Stuff You Should Know - SYSK’s Fall True Crime Playlist: SYSK Live: The DB Cooper Heist

Episode Date: September 26, 2025

Join Josh and Chuck live from Seattle as they (sky)dive into one of the most brazen robberies in the annals of crime and the only unsolved airline hijacking in American history.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, and I'm the host of the On Purpose podcast. Today, I'm joined by Emma Watson. Emma Watson has apparently quit acting. Emma Watson has announced she's retiring from acting. Has anyone else noticed that we haven't seen Emma Watson in anything in several years? Emma Watson is opening up the truth behind her five-year break from acting. Watson said she wasn't very happy.

Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty. on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Introducing IVF Disrupted, the Kind Body Story, a podcast about a company that promised to revolutionize fertility care. It grew like a tech startup. While Kind Body did help women start families, it also left behind a stream of disillusioned and angry patients. You think you're finally like in the right hands. You're just not. Listen to IVF Disrupted, the Kind Body Story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back, everybody. We're moving along on our true crime playlist with an episode we recorded live in Seattle in 2017 on the Unsolved Mystery of D.B. Cooper.

Someone using that alias hijacked a plane flying from Portland to Seattle in 1971 and jumped out mid-air, making off with $200,000. People still float suspects today, and they usually say the case is solved, but the FBI stopped investigating back in 2016, and they consider it unsolved. This one is pretty fun, so I hope you enjoy it. And if you like this live show, come see us when we hit the road again in 2026. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from How StuffWorks.com. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and we are here live at the beautiful Neptune Theater in beautiful Seattle and beautiful Washington. Thank you, guys.

Phenomenal. I'm already a sweaty mess, so that must mean we're on stage. We are off to a great start. That must mean I'm awake. Or sleeping. Yeah, I sweat in my sleep, too. Big time. It's gross.

I'm always wiping his brow while he sleeps. What movie we're going to watch tonight in the hotel? Is a spy out yet? I don't know. And we can leave the seat up on the toilet? I don't do that. I don't either, because I pee sitting down because I'm 45 years old.

Do you really? Well, yeah. Might as well get into it. What? You do two? Why have we never talked about this? I started peeing sitting down during the middle of the night, get up because if it just makes sense because you don't want to wake up too much and you don't

want to like make a mess. And then I think I just hit a certain age where I was like it's just nicer to sit down. I don't need to prove anything to anyone. I stand when I. You landed your lady? Huh? You landed your lady? You're all set? Yeah. I stand when I pee off my deck at night. I don't do that. I live in a condo complex. They would probably land everything. to me if I did that. It's not good. Man, I feel like an enormous weight's just been lifted off. I can't believe that you're not even 40 years old yet,

and you pee sitting down. Yeah. Let's start the podcast. Are there other guys out there that pee sitting down? All right. We are starting a movement, baby. That's right. Your ladies will appreciate it.

Oddly, I pooped standing up. This is so off the rails already. Like in conversation. You'll just be sitting there talking to him. You're like, you're pooping right now, aren't you? Yeah. It's like, it's more efficient this way. I get more done.

We should probably start over. We should. We're going to get off stage and come back out. I can't believe what we've been talking about here this evening already. Okay, let's all just take it down a notch, all right? So, we're podcasting. We're about to start podcasting. I think I already started the podcast.

Oh, God, which means that's going to be on, like, the thing we... That's why I said we should start over. Oh, okay, yeah. It stays here, everybody. Yeah, it's all our secret. 500 people. Okay. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and we are live here at the beautiful Neptune Theater in Seattle, Washington. Man, times two. That's even better. That's an end joke. people will be like, even better than what? Really? There's more crossover between our fans and Howard Stern than our fans and Mariners fans, I think.

Boy, there's a Venn diagram out there that's confusing me already. Okay, so Chuck. Yes. This is a little bit of history. Yeah. So we're going to go back in the way back machine. That's right. If you listen to the PR live podcast, you know that, like, the Wayback Machine is imaginary, so settle down.

They heard that live. Yeah. That was a good one, too. There are PR professionals here because they email me today. Oh, really? Yeah. I can tell. That's the call of the PR professional.

Caca! So we're going back to a cold, stormy, rainy, pretty nasty Thanksgiving Eve in 1971. And the story begins at PDX, Portland Airport. And a man walked into PDX, took a picture of his shoe on the carpet, and then walked along to the Northwest Orient Airlines ticket desk. That's right. And he walked up and he said, high. I am really interested in finding more about flight 305, the flight to Seattle.

Would that happen to be a Boeing 727-100 airplane that you guys are going to fly on that route? And the ticket agent went, yes, as a matter of fact, it is. And the man said, that is fantastic. Here's my $20. Yeah. One ticket, please, for a one-way ticket between Portland and Seattle, aboard flight 305. Yeah, and she was like, that's a weird question, but I guess he's very specific about what kind of plane he likes to fly on. Plus, it's 1971, and I'm in no position to publicly question a man, so I'll just go along with this.

That's very true. And it was $20 for that flight. This is a very 70s podcast. So they handed him his little ticket voucher and said, just fill this out, sir. don't need to see ID because it's 1971. Just tell us who you are, or whoever you want us to think you are. And he wrote down in big block letters and a red ink pen, Dan Cooper.

Few, you know where we're going with this, huh? So the Boeing 727-100, as every single person in this room knows, is a smallish plane. It's not the biggest plane in the Boeing fleet. It's not the smallest either, but it's the only one that had, an aft staircase, right? And this particular flight, flying aboard this Boeing 727-100, Flight 305, had a crew of five aboard it.

There was Captain William Scott, not Sean William Scott, we figured out later on. Not Stifler. That would have made zero sense had he had a former life in the 70s as an airline pilot. Co-pilot Robert Radazak. There's a C in there,

for those of you who like that kind of thing. And there were three flight attendants. There was a head flight attendant who was named Alice Hancock, right? Yes. And then two, I guess, regular flight attendants, Tina McLeow, who's a hero of ours, and Florence Shaftner. I think they called them stewardesses back then, to be fair. Right. But we're forward-thinking guys.

So we're going to go ahead and say flight attendant. We don't use the S-word. You just make, well, never mind. Never mind. We've done quite enough extraneous. stuff for money. I know. So Dan Cooper gets on the plane. There's 37 other passengers, because again, it was the 70s. They didn't overbook flights back then and say, I'm sorry you bought a ticket, but you really can't fly on this flight. 37 passengers pretty empty, and Dan Cooper sits

in seat 18C. They pour him up a bourbon and seven up, and he lights up a cigarette. A Raleigh brand cigarette. Because it's 1971. You get smoke on planes. And he looked to be about in his mid-40s. He was, you know, kind of look like the men of the time, which is to say you either looked, by 1971, you either looked a little more like Don Draper, kind of holding on to that 50s look, or you look like Charles Manson. He looked a little more like Don Draper. Yeah. Had the suit, had the skinny tie. And we should talk a little bit about the suit. The suit was a russet colored suit, which was like that weird burgundy brown color. That's potato colored. Right. And it just so happened.

that he was wearing this suit during the one six-month period in history where you could wear that color suit out in public. So he was okay. And then his skinny tie was a clip-on from J.C. Penny. That's right. He had an imitation mother-of-pe-in. He had an overcoat. He had a hat.

He had a bag. Kind of like a briefcase. And he had these black horn-rim sunglasses, dark kind of olive. skin, would you say? They'd call them swarthy, which I think is like stewardess. That's been phased out, you know what I mean? I thought swarthy, I thought that was like a sea captain.

I'm sure there were swarthy sea captains. Because, yeah, because they're out in the sun. So they ended up getting olive skinned? That's rugged. Okay. You're thinking of the Gorton's fisherman. Oh, right. Oh, he was swarthy.

Sure. He's swarthy as H. He had this kind of dark, wavy hair. And other than that, he would just sort of an unremarkable dude. He wanted to blend in, right? Well, yeah. Okay. So, this guy's sitting in 18C, he's being unremarkable.

Aside from wearing the sunglasses, he's smoking with his left hand, which has nothing to do with anything, but we just kind of wanted to show off how much research we've done on this. And when Florence Schaffner, the flight attendant working, his area, comes over and gives him as bourbon and I think seven up, right? Yeah. He hands her a note. And to Florence Schaffner, she was 23.

She was very pretty. She was at the time a stewardess. And this happened to her all the time, like businessmen drinking sevens and sevens, like past her notes and hit on her all the time. So when this guy in 18C, Dan Cooper handed her a note, she took the note and just put it in her flight apron without looking at it and turned and walked away.

With all the other notes. Right, exactly. From the previous flights. Right. Yeah. From all the men who wanted to rescue her from her life. Come away with me. I'm swarthy.

