True Crime Campfire - Faceless: Two American Nightmares

Episode Date: October 6, 2023

It’s October, folks. The season of mystery. So this week, to kick off our favorite month of the year, we’ve picked two of the most iconic unsolved cases in American history: both cases where the basic fabric of everyday life was threatened. Where the things we take for granted as safe—over the counter medicine and air travel—suddenly couldn’t be trusted. Both of these cases rocked the country to its core. And both of them remain unsolved to this day. Case 1: The Tylenol Poisonings. Case 2: D.B. Cooper. Sources:Rolling Stone: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/db-cooper-tina-mucklow-untold-story-1111944/The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/13/db-cooper-fbi-closes-case-plane-hijacking-washington-oregonhttps://www.opb.org/article/2021/11/24/d-b-cooper-50th-anniversary/The FBI: https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/db-cooper-hijackingAnatomy of Motive by John Douglas and Mark OlshakerThe Chicago Tribune: https://www.chicagotribune.com/tylenolmurders/ct-tylenol-murders-investigation-listicle-20220922-kndriges6zgdpf5pvrxdjatah4-list.htmlNPR: https://www.npr.org/2023/07/10/1186906874/james-lewis-suspect-tylenol-poisonings-dies#:~:text=In%20a%20span%20of%20three,over%2Dthe%2Dcounter%20medications.Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tylenol_murdersFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. It's October, folks, the season of mystery. So this week, to kick off our favorite month of the year, we've picked two of the most iconic unsolved cases in American history. Both cases where the basic fabric of everyday life was threatened, where the things we take for granted as safe, over-the-counter medicine and air travel, suddenly couldn't be trusted. Both of these cases rocked the country to its core, and both of them remain unsolved to this day. This is Faceless,

a grab bag of American nightmares. So, campers, for this one, were in my old stomping ground, Chicago, Illinois. September 29, 1982. Seventh-grader Mary Kellerman wasn't feeling well. She had a gnarly sinus headache, and she was so stuffed up she could hardly breathe. Her parents, like smart parents everywhere when their kids want to stay home sick from school, were initially a little skeptical, but a closer look at Mary convinced them. This poor kid was sick.

She needed to stay home and rest. Mom and dad went off to work. This was the 80s, after all, and before heading back to bed, Mary decided to take some extra strength Tylenol for her headache. Within minutes, the 12-year-old girl fell unconscious to the bathroom floor, still wearing her pajamas. Her parents found her later and rushed her to the hospital, but Mary didn't make it.

That same morning, just a couple hours after Mary collapsed on the bathroom floor, postal worker Adam Janus came home from his shift with an aching shoulder. He took some Tylenol and went to take a nap. He was unconscious within minutes and died soon after in the hospital. Adam's brother Stanley, shocked to his core and devastated by his 27-year-old brother's sudden death, developed a stress headache and took some Tylenol to try and fix it. He handed some to his wife Teresa, too, and within hours they were both dead. Three members of the same family. Okay, something sinister was clearly happening here. And the nightmare was just getting started. The next one to fall was Mary Reiner, a 27-year-old mom of four who had just

gotten home from the hospital with her brand new baby. Within hours, she was back at the same hospital, where doctors were unable to resuscitate her. Flight attendant Paula Prince didn't show up for her scheduled shift, and concerned friends found her dead on the floor of her apartment, a receipt for extra strength Tylenol on the floor next to her. And Mary McFarland took Tylenol for a pounding headache that night and was dead by the next morning. 7 people 7 sudden unexpected deaths within the span of about 24 hours. Fortunately for everyone, authorities figured out pretty fast that something criminal was going on.

Doctors noticed that all the victims had taken extra strength Tylenol shortly before they collapsed. On the evening of September 29th, a Cook County investigator named Nick Pishos discovered that the Tylenol bottles found at the Kellerman and Janus houses had the same control number. That pricked up everybody's antennae. And when the medical examiners sniffed the two bottles, they both smelled like bitter almonds, a tell-tale sign of the deadly poison potassium cyanide. Cyanide is an awful way to die. It makes it so your blood can't take oxygen from the lungs

and carry it to the rest of your body. So you start fighting for breath. Your blood pressure plummets. You eventually end up in convulsions, then coma, then cardiac arrest. Bad news. Don't recommend it. So, this discovery made everybody's blood run cold. Who did this? Why?

How many other bottles were contaminated? And scariest of all, what else did the killer poison? Was it just Tylenol, or did we have to worry about other products, too? See, back then, we didn't have tamper-proof packaging. So when you bought a bottle of Tylenol, you'd just open it up and find a little wad of cotton in there. That was it. There was no plastic around the cap or anything to prevent somebody for, messing with the pills inside, and that's just what the poisoner had done.

