They found a couple packets several years later along the Columbia River. The physical evidence suggests they initially landed on dry ground, then several months or years later were washed into the river, where they drifted ashore and were eventually buried by sediment. The serial numbers of the bills are known, but none have ever turned up in circulation.
This part of the Pacific Northwest is heavily forested and sparsely populated, and the initial search area was to far north. It’s easy for searchers to miss a body that in all likelihood was torn apart by wildlife long before searchers started looking in the right place, and the little evidence that would remain is difficult to spot even if it’s not buried.
My favorite example is the Bear Brook Murders in New Hampshire. In 1985, a hunter found a 55 gallon barrel with a dead woman and infant inside near Bear Brook State Park. Police searched the area for more clues, but found nothing.
In 2000, another barrel was found with two more children inside, a couple hundred yards away. We now know for certain all four victims were killed around 1980 (three were have been identified by DNA and their killer was the father of the unidentified victim), so that barrel went undiscovered for two decades.
That seems implausible unless you’ve been in woods that thick, which in north Georgia where I live is extremely common. I haven’t been to the Pacific Northwest, but from the photos and videos I’ve seen the forests there are easily thick enough to hide D.B. Cooper’s remains until he was dismembered.
Pacific northwest is so green, fallen trees grow trees and then moss drips off. Ferns cover the understory. Until more recent logging cutting down swathes again, there was entire counties where you couldn't see the land on any mountain, just trees 100 ft tall.
Then you go up a ridge and it's pure desert to the east, pretty crazy
I've tried bushwacking my way to an abandoned mine in the Cascades by Spada Lake and it took around 10 minutes to go maybe 200ft before I turned back. The foliage on the ground level is just too dense.
It's something that unless you've been deep into these areas you can't understand. So much of the woods up here are literally impossible to get through without spending a lot of time and energy cutting a path.
Yup, there are many hiking trails you literally cannot venture more than 50 ft off without a machete.
Just so much plant life coming from every direction.
Back in the 90s I had friends who lived in hidden shacks in a park a few hundred feet from some of the most expensive real estate in Canada. A couple lived year round for over ten years, had pressurized water, a sauna and a wood fired hot tub and a bunch of them just spent the summers in the woods and rode their bikes to work or wherever they could park a car. There are a few of these shacks still there and tourists hike within a few yards of them and would never suspect they are there. Split cedar covered in moss or built into caves, under huge fallen trees or into granite fissures is near invisible.
I love the Pacific Northwest so much. You can step foot into the ocean, go up a mountain, walk through a forest and be in the desert easily within the same day.
I live nearby Bear Brook and what's insane is that those barrels weren't even that far away from the trail. As in, if you walked maybe 50 feet off the trail during early winter to take a leak, you probably could've seen the barrels off in the distance. Thing is, there are a lot of random barrels in the woods of NH (I once found one in the middle of an abandoned island conservatory ffs) that no one likely even thought of checking them out further.
If you need to get rid of some trash that would otherwise you'd have to pay to dispose of at the dump, it's free to just toss it in the woods as long as no one sees you.
Also plausible, the barrel was seen but never checked. There has been a 55 gallon blue plastic drum in my driveway since before I owned my house. It's on an easement outside of the neighbors fence. It probably has a body or 2 in it, but I'm not going to look to prove it.
There was a case in Australia where the husband told everyone the wife ran off, his place was searched and the case died off, only for police to find her in a barrel the same spot it has sat for 20 years , next to the shed . There was photos of him and the kids and others sitting next to it .
One of the more famous serial killers in USA (i cant remember if it was Ramirez or Kukalinski) put a body in a barrel and put it by the waste oil barrels at a restaurant he frequented. He wanted to see how long til it was discovered. There are pictures of him sitting on it while eating a burger from the restaurant ha. It sat there for quite a while
And a few times I’ve read stories where a person goes missing and they do the standard search and rescue operation but a few years later a body is found just a tiny bit outside that search radius.
Even out of shape/average Americans (I am an out of shape, average American) can walk further than 2 miles in dangerous terrain when given a few hours.
I read a book about wilderness disappearances once and the author mentioned that in wilderness areas, stuff like leaves falling, sediment shifting around, etc. will cause something like 1/4 of an inch of the ground to rise every year with the season cycle. So if all there’s left is bones and the area isn’t bare or rocky or mountainous or whatnot, and you don’t get found within a year or two, it’ll just eventually become impossible to find you unless there’s something sticking out or some other kind of clue. Great mother Gaia will just swallow your ass whole
I’m from New Hampshire, and New Hampshire has particularly dense and unforgiving forest with invisible wet lands and just horribly impassable areas. There’s the highest per capita fugitives in NH due to the culture being very no questions as well, and all that leads to a lot of unsolved missing persons. A serial killer who was known to hide bodies in barrels put some in the woods, first body in an area was found, serial killer is confessing his crimes and says he knows he put another body out here, like super close to the first one, but they can’t find it. A group of police, combing the forest. It was found years later like 50 feet from the first barrel. The Forrest does not give one fuck about you and your stupid ape eyes. And it’s big. A square mile is so much more land than most people realize.