And so Dan Cooper sees this and he goes, Miss, you may want to have a look at that note. I have a bomb. I think you know where we're going with this. D.B. Cooper. You know, when we were coming here today, we were like, wow, we're really rolling the dice. It's entirely possible that everyone here had the D.B. Cooper case drilled into them from

like third grade on. It's not the case, isn't it? No? You didn't study it in class? It's such a side relief. I told that to Yumi, and Yumi was like, that's so dumb. She's like, do you know everything about the burning of Atlanta? And I said, no. And she's like, no, no, you don't.

And they don't know everything about D.B. Cooper. And I went back to sleep. So this was not the first commercial airplane hijacking. It actually, the first one was in 1948. And remarkably, between 1968, just three years earlier in the time D.B. Cooper hijacked this plane, there were 100 commercial hijackings in three years. Yeah, so this is not new. It was not new, but I remember, like, if anyone here grew up in, like, the 70s and stuff,

it was a thing like planes got hijacked all the time because you could bring guns and bombs on planes and you didn't need ID and no one cared they were like hmm this is weird yeah that's pretty much where the FBI was at the time and by 1971 they were just starting to like get hip to the idea of hijackings being a problem and so their first idea was well we'll put an air marshal on every flight

and then they looked at the schedule of flights in the United States and they were like oh this may have been a bad idea But they tried it anyway It was a fine idea if everyone If like a third of the population of the United States Were air marshals and yeah it was a good idea It's a good idea if you want one of every like 300 flights With an air marshal

Right right And the other 299 open for hijacking right So this was they figured out after a few years Like Ohio logistics of American air travel This is Jay Edgar Hoover's idea by the way Right He was still in charge of the FBI in 1971 Yeah so he'd been

there for about 50 years, right? Yeah. So his idea was air marshals. Didn't work, but they were still trying it. There was no air marshal on Flight 305, the D.B. Cooper hijacking flight. Yeah, they're like Portland to Seattle. Maybe we should put like three air marshals on that one. High traffic flight.

And I mean, it made sense that there would not be an air marshal on that flight because most hijackings were crazed lone gunmen with a handgun who wanted to be taken to Cuba for political reasons, basically. Right. No one flying from PDX to C-TAC wanted to be taken to Cuba. So there was no reason for an air marshal to be on the flight. It was a pretty good bet to not have an air marshal on. They just didn't expect D.B. Cooper because he was a pretty novel person.

The idea of a single guy taking control of a flight for money with a bomb, that was new. And like our whole conception of a mad bomber hijacking a flight comes from D.B. Cooper. and Sonny Bono's character in Airplane 2. This is actually, I did a little more research. Between 1968 and 79, it's literally referred to as the golden age of skyjacking. I was talking to Josh. I was like, I didn't know that you could have,

I thought a golden age was about something good. I didn't know you could have the golden age of dysentery. The good old days. It was good for the hijackers because they could get away with it, no problem. Maybe that's who wrote that. Right, yeah. The golden age of skyjerk.

man. All right. So Florence Schaffner, I'm sorry, Schaffer reads the note and she says, you know what, Cooper says, you know what, give me that note back, which is a very key thing because that means they won't have a sample of his handwriting. So he asked for the note back. And from that point on, he did not converse like everything else he had them write down to take to the captain. So they would have no more like physical evidence of his handwriting. Yeah, the only handwriting sample they had was that ticket duplicate and it was in block letters which yeah he went like this in cooper so she sits down and she says uh you know i want to know that this is legit this is for real can i can i like get a look at that bomb that you're talking about makes sense and he shows her right

yeah he gives her a little peek he opened her his bag just enough and she went to put her fingers in and he snapped it shut and she went just like pretty woman yeah yeah and uh but she sees what you know she sees red sticks of dynamite and a battery and and i guess presumably like an alarm clock with two two bells on it right it's got like a skull and crossbones it's like it says you die or something electrical tape is all around it because uh he watched a lot of cartoons he knows how to make a bomb well she i mean she bought it clearly um she saw the bomb and she uh took down a note he said take this down i have a rancers of demand. He said, I want $200,000 by 5 p.m. in cash, put it in a knapsack. I want two back

parachutes and two front parachutes. When we land, I want a fuel truck ready to refuel, no funny stuff, or all do the job. Which is, that was tough talk in 1971. Again, he watched a lot of cartoons, and that's what you say when you mean business. That roughly is about $1.2 million today. Yeah. I think it's a little low if you're going to go through a skyjacking.

It's a lot of work for a million dollars. Yeah, I would have said like if you're going to ask for 200 grand, ask for 300 or 400. That's just me. Sure.

I'm no skyjacker. So this turns out to be the only threat that Dan Cooper makes during the entire ordeal. He is this very first note that he gave up. So from that point on, like I said, he dictated everything else

so they could just pass notes back and forth. And aside from a couple of conversations with the pilots on the cockpit phone from the rear of the plane to the cockpit, they didn't have any interaction the pilots whatsoever with Dan Cooper. So they were like almost no help whatsoever during the investigation, right? And then the fact that he asked for two parachutes was a stroke of brilliance, because it did show his hand to the FBI that he was going to jump out of the plane with the ransom money. But it also said, FBI, I'm probably going to make a hostage jump with me, so don't tamper with any of these parachutes,

which if the FBI had, would have been murder, but we're talking about Jager Hoover's FBI. So they may have tried just that. So it's pretty smart that he asked for two pairs because they didn't know what he was going to do. That's right. So Schaffner takes that ransom note, gives it to Alice Hancock.

She takes it over to the pilot and the co-pilot. And, well, what did they do, Josh? She'd do a great pilot. They called C-Tac Airport and said... Why not? C-Tac, we just want to advise you on a bit of a fiddlesticks we got going on up here. Sonny Bono was taking control of the plane. He wants $200,000 in negotiable American currency by 5 p.m.

Negotiable American currency. Yeah. It was a very weird thing to ask for. It was. And so C-Tac was like, we should probably... probably call the cops. And the cops said, we should probably call the FBI. Well, yeah, this was the Seattle Police Department in 1971. They were like, no, no, no, no, no. We don't deal with things like this. They're like, wait, wait, this guy doesn't want to go to Cuba? We don't understand it.

Like, we're literally waiting for John Rambo to wander through town. So we can harass him. Just 10 more years. Wait, that was Oregon, though, wasn't it? Okay. Pretty close. That joke will kill that tomorrow night. Yeah, man. Rambo joke. Yeah, remember it. So all of a sudden, like, there's all this crazy energy going on down on the ground, right? So the FBI comes in and they're trying to get the money together.

They're like, we have an hour, you've got to give us more time. It's like, no, you can't have more time. They're like, okay, that's fine. We'll get all this stuff together. You guys are going to have to stay up there until we get everything ready for you. So the plane is circling C-TAC, and they told the passengers that the plane was experiencing mechanical problems, which I would have had a problem hearing, you know? I think they could have thought that through a little more.

Yeah, it's experiencing mechanical problems, so we're just going to keep flying. We're going to stay aloft. See what happens. Captain Scott is a gambling man. Everyone was drinking and smoking cigarettes. They didn't care. We were hooking up in the bathroom. This was 1971.

If it had been Chuck, you would have been like, I told you we should have driven. I know. It's nothing. Could have been to Portland. So they had to circle for an hour, and they ended up telling the passengers, oh, we just need to burn off some gas

and everything will be fine, right? And the passengers apparently were totally unaware that they've been hijacked. That's how cool Cooper was, right? But one passenger later said, I had a pretty good feeling we'd been hijacked. And the press pool was like, shut up, go get off the day. He was that guy.

Next person. I was at that game. Yeah. I was at that game seven. It was all right. He's that dude, you know. Oh, yeah. Any remarkable event.

Yeah, I was there. It was no big deal. I knew it was a hijacking. You really had me stumped there for a second. I'm role playing. Game seven. So, CETAC is circling, right? There's circling, circling an hour, killing time, but just burning off gas.

And Florence Schaffner has gone away to take the note to Alice Hancock, who takes notes to the cockpit. She's on the relay team, basically, now. And D.B. Cooper says, well, Dan Cooper says, hey, Tina McLeow, why don't you sit beside me for a while? And she did. And she ended up kind of taking a bit of a seat. in history, if you will,

if you will allow us that terrible analogy. And she sat down and she spent a lot of time with Dan Cooper and they ended up chatting and she said Dan Cooper kept the level head during a very tense situation like the whole time. And they chatted about things like Tina McLeod's home

state, which was Minnesota. They talked about a nearby Air Force base and how long it took to drive to C-TAC. It was like 20 minutes or something. You guys can actually probably guess the Air Force Base. We don't know. That one.

Yeah. And then they also, at one point, he looked out the window and he said, it looks like we're over Tacoma. So all this would indicate a lot to the FBI later on, right? That this guy was maybe a local. Yeah, I'm kind of curious. Could anyone here recognize Tacoma from an airplane? From an airplane? For an airplane?