Investigators soon discovered something surprising and chilling. The poisoned Tylenol bottles had come from two different factories, one in Texas and one in Pennsylvania. So obviously, the tampering hadn't happened at the factory. This had to have happened right there in Chicago, and probably very close to the time of the victim's deaths. Cyanide is a little bit corrosive, and eventually it would have eaten right through the gelatin of the capsules and made the tampering really obvious. So the pills must have been poisoned not long before they were bought. It's so creepy to think the victims might have even passed the asshole on their way out of the store. Might have held the door for him, said,

oh, excuse me, as they maneuvered past him to the register. The killer didn't have to have any special skills to do what he'd done. It was terrifyingly easy. All he'd done was by bottles of Tylenol capsules, take them home, pull open the pills, and replace the contents with cyanide, stick the pills back together and put the bottles back on the store shelves. That was it. Anybody could do it. And cyanide, at least in the early 80s, was easy enough to lay hands on that the choice of poison didn't really narrow down the field that much.

As FBI profiler, John Douglas put in his book, Anatomy of Motive, tracing sales or purchases would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Even more frustrating, the poisoner hadn't left any fingerprints on any of the bottles. Johnson and Johnson, Tylenol's parent company immediately issued a recall on extra-strength Tylenol capsules and offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to the capture of the poisoner. They'd end up taking $100 million loss as a direct result of the murders, and that's in 80s money. Yautch. About 10 million Tylenol capsules were tested in the aftermath of the poisonings, and all that testing came up with 50 tainted pills.

from eight different bottles, five of which had been bought by the victims. A couple others were sent back in the recall. Few. Imagine if you'd sent that bottle back and found out later it was poisoned. Jeez, Louise, like way to dodge a bullet, right? Right. The reaction nationwide was pandemonium. People were scared to take any over-the-counter meds.

People with nothing more serious than a tummy ache flooded hospitals, terrified that they might have been poisoned. A lot of places canceled trick-or-treating, worried about poison. poisoned candy, because this happened right around the start of October. And then there were the copycats. 270 of them in the first month after the Chicago poisonings all across the country and using all kinds of different poisons, from hydrochloric acid to arsenic. 36 of those cases, the FBI classified as hardcore, which I guess means there were significant

casualties. 270 copycats, 270. I can't freaking believe that. and we wonder why we have a mass shooting every day in this country? Apparently mass killing is as contagious as the flippin' flu. John Douglas, the original Mind Hunter, was one of the founders of the behavioral analysis unit at the FBI, and he showed up early in the investigation to help the Chicago PD. Douglas felt that unlike a lot of other mass killers, the Tylenol poisoner was the type

who could actually feel remorse, if confronted up close and personal, with the reality of what he'd done to his victims. So he suggested a place. plan to draw the guy out. First, the investigators arranged for a local reporter from the Tribune to interview the parents of the youngest victim, 12-year-old Mary Kellerman. He published a heartbreaking story, Taylor made to personalize the case and eat at the conscience of the killer, and then, at Douglas's suggestion, detectives staked out Mary's grave site. After several boring nights with no action whatsoever, the detective suddenly snapped to attention. A man had approached the gravestone and fall into his knees. The guy was sobbing, saying over and over,

I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. Holy shit, right? So the detectives hopped out of the car and ran over to grab the guy, but as they got closer, they heard him say, I'm so sorry, Susan. Wait, hang on, who the hell is Susan? Turns out, he wasn't crying in front of Mary Kellerman's gravestone, but the one right next to it, a woman named Susan, who'd been killed in a hit-and-run accident. an unsolved hit and run. Well, not unsolved anymore. So they didn't end up catching the Tylenol Poisoner during that stakeout, but they caught a different killer. And they ended up true believers and the profilers after that, which I think is just one of the wildest stories I've ever heard in my life. Like, what are the odds of that dude showing up that night? It's just, it's bananas

to me. Now, one of the first theories was that this may have been somebody with a grudge against Johnson and Johnson, like a disgruntled former employee or something. But that, that theory didn't really go anywhere. Some investigators thought it might even be a plot by white-collar criminals to make Johnson and Johnson's stock hit rock bottom, and corporate espionage can get gnarly as hell. I'm actually thinking about doing an episode on it, because there have been some absolutely bizarre stories involving this corporate espionage. So I could actually see this happening, if you get an unscrupulous enough crime syndicate or whatever, but there were no good leads in that direction. That said, the profilers did feel like the point.