Wow after typing this all out I see someone much more articulate than me posted about the same story much better worded. I’m still leaving my comment but I promise I didn’t see theirs first.
It’s almost like we both listened to an excellent podcast called *Bear Brook*. Highly recommend, goes into much more detail on just how long it took to identify their killer and then eventually the victoms.
There was also that Lear jet that went missing on approach and wasn’t found even though they knew where it was on last contact. Found three years later by accident
Growing up in there most kids were taught how deadly hiking can be even in good conditions, it’s not like you will for sure die, but the risk is literally never zero in those woods. Heavy rain, uneven terrain, wetness, cold in the winter, potentially animals but I consider them a low risk compared to exposure, and just all sorts of shit will just sneak up and kill you. Twisted an ankle on some roots and tried to walk yourself out all day? You are too tired to make shelter, it was chilly out but not too bad, you fall asleep directly on the ground, and that’s it. The wet even kind of cold earth will suck heat away from your body all night until you just slip into hypothermia and die right there. Falling asleep on the cold ground is so much deadlier than people understand if they aren’t told it all the time growing up.
people die on our mountains annually, sometimes multiple times per year. there's a very "dumbass out-of-towners" *shakes head sorrowfully* attitude about it because we all know it's going to happen, but every year some amateur mountaineer or tourist from a much warmer and flatter area or overconfident teenager/20something waltzes up the side of one of our 4,000 footers in sandals and a t-shirt with nothing more than a water bottle and a granola bar straight into an above-treeline late-spring snowstorm. the mountains are much, much colder than the ground, so people take a gander at their weather apps and say "gee, it's 65 and sunny, what a beautiful day for a hike!", set out after lunch, underestimate the length of the trail and how quickly it gets dark under the trees, don't realize how rocky the trail is, fail to check the temperature *on the actual mountain* (often 10+ degrees colder than ground temp and falls rapidly after dark), don't consider the wind chill, and get caught by a snowstorm that's localized mostly to the mountain and not the ground (and therefore wouldn't show up on the location-based weather app that they checked 10 miles away at their hotel). it's sad. and people don't ever seem to learn from others' mistakes, even though it's a well known thing around here.
I think of serial killer cases where they eventually go back and lead investigators to where they buried bodies, and it still takes days sometimes to find them.
Lol. I've left stuff *in my own woods* thinking I'd recognize exactly where it was and come back later and taken forever to find it. Something about sense of direction and pattern recognition is wonky when you can't see a flat horizon or any man-made structures, especially if you're on a slope/hill.
That’s always been a weak argument. Like you said, plenty of bodies have never been found. What really trips me up is not one of the suspects in the case was someone who disappeared around Thanksgiving and I’m of the belief that DB didn’t survive. Whoever he was, not a friend or family member ever thought “gee, where’s Dave at? Haven’t seen him in a while.”
Eh, it's a pretty safe bet to assume someone who plans and executes a solo heist with mid-air escape is a loner or doesn't have enough social ties (e.g., romantic partner, kids, close friends etc) to prevent the possible payoff from outweighing the risk.
There are apparently 600,000 people that are declared missing every year in the US*.
It’s not exactly surprising nobody ever connected any dots.
*Sidenote, Jesus Fucking Christ that’s a statistic.
Most of those people are found very shortly after being reported missing and weren’t really missing as such. It’s an inflated number when compared to what people are thinking of when you say “missing person.”
[Citation to support this.](https://en.as.com/latest_news/how-many-people-are-missing-in-the-us-the-states-with-the-most-disappearances-n/)
The actual number of open missing persons cases in the U.S. right now appears to be 25,000.
I've listened to a crime podcast about disappearance of a mother and a daughter. While canvassing rivers where they thought she died, they found OTHER bodies. There's a bunch of bodies all over the place that we don't know about.
The money they found is an interesting conundrum.
It was up river from where they thought he jumped. So either they were wrong on where he jumped or someone moved it upstream. The ole Washougal Washdown.
The bills had disintegrated in a rounded fashion and were matted together, indicating they had been deposited by river action, as opposed to having been buried deliberately. But The free-floating hypothesis neither explained the ten bills missing from one packet, nor explained how the three packets remained together after separating from the rest of the money.
Also, the rubber bands were intact so they had to have been buried and not open to the air with in a year or two of the hijacking. But the Army Corp dredged that area in 1974 and geologically speaking it had to have been buried 4 to 6 years after hijacking.
Also, analysis of diatoms found on the bills suggests the bundles were not submerged in the river or buried dry at the time of the hijacking in November 1971. Only diatoms that bloom during springtime were found, indicating the money had entered the water at least several months after the hijacking.
Also, the person who interacted with him most was Flight Attendant Tina Mucklow. And the money was found on a sandbar named Tina Bar. COINCIDENCE?! Ya probably.
Animals eat bones for the minerals. That might be especially true in areas like the Pacific North West, where high rainfall dissolves and washes away soluble minerals like Calcium, Potassium, and Sodium. After a surprisingly short time, there's nothing whatsoever left of an above-ground corpse.
It’s incredibly hard to find bodies. A dude got sucked out of a DC-10 over New Mexico and it was well known where the accident happened. Searchers could find him, and the body was found about a decade during the construction of a radio telescope. That was in desert land with low shrubs. It gets much harder with heavy trees.