Wow. Could they have a huge, like, field cut out of grass that says Tacoma? Corn? What are they saying? I think they're saying corn. Yeah? The smell? Oh, boy. I knew this would go over well here.

By the way, we didn't mention they diverted all the other flights away from CTAC at the time because they wanted that to be the only plane in the area. And to me, the most remarkable part of the... this whole story, is one of the other planes in the air, the dude, the pilot gets on and tells everyone else on that plane, what's going on? Well, he, like, he patched into the com link between Flight 305 and CTAC for the listening enjoyment of the passengers on his flight.

It's insane. It's like, I'm sorry we're delayed, but here's what's going on on another flight nearby. Right. Just sit back and listen to the dulcet tones of a skyjacking. Again, it was the 70s. Everyone was drinking. They're like, this is remarkable. Thank God it's not us. Everything's better when you're drinking.

All right, so he recognizes Tacoma, which apparently everyone in this room could do. Yeah, right. We were impressed by that, but it's nothing. Occasionally... He went, smells like Tacoma. So all of these are sort of clues, though. If he recognized Tacoma, he knew by the Air Force Base, that clearly maybe the guy's kind of from the area. Right.

Might be a clue later on. So, Mucklaw at this point asked Dan Cooper. She said, do you have a grudge against our airline, sir? And he said, no, ma'am, I don't have a grudge against your airline. I just have a grudge. Critic. Right. She was like...

Yeah. Like they did. So back on the ground, the FBI's like going crazy. The local cops are going crazy. Everybody's going crazy trying to get $200 grand in cash together. Turns out that was the easiest part of this whole thing. So Northwest Orient's president at the time, Donald Nyrop. Any Nyrop's in the house?

No? He would have been in Minnesota. Oh, okay. Yeah. But I'm convinced that someone in here is going to be related to someone in this story. Oh, I am too. Yeah. I'm just waiting.

I'm waiting for somebody standing. and be like, that's a lie. Or for someone to stand up and say, I am D.B. Cooper. Oh, yeah. That would be amazing. We'd have to come up with a different show tomorrow. Oh, yeah.

Or just bring him along. Sure. And here he is, everybody. So Donald Nyrop, the president of Northwest Orient, he's like, yeah, sure, we'll totally pay that. We have a huge insurance policy on this kind of thing. Apparently, Northwest had to pay like 20 grand and their insurance company paid out 180 gram.

And they tapped C-First Bank, which had a downtown branch. And in this downtown branch, they had a really great idea. They had stacks of $20 bills in varying amounts so that it looked like a nervous teller ran into the back and put some 20s together in the event of a bank robbery, right? And then would come out and be like, here you go, bank robber, you're getting off scot-free. But it turns out that every serial number on every one of those 20s, have been recorded. So it worked for bank robberies, worked just as well, for skyjackings as well. So they had the money, no problems. The parachutes were just very difficult.

Yeah, that was actually the harder part. Yeah. Back in 1971, the big recreational skydiving craze had not yet taken hold. It happened here and there. But the manager at CETAC said, I got a guy. Don't you worry. He's got an operation called Seattle Sky Sports in Isoquois. Anybody from Issaquah? Shout out to Issaquah. Why do you call it Seattle Sky Sports? Did they mooch off of Seattle?

Yeah. Off of the teat of Seattle. He's like a gotta guy. His name is Earl Kassie. And he agreed to help. A little side note. Earl Kassi was actually murdered three years ago. Yeah.

Yeah. Chuck likes to bring the room down. I know. We're all having too much fun. He got killed by a blow to the head in his garage, but apparently, you know, some cooperists that are still active today on the internet, you know, these conspiracy dudes.

That's how they tight. That is. Everyone did it. I love that. Everybody. See, you can all be conspiracy theories. Get out your tinball hat. Although women can't be because they're too smart.

It's always guys. did you know so Earl Kasi was killed but they think it has nothing to do with it even though Kupris are like Are you sure they're trying to silence a man Exactly So Kossi

That was pretty great man Very well-timed Yeah So Kossi called his His operation and to the dude working there And said hey can you get together these parachutes, I need two fronts and two backs. And the guy said, sure, bruh.

And in his haste, he packs three regular shoots, well, not three regular. He packs one military shoot, two regular shoots, and one thing that I still don't understand called a dummy shoot that doesn't open. No. So, like, if you were working at Seattle Sky Sports and Issaquah, you would get really, really sick of having to fold up the whole parachute every time somebody was training, throwing out the pilot shoot, which is just the little shoot that comes out first and pulls the bigger shoot out, right? If all you're trying to do is throw that part out, you don't need the bigger shoot. So if you're an employee at Seattle Sky Sports in Issaquah, you may have the idea that you should just sew the bigger part shut.

There should be no parachute that has like the most important part. sown shut, right? I think we can all agree on that. That is our rule. Every parachute should open. Right. But this is a thing, and they're called dummy shoots. The thing is, everybody's like, oh, we got it covered. We'll just put a big X on it. And everybody will know it's a dummy shoot. So one of these dummy shoots made it into the four shoots that were delivered to D.B. Cooper. So the money and the shoots go in the cop car and he does a donut skitting out, like in front of the plane, and gets out and stands outside. and waits for the plane to land, I should say.

So when they get everything together, they let Flight 305 know that they come and get it, basically, and they prepare to land. And D.B. Cooper does something very smart. Yeah, he said, you know what, I bet you there's going to be snipers on the ground because I've seen a movie or two. I've seen Black Sunday.

Anyone? No? Didn't that come out like five or six years later? Maybe. Uh-huh. Actually, I'll have to look that up. I think that was 76. You know this? Sure.

All right. He said, I have a dream about a movie one day that would be called Black Sunday. And there's going to be snipers at that airport. So have everybody put the shades down on the windows. They're all drunk. They don't care. They won't ask any questions. And so they did so, which turned out to be a pretty good move because there were, in fact,

snipers. Right, exactly. So the plane lands. and no one's allowed to get off yet. Cooper says, hey, Tina, do me a solid. Go out and get the money in the shoots and come back with them, okay? Then we can let the passengers off. And Mucklow leaves the plane.

And at this point, and this is one of the first reasons why Tina Mucklough is one of our heroes, once she's off the plane, she could have been like, so long jumps, see you in hell. Which may have been a little harsh had she said that with an earshot of somebody. this hostage situation. She could have thought it. Her actions could have said as much. She didn't. She got the shoots. She got the money. And she essentially traded herself for the hostages and went back on the plane. I would have been so out of there. That's metal. Chuck would have said out loud, see you in hell, Flight 305. I would have walked straight to baggage claim or the ground transportation and said, take me to Cousin Ike's. I need some loose leaf tea. Good luck. Good luck with the

skyjacking. Yeah, but she came back, which is amazing. She did come back. So she traded herself for these hostages. And the hostages were allowed to leave. And so too were Alice Hancock and Florence Schaffner. The rest of the crew is basically like, there's no reason for you to stay here, so go. So it was down to Schaffner and Cooper. And then in the cockpit, Radizak and Scott, right and scott and razzac repaid tina mucklow by staying themselves there there was a rope ladder actually that they could have climbed out of they had almost no interaction whatsoever with d b cooper they could have at their leisure they could have put on bathing suits and climbed out this rope ladder and laid on the tarmac for a while and then gone to the safety of like the fbi barricade and they didn't they stuck

around and they like we're like we're going to see this hijacking through yeah in my uh like in my medic mind's eye. I see them getting out on the rope swing or a rope ladder. That's different. Rope swing. That would be amazing. They may have like... It's like a tire swing on the run of the plane. They get off on the rope ladder. Tina Mucklaw never comes back and D.B. Cooper's just sitting on the plane by himself. He's like, oh, it happened again.

Yeah. Is he typing? No. Oh, no, that's going like this. Sorry. I didn't know they had a rope ladder. That's crazy. Sure. What's that for? Don't be naive. I know. Every airplane has a rope ladder in the

cock. Wake up, man. It's fashioned out of like old cheats. So the FAA actually had a their chief psychiatrist on the ground and this dude does a quick analysis, you know, like let me do one of those movie readings of

who this guy is and what's going to happen and he says you know what's going to happen is you're going to Give this guy the money and the parachutes. You're going to go up there in the plane. He's going to jump out and blow up the plane and just let everyone know that. Right. Tell the pilot and co-pilot that this is what's coming.

Right. He's going to force Mucklau to jump with him and then blow up the plane afterward, right? But yeah, make sure the cockpit knows. And then he added, and he probably has some sort of fixation on longer than usual nipples. So make sure he's not exposed to those. because he has some sort of fetish based on his experience with his mother. Because it's a 1971 psychoanalyst for the FAA. Hey, if I had done that in a German accent,

it would have sunk in even faster. Did you tell them that? Make sure you tell them that, guys. Is that all right? I'm going to go ahead and say now what I'm going to say in like an hour backstage. All right. That was amazing.