Poisoner probably had a grudge, either against the company or more likely, just against society in general. John Douglas calls this type of killer the assassin, and they're often driven by the feeling that they're victims of society. Easier than admitting you suck, and a lot of your problems are your own damn fault, I guess, right? Like, hello Elliot Roger and every other mass shooter we've seen in the past few decades. Good losers. Now, there have been quite a few suspects over the years, obviously, and we don't have time to talk about them all, so we're just going to highlight a few of the more interesting ones, one of which is the guy we think probably did it. Because this case is only technically unsolved. I think we know exactly who the killer is in this one. We just didn't get them in

time. The first of these suspects is Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber. I don't really buy this one, so we're not going to spend much time on him, but I can see why people might make the connection between a bomber and a poisoner. They both like to stay removed from the immediate aftermath of their work, like they're not strangling you or stabbing you to death, which are really up-close and personal murder methods. But I just don't see Kaczynski be in this random. His targets were all really specific, and they all had to do with moving forward with his anti-technology mission.

The Tylenol killer had no way of knowing who would fall victim to the poison pills, so I just don't buy it, but in 2010, I think they did actually test Kaczynski's DNA against some of the tainted Tylenol bottles, and it didn't match, so whatever. And then we have Roger Arnold, or as I like to call him, the very definition of fuck around and find out. Arnold was a 48-year-old dock worker who liked a little drinky poo and spent a lot of time hanging around his favorite bar, telling tall tales about his military service and his favorite hobby. Chemistry. Around the time of the poisonings, things weren't going great for Mr. Arnold.

His marriage had broken up and he'd been acting erratically ever since. and one night he made what you might call the biggest mistake of his life. He went to the bar and started running his mouth about having just poisoned a bunch of people with a white powder. Well, this was right in the aftermath of the Tylenol poisonings, and the owner of the bar, a guy named Marty Sinclair overheard him and called the police. Good for him. And when the investigators took a look at Arnold, they found several things that made him nervous.

For one thing, Arnold worked at a warehouse for Jewel Osco, the grocery chain where some of the tainted Tylenol bottles had been sold. Not only that, but the father of one of the victims worked at the warehouse with him. A small connection, but a connection nonetheless. When they searched his house, they found the book The Poor Man's James Bond, which had a how-to on making potassium cyanide. And they found other chemistry stuff, beakers and testing equipment. Arnold came right out and told him he'd worked with cyanide before. So over the next year or so, the investigators crawled right up Roger Arnold's ass as well they should. Hell yeah, I mean, they had to do their diligence. They held him for questioning a bunch of times. They were never able to get anything solid enough to charge

him, but it was a lot of stress on a guy whose life was already kind of falling apart at the seams. And in the summer of 1983, Roger Arnold snapped. He got it into his head that the guy who turned him into the police was a guy named John Stanisha, another regular at the bar. It wasn't. It was Marty Sinclair, but Arnold was convinced that it was Stanisha, and one night he laid in wait for the poor guy outside the bar and shot him dead. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison. In 1996, he gave an interview from the inside where he expressed remorse about the killing. I killed a perfectly innocent person, he said. I had choices. I could have walked away, which is interesting to me because the phrasing says that maybe if it had been Stanisha, he wouldn't

be so remorseful. You know what I mean? I know. That is interesting, actually. Roger Arnold died in 2008, and in 2010, his DNA was compared to the samples from the Tylenol bottles. It didn't match. For the record, I don't think this dude had anything to do with the murders. I think he was mentally not super stable, and I think he made the mistake of running his mouth, and it did not go well for anybody. I agree, actually. Yeah. And now we come to the guy who we think probably did it. About a week after the deaths, a letter arrived at Johnson and Johnson that made everybody snap to.

In handwritten, all caps letters, it said, gentlemen, as you can see, it is easy to place cyanide, both potassium and sodium, into capsules sitting on store shelves. And since the cyanide is inside the gelatin, it's easy to get buyers to swallow the bitter pill. Another beauty is that cyanide operates quickly. It takes so very little, and there will be no time to take countermeasures. If you don't mind the publicity of these little capsules, then do nothing. So far, I have spent less than $50, and it takes me less than 10 minutes per bottle. If you want to stop the killing, then wire $1 million to bank account number 844957 at Continental Illinois Bank, Chicago, Illinois. Don't attempt to involve the FBI or local Chicago authorities with this letter. A couple of phone calls by me

will undo anything you can possibly do. We don't have time to get into the specifics of how they did it. If you're interested, the Chicago Tribune has a great six-part series on this case, plus a podcast version that goes into a huge amount of detail. But suffice it to say that they traced this letter to a 36-year-old former accountant named James Lewis. Now, this was a guy with some major skeletons in his closet. When he was 19, he was arrested for chasing his mother with an axe and attacking his stepfather. In 1978, he was charged with the murder and dismemberment of an elderly man named Raymond West, who hired him to do the books for his business. He denied any involvement, and the charges ended up being dropped.