>A dude got sucked out of a DC-10 over New Mexico
Can you imagine the horror? He probably had at least a minute or so to come to terms with his situation.
Edit: Just looked it up, he fell out at cruising altitude, 30,000+ feet. He had several minutes.
It's probable he was dead or unconscious after getting sucked out of an airplane at whatever speed it was going before he even had a chance to realize what happened.
One would hope so. But that's only if the trauma of the initial accident did so. I've read reports of paragliders and others getting cloudsucked up to that altitude. They do lose consciousness up there, but they pretty much all regained it before they landed again.
I'm trying to think what I'd do if I woke up in that situation. Try to minimize my terminal velocity so I have more time or try to maximize it and plow head first to better ensure I die on impact instead of in agony shortly after.
The money never going into circulation is the clincher. He died after the jump.
The only other explanation would be he did a crime like this and was too scared to spend the money. Which seems unlikely.
You can read more about it here:
https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/cash/currency.html
Notes (cash/bills) that pass through Federal banks are fed into high speed scanners to check for quality and authenticity. If the note is not up to quality its pulled. If the authenticity check fails its pulled.
The website doesn't detail how they do the authenticity check but I can only assume it reads the serial number and compares it against a database of serial numbers. The DB Cooper serial numbers would be in that database and would probably have a flag to indicate the note should be pulled from circulation for review.
A lot of this was done by hand years ago and even banks themselves would do random pulls of notes and check them against flagged serial numbers. Some crimes have been solved because some banker decided to spend their downtime checking serial numbers.
DB Cooper received $200,000 in $20 notes or 10,000 notes. Those have an estimated lifespan in circulation of about 22 years.
Its really hard to believe that not one of those $20 notes made it to the fed in the past 50+ years. So either the money is still out there to be found or whoever has/had them never spent them. They did find in the early 80's roughly $5200 or 260 of the 10,000 notes on the banks of the Columbia River.
I wonder what happens to US dollar bills used outside the US?
Maybe someone fulfilled a dream of retiring to Panama 😀
Or maybe between the river and the bears...
So you find a dead body, parachute and a lot of money.
Options:
1. Report the find. Results: A little bit of fame. But no money.
2. Take and hide the money. Report just body and parachute. Results: A little bit of fame. Your name in a wikipedia page. A lot of money and a lot of suspicion. Hours and hours of interrogation by FBI agents. Won't be able to spend the money for quite a while due to FBI monitoring.
3. Take the money. Bury the body and parachute. Results: No fame, but you have a lot of money to spend. Can't spend it all at once though.
I suspect that more than a few would take option number 3.
They tracked the serial numbers of all the bills. If you spent it somewhere it would come back to you soon. When’s the last time you received a dollar bill that was made in the 70’s? Now imagine have thousands of dollars worth. It would be extremely difficult to pull 2/3 off at all to the point of nearly not being worth the mental anguish
This adds nothing to your thoughtful comment, but I received bills from the late ‘70s within the past five years.
Thanks for the birthday money, Grandpa! :D
For sentimental reasons I’ve made a point to keep a 20 from my birth year. They look so different now, and it’s a good keepsake to remember my grandparents.
Tracking bills isn't that easy. It's often done by recording the serial number and then cross referencing those numbers later on. Typically they have to be used in a crime to get checked. The main use is if Cooper was later caught they could confirm that the money matched, or if someone deposited an unusually large amount in a bank they could check. If the bills were slowly filtered into banks and stores it's possible no one would have ever noticed.
I could see the bills slowly being circulated back, especially back then. But eventually the bills would have been collected and destroyed and they check those bills. Of course he could have traveled outside the US to circulate them.
I've heard of money like this being laundered in countries that use US currency frequently (due to local currency stability issues) but aren't actually in the US.
Actually no, the bills were not tracked. FBI had a copy of the serial numbers, not even in numerical order from what i have read(!), but there was no way to track these bills in circulation. There is no way for a teller or cashier to cross reference a list for these particular bills.
The serial number of the bills are recorded and checked when they are destroyed by the Federal Reserve when they get too worn out. Ok sure maybe he finds a way to launder them but literally zero of them ever make it back to the Federal Reserve at the end of their life? Extremely unlikely. Much more plausible is that he died during the jump or shortly thereafter and the money all rotted in the forest.
Yeah, I bet some random camper or hiker will find him eventually kind of like when those Everest climbers found George Mallory 75 years after his death.
No one realizes HOW BIG and DENSE the pacific northwest wilderness is until you're in it looking out at tens of thousands of square miles of forest covered mountains without a person or building in site.
Every single bill used as the ransom money had their serial numbers written down for documentation. The only money they found from the heist was found half buried on a sandy riverbank. Not a single bill was ever found in circulation. The dude died in the jump.
What everyone has skipped over here is that the area he supposedly landed in was buried by the Mt. Saint Helens eruption. Any evidence left in the hills there is now under several feet of volcanic deposits.
I thought he died for sure too, for years. Then it suddenly dawned on me, he had a second bag. I don't know why that never registered with me. I read it before yet some how my mind always conflated "the bag" with "the briefcase".