Was it? Thank you. I thought that's not what you're going to say, actually. I didn't see that one coming. You got me. Yeah. I had no idea where you were going. literally you said

longer than usual nipples and I went in my head I went am I is this happening like Josh Josh am I stolen Atlanta is the trip

am I sleep pure gold buddy Thank you Power struggles, shady money, drugs, violence, and broken promises. It's a freaking war zone. These people are animals. There's no integrity.

There's no loyalty. That's all gone. In the 1980s, modeling wasn't just a dream. It was a battlefield. Book, book, book, make deals. Let's get models in. Let's get them out. And the models themselves?

They carried scars that never fully healed. Till this day, honestly, if I see a measuring tape, I freak out. The Model Wars podcast peels back the glossy cover and reveals a high-stakes game where survival meant more than beauty. Hosted by me, Vanessa Grigoriatus, this is the untold story of an industry built on ruthless ambition. Listen to Model Wars on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I started trying to get pregnant about four years ago now. We're getting a little bit older, and it just kind of felt like the window could be closing.

Bloomberg and IHeard podcast present. IVF disrupted, the Kind Body story. A podcast about a company that promised to revolutionize fertility care. Introducing Kind Body, a new generation of women's health and fertility care. Backed by millions and millions. venture capital and private equity, it grew like a tech startup. While Kind Body did help women start families, it also left behind a stream of disillusioned and angry patients. You think you're finally like with the right people in the right hands and then to find out

again that you're just not. Don't be fooled. By what? All the bright and shiny. Listen to IVF disrupted, the Kind Body story starting September 19 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jay Chetty, and I'm the host of the on-purpose podcast. Today, I'm joined by Emma Watson. Emma Watson has apparently quit acting. Emma Watson has announced she's retiring from acting. Has anyone else noticed that we haven't seen Emma Watson in anything in several years?

Emma Watson is opening up the truth behind her five-year break from acting. Watson said she wasn't very happy. Was acting always something you were going to do? I was using acting as a way of escaping to feel free. My parents, it wasn't just the divorce, it was just like the continuing situation of living between two different houses and two different lives and two different sets of values, the career and the life that looks like the dream.

But are you really happy? Fame has given me this extraordinary power. It's also given me a lot of responsibility. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. food for the crew during the refueling process. Yeah, he's a nice guy. Yeah. You want to know who else is cool.

It's Tina Mucklaw because once they released the passengers and they got the money on board, she sat back down, and he offered her a couple of the stacks of money and she said, well, you go ahead and say it. No tipping allowed. Smooth.

Again, had it been me, well, first of all, I would have been Uncle Ikes by then. But if I was dumb enough to get back on, I would be like, yeah, pay it for it. Just two stacks of bills? Yeah. What gives, jerk? I want half. She's amazing.

So the plane's being refueled. He passed along a request, a very specific request for what's to happen when they go to take off. He said, I want to take off with that aft staircase that I know is back there down in the jump off the plane position. And they said, you can't take off with the plane. You can't take off with the door down. And he said, well, can you check on that? Are you sure? And they said, no, you can't do that.

And he said, are you super sure? And they said, no, you can't do that. He said, all right. And they said, oh, but once you're up there, you can totally lower it and jump out. And he said, well, why didn't we just start there? Because that's really the only thing it matters. He's like, fine. Fine.

And then the pilot's like, well, where do you want to go? And Dan Cooper says, Mexico City, let's say. and the pilot goes well that's that's kind of far we're going to have to refuel is reno okay and dan cooper goes i don't know how i can get this across anymore clearly i'm jumping out of the plane the next time we go up fly wherever you want just fly southward yeah so they refuel the plane and the only time uh dan cooper gets a little a little ruffled is when it takes a little long for his liking and he says it shouldn't take this long. Let's get the show on the road.

Right. He picked up, for one of the few times, he picked up the cockpit or the cabin and cockpit phone and said, let's get the show on the road. I would have screamed it and, like, hit the phone and then hit myself in the head with it. And then just started crying and been like, it's never going to work. This is never going to work. I think as well-established, we'd be the worst skyjackers ever.

And hostages. Yeah, just get, no, I don't want any part of it. He also gives them instructions on how. to fly the plane, which is getting really specific. He said, don't go any higher than 10,000 feet. Set your wing flaps at 15 degrees, which apparently, we learned, is an angle that only the 727-100 could position those wing flaps. Which everyone in this room knows because it's a Boeing.

Sure. And he said, don't go any faster than 190 miles per hour, 200 knots. So that means they're going to be flying slow and low, like you're cooking ribs. Or jumping off a plane. Because that means the cabin isn't pressurized, and that means when you open that door, you're not just going to suck everything out. It's still skydivable.

Yeah? No, that's the terminology. Okay. So, Cooper had some problems, right? He had specifically asked for a knapsack, and the feds had given him the $200 grand in a bank bag, which, as we all know, is a very unwieldy, clumsy bag, right? It's like a canvas bag.

there's nothing to it. Like, tuck it under your arm? What are you supposed to do with that, right? So he's like, well, I need to make a handle for this thing. I'll harvest one of these parachutes for its rigging. And he chose the pink one, which the pink one was actually the best one of all of them. Yeah, because it was the dummy shoot, the military shoot. A so-so shoot.

Is that what we're going to call it? Yeah. The medium shoot? Yeah. And then the pink one, which, like Josh said, is the best one. So he cuts the stuff loose. a handle for it things are happening at this point

they move to the rear of the plane he and Tina mucklaw and he says I think I need help lowering the staircase and she goes back there with him she's a little freaked out at this point she's super freaked out like she was calm and cool but like it's go go time and she thinks she's going to get

sucked out rightfully so because she didn't understand the physics of you know the plane being that low and that slow or she did another her cooking ribs to hell with physics I am still freaked out. We're about to lower a staircase at 10,000 feet.

Why did I mention physics? Exactly. So she gets back there and he said, she said, can I at least have some of that rope so I can tie myself to the interior of this plane? Like, that's how helpful she was. She's like, just let me lash myself to the plane. Let me save myself. Right.

I just spit like all the way across that table. I spit earlier. It's fine. Okay, good. We should learn to sync those up. like in Vegas that's what I was just thinking yeah man we're in sync

I know my god except well never mind so she asked for some rope to lash yourself in and he goes at this point you know what never mind he literally like this is the quote he goes never mind he said you know what you just go back up to the cockpit and you see that first class curtain

just don't come any further back I got it from there. He turns back around and looks, and then he turns back around to where she was, and he just sees, like, a pile of dust to where she was just standing. She was, like, in the cockpit all of a sudden. And so it's go time. In the cockpit, at 7.42 p.m.

The little light comes on that says a door, ajar, I guess. And they said the pilots were like, Dana, let's call back one more time. She's like, no, you can't call him? And they're like, no, really, we should call. So we can totally call him. Like, the FAA shrink said, like, he might blow us up. He said some other weird stuff, too, but he said...

Like, he's going to blow us up. We should really butter this guy out. Right, and we could have left on that rope swing, and we stayed because of you. Rope ladder. So they call. They do call, and the pilot's like... Ring, ring, ring, ring.

Ring, ring. Oh, am I Cooper? Yes, ring, ring. You let it ring a couple of times. Ring ring, ring. Dan Cooper, hijacker. Mr. Cooper, we want to make sure your flight is as comfortable as possible. Is there anything we can do to help you back there to make your hijacking more successful, sir?

No. Click. I know, it's kind of rude. He said no. hung up, and then at 8.12 p.m., the crew felt the plane kind of jiggle a little bit as if someone had jumped off the rear of it, and they said, Tina, go check. We're flying the plane.

She's like, wait a minute, only one of you is flying. No, it takes both of us. You don't know. And that's it. So from the moment that Tina Mucklaw left, shut that first-class curtain. Nobody, to anyone's knowledge, ever saw Dan Cooper again. Yeah. but that's not the end of the show.

No, it's not. So there was a manhunt, right? So Dan Cooper had pretty clearly signaled his intentions that he was going to jump off the back of the 727, and the FBI was like, we need to scramble some jets. Let's get some fighter jets that are in the area. We're going to scramble them to go follow the 727.

What is the scrambling? I never get that. It's like, go. I know, but they all... It just sounds... It sounds chaotic. Like, they're scrambling jets. I think that's the point.

Like, people are supposed to run around and bump into each other and fall out and then get up and get in their jets and fly off. That's scrambling. That's classic scraming. I would have renamed it. It would be like, activate the jets. That's not bad.

That's not bad at all. Scramble the jets! Sounds desperate, you're right. Activate the jets. So, however the jets were brought into this picture, there was a problem with them in that they were way too fast for the 727, which is putting along at 190 miles an hour.