By the time it was discovered, the body was too damaged for the medical examiner to settle on a definite cause of death. Plus, some of the evidence was ruled illegally obtained and inadmissible. So was he guilty? Who knows? We can't prove it, obviously, but it really makes me wonder. Especially since, according to Douglas' book, the ME suspected that West had been poisoned. And that wasn't all. Lewis had also been guilty of six counts of mail fraud and a credit card scam in Kansas City.

As NPR put it, police in 1983 described him as a chameleon who lived in several states, used at least 20 aliases, and held many jobs, including computer specialist, tax accountant, importer of Indian tapestries, and salesmen. And just like the profilers thought the poisoner would, he'd sent threatening letters to public officials in the past, including then-president Reagan, who he threatened to assassinate if he didn't fix a particular tax law. CCTV wasn't very common in the early 80s, but the investigators did have some surveillance footage, and the video from one of the stores had captured a man taking a bottle of Tylenol out of his pocket and putting it on a shelf.

The man looked a lot like Lewis, but the footage just wasn't clear enough to be sure. I mean, it often isn't today. Imagine in 1982 or whatever it was, it was going to be grainy as hell. So, anyway, Lewis admitted to writing the extortion letter. He said he was trying to embarrass his wife's ex-employer by having a million dollars sent to the dude's bank account. Oh yes, how embarrassing. Like, what? That's the stupidest story I've ever heard. Anyway, that's what he said he was doing.

And he claimed he never planned on trying to actually collect the money. Convincing. Lewis went on the lamb, and it took him a couple of years to catch him, and during that time, he sent more letters. This time to the Chicago Tribune, which had been running non-stop stories about the Tylenol case. One said, we are not armed unless one means in the anatomical paraplegic sense. We shall never carry weapons, no matter how bizarre the police and FBI reports. Domestically, weapons are for two quite similar types of mentality. One, criminals, and two, police.

We are neither. In his book Anatomy of Motive, profiler John Douglas wrote, As soon as I read this, I sat up and took note, I had profiled the Tylenol Poisoner as a cowardly type who would not be comfortable with direct one-on-one confrontation. And so, despite his strong inner rage, he would not be the type to carry a weapon. Interesting.

So, anyway, they finally got him, and they were able to charge him with extortion for the letter. He ended up serving 13 years of a 20-year sentence and got out in 1995. He didn't stay out of trouble, though. According to NPR, in 2004, Lewis was charged with kidnapping and sexual assault on a woman in Massachusetts.

But the charges were dropped when the victim wasn't available to testify, which is just horrible. At one point, he wrote a book which he titled, Poison, the Doctor's Dilemma. Had nothing to do with the Tylenol case, he said. He was just interested in poison. Uh-huh. In the early 90s, while still in prison, Lewis pulled a Ted Bundy, where he offered to help investigators figure out how the killer would have done it. Hello, O.J. Simpson, too, right? That's suspicious as hell to me.

It really smacks of a killer who likes talking about his crimes and is enjoying the attention he's getting from detectives. Like, at least Bundy was vaguely helpful. Like, I hate to compliment the guy, but he did actually help with the Green River case. He did, actually, yeah. So John Lewis died in July of this year of natural causes. And for the record, he always denied any involvement in the Tylenol murders, and his DNA didn't match the sample in the Tylenol bottles either.

But at the time of his death, authorities were apparently gearing up to finally charge him with the murders. They'd gathered some new evidence that nailed down the timeline of the case, including a definite postmark on the extortion letter, which they say shows that Lewis sent it before the public knew that these poison deaths were the result of contaminated Tylenol pills. Right? So, like, how would he have any knowledge of that unless he was involved?

That seems pretty damn convincing to me. And one of the nurses who was on duty the night the deaths began, Gann told the Associated Press, quote, His death is a conclusion. Not necessarily the ending everyone wanted, but it's an end. I'm 86 now, and I'm glad I got to see the end before I die. Clearly, she believed, what a lot of us do, including profiler Douglas, by the way.

Or at least he says he thinks the killer was either Lewis or somebody very much like him. So, yeah, it's not exactly justice, but like the nurse said, it's an end. This is a case with a huge ripple effect. We've got the victims and their families, obviously, but also the entire city of Chicago, then the whole country. People scared to take their over-the-counter meds for fear of poisoning. And we've got the guy arrested at the cemetery stakeout. And poor John Stinisha, suspect Roger Arnold's murder victim,

the eighth victim of the poisoner, whoever he was. And of course, this case was the reason we have Tampa Proof packaging. It's a horrible irony, isn't it? That we ended up safer because of this awful crime. It's a shame we can't use some damn common sense about this stuff in the first place, but nope, seems like somebody's always got to die horribly before we take safety seriously. In 2022, a podcast host managed to get prime suspect James Lewis on the phone and ask him if he had any theories on who the Tylenol poisoner might be.

