Infamous America - DB COOPER Ep. 3 | “The Suspects”

Episode Date: July 22, 2020

Years pass, and the heat of the initial investigation dies down. The FBI reviews numerous suspects but dismisses each one. There are no leads on the hijacker and no new pieces of evidence … until a boy finds bundles of money buried in the sand. The money is verified as part of the ransom and it briefly reignites the investigation. But as the new millennium dawns with no forward progress on the case, the FBI enlists the help of “citizen sleuths” to help solve the mystery of D.B. Cooper. Join Black Barrel+ for early access and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com. Our social media pages are: @blackbarrelmedia on Facebook and Instagram, and @bbarrelmedia on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1981, as the 10-year mark of the hunt for D.B. Cooper comes and goes, his identity and whereabouts remain a mystery. The case will see a changing of the guard, new suspects, a cry for help from the FBI, and the emergence of a citizen army of pseudoscientists, investigators, theorists, and conspiracists. But before that, the most important discovery since agents bagged a black clip-on tie and some cigarette butts on the night of the hijacking will be found by an eight-year-old boy. My relentless sleep problems have always come from an overactive mind.

I lay in bed at night with my mind racing from one thing to another, and then, of course, I have a brainstorm about something new. That lights the fire, and then I'm in real trouble. To calm my mind, the only things that have ever worked with any consistency are sleep gummies. Sleepy Time Advanced Gummies from Mood.com come in various combinations of THC, CBD, and CBN. So you can get something that's very low in THC, but higher in CBD, which helps turn off the stress, and CBN, which is the thing that makes you sleepy.

The brain shuts up, the racing thoughts stop, and it's off to sleep. Mood is federally compliant. The gummies are legal and delivered right to your door. At Mood.com, get 20% off your first order with our promo code, Infamous. Go to mood.com and use the code infamous to get 20% off your first order. And they have a 100-day satisfaction guarantee. Mood.com promo code infamous. From BlackBarrell media, this is Infamous America.

I'm your host, Chris Wimmer. In this season, we're telling the story of D.B. Cooper, the mystery man who pulled off the only unsolved skyjacking in American history. This is Chapter 3, The Suspects. Vancouver, Washington sits on the north bank of the Columbia River across from Portland, Oregon. It grew out of the timber and fur trade, but by the mid-20th century, it enjoyed an industrial boom centered on the port of Vancouver. In 1980, it has a population of roughly 42,000. Downstream from Vancouver, near where Lewis and Clark made camp almost 180 years earlier,

is a spit of beach known as Tina Barr. It's a popular spot with locals, so you can expect the smell of cheap marijuana and warm, rainier beer. Families come to swim and picnic. And that's what the Ingram family is doing on a mild Sunday afternoon in February of 1980. Brian Ingram is eight years old. He prepares a spot for his father to build a campfire. As he digs into the wet sand, his fingers find a brick of dirty, slimy paper. Below that, he finds a second, and then a third.

He shows them to his parents. They realize the bricks aren't just degraded stacks of paper, their bills, their $20 bills. The rubber bands holding the bundles together nearly disintegrated the slightest touch. The Ingrams take the money home. They wonder if they can cash it. The family is from Oklahoma originally. They're new to the Pacific Northwest. So the legend of D.B. Cooper is new to them.

It doesn't dawn on them that this could be money from the hijacking. But before they take the money to the bank, they decide to call the FBI. They meet with Special Agent Ralph Himmelsbach and other skeptical FBI experts. There's over $5,000 in decrepit bills. The edges are worn to the point that the bills are now more oval-shaped than rectangular. Tiny holes pepper the bill. But Andrew Jackson's face, and the serial numbers on many, are fully legible. Before the man who called himself Dan Cooper jumped out of flight 305 nine years ago,

the money he demanded had been cataloged. He wanted $200,000 in $20 bills. He demanded that the bills have non-sequential serial numbers, and they did. But all the bills had been from the years 1950, 1963, and 1969. Now, here in 1980, agents carefully remove a single $20 bill from a pack. They compare its serial number to a list of 10,000 possibles, and they find a match. Eight-year-old Brian Ingram found some of Cooper's money. As the news spreads, the Ingrams become celebrities.