And all of a sudden, there's a jet that goes, and then the next one comes, and they're like, what are we going to do? Well, we'll stick a helicopter on them. This is like Goldilocks. The helicopter was too slow. 727 is just putting along. People are going,

and trying to catch up. Nothing happening. They should have scrambled a 727. And just followed right behind them. That makes sense as a matter of. With the headlights on. Right? So they're scrambling.

The point is nobody saw Dan Cooper jump when he jumped. So they used that 8.12 p.m. oscillation to kind of figure out where they should start looking. And they zeroed in on a place called Eric. Washington near the Lewis River. Anybody from Ariel? Good, because we got aerial jokes. Nobody from Ariel.

Anyone ever heard of the Lewis River? Oh, okay. So they get this manhunt going. They're scrambling and combing. Those are the two things you do here in the FBI. It was a massive manhunt, too. There was like a thousand troops and cops combing this area. Yeah, no one from Seattle PD, of course.

They were just sit around stoned. Hanging out in Nysiqua. Waiting for Rambo. Here's another fun fact. There was a millionaire, a local millionaire, who we don't know. Do you know the name? No, I've looked. If anybody knows, let's tell us.

Just stand up and say it with dignity. It was on the news, so this local millionaire says, you know what? That's near Lake Merwin, and I'm going to rent a submarine. Because I'm a millionaire, and that's, you know, we're... That's what I do. Yeah. I don't work.

I'm a millionaire. He got a submarine, and he trolled the depths of Lake Merwin. He said he rented a small submarine. Because he's not an extravagant local millionaire. This is a 30-foot-old-do. The 25 seems ostentatious. The hydraulics on it. Who needs that in a submarine?

Does it have a metal detector? Which would not have helped because it was cash bills. Exactly. So you'd make a great local millionaire. I would. If only. The other weird thing that happened was the CIA got involved, which is a little bit strange. Yeah.

And they scrambled the SR-71 Blackbird, right? They scrambled it several times. Yeah, it was almost over-easy. Terrible. Woo, whoever said, woo, you should be ashamed of that. It doesn't even make sense. Because once you scramble it, it can't be over easy. Terrible joke, Chuck.

That's what I say. It's all right. Rebound, rebound. Is this really happening? Did you talk about long nipples? All right. The SR71 Blackbird was at the time super secret. We all know about it now, but at the time it was very secret.

And it was kind of a big deal to get this thing up the air. Especially multiple times. Like one time it's like your dad is the head of CIA and you're the head of Seattle PD. So you can make it happen maybe once, right? Multiple times, that's weird that the SR-71 was scrambled, right? The FBI is very studious and likes to do a lot of obvious stuff. So they interviewed everybody in the area with the last name of Cooper, which there's like

a square one. Sure. This is like square negative five. Yeah, yeah, sure. No, it's negative five. I looked it out. Okay.

So you look up all the Cooper's in the area and at this point they have a press conference and if you've noticed, we've been calling this dude Dan Cooper the whole time because up until this time, he was just Dan Cooper. So they have a press conference and there's sort of, I don't think we know who messed it up, right?

It's either a reporter or a cop. Either a file clerk or a cop was talking in front of a reporter. Gotcha. Either UPI or AP, depending on who you ask. And they were saying, like, what Cooper could have done something like this. Right. And somebody said, well, there's a Dan Cooper.

Who's a cat burglar in the area. That's a terrible suggestion. Cat burglar does not go to hijacker, you know? And this reporter was like, what a scoop. And hit the wire with cops looking. looking for D.B. Cooper. Yeah, he said D.B. Cooper. Did I say Dan Cooper?

Yeah, that's all right. The little part of my brain was like, you just said Dan. Let's start over. So a cop was talking in front of an AP reporter, and they said, what Cooper do you know could have done this? And the cop said, well, there's this D.B. Cooper. What did you just say? Did you just say A.D. Cooper?

I said, there's a D.B. Cooper. I got it at that time. He's a cat burglar, and the reporter said, this is hitting the wire. And he reported that the cops were looking for a D.B. Cooper. And it just changed from that point on. Yeah, I mean, he was never D.B. Cooper. It was literally a mistake. So that's why we all know him as D.B. Cooper today.

And the FBI, actually, a little smart, believe it or not. And they said, you know what, let's keep it that way. That way we'll know if any tips come in on a Dan Cooper, we'll know it's a hot leak. So it actually ended up kind of working in their favor. Yeah. And any time a tip like that came in, like the office prankster would come in with the facts and be like, hot lead, hot lead.

It was like a joke around the Portland office. Everybody loved Richard. And this will come up later too when it comes time to solve the crime. Later on, the FBI learned that there was a comic book in the 1950s about a Dan Cooper who was a Canadian jet pilot and it was a Belgian comic which is a little weird

but it was, you know, there was literally a Dan Cooper who jumped out of planes in comic book form. Right, exactly. So it could be a clue maybe. And that's a niche comic, right? I would say so. Printed in Belgium, in the French,

about a Canadian fighter pilot. In the French? All they had to do was find like the 10 people who knew of that comic were going to be like, what'd you do? We know it was one of you. So the FBI had a pretty clear belief, a very openly stated belief,

that D.B. Cooper died in the jump. It was just the line that they took right off the bat. They're like, there's no way this guy survived. And he wasn't the lead agent on the case, but he became the most famous agent, Ralph Himmelsbach. Any Himmelsbach's in the house? No, you're a liar, sir. Yeah, you're a liar.

So Himmelsbach, like I said, he wasn't the lead agent, but he was out of the Seattle office, and he became the most famous agent associated with it. And he actually gave the case its official name, Norjack, which is stupid. No, Northwest Jack, Skyjack. Right, but remove the C. It's just called it the D.B. Cooper case, you know, or heist even better. So he self-published a book in 1986 about the case, and Himmelsbach said he thinks that D.B. Cooper didn't even get a shoot open,

that he plunged to his death and hit the forest floor with such impact that he basically was buried immediately with the parachutes still attached and maybe even the money. And that was him all's box take. It was, excuse me. You going to get that?

I realize it wasn't a twist off. And then I realized I had my lighter from the loose leaf tea place. Nice. Nice going. You just saw the sum of Chuck's college education. So Cooper had jumped from the plane. Did he live, did he not?

The odds are against him in a lot of ways. Outside the temperature that night was 20 degrees Fahrenheit. Hey, we're in America, man. Just say 20 degrees. Yeah, you're right. 20 degrees USA At 10,000 feet

it was negative 7 degrees And he was going 190 miles an hour There was freezing rain There was like a quarter crescent Or not a quarter crescent A crescent moon Yeah

Those are two different things Sure Crescent moon in the sky But it was cloudy and rainy So there's probably It was zero light It's freezing He's 10,000 feet

He's not dressed for the occasion No he's wearing loafers, he's wearing an overcoat. He's got this, he doesn't have this knapsack, so he's fashioned this weird kind of knapsack with this pink rope. Plus, plus the area he's jumping out into, and he's flying at 10,000 feet over the Cascades. Some of the Cascades, as you guys know, are higher than 10,000 feet. Very dangerous jump. And there's a lot of pointy trees. I mean, the poignest. Am I right, Seattle? The pointiest trees are out. Plus, despite what the FAA guy said, the FAA psychiatrist,

he did not leave the bomb to be detonated after he jumped off. He took it with him. Bank bag, bomb, overcoat, loafers, parachute. Pointy trees. That was my D.B. Cooper jumped impression. And by the way, the FBI later on, they interviewed Mucklalk. Who was the one who saw the? Schaffner. Yeah, Schaffner saw the bomb.

Like, you just did. And she said, yeah, these red sticks taped together, and they went, that wasn't dynamite. Dynamite isn't red. You've seen too many cartoons. Dynamite is tan. Road flares are red. So it was more than likely a fake bomb with an alarm clock and road flares.

Plus, D.B. Cooper did not help his cause by his choice of parachutes, right? So he chose a military shoot as his main shoot. It was not a great shoot. The rip cord wasn't as easily accessed as. the recreational shoots, and once it deployed, you can't steer it very well. It was not the best choice. Even worse was his choice of the dummy shoot for his front reserve shoot. He took the best shoot and gutted it to make a handle for the bank bag, left the second best shoot, and chose the two worst shoots to jump out with, right? So... I didn't know you couldn't steer a military shoot,

but it makes a total sense. Yeah, they're just like, go for it, pal. Yeah. Because if I was in the military, I would steer, I would be like, well, how don't we go over here instead? I see a lot of guns down there. Let's take it this way. So they just drop you, apparently. Yeah. Man, I guess they know what they're doing, though. So some other theories, because it's Washington, believe it or not, some people actually

posited that he was eaten by Sasquatch. Yeah. with a straight face. I mean, let's be honest, how many of you in here were thinking the same thing? Some other people say, well, he was clearly burned up by the jet exhaust because when you come down the stairs of a 727,

the rear jet engines right in front of you, and it would have been 7,800 degrees right there. But the FBI conducted a test right afterward where they took a 727 up, and they took a 200-pound sled. A 200-pound prison victim. He was condemned. Don't worry about it. It's fine. And they said, and threw it off, and they found that the 200-pound sled, that's a euphemism, I guess now, went straight down.