I think that's fairly obvious, he said. Yeah, James, I think so too. And he wouldn't elaborate on that either. He just said, I think it's fairly obvious, which, yeah, it is. It was you, asshole. No, he was playing games. It's the same thing. I think so, too.

I mean, Raiders been in the news recently because he's, like, toying with his daughter, which I think is absolutely beyond the fucking pale. Like she hasn't been through enough already. I mean, I think he's punishing her because she came out with all the dirty laundry. But, yeah, guys like this do like to play games. games because what else are they going to do in prison? They got nothing to entertain their fucking lizard brains. Campers, fall sports are in full swing. And I am not getting in a younger. I coached a fall break camp.

night and this morning, I felt like I was hit by a train. That's where Magic Mind comes in. Magic Mind is a fully optimized blend of adaptogens, nootropics, and mushrooms combined in a convenient daily drink that can help you reduce stress and anxiety, elevate your mood, and dial in your focus. When I tried it, I was shocked at how awake I was. I still had my morning coffee and I wasn't jittery or anxious at all, just a little less foggy. I also noticed that I didn't need my 2 p.m. caffeine pick me up either. The drink is vegan. and friendly, gluten-free, and nut-free, and contains ingredients like macha, cognition supporting lions-made mushrooms, and cordyceps. Don't worry, not the kind that makes zombies, the kind that

supports higher energy levels. If you're having trouble being at 100% some days too, I would really encourage you to try it out. You can go to magicmind.com slash campfire using code Campfire 20 right now for up to 56% off of your first box now for a daily science-backed shot of motivation. grab the 30-pack for the best bang for your buck. Okay, moving on to case two, the curious case of D.B. Cooper. For this one, we're in Portland, Oregon, November 24, 1971, a brisk windy day right before Thanksgiving. A man in a dark suit and tie with a raincoat carrying a briefcase and a brown paper bag walked into Portland International Airport and up to the desk for Northwest Orient Airlines,

where he bought a one-way ticket to Seattle, paying for it with a $20 bill. When asked for his name, he said, Cooper. Dan, Cooper. Bond. James Bond. I'm going to start saying my name like that every time. It's so insufferable, like podcaster. Whitney Podcaster. Like, come on. Like, your last name should be the leader. Shut up. My last name is podcaster. Ironically, no. Yeah, it's weird. When she first added me on Facebook, I was like, that's crazy, dude.

Whitney Podcasting? A little later, he and 36 other passengers boarded the jet bound for Seattle and settled in. No metal detectors, no wands, no x-rayed baggage, no ID required. This was flying in 1971. pretty much as easy as catching a bus. The armrest, sad ashtrays in them, too. Strange, strange times. Wild, Wild West, baby. The flight to Seattle would take only a little more than half an hour,

barely enough time to get a drink, but Northwest Airlines like to pamper their passengers a little bit, so they started drink service before takeoff. As the flight crew got ready, Dan Cooper sipped a bourbon and seven and smoked a Raleigh cigarette. Right before takeoff, flight attendant Tina Mucklow, who had been serving the front half of the plane, headed toward the back, take her seat. Her colleague, Florence Schaffner, was sitting beside an athletic 40-something man in a dark suit, Dan Cooper.

This was weird. Florence should have been back alongside Tina on the jump seats reserved for flight attendants. What had happened was that Cooper had slipped Florence a note. She'd just smiled and dropped it into her purse. It wasn't that unusual for guys to slip notes to flight attendants in 1971. Airlines ran commercials, emphasizing how cute and easygoing their attendance were. The young women working this flight were required to keep their weight down and not wear glasses and were contracted to retire before they turned 30.

Jesus of Murphy, that is so fucked up, man. It was only a little bit before 1971, in fact, that married Northwest flight attendants were even allowed to wear their wedding rings or even be married in the first place. It's like they had to be available in case some dude on the plane wanted to fuck them. It was so messed up. These flight attendants were skilled professionals who were trained in emergency procedures, but the airlines deliberately made a selling point of them being pretty young things that the dudes could flirt with. Ew.