Local police at FBI agents head to Tina Barr and dig in the sand in search of more bundles. None are found, but the case receives a jolt of energy. The discovery is also a serious complication for the case. The area along the Columbia River where the money is found is well outside the path of Flight 305. It's nearly 40 miles west of the area where the FBI thought Cooper jumped out of the plane. The FBI runs some theories.

So do the media, treasure hunters, and the population at large. Has the money been in this spot since 1971? If not, how and when did it get here? Did it wash down the Columbia River? Or did someone bury it here? If someone buried it, then where's the rest? As the investigation starts its second decade, the FBI finds itself with a whole new set of questions.

It still hasn't answered any of the questions from 10 years ago on the night of the hijacking, and now there's a whole new round. But there's one agent who won't be tracking down these answers. If the FBI is going to get their elusive man, they're going to have to do it without Special Agent Ralph Himmelsbach. When Brian Ingram pulls the money out of the sandbar, Agent Himmelsbach is just weeks away from retirement. Other than D.B. Cooper himself,

Himmelsbach's name is more synonymous with the case than any other, and he won't get the ending he wants. But he never weakens his stance that Cooper is not a folk hero, and he remains consistent that he believes the hijacker did not survive. After almost 10 years without a viable suspect, most agents in the FBI believe the hijacker died the night of the jump. Some experts on skydiving say the jump was just too dangerous. Several copycat hijackers had successfully jumped out of commercial airliners with their riches and lived to be caught. But none had to deal with the combination of factors that

that collided on the night of Cooper's jump. His status remains a mystery. And though the FBI never makes an arrest and maintains publicly that it has no primary suspect, several promising characters populate the Cooper mythology. Richard McCoy Jr. remains near the top of the list. He completed a successful hijacking just six months after Cooper, and the details were nearly identical. He hijacked a Boeing 727 out of Denver, Colorado, and held it for a ransom of $500,000. He used the rear air stairs to jump out of the plane, and he successfully parachuted to the ground. McCoy was a helicopter pilot in the Vietnam War and received a distinguished flying cross

and a purple heart. He was brash and daring, and he even looked like Cooper. The FBI thinks he's nearly the perfect suspect, but its hopes are dashed. McCoy is arrested a couple days after the Colorado hijacking, and he seems to have an airtight alibi for the day of the Cooper heist. The FBI says publicly that it has essentially eliminated McCoy as a suspect, but he remains a person of interest. When McCoy goes to prison for his hijacking, he escapes, not once, but twice. In 1974, after his second escape, he hides in Virginia Beach.

He comes back to his apartment one night and finds the FBI waiting for him. The confrontation leads to a shootout and Richard McCoy dies at the scene. At least one agent believes that D.B. Cooper just died as well. In 1977, Barbara Dayton reveals a secret to her friends, Pat and Ron Foreman. Barbara is an accomplished Cessna pilot and an avid skydiver, and now she tells her friends, her name you. to be Robert Dayton. She says she underwent sex reassignment surgery eight years earlier. And if that secret shocked the foreman's, they were in for an even bigger surprise. Barbara

then claims she disguised herself as a man and hijacked Flight 305 in 1971. When Barbara had been Robert Dayton, she'd been in the military, where she'd gained experience with explosives. So it was possible that she could have built a real bomb in a suitcase and survived a jump out of an airplane on a cold and rainy night. Through their years of friendship, Barbara outlines the tale for the foreman's. She claimed she hid the money on a farm in rural Oregon. Barbara Dayton died of cardiac and pulmonary disease in 2002. In 2016, the foreman's published a book about their friend's confession called The Legend of D.B. Cooper, Death by Now. natural causes. In it, they suggest the ground search for Cooper was entirely in the wrong

place. Dayton claimed to have made the jump nearly 10 minutes after the time of the long-standing FBI theory. This would put her drop zone over Woodburn, Oregon, at least 60 miles from the original search zone. But even with Dayton's confession and military experience, the FBI never comments on Dayton as a suspect. Kenneth Christensen seems to be an ideal suspect. He was a paratrooper in World War II, an employee of Northwest Orient Airlines, and he was 45 at the time of the hijacking.