So it didn't come in contact in any way with the jet exhaust. So it kind of did away with this idea. that he burned up. Well, it was kind of good news, bad news, though, because what it did do, at least, was it mimic that same oscillation. Yeah. So they're like, oh, you know what? It was the exact same thing happened when you were in the air.

So that 8.12 p.m. jump time. Like, it was probably right on the money, so we know probably where he might have landed. Right. So there's a lot of questions remaining, right? And there were some clues left behind. The thing that really kind of confounded the FBI at first was that they combated. They combed the area where they were looking for him with like a thousand people just combing this area. This SR-71 blackbirds circling around looking.

They didn't find anything. He had left a couple of things on board the plane, right? He'd left his clip-on tie, which was his second biggest secret that night. Well, that's what you do before you jump out. Sure. You know, you take it off. It was a clip-on all along. You unbutton that button, and you...

you're like, I'm out of here. He left eight cigarette butts of his Raleigh brand cigarettes. He'd smoked eight over five hours. And all eight butts have since been lost, right? They found a hair on the headrest. The thing is the FBI traded in fingerprints. That was their big thing at the time. And Dan Cooper had been very smart to not leave a single print on any of the cigarette butts.

Yeah, true. But there was fingerprints on the, flight, I guess, SkyMall magazine. Yeah. R.I.P. SkyMall. What do you mean? It's not around. What?

Yeah, SkyMall's gone. Did you guys not know this? No way. Yeah. That's why I said, RIP SkyMall. I know, but I just, I don't know.

Where am I going to get my putting green that doubles as a cat feeder? My friend, you can just go to Frunkate, because Froncate has everything everyone needs. What's that? Frontgate, they advertised in Skymall, but they have stores, too. I don't even know where I am right now. That's Uncle Ikes.

What year is it? No. So, it would be seven years before any trace of the hijacking, any real clue turned up. And it was in 1978, there were some hunters in Oregon hunting animals. I guess. Right? Unless it was the most dangerous game. Right.

You don't know. It's Oregon. You never know. There are less civilized people than we have here. They found a plastic instruction placard showing how to lower the F staircase in the woods. So this is like a really good clue. It was, but it didn't lead to anything new.

Well, no. Well, it was definitely from Flight 305, which is, I guess I'm saying it was cool. It was cool. Like, if you were the hunter, you'd be like, I'm keeping this. Sure. But it was on the flight path, so it didn't generate any new leads, but it generated a lot of renewed interest in the case. Because, believe it or not, the D.B. Cooper case had kind of fall into the wayside in the last, like, seven years. People just didn't think much about it anymore.

Oh, it was a gold major skyjacking. Right, exactly. So it was like a dime a dozen. But all of a sudden, everybody's like, we got to make a movie. Who's the biggest movie star we've got? Treat Williams. Make him as D.B. Cooper. And that's what they did.

Has anyone ever seen the pursuit of D.B. Cooper? No, that's right. That's right, everybody. God bless you, Seattle. Smart town, Chuck. I figured here, like, somebody, because it was a local thing, 1981, very, very bad movie was made. Several.

Starring Treat Williams and Robert DeVall, right whose mom needed surgery at the time to lay off so here's what you do well first of all if you want to know how big a piece of garbage this movie is it had three directors and if you know anything about filmmaking if you have more than one director

it's probably a really bad movie for one reason or another if it has three then it's guaranteed to be bad but all you need to do is go home tonight when you get back to your to your houseboat in Issaquois. Does anyone here live in a houseboat? No?

Okay. Because I was going to ask if I could come stay over. Because those things are awesome. That was just sleepless in Seattle. You've seen that too many times. Oh no, they exist. Because I tried to stay in an Airbnb actually before I came here. On a houseboat?

Yeah, I totally did. And I ended up in some stupid hotel downtown. Go home to your youth. tubes, type in pursuit of D.B. Cooper, and watch the first three minutes. Because this movie literally starts with the point from where D.B. Cooper jumps out of the back of the plane. It starts from the point where we know nothing else that happened is literally fictional from that point forward. The slogan on the movie poster is fact schmacks.

So it starts with the pursuit of D.B. Cooper and has Robert Duval, the names all come up and all that. And it's got a Jew's heart plane. It's like, dung, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong. And Treet Williams, it's a terrible voiceover recording. You just hear, uh, yeah! And he jumps off the thing, because that's what you do, and he jump off a plane and you're skyjacking. and he parachutes down in the night and the night and he crashes through some trees and lands and then there's this really little sad yahoo everything was sad about that

and Treat Williams gets on the ground and he takes out a cigar and he takes out a lighter because that's what you do too when you successfully landed after skyjacking he doesn't light the lighter though he rips open the money bag and he takes out a hundred dollar bill

and he lights that and then he uses that to light a cigar and that is how that movie opens and it goes downhill from there and Robert Deval is he's just you can tell he starts every scene going like this let's do it

it's so bad but I do encourage you it was like when I was a kid and it came out it was like we got HBO on my street and it was a really big deal when we got cable in HBO so I would literally watch any movie that came out. It was like, Krull. That's on.

I'll watch Krull. Hey, hey, hey, hey. Kroll was okay, man. War games, great movie. Sure. Pursuit of D.B. Cooper. Why not? I was not exposed to that.

Yeah. I think my mother shielded me from that movie. Good for you, Mom. Yeah. Watch the first two minutes on YouTube. No, no. Power struggles, shady money, drugs, violence, and broken promises. It's a freaking war zone.

These people are animals. There's no integrity. There's no loyalty. That's all gone. In the 1980s, modeling wasn't just a dream. It was a battlefield. Book, book, book. Make deals.

Let's get models in. Let's get them out. And the models themselves? They carried scars that never fully healed. Till this day, honestly, if I see a measuring tape, I freak out. The Model Wars podcast peels back the glossy cover and reveals a high-stakes game where survival meant more than beauty. Hosted by me, Vanessa Grigoriatis,

this is the untold story of an industry built on ruthless ambition. Listen to Model Wars on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I started trying to get pregnant about four years ago now. We're getting a little bit older, and it just kind of felt like the window could be closing. Bloomberg and IHeart Podcasts present. IVF disrupted, the Kind Body story, a podcast about a company that promised to revolutionize fertility care. Introducing Kind Body, a new generation of women's health and fertility care.

backed by millions in venture capital and private equity, it grew like a tech startup. While Kind Body did help women start families, it also left behind a stream of disillusioned and angry patients. You think you're finally like with the right people in the right hands, and then to find out again that you're just not. Don't be fooled. By what? All the bright and shiny. Listen to IVF disrupted, the Kind Body story, starting September 19 on the IHeart Radio, app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Jay Chetty, and I'm the host of the on-purpose podcast. Today, I'm joined by Emma Watson. Emma Watson has apparently quit acting. Emma Watson has announced she's retiring from acting. Has anyone else noticed that we haven't seen Emma Watson in anything in several years? Emma Watson is opening up the truth behind her five-year break from acting. Watson said she wasn't very happy. Was acting always something you were going to do?

I was using acting as a way of escaping to feel free. My parents, it wasn't just the divorce, it was just like the continuing situation of living between two different houses and two different lives and two different sets of values, the career and the life that looks like the dream. But are you really happy? Fame has given me this extraordinary power. It's also given me a lot of responsibility.

Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So there's a young lad named Brian Ingram. He was eight, I think, at the time. Yeah. And his family was camping on Tina Barr. Are you guys familiar with Tina Barr? Do you guys know what that is? The Columbia River? Yeah. So are we correct in understanding that you would just call it an island, not a bar? Okay, all right. So Tina Island, everywhere else, the Ingram family was camping, and Brian Ingram was fashioning a fire pit for his family. Oh, father's going to love this. fire pit he'll be proud of me yet oh father won't you love me and as he's as he's like as he's going like

this to the sand poor little eight-year-old he turns up a stack of bills several stacks of bills actually three and these stacks of twenty-dollar bills total fifty eight hundred and eighty dollars and he's like father love me father takes those and uh starts looking at him, and he's like, we should probably call the police. So they go and call the police. Yeah, again, they call the Seattle Police, which evidently, all they do is forward calls to the FBI at this point. They're like, Seattle PD, please hold. So the FBI is like, read us a serial number, and he reads one, and they're like, read us another, reads another, and they're like, that's D.B. Cooper money. And Ingram's father's

like, what did you say? And they're like, nothing. so the FBI gets their hands on it and actually we should say it turns out they let little Brian Ingram take some of the money $3,000 of this money actually Yeah this is later on they returned a little Not bad right

And you want to know what's even better In 2008 little Brian Ingram sold that money on eBay for 37 grand Right? Yeah Take that father So the thing is, this money showed up in a place where it should not have been. It showed up 20 miles south of Ariel Washington in another river.