And y'all should see some of these commercials, seriously. Like, we found a few of them while we were researching this case, and they are just vomit-int-dusing. There's one where all these, like, cute flight attendants are walking by, and they all go, fly me. and it's so obviously a euphemism for fuck me. Like, it's just, it's messed up. We'll post a couple on our social so you can see him. So obviously, this was not the first time a man had handed Florence a note. But Cooper leaned close and whispered,

Miss, you'd better take a look at that note. I have a bomb. Her blood running cold, Florence sat down beside him and unfolded the little piece of paper. Cooper cracked open his briefcase and Florence saw what appeared to be several red sticks of dynamite connected to a battery. There were a ton of plane hijackings in the late 60s and early 70s,

and not all of them involved actual weapons. One guy used a metal comb covered with a sweater, which he pretended was a gun. But Cooper's threat seemed like the real deal. It may not have been. In 1971, dynamite was almost always wrapped in brown paper. The red sticks in Cooper's briefcase sure looked like dynamite to anybody who'd seen movies or cartoons,

but they might have just been highway flares. I feel like the 60s and 70s operated on cartoon logic. Oh, we're heaving a metal tube thousands of feet in the air using jet fuel traveling at speeds previously unimaginable overpopulated areas. Yes, you could smoke and no, we won't confirm your identity at all. And sure, bring whatever weapons you want on. And don't forget to take your unsealed Tylenol with you. Please, sexually harass our staff while you're at it.

It's true, though. God. Right after the plane took off, Florence dropped the piece of paper and motioned with her hand for Tina to pick it up. The note read in neat capital letters, Miss, I have a bomb in my briefcase and want you to sit by me. There was a phone to the cockpit right beside Tina, and I bet her hands were shaking as she picked it up to tell the pilots what was going on. They were being hijacked. Tina, outwardly calm but with her heart hammering in her chest, joined Dan Cooper in Florence. Florence was busy writing out Cooper's softly spoken demands,

$200,000 and $20 bills, four parachutes, and a fuel truck standing ready in Seattle to refuel the plane. Why did he want four parachutes? Well, the prevailing theory is that he wanted the authorities to think he might be planning to force a hostage to parachute out of the plane with him, because if they thought an innocent person might need one, they wouldn't sabotage the shoots. Not that they would anyway.

Like, that's not how we usually deal with criminals to just outright murder them, but this dude strikes me as the type to have a paranoid streak about a mile wide, so I'm not surprised that he would think about that. Cooper sent Florence to the cockpit with the ransom note. He told Tina, I need you to stay here. So Tina sat beside him, and from there on out, she would be Cooper's line of communication, with calls back and forth to the cockpit.

Tina was terrified, of course, but right away she took on the responsibility of keeping the situation as calm as possible so that Cooper wouldn't detonate his bomb and kill them all. She was just 22 years old. Northwest agreed to Cooper's demands, but it took the government longer to get the money and parachutes together than it took for the plane to reach Seattle, so air traffic control had it circling over the water of Puget Sound for a couple of hours.

That way, if it exploded in mid-air, the wreckage wouldn't land on a populated area. The co-pilot told the passengers that the delay in landing was due to a minor engine problem that meant they had to burn fuel. Other than the crew and Cooper himself, no one on the plane had any idea what was really going on. Not that that means they weren't scared. I mean, you tell me the plane can't land because of minor engine trouble,

and I'm just going to go ahead and assume I'm about to die screaming, but maybe that's just me. As the plane circled, Cooper chatted with Tina. She'd later describe him as not nervous. He seemed really rather nice, and he wasn't cruel or nasty. She asked him why he'd picked this airline hijack, and Cooper laughed and said, it's not because I have a grudge against your airlines,

it's just because I have a grudge, a statement that people would try to pick apart for decades. Eventually, the plane landed at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Police snipers were ready, and I'd like to think there was no chance of them taking a shot without knowing exactly what Cooper had in his briefcase and how it could be triggered, but who knows. Sometimes the cops do really dumb shit,

but they never got the chance anyway, since Cooper had the flight attendants pull down the shades on all the windows. While the plane was refueled, Cooper had Tina Mucklow make several trips up and down the stairs to the runway to pick up his money in parachutes. His deal with Northwest was that he would release the passengers as soon as he had his money, and he did. All the passengers disembarked and were picked up by a bus, and it wasn't until that point that they realized there had been a hijacker with a bomb on the plane the whole time. Good gut. Can you freaking imagine. man, that just makes my... I'd be driving everywhere. I'd take a robo

before I took a plane in that case. No shit. And they, like, how? It amazes me. Like, that, Tina and Florence, absolute frickin' badasses, like, to not give that away. And you know, they were still working the plane. Or at least Florence was still working the plane, you know, like answering customer calls and stuff. How they didn't let on that something was going on. I just think that's absolutely amazing. I don't think I could do it. Florence and another flight attendant asked if they could leave, too.

Cooper said, whatever you girls like, so they got the hell out of there. But Cooper made Tina stay with him, poor kid. As the plane took off again, Tina was alone with Cooper in the main cabin of the plane, with the only other people on board the three crew members in the cockpit.