Anyway it was almost universally described by witnesses as a 14 inch by 14 inch beige paper shopping bag with the top rolled down to act as a handle. Not a brown supermarket bag, more like those bags you got at Macy's or Nordstrom's. One lady said it was fabric but whatever.
Someone over at the DB Cooper subreddit got a similar bag and easily fit in jump boots, helmet, googles and gloves. Along with a revolver.
Nobody ever saw what was in that bag, but given his planning I'm sure it was something to help with the hijacking so that stuff makes sense. So much for, "He jumped in a business suit and loafers."
Also the, "He was an idiot who didn't know about parachuting. He choose the technically inferior chute and the sown shut dummy reserve." Both main chutes were exactly the same, other than size, canopy chutes. He chose the slightly smaller one. He'd specifically asked for "civilian chutes, not military ones." I think assuming they'd be steerable sports chutes. Instead they brought him "civilian" chutes that were emergency chutes for acrobatic pilots. Those rigs had no front D rings to attach a reserve chute to. He couldn't have used any reserve even if he wanted to. He probably chucked the dummy one out the back in disgust. That's sure what the FBI initially thought. They asked anyone to be on the look out for the intact dummy chute so they could try and more accurately track the plane's path.
Over a dozen copycat hijackings occurred within the next 12 months. Everyone who jumped survived.
He landed on the Woods and had to burn his cash to stay alive. His site was eventually found by 3 friends who went on an adventure to find his stash. They had a pretty wacky journey along the way. ;)
A few cells from the part of a blastcoele that will later become the placenta is enough to do tons of genetic testing on to screen out aneuploidy, genetic disorders, etc
[Yes, really](https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/db-cooper-hijacking).
I assume they ran it against CODIS/NDIS, but didn't find a match. It's not like the movies, they can't just instantly figure out who you are with your DNA alone.
My favorite silly theory is that he’s Tommy Wiseau. Similar face shape, weird accent, and people who know Tommy say he’s 1) much older than he says and 2) showed up out in Hollwood with a mysteriously large amount of money.
I have also heard this theory before...
But also that Wiseau is a former Eastern Bloc spy and all sorts of other stories.
Also that DB Cooper was a Soviet/Eastern Bloc agent with an escape plan.
There are so many conspiracy theories and rumours around both of them, so it's no surprise there are theories that overlap them.
One of the most likely guys was actually a spy, but for the US. He planted a bug in Party Headquarters, Hanoi. My pet theory is that the feds caught him, and then someone called them up, said "National Security" and they gave him lunch and a pack of smokes and let him go. It makes the most sense considering what is know.
“Yeah, can I have 200,000 dollars please?”
“Oh hi Tommy I didn’t know it was you. Here you go!”
“That’s meeeeee, hi doh-gee!”
“You’re my favorite hijacker.”
Yeah I am from New Orleans we certainly do NOT talk like Tommy lol he had a relative that lived in Chalmette so that is his claim to New Orleans
But Tommy made his money on selling underwear and jeans to the gay community in Cali (he still has the web store up; you can buy sexy undies that say WISEAU on the band)
I always wonder that if he died, why did no one ever notice that their friend/coworker/family member went to the airport and never came back? If he’s dead shouldn’t someone have noticed him missing?
1971. No access to the internet, not everyone had access to a TV, etc. If he was from a rural area, forget about it. People moved, never to be seen or heard from again all the time back in the day. He could’ve ‘moved’ and no one would’ve questioned it.
I was watching a video yesterday of a hiker who died in the woods and it took a lot for them to identify him because he was estranged from everyone. No one thought he was missing because he hadn't talked to anyone he had known for years.
There was a famous case in the UK a couple years back of a man who went on a train from London to the countryside and died under unknown circumstances. Huge mystery, in the news every day, lots of speculation, until much later when it turns out that it was just a random guy who even had a brother living in London. Really doesn’t take much to vanish without anyone noticing
271,000 missing reports filed for men in the US in 2022.Population increased by ~1.5x since 1971 and it appears missing reports peaked in the 90s at around 900k/year (all genders). "About 70%" of missing persons are found/returned (recent fbi report) within 72 hours.
I think it's safe to say based on current numbers and the increased technology and awareness about missing persons that the 1970s stats would be in the 10s of thousands range for men alone.
Don't forget the people who never get a missing report filed.
Some guy, bit of a loner, from a small town, tells people he's moving to a job in the city or whatever, there's no LinkedIn or Facebook to check up on him, he just drops out of his quiet life and moves on, like tens of thousands of others do, except he doesn't go where he's saying he goes.
If he was an only child with deceased parents and no other close relatives, would anybody notice, ever? Possibly not.
It's also possible he wasn't American since he oddly specified that the ransom be paid in "Negotiable American Currency", which would be an odd thing to say if he was a citizen.
It’s entirely possible that the kind of people who hijack airplanes for money and parachute out of them could be loners without many close friends or coworkers.
It’s also possible that his friends and coworkers were also doing criminal stuff and so not particularly open to bringing police attention into their lives.