So they were looking here in the Lewis River, right? Everybody knows Lewis River, Ariel Washington here. Tina Barr is down here just a little south of Vancouver. Is my geography, my air geography, right? Of Vancouver, Washington, everybody. Vancouver, Washington. Is it like this? That's even more amazing.

This is what I suspected, and I looked it up on Google Maps, and they were like, what do you mean, Tina Barr, Josh? So I wasn't able to conclusively find it. But I did have this idea that it somehow ended up above it. And an FBI hydrologist looked at this money. The FBI has a hydrologist. Right. I'm retainer.

Himmel's Bach. Got a whole of him. And the guy was like, so this stuff's only, been exposed to the elements for a year, even though it was found, what, nine years after the robbery, right? Yeah. And it got here one of two ways, the guy said. So the Columbia River flooded in 1974. Yes. And it was also dredged in like 1977. So one of those two probably got this year, but no one's ever said conclusively how it ended up where it was. So it did, yeah, there you go. I got it. It would be another 28 years before any more clues to.

turned up. So that's a very long wait. In 2008, just eight short years ago, some kids were playing on their, was it their own land in Amboy? A little south of Ariel, anyone from Amboy? No. I suspected not. Are we in Washington? Okay. Yeah, but nobody's from Amboy. We got more response in Birmingham. No. About Amboy? Yeah. They're like, we like the sound of that. So these kids were playing in the woods on their property, and they said, oh, look at there. There's a parachute. And they start pulling out this parachute for like an hour.

It's like a magic trick. And they finally get to the end of the parachute, and they run and show paw. And they say, Paul, I found a parachute in the woods. What should we do? Right. And Paul recognized that this is the most exciting thing that ever happened in Amboy Washington

called the cops who called the Seattle police, who called the FBI. And the FBI did something smart. They're like, well, you know who would know if this was D.B. Cooper's parachute. Good old Earl Kossi. That's right. He's not dead yet. Not dead yet.

Oh. Too soon? That's a good. He's not dead yet. a celebratory. None of us are dead yet. Right? That's a good, good way of looking at it, Chuck. Good save. Way to find the silver lining. So Earl Cossey looked at this thing and he was like, yeah, he said, I'm sorry. He said, Cooper's chute was nylon. That's clearly silk. Good try. Yeah, he said this is, I know whose shoot this is actually. Yeah. It turns out that back in

1945, a jet pilot named Floyd Walling bailed out of his corsair jet that was going down and parachuted out in the woods around Amboy, Washington, right? Which isn't too far from Ariel. And it wasn't Cooper's shoot. You guys all remember when they found that parachute, right? Like 2008, it wasn't that long ago. It was a big deal. And it wasn't his shoot, but it did suggest that possibly he could have made it because Floyd Walling had and he walked out of the woods in terrible weather just like D.B. Cooper would have had to. So it kind of, um, shined a light on the whole thing again. Yeah, it kind of kicks some interest up. So, um, over the years, there have been many, many, many, many suspects. Like we're talking over a thousand. The FBI won't even say

how many suspects they've had. Or weirdly, people confessing to be D.B. Cooper. It's one of those strange things that people do, where they claim to be something that will send you to prison. Well, a lot of them are already in prison, but they're in worse prison and hoping to go to a good prison. No, it's true. Apparently, state prisoners will try to confess to federal crimes because the cinnamon buns are better in federal prison? I was thinking cinnamon buns. Were you really? That's because there's cinnamon buns in our green room. Yeah.

Well, no, we've mentioned that in the prisons. It's like a commodity in prison, right? Cinnamon buns? Yeah, it's like currency. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. All right. Cinnamon buns and cigarettes. We know.

So, there's a very famous sketch. If you go home, before you get on YouTube and look at the first three minutes of that terrible movie, which you definitely need to do, just Google, get on the Googles and type in DB Cooper sketch. There's a very singular famous sketch of D.B. Cooper. Kevin Spacey. It looks a lot like Kevin Spacey. Yeah, or Don Draper.

Again. As Kevin Spacey. I think it would be Kevin Spacey as Don Draper. Yeah, sure. So if you go home and look at that, it's like, you know, got this kind of short-year guy. It looks like he's sort of from the 50s or 60s.

It's got the hair, he's got the sunglasses on and the tie, the skinny tie. And that's the only sketch that they have of D.B. Cooper that they got from the flight attendants, specifically Tina Mucklaw, because she spent like five hours right next to the dude. She incidentally was really messed up after this, understandably,

and she went to be a nun in Oregon in the 1980s, which is a little weird. I didn't know they had convents in Oregon. Sure. They've got them everywhere. Convents everywhere. There's a convent right over in the alley back here. Yeah, there's a comment behind us right now.

But even worse than that, the Mother Superior, in an article I read, at the convent said, she never really fit in here. Oh. You're not supposed to say that. a mother superior? That's a mother inferior if you ask me, you know?

Good one. Sorry, you go ahead. No, you. All right, if you look at some of the behavior that Cooper displayed, you're going to turn up some clues, and that's what the FBI does. It kind of examine what happened. He chose a military shoot,

which could mean one of two things. Either he was former military, which could narrow it down, or it could mean he has no idea what he's doing when it to jumping out of a plane. Right. And the choice of that dummy shoot would definitely suggest that because even recreational skydivers say like even if you're just a military parachutist, you're going to see a huge ex on a parachute and instinctively shy away from that parachute, you know? I thought it stood for extreme. Right. Mountain Dew extreme. So a lot of people say

I think he probably is ex-military, had some like parachuting experience, probably a parachute. or something like that. A lot of people point to the idea that he knew a lot about the plane. He knew about the wing flap degree that it could go to. He knew about altitude. A lot of the witnesses later on said that he clearly was very much aware of what was going on in the cabin. He just knew the plane very much.

So a lot of other people say this guy was probably an airline employee, maybe even a pilot, actually, based on the altitude and stuff that he gave them fly. Yeah, and one of the weird things that he knew was that the 727 100 had an app staircase that you could lower and jump out of because this wasn't common knowledge at the time. Apparently, a small

group of people knew this. You were either an employee of Boeing, or you may have been in the CIA because in the Vietnam War, we actually used the 727 over Cambodia, which is where we were not supposed to be, and they lowered that aff staircase of the 727

to drop supplies. I said, go! you can't steer but go well and then there's the whole thing with the SR 71 blackbird so a lot of cooperists still say that he might have been secretly a member of the CIA right well he knew about the aft staircase he knew about the or the blackbird was scrambled so they had like some skin in the game right so a lot of suspects have come and gone and come back and stayed over the years the FBI says about it well they won't say but a lot of people say about a thousand like Chuck said. But one of the first ones to emerge

was a dude named Richard McCoy. And in February of 1972, I think four months after the D.B. Cooper heist, Richard McCoy hijacked a 727-100 flight. And he asked for $500,000 in cash, and he parachuted successfully out the back over Utah, right? Yeah. So a lot of people say, it's pretty similar.

Yeah. Maybe that was D.B. Cooper. Well, and $500,000, to me, that makes sense. Like, $200,000 worked out fine. Right. I should have asked for more to begin with. Right. So let me try it again.

Let's try it again. It turns out that he was a green beret in Vietnam, so that sort of fits with the whole profile. He looked a little bit like the sketch of Dan Cooper. A little bit. Yeah. He was 29 years old, so he was much younger than Cooper, but he didn't look 29. I'll say that. He looked much older than that.

True. He looked more like Don Draper than Charles Manson. It's true. I'll say that. Absolutely. So this guy gets caught, actually, after pulling off this he initially. And he goes to prison, and he makes a fake gun out of dental plaster from the dentist in the prison. And he takes a truck by force and literally crashes through the front gate of the prison and escapes.

And is later killed in a shootout by cops. Which is to say, Richard McCoy knew how much. how to live. He did. And die. And his family would later go on to say, actually, he was at home in Thanksgiving, 1971,

so it probably wasn't him. Right. Good suspect, though. Suspect number two is named Dwayne Weber. Is this your guy? No, this isn't your guy. No, this isn't my guy. I like this guy. He's fine, but I don't like him.

You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. So Dwayne Weber was a career criminal, and the definition of a career criminal is one where you and your alias have both done time and prison. And he and his alias had done a combined 16 years, right? So he was on his deathbed, and his wife, Joe, came around and said, how are you doing? It's like, while I'm still dying, I have a confession for you that I'd like you to hear.