Cooper had detailed instructions ready for the flight crew. They were to head for Mexico City at a dangerously low speed, around 115 miles per hour at no higher in altitude than 10,000 feet. The landing gear had to stay down, the wing flaps were to be lowered 15 degrees, and they were not to pressurize the cabin. These detailed instructions have led some people to think that Cooper must have had a lot of experience around planes, and you can see why. It's much more likely that he knew to demand this stuff from experience rather than research.

Having the plane fly this way would burn through its fuel, though. They wouldn't reach Mexico City without refueling, so the crew negotiated with Cooper and agreed they'd make a stop at Reno. Three Air National Guard planes followed the 727, staying well behind and out of Cooper's sight. It was 8 o'clock in dark now, with wind and rain lashing at the low-flying jet. Cooper had Tina open the door at the rear of the cabin, which led to the rear stairs. The Boeing 727 had a stairway at the back of it, in line with the body of the plane, that could be lowered directly onto the runway so passengers could disembark at small airports that didn't have air stairs to roll up to the main doors. The stairs meant the 727 was one of the few planes that had an exit that could be opened mid-flight. A year after this, the FAA actually ordered all 727s be fitted with a simple device that prevented the stairs opening while airborne.

It was called the Cooper Vane. Initially, Cooper wanted Tina to lower the stairs, but she told him she was scared of being pulled out by the wind. So he had her show him how the stairs opened, then said she could go forward and join the flight crew. As Cooper started working on the parachutes, Tina paused. Will you please take the bomb with you? She said. Cooper didn't answer, and Tina hurried forward to the cockpit, grateful to not be alone. About a half hour after they left Seattle, while they were over the dark and wooded hills of Southern Washington, pressure in the plane suddenly dropped and a warning light flashed on the cockpit.

The stairs had been lowered. The pilot called back on the intercom to ask if Cooper needed any assistance. He got a one-word reply. No. At 8.13 p.m., the tail of the plane pitched up a little. I think our guest has just left us, the pilot said. Still, the three of them stayed in the cockpit till touchdown in Reno, where the police and FBI were waiting. They didn't approach yet in case the hijacker and his bomb were still on board. The pilot, Captain Scott, went back to search the cabin. There was no sign of

Cooper. The flight crew and Tina Mucklow were taken down to waiting cars. on the runway and it wasn't until she was in the back seat that all the stress finally caught up with Tina and she broke down sobbing. Bless her heart. I can't even imagine going through all that. Like that stress would just be unreal. It probably took her like a straight week to feel somewhat normal again. An FBI bomb squad searched the plane for 30 minutes before declaring it safe for investigators to come on board. All that remained of Dan Cooper and his hijacking were a black clip on tie, a tie clip, and two of the four parachutes he'd, demanded. The daring robbery and getaway was a media sensation right away. Everybody was desperate

to be the first to report a break in the story. The police and the FBI were pretty sure that Dan Cooper was an alias, but just to be sure, Portland police checked on a guy they knew by the name of D.B. Cooper, who had a minor rap sheet. This D.B. was immediately eliminated as a suspect, but one reporter who was rushing to meet a deadline used D.B. when he meant to use Dan, and a new service picked up the mistake and spread it all across the country. D.B. Cooper. So from then on, the mysterious skyjacker had a new name, D.B. Cooper. The investigation was huge. Till now, there'd never been a successful skyjacking in the U.S.

And the FBI definitely did not want to encourage anymore. But the search was complicated by about 1,000 different factors. Investigators had a good idea when Cooper had jumped, but they didn't know exactly where the plane was at the time or how strong the wind was. They also didn't know how long he'd let himself free fall before opening the parachute. The area where he could have landed was enormous, and most of it was just rugged woodland. J. Edgar Hoover had an Air Force Blackbird spy plane retrace and photograph the flight route, looking for any sign of Cooper or his parachute, but nothing came up.

The FBI recreated Cooper's escape with a 727 in a 200-pound sled and replicated the jerking of the tail that the pilots had reported at 8.13 p.m. Repeated search parties combed the woods and searched every farmhouse, outhouse, and doghouse they could find, but came up with exactly nothing related to D.B. Cooper. For all intents and purposes, Dut had vanished. The FBI published the serial numbers of the ransom money, but pretty much all it came of that was that a couple of guys printed some counterfeit 20s that matched the numbers, which they used to bilk 30 grand from Newsweek magazine in exchange for the promise of an interview with Cooper. Jesus. That's a couple of enterprising young fellas.

Honestly, I respect it. I'm not saying I approve of it, but damn. Respect it. You know, that's, yeah, that's creative. Some of the actual money would, in fact, turn up years later in 1980 when an eight-year-old kid named Brian Ingram dug up three packets of mostly disintegrated $20 bills on a Columbia River beach. It added up to about $6,000.

