimless crime. Nobody got hurt. The mythologizing of dB
Cooper is definitely something that has continued and probably will
still continue even if we never figure out who dB
Cooper actually was.
Speaker 2: So tell us a little bit more about the mechanics
of how he hijacked the plane.
Speaker 3: Okay, so D. B. Cooper, who may or may not
have taken his cues from the nineteen fifty nine Hitchcock film.
He boarded the seven twenty seven in seed a teen e.
At the back of the plane, he ordered a bourbon
in soda, again another nod to Roger Thornhill. After three
o'clock after takeoff, he handed twenty three year old stewardess
Florence Schaffner a note stating that he had a bomb
in his briefcase and he wanted her to sit with
him to take down his demands to the captain. Now,
this is interesting. I saw two names for this stewardess,
so I'm not sure which reporting was correct. I saw
Florence Schaffner and I saw Tina Mucklow, So I'm wondering
if some of the reporting got conflated somewhere or another.
But I did see two names, and I just want
to note those are both names that I saw.
Speaker 2: There would have been several flight attendants or stewardesses as
they called them back then, aboard the aircraft, and as
you explain a little bit, more people were actually permitted
to exit the plane, which I'd completely forgotten about.
Speaker 3: dB Cooper was carrying a VFBI kind of just gcribes it,
whether snotally is being a cheap leather attache case that
he opened to reveal a massive wires and red colored sticks.
He demanded two hundred thousand dollars in twenty dollars bills,
and then he wanted four parachutes as well.
Speaker 2: Interesting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it took some scrambling for the two hundred thousand
dollars in the four parachutes to be gathered, so the
plane ended up circling the Puget Sound for a couple
of hours. But once the plane actually landed in Seattle,
dB Cooper let thirty six passengers d plane and he
exchanged the passengers for the money and the parachutes. He
kept the youngest stewardess, Tina mclough on board. He also
kept the pilot, the co pilot, the flight engineer, and
he told the pilot, we're flying to Mexico City, which
I mean, okay, I guess if you're going to flee
the country, sure, Mexico City. I can't think of any
better place to go. The interesting part I think about
the Mexico City destination is the fact that it would
have necessitated refueling in Reno.
Speaker 2: I thought that was odd as well. Multiple stops this
part I had completely forgotten about where he actually had
them land the plane. Most of the passengers are removed,
and then he's left with kind of a skeleton crew,
if you will. And then this flight to Mexico City
at least allegedly requires another stop. And all the while
I'm thinking to myself, this all seemed so risky from
a Dan Cooper perspective, because every time you're on the
ground there's a good chance that they might try to
stop the plane and take control of it.
Speaker 3: Why wouldn't you order the plane refueled while you were
on the ground, exchanging your passengers for your parachutes and
your money.
Speaker 2: I don't know. This part's very strange.
Speaker 3: After eight o'clock PM, when they're on that flight between
Saddle and Reno for refueling, dB cooperumped out of the
plane via the lowered aft stairs with the parachute and
the ransom money. And when the plane landed in Reno,
no hijacker, no ransom. The only thing left was some
trace evidence. So according to theistory dot com, right up
on the case, I'm going to go and quote directly
from them. Here cannily, Cooper had taken his ransom note
back from the flight attendant, so investigators were unable to
examine it. Cooper did leave a few traces behind, though,
cigarette butts, a hair on the headrest of his seat,
and a clip on necktie which he tore from his
collar before hurdling himself from the plane. Unfortunately, the FBI
could not get any fingerprints from the items.
Speaker 2: One of the things that made me laugh out loud
when I was reading this part of your research cigarette butts.
I completely forgot that Back when I was a kid,
adults could smoke on board airplanes, and now you think.
Speaker 3: Really whole different time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this guy's smoking cigarettes and drinking a bourbon. It's
just there's something about it that feels like such a throwback.
Speaker 3: He tore off that clip on necktie, and I'm imagining
him like lowering the stairs, shouldering the parachute, edging out
with the money and the briefcase, and then stopping to
just pause, yanks off the necktie, throws it and then
throws himself out of the plane. Like it feels very
It feels very theatrical in a way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it really does, and of course I had worn
a clip on necktie since again I was probably getting
my confirmation or something. The whole thing just feels like
such a different time and place.
Speaker 3: I do wonder about the clip on part of the necktie.
If you're a business person, or if you dressed like
a business person like dB Cooper was, wouldn't you know
how to tie around necktie? What do you need a
clip on for? Yeah?