According to flight attendant Florence Schaffner, Christensen also bears a resemblance to the man who became D.B. Cooper. With all those things, it would stand a reason that Christensen would rise to the top of the list of suspects. He doesn't. But he'll be featured on a history channel special, and he'll be the subject of two books. His brother Lyle becomes so focused on the idea that he tries to sell Kenneth's story to author and screenwriter, Nora Ephra. But the FBI states publicly that Kenneth Christensen is not a viable suspect.

More names appear in association with the case. Robert Lepsy, a grocery store manager from Michigan who disappeared two years before the hijacking a flight three and fit the description of the hijacker. Dwayne Weber, a World War II vet with a secret life as a career criminal that he kept hidden from his wife. He confesses on his deathbed, I am Dan Cooper, and it becomes his wife's obsession. William Gossett is a veteran of Korea and Vietnam. He becomes obsessed with the Cooper hijacking.

He allegedly convinces family members that he has some of the ransom money. Experts will claim to uncover an encryption in letters sent to news outlets after the hijacking. They say the encryption links gossip to the letters. These names and dozens more are discussed in books, internet chat rooms, and TV specials, but none of them will ever be recognized as viable suspects by the FBI. As the 1980s move into the 1990s and then the 2000s, little changes in the case. No new physical evidence is found and no new persons of interest arise. But there is one change in the overall, a change in perception.

The Cooper mythology begins to crack. He was once viewed by many as a fearless folk hero who stood up to the government and big business. But by mid-September of 2001, Americans are not so quick to lionize a desperate individual who sticks it to the proverbial man while endangering others. A skyjacker is no longer a rebellious individual who Americans can gravitate toward, or at least passively tolerate. That type of person is viewed as a terrorist. And of course, those attitudes don't suddenly flip like a light switch

on September 11, 2001. The 1980s saw a rise in air terror. In 1985, an Air India flight from Mines, Montreal explodes in the air, killing all 329 people on board. A Sikh separatist claims responsibility. In 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 is flying from Frankfurt, Germany, to New York City. Over Lockerbie, Scotland, a bomb detonates on the plane. The aircraft rips apart.

Debris is spread over miles of Scottish countryside. all 243 passengers and 16 crew members are killed, as well as 11 people on the ground. Fifteen years later, in 2003, Libya's leader Moammar Gaddafi admits his country is responsible for the bombing. By that point, air travel has changed forever. Soon, people will hardly remember what it was like to fly before September 11th. And many alive have no concept of what it was like in the Golden Age. of hijacking, when there was no airport security of any kind. And as the media and the public view hijacking differently, the FBI starts to view the Cooper case differently as well.

In 2007, FBI Special Agent Larry Carr becomes the lead investigator on the Cooper case. If Agent Himmelsbach looked like a Western lawman out of American lore, then Agent Carr looks like a quintessential Fed pulled from central casting. car sports a high and tight haircut and a proud square jaw. His physique hints at his past as a Division I All-American Pole Walter. Agent Carr's take on Cooper after reviewing the case sounds familiar. He fixates on Cooper on the air stairs. Even at the very edge, the stairs would guard the hijacker from wind moving along the plane.

Carr believes the instant Cooper leaps off the stairs. the wind sends Cooper into a diving tumble that he can't recover from. Like Agent Himmelzbach before him, Carr is confident that Cooper never got his shoot open, and he died that night in November 1971. But as confident as he is that Cooper died, he's equally confident that the case can still be solved. Carr says,

He came from somewhere and some won, and that's what we want to know. But Cooper isn't the priority for the FBI. that he once was. Carr won't have the money or manpower that agents in the past have enjoyed. But what Carr lacks in resources, he makes up for in resourcefulness.