Well, nobody identified the very dead perpetrator of the [1973 Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce robbery](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Canadian_Imperial_Bank_of_Commerce_bank_robbery) either, so it's not impossible.
You assume the disappearance and the heist were close in time.
If this was someone who had disappeared months or even years earlier, the connection might never be made.
Or DB Cooper is someone that for whatever reason could quietly vanish and never be noticed as missing.
No, just using missing people (i.e. known missing) won't do.
What would be interesting is to find the identities of everyone within the US and Canada of about the right age who has a birth certificiate, but no death certificate and no current known whereabouts, then look at everyone whose trail goes cold around that time and a bit before. That might turn up something a lot more interesting.
Truthfully, we're probably far better equipped to do the data science now than we were back then, providing there are enough complete records this would be a relatively achievable task for the kinds of bits of software the likes of Meta have created.
There used to be a dive bar in Kansas City called DB Coopers. My theory was always that the real db cooper took his money he got and opened a dive bar. He named it after the mystery to hide in plain sight.
> So we would know if any of the bills went into circulation
People keep saying this but it isn't true. None of those bill have come OUT of circulation. They are technically still IN circulation.
Thy're technically still in circulation by default of not being recorded as taken out but that doesn't mean they're out or ever were out being used anywhere since 1971. The avearge usable lifetimes of paper money has long passed for them and none have shown up in any search or in the recycling of money, where serial numbers are checked.
$1 bill lasts 5.8 years; $5 bill, 5.5 years; $10 bill, 4.5 years; $20 bill, 7.9 years; $50 bill, 8.5 years; and $100 bill, 15 years. Bills that get worn out from everyday use are taken out of circulation, destroyed and replaced. Except for some found still bound in stacks in a sandbank 9 years later none of the 1971 hijacking bills ever have shown up.
Interesting to learn about how long these bills last. I don’t think a lot of people know paper money gets replaced so often because while it seems logical after thinking about it, old coins still get around and we run into shitty bills all the time so you just never think about it
He landed in the woods and stumbled and fell into an old mineshaft, where he broke both of his legs. Because of the extreme cold, he was forced to burn the money to stay warm
There's definitely been more money spent on looking for him than he stole too. He got away with $200,000 in 1971 and the FBI were paying for DNA analysis 27 years later. Not to mention all the amateur sleuths who spent time and money going looking.
He's a cottage industry bringing jobs to America!
Also they recovered a small amount of the money from the columbia river nearby about a decade later. Could have fallen out of his bag, but it certainly makes it more likely that he didn't make it.
Citizen sleuths got together, and tested the Cooper tie. They discovered microscopic rare earth minerals like titanium and bismuth….he likely was a manager or engineer at an industrial fabrication facility…..interesting stuff:
https://citizensleuths.com/titaniumparticles.html
lowkey think that that flight attendant who hung out with him the most and was the last to see him hid him in the plane somewhere or something lol. based on literally nothing
This is one of the strangest true stories. Part of me thinks he died, but then you'd think they'd have found a body or a parachute.
Maybe someone did lol
I too thought the same since there had been money found in the forest around the area where he parachute out.. iirc
They found a couple packets several years later along the Columbia River. The physical evidence suggests they initially landed on dry ground, then several months or years later were washed into the river, where they drifted ashore and were eventually buried by sediment. The serial numbers of the bills are known, but none have ever turned up in circulation. This part of the Pacific Northwest is heavily forested and sparsely populated, and the initial search area was to far north. It’s easy for searchers to miss a body that in all likelihood was torn apart by wildlife long before searchers started looking in the right place, and the little evidence that would remain is difficult to spot even if it’s not buried.
"They would have found a body" think of all the times they *haven't* found a body
My favorite example is the Bear Brook Murders in New Hampshire. In 1985, a hunter found a 55 gallon barrel with a dead woman and infant inside near Bear Brook State Park. Police searched the area for more clues, but found nothing. In 2000, another barrel was found with two more children inside, a couple hundred yards away. We now know for certain all four victims were killed around 1980 (three were have been identified by DNA and their killer was the father of the unidentified victim), so that barrel went undiscovered for two decades. That seems implausible unless you’ve been in woods that thick, which in north Georgia where I live is extremely common. I haven’t been to the Pacific Northwest, but from the photos and videos I’ve seen the forests there are easily thick enough to hide D.B. Cooper’s remains until he was dismembered.
Pacific northwest is so green, fallen trees grow trees and then moss drips off. Ferns cover the understory. Until more recent logging cutting down swathes again, there was entire counties where you couldn't see the land on any mountain, just trees 100 ft tall. Then you go up a ridge and it's pure desert to the east, pretty crazy
I've tried bushwacking my way to an abandoned mine in the Cascades by Spada Lake and it took around 10 minutes to go maybe 200ft before I turned back. The foliage on the ground level is just too dense.
It's something that unless you've been deep into these areas you can't understand. So much of the woods up here are literally impossible to get through without spending a lot of time and energy cutting a path.
Yup, there are many hiking trails you literally cannot venture more than 50 ft off without a machete. Just so much plant life coming from every direction.