Speaker 2: They were common though back then, actually when we were
going to church every Sunday and that sort of thing.
Oh no, it just like I said, it was one
of those details like the cigarettes, where I just laughed
out loud. I thought, wow, this really was more than
fifty years ago.
Speaker 3: So we're going to come back to the tie in
just a couple of minutes because there is some interesting
stuff there. We've covered the basics of the skyjacking, so
now the next section that I want to talk about
is the manhunt for dB Cooper and then what actually
happened to the cash The best book that I have
seen so far on the subject. And there are people
who are free to disagree with me. They'd be wrong,
but you can disagree if you want.
Speaker 2: I should, she said, with total humility.
Speaker 3: Yes, for my money, the best book on dB Cooper
so far is from Jeffrey Gray, who wrote Skyjack The
Hunt for dB Cooper. It was published in September of
twenty eleven, and he told the story of the hijacking
to NPR's Guy raz on All things considered. So I
want to go ahead and quote from him here as
I'm moving through this next section of the story. So
he's talking about the size and the scope of the
man hunt for dB Cooper. Quote. It was an epic
manhunt that followed and one of the biggest in the
nation's history, and one of the first things they tried
to do in addition to figuring out who he was
where he landed. Now, this area of terrain to search
is some of the most remote, if not the most remote,
in this country. It's where Bigfoot lives. So they went
about trying to pinpoint when the hijacker actually jumped, and
they composed all kind of different maps. What they were
able to determine after everything had been transcribed, is that
the hijacker jumped between the minutes of eight twelve and
eight seventeen PM for nineteen seventy one. That's pretty good
to pinpoint five minutes. I think is pretty impressive. The
only problem is that if you're pinpointing a jump from
a plane moving two hundred miles an hour on a
flight path that's fifteen miles wide, where you're searching is
hundreds of square miles long. End quote. I don't have
mathematical brain, so that wouldn't have occurred to me like
at all.
Speaker 2: But you begin to realize this isn't just like one area.
You're really searching a long, wide path, which is why
as you get into more detail here, this becomes incredibly
challenging in terms of trying to figure out where did
this guy land and where did the backpack with the
money go.
Speaker 3: There seems to be true. Schools have thought about what
could have happened to dB Cooper after he jumped out
of the plane. Either he survived or he didn't. Jeffrey
Gray explained to NPR why he thinks dB Cooper may
actually have survived that jump from the airplane. And I
actually would have had to have been convinced that somebody
could have survived that. But when he puts it like this,
I can see how he did. So. This is a
quote from Jeffrey Gray to NPR quote. One of the
things I found in the FBI files was that FBI
agents interviewed parachute experts directly to the hijacking, who told
them surviving that kind of jump, even in the trees,
was possible. And one of the things we now know
about the case is that the hijacker likely landed a
little bit farther south than what the FEDS originally thought,
and that area is not as harsh as the legend
of D. B. Cooper portrays it. To me, it's a
little bit marshy, it's closer to the Columbia River. It
is not a bad place for a parachute jump.
Speaker 2: The one thing that's a little bit strange is that
if he jumped out after eight PM, had to be
dark by that point. I'm not sure if dB Cooper
is just lucky or has really planned this out to
the nth degree, because as you get into now, the
area where they now think Cooper landed is a place
where you probably could have survived a parachute jump if
he knew what you were doing.
Speaker 3: I'm just thinking, from my point of view, I would
not know when precisely to jump out of that moving plane.
I knew, Okay, I've got to jump between eight twelve
and eight seventeen. If I've got to jump at eight
fifteen exactly, I still wouldn't. I would be too rattled
trying to do all of these things and track the
money and make sure I have my parachutes and everything.
You'd have to be really cool, calm and collected to
be able to pull off that jump and jump right
at the time where you know you're going to be
at a survivable area of land. I feel like this
guy had to have ajnees of steel to be able
to do that.
Speaker 2: Having jumped out of a plane twice with no hijacking involved,
the amount of adrenaline that's flowing when you're actually ready
to jump out of an aircraft is pretty high to
start with. This guy pulled off a pretty amazing feat
if he survived.
Speaker 3: You've jumped out of an airplane twice twice.
Speaker 2: That was my high school graduation present. My folks asked
me what I wanted for my high school graduation, and
I said I wanted to jump out of an airplane
will willingly.
