D.B. Cooper identity remains ‘enduring mystery,’ but release of investigative files builds case for FBI effort (2024)

D.B. Cooper has been dead for more than 50 years.

Larry Carr is sure of it, and he should know, seeing as he once headed up the FBI’s investigation into the unknown criminal’s famous crime, the only unsolved skyjacking in U.S. history.

Of course, Carr doesn’t definitively know the hijacker died on Nov. 24, 1971, after he jumped out of a Boeing 727 somewhere over southwest Washington with a parachute and $200,000 in ransom strapped to his body.

Because nobody knows for certain. No human remains connected to the skyjacking have ever been discovered out in the Pacific Northwest forest. No solid suspect has ever been identified.

But Carr knows this: the FBI did everything it could to find out what happened to the man who bought a $20 ticket at Portland International Airport on Thanksgiving Eve 52 years ago, giving the fake name “Dan Cooper,” and then hijacked Northwest Orient Flight 305.

“Every office in the country had agents working the case, and international [offices] as well,” Carr told The Oregonian/OregonLive last week. “I think the FBI did a great job on the investigation. Everybody was all in on it.”

If the retired FBI agent sounds a little defensive, there’s a reason for that. For years, the bureau has been a punching bag for amateur Cooper hunters, who argue the law-enforcement agency made various fatal mistakes in its pursuit of the skyjacker.

Carr dismisses the criticism. No, the investigation wasn’t perfect – no investigation is – but it was professionally and diligently pursued, he said.

The problem, simply enough, was a lack of evidence. The hijacker – unmemorable-looking, polite, apparently middle-aged – could be almost anybody. Investigators had only useless partial fingerprints of the man. The butts of cigarettes and strands of hair they collected from the plane led nowhere and eventually were discarded or lost. This was before DNA testing had been invented.

All of this surely will be discussed at the latest CooperCon, the annual D.B. Cooper convention, which gets underway Friday in Seattle. All these years after the skyjacker leapt into a frigid, stormy night, interest in the investigation remains strong.

Even Carr, who worked the case 20 years ago, is still invested in it.

“I want to know the end of the story,” he said. “It’s a great story. Unfortunately, I think it’s going to be an enduring mystery.”

In the weeks after the skyjacking, the FBI set out to find men who both fit the description of the suspect and recently had gone missing. This was a mammoth task.

Before the internet and widespread computerization, missing-persons cases could be difficult. They were time-consuming slogs, requiring shoe-leather detective work – and that was when the person’s real name was known.

Making it still more difficult, most missing persons at the time went unreported – “the missing missing,” as they were called. That’s just the way it was. Everyone knew that, unless the police had reason to suspect foul play, they weren’t going to look for you if you stepped out for a pack of cigarettes and never returned to your wife and kids.

At one point early in the investigation, the FBI had a list of 21 missing men who showed promise as the “Norjack” suspect. The men hailed from places across the country: New York and Florida and South Carolina, Ohio and Maryland and California.

None of them panned out as serious suspects.

A key reason the FBI concluded Cooper probably died on the night of the hijacking is he “clearly didn’t have the experience to pull this off,” Carr said. “He was some guy on the fringes who did this audacious thing.”

The skyjacker’s actions indicate he had limited if any skydiving experience and no special military training, Carr pointed out. Cooper didn’t specify the kind of parachutes he wanted or dictate a flight path. He didn’t have goggles or appropriate clothes for the dangerous jump.

“I’m firmly in the camp that Cooper died” on the night of the hijacking, Carr said.

But if D.B. Cooper really was just some guy on the fringes who did an audacious thing, wouldn’t that have made him easier to identify than if he were, as many amateur Cooper theorists believe, some kind of spectral special-ops CIA man? Wouldn’t it reinforce the idea that the FBI screwed up – and kept screwing up until it finally closed the case in 2016?

Ryan Burns, a Mississippi defense attorney and former prosecutor who’s writing a book about the investigation, doesn’t think so. Every now and again, investigators run into a case that can’t be cracked, he said.

The point of his in-the-works book, which doesn’t have a publisher, is different than most other tomes about the D.B. Cooper case, Burns said. He isn’t making an argument for one of the many suspects out there who’ve been embraced and debated by the Cooper-hunter community. His goal is to use the reams of case-file documents publicly released in recent years to “rehab the FBI,” he told The Oregonian/OregonLive. “They worked their asses off.”

That’s why Carr, who’s been reading chapters of Burns’ book in draft form, is enthusiastic about the effort.

“By far it’s the definitive book on the D.B. Cooper case,” he said. “He supports everything he’s writing with FBI work product. He’s not trying to hammer a [favorite] suspect into the ground, throwing out evidence in a reckless manner.”

Carr has given the unfinished book his imprimatur, saying he is “so happy with it.” But that doesn’t mean he agrees with its author on everything about the case.

“I think Cooper probably lived,” Burns admitted when pressed. “I do believe that.”

-- Douglas Perry; dperry@oregonian.com