He understands that new technologies have not been maximized by law enforcement. Yes, they had some DNA testing available when the crime first occurred, but science has evolved. And not only have hard sciences made leaps forward, but Carr now has a powerful tool that his predecessors didn't,

the World Wide Web, and the people on it. Agent Carr hatches a plan. He goes into Cooper chat rooms on the internet and looks for ideas and clues. On New Year's Eve, 2007, the FBI posts a press release on its website. It's an invitation to Cooper scholars,

writers, and enthusiasts to join the hunt. The FBI shares pictures of the black clip-on tie and the tie clip. It shares pictures of the unfurled parachute left on the plane and the money found in the sandbar. Agent Carr tells his new audience to keep some things in mind. The FBI is confident in the accuracy of Cooper's physical description. They don't believe Cooper had help from anyone on the ground.

They don't believe Cooper was an experienced skydiver. And Carr dismisses several key names that have been linked to DB Cooper over the years. including Dwayne Weber, Kenneth Christensen, and Richard McCorley. It doesn't take long for what Agent Carr will dub the citizen sleuths to mobilize. It's clear to the FBI that with or without their invitation, there's a subset of people for whom the case of D.B. Cooper remains very active. Tom K. is possibly the greatest citizen sleuth of the newly deputized civilian army. With experience in paleontology, geology, and astrophysics,

Kay brings new scientific methods to the case. He partners with the FBI and focuses on the most critical pieces of physical evidence. The money is first. It's baffled investigators more than anything. Kay goes to work on it using technology that wasn't available when it was found in 1980. He studies the money on an elemental level with a scanning electron microscope. He creates field tests to explore the nature of how the bills degraded. He tests how stacks of bills would float.

He tests how they would age in jars of water and sand, similar to that found on the banks of the Columbia River. He lets the bills degrade for nearly three years to watch the process. All of this is to figure out when the money got to the spot where Brian Ingram found it. Unfortunately, Kay reaches no real conclusion. He says, How the Cooper bundles came to be buried where they were remains as big a mystery as who D.B. Cooper was.

But Tom Kay isn't done. With an electron microscope, he pours over the black clip-on tie. He finds pollen on it. He finds chemicals that seem to confirm that the person who wore it was a smoker, possibly confirming that the tie did, in fact, belong to Cooper. Particles of pure titanium are also found on the tie. And that's a new twist. Could they be looking for someone who worked for a company that used titanium?

How many of those could there have been in 1971? It's an interesting new question, but like all the others, it has no answer. The scientific review of the physical evidence provides a great deal of information, but it doesn't lead to new suspects or additions to Cooper's profile. However, there are some pieces of evidence that might have the best of evidence that might have the best potential to lead to a break in the case. Tom K. would love to get his hands on them. The Raleigh cigarette butts. Throughout the hijacking, Cooper smoked Raleigh cigarettes and smashed the butts into an ashtray in the armrest of his seat. They were bagged by law enforcement

after the plane landed. Tom K. would love to test them, but he can't. Sometime in the last 49 years, they disappeared. The FBI has never been. never been able to compare DNA samples from the cigarettes to databases that didn't exist in 1971. In 2011, Tom K. and Agent Carr are featured heavily in a book called Skyjack, The Hunt for D.B. Cooper by journalist Jeffrey Gray. During the 40th anniversary of the hijacking, the book becomes a New York Times bestseller. It remains a highly regarded version of the D.B. Cooper story. But within five years of its publication, the FBI makes a disheartening announcement. The Seattle office issues a statement that reads, in part, following one of the longest and most

exhaustive investigations in our history, on July 8, 2016, the FBI redirected resources allocated to the D.V. Cooper case in order to focus on other investigative priorities. The case is closed. You could walk around the outside of a Boeing 727 10 times and not notice the small metal paddle near the rear of the plane. When the plane is on the ground, the paddle sticks out so you could grab it with your hand if you were on a ladder.