Speaker 3: You willingly wanted to absolutely.
Speaker 2: Know And my dad jumped out with me twice.
Speaker 3: Oh that No, that is terrifying to me. You could
not get me jumping out of a moving plane for
anything in the world.
Speaker 2: No, we did it twice. It was really fun.
Speaker 3: Wow. Okay, well that's a new piece of trivia for me.
Sound off in the comments if you expected bills who
have been a skydiver. That's pretty cool.
Speaker 2: It was fun. Wow.
Speaker 3: Okay, So wait where what where was this?
Speaker 2: Like? This was out in western Massachusetts. I attended the
University of Massachusetts at Amherst undergrad and my dad actually
was working on his doctor at UMass at the same time.
Jumped on like a beautiful Saturday morning, and then we
did it again a couple months later.
Speaker 3: Wow, that's really cool.
Speaker 2: All right, you're listening to Mind over Murder. We'll be
right back after this word from our sponsors. We're back
here at mindover Murder.
Speaker 3: As Bill can tell you, maybe this is something that
you can do and survive. There. Did he survive? Did
he not? The evidence to indicate that he did actually
survive the jump is that the money started turning up
in nineteen eighty I'm going to get quote from some
reporting here from Popular Mechanics. Quote, eight year old Brian
Ingram was digging in the sand on the banks of
Washington's Columbia River when he found a bundle of rotting
twenty dollars bills totaling five eight hundred dollars. When his
parents contacted the police, they learned the serial numbers on
the cash match those from the stash given to D. B. Cooper.
Aside from the few items left behind on the plane,
this is the only material evidence found from the hijacking.
Six years after he discovered the money, Ingram was allowed
to keep two thousand, seven hundred and sixty dollars of it.
And here's the part where you got to admire this
guy's sensit time. I mean, in two thousand and eight,
he sold fifteen of the fragmented twenty dollars bills at
auction for thirty seven thousand, four hundred and thirty three
dollars and thirty eight cents.
Speaker 2: Highly collectible, so collectible. And he was a little kid
when he found this money. I think that's pretty cool.
I was trying to figure out how they arrived at
two thousand and seven hundred and sixty dollars of five
eight hundred dollars that he recovered. I was that one
kind of maybe scratch my head.
Speaker 3: Yeah, is that? I don't know. Maybe that's half. I
don't have a calculator on me right at the moment,
even though I should try not to have my phone
near me when we're podcasting. But I'm wondering if that's half.
I'll let you figure it out, since you've got your phone.
Speaker 2: No, it's close, but it's not half. I'm not sure.
Interesting two times twenty seven to sixty would be fifty
five to twenty.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 2: I don't know. Maybe there was FBI handling charge. I
don't know. Yes, sorry, kid, we have to take a commission.
Speaker 3: We take a little cut of this for handling charges.
I love that. Yeah, you had actually mentioned something a
couple of minutes ago that I also found some research
for that I think is really interesting. The skyjacking had
a lasting impact on the state of air travel in
at least one form, and so again i'm quoting here
from Popular Mechanics. In the wake of the skyjacking, the
FAA ordered that Cooper vanes, named after the elusive dB,
must be installed in all Boeing seven to twenty seven aircraft.
A Cooper vein is a small latch fitted to the outside.
Of all planes with rear stairs, the latch prevents anyone
from opening the door mid flight, just as dB Cooper
did as he leaped into the air and vanished into obscurity.
End quote.
Speaker 2: I did know about this. I remember reading about it
in some of my library excursions from many years ago,
because I have been on airport planes that do have
those rear stairs. But I came to understand you can't
open those rear stairs from inside the plane anymore. They
have to be opened from the outside, and that's directly
as a result of this hijacking.
Speaker 3: It's so interesting to see how certain crimes have caused
major impacts down the road. And I think that's really
interesting because it certainly wouldn't have occurred to me that
the reason we have X latch on X door is
because a guy wants sky jacked two hundred thousand dollars
and parachuted out of a plane. That is the sort
of thing though, that if I told my students, they
would be like, Wow, that's cool.
Speaker 2: We've talked about this before on Mind Over Murder. The
tailanol case is the reason that we have all of
these tamper proof bottels and cans and not just for medicine,
but for food. This is all as a result of
that one case. Yeah, it used to be that you
could open up a medicine bottel or a jar of
food or whatever and directly access the contents, and of
course those things are no longer true as a result
of that one case.