Back in the 90s I had friends who lived in hidden shacks in a park a few hundred feet from some of the most expensive real estate in Canada. A couple lived year round for over ten years, had pressurized water, a sauna and a wood fired hot tub and a bunch of them just spent the summers in the woods and rode their bikes to work or wherever they could park a car. There are a few of these shacks still there and tourists hike within a few yards of them and would never suspect they are there. Split cedar covered in moss or built into caves, under huge fallen trees or into granite fissures is near invisible.
And they held down jobs and essentially saved a decade’s worth of rent and utilities?
No one ever saw or smelled the trail of smoke from the wood fired saunas?
I love the Pacific Northwest so much. You can step foot into the ocean, go up a mountain, walk through a forest and be in the desert easily within the same day.
PNW born and raised - Can confirm.
I left the PNW for a city of 12 million people and your comment is making me really miss home.
I've lived in both Georgia and Washington. The forest up there is way thicker....and the rain is relentless
And its so fucking lovely.
Yes it is
I live nearby Bear Brook and what's insane is that those barrels weren't even that far away from the trail. As in, if you walked maybe 50 feet off the trail during early winter to take a leak, you probably could've seen the barrels off in the distance. Thing is, there are a lot of random barrels in the woods of NH (I once found one in the middle of an abandoned island conservatory ffs) that no one likely even thought of checking them out further.
Why so many barrels in the woods?
people would dump oil barrels there back in the day so that they didn't have to dispose of them properly. Also lots of farmers
If you need to get rid of some trash that would otherwise you'd have to pay to dispose of at the dump, it's free to just toss it in the woods as long as no one sees you.
Also plausible, the barrel was seen but never checked. There has been a 55 gallon blue plastic drum in my driveway since before I owned my house. It's on an easement outside of the neighbors fence. It probably has a body or 2 in it, but I'm not going to look to prove it.
There was a case in Australia where the husband told everyone the wife ran off, his place was searched and the case died off, only for police to find her in a barrel the same spot it has sat for 20 years , next to the shed . There was photos of him and the kids and others sitting next to it .
I read this 3x hoping I read it incorrectly.
One of the more famous serial killers in USA (i cant remember if it was Ramirez or Kukalinski) put a body in a barrel and put it by the waste oil barrels at a restaurant he frequented. He wanted to see how long til it was discovered. There are pictures of him sitting on it while eating a burger from the restaurant ha. It sat there for quite a while
And a few times I’ve read stories where a person goes missing and they do the standard search and rescue operation but a few years later a body is found just a tiny bit outside that search radius. Even out of shape/average Americans (I am an out of shape, average American) can walk further than 2 miles in dangerous terrain when given a few hours.
That's your favorite example?
I read a book about wilderness disappearances once and the author mentioned that in wilderness areas, stuff like leaves falling, sediment shifting around, etc. will cause something like 1/4 of an inch of the ground to rise every year with the season cycle. So if all there’s left is bones and the area isn’t bare or rocky or mountainous or whatnot, and you don’t get found within a year or two, it’ll just eventually become impossible to find you unless there’s something sticking out or some other kind of clue. Great mother Gaia will just swallow your ass whole
I’m from New Hampshire, and New Hampshire has particularly dense and unforgiving forest with invisible wet lands and just horribly impassable areas. There’s the highest per capita fugitives in NH due to the culture being very no questions as well, and all that leads to a lot of unsolved missing persons. A serial killer who was known to hide bodies in barrels put some in the woods, first body in an area was found, serial killer is confessing his crimes and says he knows he put another body out here, like super close to the first one, but they can’t find it. A group of police, combing the forest. It was found years later like 50 feet from the first barrel. The Forrest does not give one fuck about you and your stupid ape eyes. And it’s big. A square mile is so much more land than most people realize. Wow after typing this all out I see someone much more articulate than me posted about the same story much better worded. I’m still leaving my comment but I promise I didn’t see theirs first.
I found your version a bit more riveting with higher stakes and more details.
It’s almost like we both listened to an excellent podcast called *Bear Brook*. Highly recommend, goes into much more detail on just how long it took to identify their killer and then eventually the victoms.
There was also that Lear jet that went missing on approach and wasn’t found even though they knew where it was on last contact. Found three years later by accident
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Growing up in there most kids were taught how deadly hiking can be even in good conditions, it’s not like you will for sure die, but the risk is literally never zero in those woods. Heavy rain, uneven terrain, wetness, cold in the winter, potentially animals but I consider them a low risk compared to exposure, and just all sorts of shit will just sneak up and kill you. Twisted an ankle on some roots and tried to walk yourself out all day? You are too tired to make shelter, it was chilly out but not too bad, you fall asleep directly on the ground, and that’s it. The wet even kind of cold earth will suck heat away from your body all night until you just slip into hypothermia and die right there. Falling asleep on the cold ground is so much deadlier than people understand if they aren’t told it all the time growing up.
people die on our mountains annually, sometimes multiple times per year. there's a very "dumbass out-of-towners" *shakes head sorrowfully* attitude about it because we all know it's going to happen, but every year some amateur mountaineer or tourist from a much warmer and flatter area or overconfident teenager/20something waltzes up the side of one of our 4,000 footers in sandals and a t-shirt with nothing more than a water bottle and a granola bar straight into an above-treeline late-spring snowstorm. the mountains are much, much colder than the ground, so people take a gander at their weather apps and say "gee, it's 65 and sunny, what a beautiful day for a hike!", set out after lunch, underestimate the length of the trail and how quickly it gets dark under the trees, don't realize how rocky the trail is, fail to check the temperature *on the actual mountain* (often 10+ degrees colder than ground temp and falls rapidly after dark), don't consider the wind chill, and get caught by a snowstorm that's localized mostly to the mountain and not the ground (and therefore wouldn't show up on the location-based weather app that they checked 10 miles away at their hotel). it's sad. and people don't ever seem to learn from others' mistakes, even though it's a well known thing around here.