From the ground, you wouldn't recognize that the paddle is spring-loaded. When the plane climbs into the sky, the air that rushes past the plane pushes the paddle into the fuselage. It's a simple but ingenious device. Boeing began to install it on 727s in 1972, and it's called the Cooper Vane. It's a locking mechanism. When the paddle slides into the fuselage,

it prevents the air stairs from lowering while the plane is in flight. When the plane lands and the air pressure goes away, the paddle pops back out so the stairs can be lowered. When the 727 was retired in 2019, the media that covered the event almost always mentioned the Cooper vein. The little metal lever is a character in the history of the aircraft. And the idea of DB Cooper becomes a character on TV. A fictional Cooper appears as a desperate inmate on an episode of Prison Break. He's an eccentric news mogul on news radio.

He's the focus of an episode of leverage, which also contains a thinly veiled Ralph Himmelsbach character. Shows like In Search of and Expedition Unknown tell condensed versions of the hijacking. And then, a four-part series on the History Channel features a suspect who's still new to most people, Robert Rackstraw. He's a central figure in the series.

Although briefly considered a suspect early in the investigation, Rackstraw had been cleared. Even though he was former military and had explosives training, he was simply too young at the time of the hijacking to possibly be the man whom eyewitnesses described. But by 2016, Rackstraw is a different man with a much more interesting story. He's been charged with Czech fraud.

He's been taken into custody on explosives charges in Iran. He's been tried for murder and charged with attempting to fake his own death. At first he leads the filmmakers to believe that he is D.B. Cooper. But then he takes back his confession. Rackstra becomes a fascinating suspect and great television. But the FBI refuses to comment. The story is intriguing, but the FBI does not reopen the case.

Nor will the FBI reopen the case in May of 2018 when a man named Carl Lauren publishes a book about his friend. Walter Recka. Reca was a paratrooper and an avid skydiver, and his recently passed away. Carl Lauren says he can provide audio tapes of Reca confessing to the crime and giving details of the hijacking. He can also provide the long underwear that Reca says he wore when he jumped out of the plane. Lorin was asked to hold the story until his friend passed away. The story earns Carl lore in a book deal and a new documentary series, but the FBI still isn't interested in Walter Recka. One year later, in July of 2019, Robert Rackstraw dies from a heart condition at age 75.

And now, every person of interest who was thought to be D.B. Cooper is gone. As the internet becomes part of the investigation, a fun feature develops. There's an online search engine where you can check serial numbers of $20 bills against the ones from Cooper's Hall. So that old 20 you found in your uncle's attic way back when, you can see if it just might be from the Cooper heist. To this day, almost five decades later, not a single bill has ever been discovered in circulation. So, as the 50th anniversary of the unsolved case called Norjack approaches, where are we at? And where do we go from here? If the physical description is accurate, then the man who called himself Dan Cooper could be as old as 95 if he's still alive. If he is, then the man who pulled off one of the most infamous crimes in American history has somehow kept it a secret for nearly 50 years.

It could mean that law enforcement is no closer to catching him now than when the agents and officers scoured the Pacific Northwest on Thanksgiving weekend 1971. It could also mean that one of the men who confessed to the crime, or was heavily suspected, was actually D.B. Cooper. But since they're all gone now, we'll never know for sure. It means we might never know the true identity of Dan Cooper. But as the figure of Cooper remained stuck in limbo, life moved on for the other characters in the story. Special Agent Ralph Himmelsbach retired shortly after the money was found in the sandbar, and published a book. book about the case in 1986. He remained involved in the case to some degree for the rest of his days. He never believed any of the suspects were Cooper, and he remained resolute that the real Cooper

died somewhere in the woods. Special Agent Himmelsbach passed away in October 2019 at the age of 94. Captain William Scott never set eyes on D.B. Cooper, and after Flight 305, he rarely spoke of the hijacking. But he continued to fly for Northwest Orient Airlines, even after tragedy struck his family. One year after the hijacking, four members of his family died in a plane crash. He denied interview requests for the rest of his life. He passed away in 2001 at the age of 81. Flight attendants Florence Schaffner and Tina Mucklow were immensely helpful to the investigation, but neither shared much with the media. Mucklow, who spent the most time with Cooper, joined a nunnery for several years after she left Northwest Orient Airlines and then changed her name.