Speaker 3: It's funny. As a teacher, it became weird for me
when I realized I was teaching a group of kids
that didn't remember nine to eleven and then weren't alive
for nine to eleven, and then like more recently, it's
kids who don't even know why nine eleven happened, Like
they have no concept of it. And so I was
explaining to them one day about why we have to
take our shoes off when we get in line for
TSA and nobody knew why that was. I was like,
just out of curiosity, do you guys know why that is?
And they're going to let you know, and I said,
because a guy tried to take a shoe bomb onto
an airplane after nine to eleven, And they were floored.
They were like, what somebody tried to do that? What
this kid gets on his laptop and he's looking to
see if there was a successful shoe bombing, and I
was like, no, it wasn't successful. And he's like, why
do we still have to take our sho was off
twenty four years later?
Speaker 2: Question? Actually, yeah, there is.
Speaker 3: But it's so interesting to see how what used to
be commonplace to us is somebody else's history. These kids
have no concept of shoe bombings or anything else, just
like they have no concept of When I told them
that you used to be able to walk somebody to
the gate at the airport, Yes, they were amazed. They
were amazed. They were like, wait you.
Speaker 2: Could yeah, all the way, Yes, all the way to
the gate, and say all.
Speaker 3: The way to the gate. Amazing. Let's get down to
I think the most interesting and potentially rabbit holy aspect
of the dB Cooper case, and that, of course, is
the suspects. Before we get into our litany of suspects, Bill,
I knew you'd heard about the case before. After the
initial hearing about the case, did you follow it in
any way? I know there was a manhunt and all
the rest of that. Did you follow up with potential
suspects later?
Speaker 2: Or I might have lost some aspects of the case
over the years. I was very surprised in your research
how many different suspects there were and this is just
the short list. Oh yeah, because so many of them
seemed extremely unlikely. Although there are a couple that really
jump out as a strong possibility, there's a couple that
are just odd deathbed confessions. Interestingly, though a number of
them do have a background in aviation or parachuting from planes,
and so they've got a background in this field where
it makes some sense. I think, really there's only one
or two that I feel are most likely.
Speaker 3: Is moving into this portion. I want to acknowledge the
truly stellar reporting from Michael Natale in a February twenty
twenty four article in Popular Mechanics for this really excellent
rundown of some of them notorious dB Cooper confessors, because
a lot of these people just came forward and were like,
I'm dB Cooper. It was me, And also just some
that are flat out suspects. I also want to acknowledge
that I know these are not all of them, it's
not even most of them. I'm sure that I missed
people's favorite suspects. I couldn't hit every single dB Cooper suspect,
and every single dB Cooper website out there. So if
I missed your favorite like your pet suspect, I'm sorry.
That is truly my bad. The dB Cooper case is
such a wide, deep rabbit hole. I'm actually surprised I
was able to get away with this amount of work
like this. Truly, I could have doubled the amount of
notes that I had sent to Bill and it still
wouldn't have really done more than scratch the surface. If
I missed your favorite suspect, I'm sorry. Please do fill
us in the comments. Okay. This is based largely on
the reporting from Michael Natale, and we will put the
link to this article in the show notes. It is
truly excellent and contains a lot of interesting images as well.
Suspect number one and this is my favorite. I think
this one is the most likely Richard Floyd McCoy Junior.
The way I divided this up is I gave the
proof that was offered for his guilt, and then I
gave the refutation that was offered either by an investigative
agency or something else. The proof offered for Richard Floyd
McCoy's guilt as dB Cooper was from his son, Rick
McCoy son Rick McCoy came forward to the FBI in
twenty twenty after his mother, Karen McCoy's death. He claimed
that she had confessed to not only helping her husband
plan and pull off the dB Cooper heist, but also
in April seventh, nineteen seventy two parachute skyjacking, very similar
to the Cooper heist that resulted in her husband's capture
after a three day man hunt. He also went on
a plane, demanded a ransom, parachuted out of it. He
got caught, whereas dB Cooper did not. For that second
parachute skyjacking, Richard Floyd McCoy was sentenced to forty five
years in prison. He then escaped from prison in nineteen
seventy four, two years later and was killed in a
shootout with cops in Virginia. And I actually want to
do I feel like this guy's maybe worth a longer
episode all on his own.
Speaker 2: This one really jumps out for me because this guy
actually succeeded in parachuting an aircraft less than a year
after the dB Cooper incident. I think Richard Floyd McCoy
Junior is suspect number one because I think he is
then most likely now.