Nature is, in fact, very good at getting rid of bodies.
I think of serial killer cases where they eventually go back and lead investigators to where they buried bodies, and it still takes days sometimes to find them.
Lol. I've left stuff *in my own woods* thinking I'd recognize exactly where it was and come back later and taken forever to find it. Something about sense of direction and pattern recognition is wonky when you can't see a flat horizon or any man-made structures, especially if you're on a slope/hill.
That’s always been a weak argument. Like you said, plenty of bodies have never been found. What really trips me up is not one of the suspects in the case was someone who disappeared around Thanksgiving and I’m of the belief that DB didn’t survive. Whoever he was, not a friend or family member ever thought “gee, where’s Dave at? Haven’t seen him in a while.”
Eh, it's a pretty safe bet to assume someone who plans and executes a solo heist with mid-air escape is a loner or doesn't have enough social ties (e.g., romantic partner, kids, close friends etc) to prevent the possible payoff from outweighing the risk.
There are apparently 600,000 people that are declared missing every year in the US*. It’s not exactly surprising nobody ever connected any dots. *Sidenote, Jesus Fucking Christ that’s a statistic.
Most of those people are found very shortly after being reported missing and weren’t really missing as such. It’s an inflated number when compared to what people are thinking of when you say “missing person.”
[Citation to support this.](https://en.as.com/latest_news/how-many-people-are-missing-in-the-us-the-states-with-the-most-disappearances-n/) The actual number of open missing persons cases in the U.S. right now appears to be 25,000.
Ok off top of my head: Jimmy Hoffa, Alexander the Great, Jesus, the prophet Muhammad, and now D.B. Cooper.
And don't forget the real killer OJ never found.
I've listened to a crime podcast about disappearance of a mother and a daughter. While canvassing rivers where they thought she died, they found OTHER bodies. There's a bunch of bodies all over the place that we don't know about.
The money they found is an interesting conundrum. It was up river from where they thought he jumped. So either they were wrong on where he jumped or someone moved it upstream. The ole Washougal Washdown. The bills had disintegrated in a rounded fashion and were matted together, indicating they had been deposited by river action, as opposed to having been buried deliberately. But The free-floating hypothesis neither explained the ten bills missing from one packet, nor explained how the three packets remained together after separating from the rest of the money. Also, the rubber bands were intact so they had to have been buried and not open to the air with in a year or two of the hijacking. But the Army Corp dredged that area in 1974 and geologically speaking it had to have been buried 4 to 6 years after hijacking. Also, analysis of diatoms found on the bills suggests the bundles were not submerged in the river or buried dry at the time of the hijacking in November 1971. Only diatoms that bloom during springtime were found, indicating the money had entered the water at least several months after the hijacking. Also, the person who interacted with him most was Flight Attendant Tina Mucklow. And the money was found on a sandbar named Tina Bar. COINCIDENCE?! Ya probably.
I see you also watched the Leminno video
Animals eat bones for the minerals. That might be especially true in areas like the Pacific North West, where high rainfall dissolves and washes away soluble minerals like Calcium, Potassium, and Sodium. After a surprisingly short time, there's nothing whatsoever left of an above-ground corpse.
It’s incredibly hard to find bodies. A dude got sucked out of a DC-10 over New Mexico and it was well known where the accident happened. Searchers could find him, and the body was found about a decade during the construction of a radio telescope. That was in desert land with low shrubs. It gets much harder with heavy trees.
>A dude got sucked out of a DC-10 over New Mexico Can you imagine the horror? He probably had at least a minute or so to come to terms with his situation. Edit: Just looked it up, he fell out at cruising altitude, 30,000+ feet. He had several minutes.
It's probable he was dead or unconscious after getting sucked out of an airplane at whatever speed it was going before he even had a chance to realize what happened.
One would hope so. But that's only if the trauma of the initial accident did so. I've read reports of paragliders and others getting cloudsucked up to that altitude. They do lose consciousness up there, but they pretty much all regained it before they landed again.
I'm trying to think what I'd do if I woke up in that situation. Try to minimize my terminal velocity so I have more time or try to maximize it and plow head first to better ensure I die on impact instead of in agony shortly after.
*Aim for the bushes?* Nope. Def animorphing myself into a lawn dart.
The money never going into circulation is the clincher. He died after the jump. The only other explanation would be he did a crime like this and was too scared to spend the money. Which seems unlikely.
Maybe it wasn't about the money. Maybe it was about sending a message.
drink your ovaltine
How often are the serial numbers of any given bill checked?