I am Dan Cooper, and Joe's like, I don't know who that is. and Duane blows up they have a fight on his deathbed never speak of it again and he dies nine days later so Joe starts poking around after that she's like who is this Dan Cooper which is a legitimate question after experience like that that she went through I would say so and she finds out via internet

this is 1995 that Dan Cooper was DB Cooper and she said you know what I think that he was telling the truth. I think he was D.B. Cooper, because, you know what? I remember in 1979, we were on a vacation. We were on a car trip. We were kind of right around the area where the hijacking, or I'm sorry, where the landing supposedly took place.

And my husband stopped the car and just pointed and said, you know what, that's where D.B. Cooper walked out of the woods. Which is a weird thing to say on vacation. Very weird thing to say. It's even weirder that she didn't say, what the hell are you talking about? Yeah. Agreed.

There's another story. Later on, they were on another vacation. No, this is the same vacation. Oh, is the same one? Yeah, yeah. All right, we'll just call this the communication vacation. The non-communication vacation, because they clearly didn't talk to one another. Because he stopped over the Columbia River on a bridge,

literally stops on a bridge, gets out of the car, goes to the back, opens the trunk, and it's just gone for like 10 minutes, gets back in the car, and they just drive on. Yeah. And she doesn't say anything. She's just sitting there like this. I know Yumi. Yumi would have been like,

why did you take your foot off the gas? Yeah, you know, Emily. Yeah. Emily would have had 300 questions on Huawei stops on a bridge and I opened the truck. Yeah. Not Joe. Not Joe.

Yeah. So a lot of people still like Dwayne Weber, but he's actually, the FBI said, no, that's not the guy. guy. We ruled them out with DNA, right? Yes. The next guy is my guy, Kenny Christensen, Chuckers. That's right. He was a pretty well-like suspect for a while. He, keeping with the series of family members outing their family, his D.B. Cooper. Yeah, which actually supports the family motto that I was brought up with, never trust family. It's a proud Clark tradition. So his brother Lyle actually,

this gets a little weird. He outed him as a suspect in an effort to get the screenwriter Nora Ephron sleepless in Seattle, right? Yeah, it's all coming for a full circle. Didn't even see that coming. He tried to get Nora Ephron

to write a movie about D.B. Cooper via his brother being the main suspect and he weirdly I guess he didn't have an agent, he hired a private investigator to get him in touch with Nora Ephron. Right. Very strange. but he championed his own brother as the main suspect.

Or outed him. That's another way to put it for sure. And a guy named Geoffrey Gray wrote a really great article in New York magazine, if you guys are interested, about this particular guy. But there's a lot of similarities between D.B. Cooper and Kenny Christensen. For one, he looks a lot like him right off the bat. He was a purser for Northwest Orient Airlines. That's a big deal.

Former paratrooper. Yeah. He was quiet. He smoked cigarettes. He drank bourbon, lived in the area where the hijacking took place, which is to say, around here. And in I think 2011, Geoffrey Gray, the guy who wrote that New York Magazine article, got in touch with Florence Schaffner and said, what about this guy? And Florence Schaffner said, I think you may be on to something here. Yeah. And like Dwayne Weber, Kenny Christensen, on his deathbed, tried to make a confession to his brother Lyle. He said, I have something really important to tell you, but I'm not sure if I can say this. And Lyle said, no, no, no, I don't want to hear it. Did you guys know that you can not hear a deathbed confession?

Well, not only that, but I want nothing more than to hear a deathbed confession. I would be dying. I would be like, oh, my God. Chuck would be like, dish. Yes. What do you have to say? But he was like, no, no, no, I don't want to hear what you got to say. Just go ahead and die.

And then he laid on top of him Until he stopped squirming Here this pillow will make you comfortable You sleep now, brother What is going on with these people? Did you just do the Buffalo Bill voice? No Oh, okay

That was coincidental Who else do we have? L.D. Cooper Yeah. Little on the nose With the name? He lived in the area too. Yeah, and he was also

outed by a family member, keeping with the Clark family tradition. This time it was his niece. And she said, you know what? I remember, this was in 2011. This was not too long ago. She said, you know what? I remember back in Thanksgiving 1971, just like it was yesterday. And Uncle L.D. showed up, bruised and bleeding for dinner.

But he was euphoric, which was weird. And I'm just now mentioning this. Right. And what she said, by the way, she had a book coming out simultaneously As she's telling everybody this. What did she say that she overheard? Because this is where she loses Chuck and me. Well, yeah, she said he went to talk to, he was my uncle,

he went to talk to my dad, and I overheard them in the hallway say, we did it, our money problems are over, we hijacked the plane. The book by Simon & Schuster, on sale now. at your local airport. But there were a few things. It wasn't totally out of the blue. He was an engineer at Boeing. No, his brother was.

Oh, his brother was. Yeah, but they were in on it together. Sure, right. Because we hijack the plane. Right. He's a silent partner. And weirdly, remember those Dan Cooper comic books? He was one of the ten people on the planet that was a fan of the Dan Cooper comic book. That's a little weird.

It's pretty good. The weird thing is, is he didn't have any experience skydiving, which a lot of people say. it's just too insane to think that somebody who never skydive before did their first skydive during a heist out of a 727 but the people who knew L.D. Cooper say, no, he was just crazy enough to do something like that. And you can make a case that that actually explains the choice of the dummy shoot. Yeah, that's right. And the military shoot even. Yeah. All right. So the legacy of D.B. Cooper, to this day, the heist remains the only unsolved. airline hijacking in the history of the world.

In America. In America. Really? Are there other ones? Yeah. I'm only standing behind America. Oh, okay, I got you. Yeah, right?

Every year, if you go to the aerial store and tavern in Ariel Washington, you can go to the DB Cooper Days Festival. Yeah, have you guys, has anyone ever been to that? We should all totally go. Well, go. Let's go right now. We're going to meet up this Thanksgiving. You can win a D.B. Cooper look-alike contest.

If you look like Kevin Spacey? Yes. Or Charles Manson or Don Draper, which none of us do. Well, I'm talking about you and me. I look like Justin Bieber. I look like I ate Justin Bieber. I just spit out my tooth. That's how I lost it. I broke it on Justin Bieber's bones.

They're pliable, though. You can go to that, and win the contest. There have been songs over the years. There was that terrible movie. There have been countless TV reenactments and dramatizations. Unsolved mysteries, am I right? Yeah. Everybody see that one?

You can watch that on the YouTube, too. Yeah. And there are many, many Cooperist websites, most notably one called DropZone.com. And Dropzone actually used to be a recreational skydiving site until it got mostly taken over by DB Cooper aficionados. They hijacked the website. They did, as a matter of fact.

And this site is like so hot for Cooper Slews that a guy named Secret started posting on it. And he seemed to have a lot of information about the D.B. Cooper case that people didn't know about. And it turned out that these Cooper Slews were so good, they unmasked the secret guy as the new agent in charge of the D.B. Cooper case, Larry Carr, who was posting secretly as secret, on the dropsoam boards.

That's how good these people are. He's like, no, I'm not. Yes, you are. No, I'm not. Yes, you are. He's like, okay, I am. You can go on YouTube. Boy, you've got a lot of YouTube into the night people. You can go on YouTube as well and look up Larry Carr. And for many, many years, they kept all this evidence sort of under wraps. and you can look up videos now.

Larry Carr said, you know what we should do? The modern age is here. We have the YouTube's and we can let everyone see this evidence even though, I think it's kind of funny that the FBI's official thing is like, no, he totally died. No one told Larry Carr that.

You know? Because he's like, let's make a YouTube video. Let's show everyone this skinny tie. All the kids are into it now. He shows the clip on tie. You can see all the money, the clip on tie, all this evidence hoping for a lead.

And he oversaw DNA evidence actually being removed from the tie. They found three people's profiles. They also found, we don't even know, but pure titanium and impatience pollen. Hopefully that will eventually crack the case, but it made everybody just be like, what? We thought we had a handle on this. Impatience pollen. Where did that come from?

Bring us home, my friend. Thank you. The Cooper Heist, it changed America forever, right? Maybe Cooper is the reason we all started walking through metal detector shortly afterward. He's the reason, seriously, he's the reason that the airlines were given the right to search your bags before you get on one of their planes. And they apparently reinstituted the death penalty for hijacking. I don't know when they took it off. Was it like sea ships being hijacked?

I have no idea. I don't either. But I think the coolest outcome of this whole thing was if you look at, you look at it. at a Boeing 727, they still make them, airplane, if you look at that aft staircase in the back, there's a white paddle that holds the stairs closed. Pretty smart. You can't open the aft staircase mid-flight because you have to go outside and pull the paddle down, and then the aff staircase will open. And it's a pretty smart, easy solution to a pretty complex case, and they call that little white paddle a cooper vein. That's right. And that is,

the story of D.B. Cooper, and that is our show. Good night, Seattle. Good night, everyone. Thank you. thousands of other topics, visit How StuffWorks.com. not the other way around. Whoa, this thing moves. Stop hitting snooze on new tech. Win the tech search at Lenovo.com.

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