Speaker 3: According to the FBI, by the five year anniversary of
the hijacking, we'd considered more than eight hundred suspects and
eliminated all but two dozen from consideration. One person from
our list, Richard Floyd McCoy, is still a favorite suspect
among many. We tracked down and arrested McCoy for a
similar airplane hijacking and escape by parachute less than five
months after Cooper's flight, but McCoy was later ruled out
because he didn't match the nearly identical physical descriptions of
Cooper provided by two flight attendants and for other reasons
end quote. I'm like, you just threw in, and for
other reasons, like you want to give us any of
those No.
Speaker 2: It's suitably vague. There isn't this.
Speaker 3: Chapter and verse of what we get from the FBI
on the regular. But yeah, for other reasons. Yeah, so
that's the FBI's version. But this particular little wrinkle that
came about in twenty twenty three I think was particularly
interesting as well, and leans more toward I think this
was probably our guy. According to reporting from Ella Morton
of history dot Com, quote, McCoy's children Chante and Richard
the third Rick have long believed their father might have
been behind the nineteen seventy one hijacking. They opened up
about their suspicions to Dan Grider in twenty twenty three
after being repeatedly contacted by the amateur investigator. According to Grider,
they presented the FBI with a parachute and harness that
had been stashed in a storage shed on their family's
North Carolina property. Also stored with the parachute was a
logbook that McCoy's daughter claims places their father at the
site of the skyjacking. Chantay and Rick have said they
waited until their mother passed away before sharing the items
with investigators.
Speaker 2: I think this guy is extremely likely. There's other suspects
that are worthy of consideration, but Richard McCoy Jr. He's
definitely the top of the list.
Speaker 3: I would agree with that too. I would be interested
in that tie that we mentioned a little bit. Ago
is still an FBI custody and they're able to do
some testing on that. I would love to see. They've
got his kids right, which means they have DNA available
to them that's testable, and there is presumably DNA on
the tie. I would love to go ahead and see
them do the testing. There is a little bit more
though about the testing and the tie that comes up
a little bit later. Possible suspect too, Bryant Jack Kofelt
proof offered. In nineteen seventy two. Kofelt reached out to
his former cellmate James Brown, presumably not the King of Soul,
and confessed to the hijacking. He stated that he landed
near Mount Hood after jumping out of the plane, with
injuring himself and losing the money in the process too
bad for him. He stated that he burnt his parachute
with magnesium powder, then walked to a jeep he had
stashed nearby to affect his escape. Since one of Cooper's
parachutes was later found, that makes his story suspect because
he said he burned the parachute.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this really starts to fall apart for me for
two reasons. One is, we know that at least a
portion of Deep Cooper's parachutes later recovered. The second thing
is jumping out of a plane is an imprecise science,
and the gep he supposedly stashed nearby in order to
escape exactly how would that work because this airplane is
flying at least two hundred miles an hour. How closely
could you time your jump so that you're able to
walk to a jeep you've stashed in the woods somewhere.
This one doesn't work for me.
Speaker 3: No, I agree. So that is the proof that Jack
Koefelt and his former cellmate James Brown offered. The refutation
came again from the FBI. The FBI described him as
a quote notorious swindler, which of course makes his credibility
less than stellar. The FBI later said that the two
gentlemen in question offered the FBI details that did not
match the confidential holdbacks. So the lead investigator on the case,
Ralph hemmel's Bach, believed that that co Felton Brown were
just attempting to run a con on the Bureau. They
pursued a movie deal based on this confession koe Felton
Brown did. They allegedly went on a camping trip to
find the missing money, though shocker, they were never able
to recover the money.
Speaker 2: And the holdbacks. Just as a reminder if you're not
familiar with that expression, usually law enforcement will hold back
certain key details in a case like this and murder cases, etc.
They're usually designed to flush out people that may be
claiming involvement. But if they don't know certain key facts
which are held back from the public, when law enforcement
investigators are questioning them, they will put forth these questions
which are not known to the public and really should
only be known by someone who was there. So the
fact that co Felton Brown discussed details but didn't seem
to be able to match the holdbacks and give Kofelt's
history of being a con man, I don't think this
one flies at all.
Speaker 3: I agree it's suspect three. Dwayne l. Weber proof offered.