She rejected countless offers to talk about the hijacking until she agreed to appear on a 2016 documentary about the event. Florence Schaffner stayed further away. She appeared on an episode of Unsolved Mysteries in 1988, but that was it. She suffers from memory loss caused by the trauma of the hijacking and was last known to be living quietly in South Carolina. Lastly, there's the airplane with tag number N467 U.S. It might be the most famous Boeing 727 in history. Engineers repaired the air stairs after the rough landing in Reno, Nevada

on the night of the hijacking. Then they installed the Cooper vein to prevent any further incidents like Cooper's jump. The plane continued to fly until 1978. It was sold to Piedmont Airlines, and then purchased and used by the Air Force until it was scrapped for parts in 1996. And since this story will likely go on forever without a real ending, we want to leave you with an image of what might have been. Jeffrey Gray, author of Skyjack, put it brilliantly. Through the years, Cooper has become more than an outlaw. He's a canvas.

He is who we want him to be. So if we want him to be the outlaw who made it, here's what might have been. On a dark and stormy night in November 1971, a middle-aged man inches his way down a rattling set of air stairs on the back of an airplane. He grapples with a satchel filled with bundles of money. He curses as two or three bundles get away from him

and vanish into the night. He steals himself and then leaps out. The wind heaves him from side to side, back and forth, up and down. He rips the cord on the military parachute and it opens. The initial jerk isn't violent enough to dislocate a shoulder. He's conscious. His drop is blind and rough, but he finally sees the ground. He slips between the towering trees and luckily finds a patch where he can land

without becoming tangled in the canopy of furs. His adrenaline is intense, but he remembers to collect the parachute. He hides it the way he's planned. In a spot, the search parties won't think to look. He's wet, cold, and possibly in shock, but he looks for lights. Maybe they're from Merwin Dam. Maybe they're from a city across the river from Portland. He's planned for this, and he gets moving.

He's got a whole new life outside. this wilderness. Singer-songwriter Todd Snyder ends his ballad of D.B. Cooper this way. As for me, I hope they never see D.B. Cooper again. Not far away from the city of roses, a light shined from a house out in the rain. It was D.B. Cooper drinking champagne. He was drinking champagne. That ending works for us, except it's not champagne. It's a bourbon and soda. So here's to you, D.B. We hope we never see you again. Thanks for listening to the story of D.B. Cooper here on Infamous America.

Next time on the show, we're going back to 1924 to tell the story of one of the most infamous murder cases in American history, the Leopold and Loeb case. That begins August 12th, 2020 for the general public, and August 5th for members of our Black Barrel Plus Premium Listening Program. Members can binge the entire series one week before it begins for everyone else. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. And if you want to know more about the DB Cooper story, there's a ton of stuff out there for you. Here's a couple quick resources. You can do a deep dive into the evidence on scientist Tom Kay's website, citizen sleuths.com. Agent Ralph Himmelsbach's book is

Norjack, the investigation of D.B. Cooper. And journalist Jeffrey Gray's book is Skyjack, the hunt for D.B. Cooper. This season was researched and written by Jamie Lyko. Audio editing and sound design by Dave Harrison. I'm your host and producer, Chris Wimmer. Find us at our website, blackbarrelmedia.com or on our social media channels.

We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram and VBeryl Media on Twitter. And you can stream all our episodes on YouTube. Just search for Infamous America Podcast. Thanks for listening.