The serial numbers matched Cooper's ransom money and the condition they were in suggested that the bills had washed downstream and been done. naturally buried in the sand, although there was also some evidence that the money had gone into the water sometime after the hijacking, so that's weird. As to how that might have happened, nobody knows and probably nobody ever will. And that nobody will ever know part extends to the question of just who the hell D.B. Cooper was. After the daring hijack of Flight 305, D.B. Cooper quickly became sort of a folk hero in the northwest, and soon afterwards became a sort of American icon, referenced in books and movies and grabbing the imagination of thousands of people.

And that's led to a whole lot of hours put in by amateur sleuths, trying to figure out who Cooper was and what happened to him after he jumped out of the plane. If you want to go searching for more about this case online, just be aware that it's got more rabbit holes than watershed down. It could suck up your life. So, of course, the Seclaid's Long scrutiny has turned up some pretty strong possibilities for potential D.B. Coopers. lots of them. In fact, mostly veterans of the Korean and Vietnam wars who had turned to risky crimes or current or former employees of the aerospace industry in the Pacific Northwest.

As you'd expect for such a famous and mysterious case, there's no shortage of people claiming to be Cooper or a little later people insisting he was their recently deceased dad or uncle. There's a documentary on HBO Max that focuses on a few of these folks. It's like the Black Dahlia case in that regard. It's like everybody and their brother thinks, My dad did it. A lot of people real eager to rat on their dads. It's so funny. There's the H.H. Holmes guy that's like, he's my great uncle, and I know he was Jack the Ripper. Oh, God.

I cannot. Don't even get me. Oh, boy. We could, honestly, we should do an episode about that, about just like people that pretend that they did a crime or related people. Because there's the zodiac folks. That's a great idea. Yeah. We should do an episode about that.

Also, you have unzipped me mentioning H.H. Holmes and Jack Thripper because you know this is one of my absolute all-time, freaking true crime pet peeves, right? So do not get me started. I'm sorry. Unless you want to be here all night. No, I'm sorry. We can talk about it later off Mike. She's like, God, please, no. Please, please. I go, I am the same. I'm the same fucking way. Anyway, or John Bonae Ramsey. That's another one. A more modern one. But yeah, I mean, it's leave your uncles alone. They're probably fine. They have weird opinions that they share at Thanksgiving and then you just leave them alone for the rest of the year, all right? Your uncle was not D.B. Frick and Cooper, stop it. And if you go look at a list of D.B. Cooper suspects, there's every chance that one of them is right on the money, but which one? That's a question we'll probably never have an answer to unless the rest of the money turns up. Lots of people think they know the answer, but they really don't have. any proof, not enough to be 100% sure. Plenty of people at the FBI think D.B. Cooper didn't last much longer than his jump from

the back of the plane. It was extremely dangerous, a jump into the dark in a high-speed wind with a 15-degree wind chill with no boots or helmet. He might have landed in water and drowned or been killed on impact with the ground or trees or broken his ankles and been stranded out in the wild. Shit, he could have ended up stuck in a tree. Those northwest wood, woods are plenty deep as to how some of the money ended up on the beach on the Columbia River. Well, it's not called a mystery for nothing, you know? And for another slice of mystery pie, just what did Cooper have in that brown paper bag he boarded with? Was it big enough to stuff jump boots, gloves, and goggles in? Some rations for the woods. See, we only have pretty vague eyewitness accounts as to how

big the bag even was. Are we talking tote size, packed lunch size? Like I said, a slice of mystery pie. We'll probably never know. I'm so sorry, babe. I know you hate that. It's fine. It's fine. We do it for the campers. In July of 2016, the FBI officially announced that their investigation of the Cooper case was suspended, saying their resources would be better spent elsewhere, which is probably the right decision. I'd like to think that the FBI has, has better things to do than try to chase down a robbery they failed to solve for 50 years anyway. Yeah, and just a little PS to tie this in with our other story this week, skyjacking for money was incredibly rare before D.B. Cooper, at least one that actually resulted in

money. If a plane was hijacked, it was usually for political purposes, which in the U.S. often meant dissidents or Cuban nationals commandeering planes to take them to Havana. This happened over 130 times between 1968 and 1972, so frequently that airline crews started taking it in their stride. You'd get some rum and a few cigars and fly on home. But Cooper's apparently successful crime was new, and it lit a spark. The next year, in 1972, there were 15 attempts at similar hijackings, all of them unsuccessful and with the hijackers quickly arrested. Big, splashy crimes tend to create copycats, but just because DB made it look easy does not mean it was.

yeah, don't recommend you try this at home. So those were wild ones, right, campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Darkees, Rowan, Cherise, Marie, Jamie, and Marina. Pretty names today. Dang, those are all beautiful.

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