Dwayne L. Weber offered a deathbed confession to his wife, Joe,
revealing that he was Dan Cooper. Joe said she began
putting pieces together, including quote recalling the sleep talking nightmare
Dwayne had about leaving fingerprints on the plane, an old
knee injury he claimed he got from jumping out of
a plane, and the local library book on dB Cooper
with Dwayne Weber's handwriting in the margins end quote seems
a little this body.
Speaker 2: To me if he too, And then of course you
get into the refutation.
Speaker 3: The refutation offered for that one is fairly straightforward. Dwayne
Weber said that he had left fingerprints in the airplane
during the hijacking, but Weber's fingerprints in DNA did not
match the fingerprints and DNA found on the plane, so
the the guy ruled him out as a suspect.
Speaker 2: One thing that's interesting about this Dwayne Weber suspect is
that the FBI has clearly gone back and tested evidence
from nineteen seventy one, because nineteen seventy one is decades
before DNA is in current use in crime labs. It's
not until the late eighties early nineties, as we've discussed
here on Mind over Murder, So it's fascinating that they'd
be willing to go back and retest evidence, including seeking touch,
DNA and other sources, in order to rule people in
or out as a suspect. Clearly, the FBI had not
let the Dan Cooper case go follow they were continuing
to do scientific testing well into the nineties.
Speaker 3: I agreed suspect for Barbara Dayton. Barbara Dayton is one
of the most interesting confessors in the dab Cooper saga.
She was included in Skyjack by Jeffrey Gray Barbara Dayton
died in two thousand and two. She was a World
War II VET, a former merchant marine, an aviation enthusiast,
and she was likely the first person to undergo gender
reassignment surgery in Washington State. In nineteen sixty nine, Barbara
Dayton quote purportedly made a bold confession to her friend
Ron Foreman and his wife, claiming that two years after
undergoing a gender reassignment surgery, she boarded a plane while
presenting as a male, altered her voice, and carried out
the greatest unsolved aviation heist ever. Dayton, who had been
denied a commercial pilot's license, allegedly sought revenge on the
airline industry with this act and proclaimed to have hidden
all the stolen money in a cistern in Woodburn, Oregon.
End quote.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this one doesn't wash for me at all, but
you can please continue because it starts to fall apart.
Speaker 3: It does because she ultimately recanted her own confession quote.
When she realized the government was still ready willing and
able to prosecute whoever committed the skyjacking, she swiftly recanted
her confession and swore she had made the whole thing
up to date, there has been no actual evidence linking
Barbara Dayton to the crime.
Speaker 2: This one is just such an eye roller because Dayton,
after reassignment surgery, makes this really crazy claim to have
been Dan Cooper, but then scrambles to take it all
back when Dayton realizes, Oh my gosh, they're actually going
to go after me and charge me, and if they
find me guilty, I'll end up spending years in jail. Oops.
Maybe I shouldn't be claiming or maybe bragging that, post
gender reassignment surgery, I presented as a mail and hijacked
this plane and stole this two hundred thousand dollars. Oh,
people aren't necessarily taking kindly to that. They're going to
put me in jail. Sorry, I made the whole thing up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is play stupid games, win stupid prizes territory.
Speaker 2: There's a more obscene version of that, but we'll leave
that for another time.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Oh, in speaking of another time, I think we're going
to have to move into part two of our dB Cooper. Look,
we have.
Speaker 3: Much more to go on our in depth deep dive
into the dB Cooper skyjacking from nineteen seventy one. So
we're going to call a halt to this episode of
Mind Over Murder. We would like to remind you that
we have an upcoming live event on May thirty first,
which is Saturday. We are going to be at the
South Norfolk Library for the Murder, Mystery and Mayhem Market
where you can come and hang out. We are going
to be hosting a true crime book swap. As you
are aware, I am an absolutely avid reader of true
crime and right now I have more books than can
fit on my shelf. So if you're interested in stopping
by the mind Over Murder booth, bring some of your
favorite true crime books and swap them for mine. You
can also hang out. We'll talk talk to me about
your favorite cases and various other things. Will have a
ton of fun. So if you're interested, please do swing
by the South Norfolk Library on May thirty first. All
of the information about this event is going to be
on our social media page. We'll also put links in
the show notes. That is going to do it for
this episode of mind Over Murder. Thank you so much
for listening. We'll see you next time.
Speaker 1: Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and
Another Dog Productions.
Speaker 2: Our executive producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley.
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Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to mind Over Murder.