You can read more about it here: https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/cash/currency.html Notes (cash/bills) that pass through Federal banks are fed into high speed scanners to check for quality and authenticity. If the note is not up to quality its pulled. If the authenticity check fails its pulled. The website doesn't detail how they do the authenticity check but I can only assume it reads the serial number and compares it against a database of serial numbers. The DB Cooper serial numbers would be in that database and would probably have a flag to indicate the note should be pulled from circulation for review. A lot of this was done by hand years ago and even banks themselves would do random pulls of notes and check them against flagged serial numbers. Some crimes have been solved because some banker decided to spend their downtime checking serial numbers. DB Cooper received $200,000 in $20 notes or 10,000 notes. Those have an estimated lifespan in circulation of about 22 years. Its really hard to believe that not one of those $20 notes made it to the fed in the past 50+ years. So either the money is still out there to be found or whoever has/had them never spent them. They did find in the early 80's roughly $5200 or 260 of the 10,000 notes on the banks of the Columbia River.
I wonder what happens to US dollar bills used outside the US? Maybe someone fulfilled a dream of retiring to Panama 😀 Or maybe between the river and the bears...
I think the federal reserve collects the serial numbers of every bill it destroys.
So you find a dead body, parachute and a lot of money. Options: 1. Report the find. Results: A little bit of fame. But no money. 2. Take and hide the money. Report just body and parachute. Results: A little bit of fame. Your name in a wikipedia page. A lot of money and a lot of suspicion. Hours and hours of interrogation by FBI agents. Won't be able to spend the money for quite a while due to FBI monitoring. 3. Take the money. Bury the body and parachute. Results: No fame, but you have a lot of money to spend. Can't spend it all at once though. I suspect that more than a few would take option number 3.
They tracked the serial numbers of all the bills. If you spent it somewhere it would come back to you soon. When’s the last time you received a dollar bill that was made in the 70’s? Now imagine have thousands of dollars worth. It would be extremely difficult to pull 2/3 off at all to the point of nearly not being worth the mental anguish
This adds nothing to your thoughtful comment, but I received bills from the late ‘70s within the past five years. Thanks for the birthday money, Grandpa! :D For sentimental reasons I’ve made a point to keep a 20 from my birth year. They look so different now, and it’s a good keepsake to remember my grandparents.
Tracking bills isn't that easy. It's often done by recording the serial number and then cross referencing those numbers later on. Typically they have to be used in a crime to get checked. The main use is if Cooper was later caught they could confirm that the money matched, or if someone deposited an unusually large amount in a bank they could check. If the bills were slowly filtered into banks and stores it's possible no one would have ever noticed.
I could see the bills slowly being circulated back, especially back then. But eventually the bills would have been collected and destroyed and they check those bills. Of course he could have traveled outside the US to circulate them.
I've heard of money like this being laundered in countries that use US currency frequently (due to local currency stability issues) but aren't actually in the US.
You could ship it out of the country and use it immediately. It would be very easy to do before Patriot Act was passed.
Money isn't constantly tracked though. Most money probably wont be logged until it is destroyed.
Actually no, the bills were not tracked. FBI had a copy of the serial numbers, not even in numerical order from what i have read(!), but there was no way to track these bills in circulation. There is no way for a teller or cashier to cross reference a list for these particular bills.
The serial number of the bills are recorded and checked when they are destroyed by the Federal Reserve when they get too worn out. Ok sure maybe he finds a way to launder them but literally zero of them ever make it back to the Federal Reserve at the end of their life? Extremely unlikely. Much more plausible is that he died during the jump or shortly thereafter and the money all rotted in the forest.
Couldn’t they also be used to exchange currency in another nation, potentially not making it back to the US?
Possibly. It's really hard to believe not one of the 10,000 notes he received didnt make it back to the states.
Those woods are super dense, it’s not exactly easy to find someone in there.
Yeah, I bet some random camper or hiker will find him eventually kind of like when those Everest climbers found George Mallory 75 years after his death.
But Everest is a place where humans regularly go. DB Cooper’s body might just be in the middle of a massive forest with no hiking trails nearby.
Yeah true.
> when those Everest climbers found George Mallory 75 years after his death. Truly poignant.
Everest is cold and preserves. Dude is eaten and long buried by natural processes.
No one realizes HOW BIG and DENSE the pacific northwest wilderness is until you're in it looking out at tens of thousands of square miles of forest covered mountains without a person or building in site.
And this happened pre-internet, cell phone, mass video, and surveillance. Dude ain't being found
Every single bill used as the ransom money had their serial numbers written down for documentation. The only money they found from the heist was found half buried on a sandy riverbank. Not a single bill was ever found in circulation. The dude died in the jump.
Apparently they found some of the stolen bills in a creek or something close to where he parachuted. Most think he died on landing.
What everyone has skipped over here is that the area he supposedly landed in was buried by the Mt. Saint Helens eruption. Any evidence left in the hills there is now under several feet of volcanic deposits.
I thought he died for sure too, for years. Then it suddenly dawned on me, he had a second bag. I don't know why that never registered with me. I read it before yet some how my mind always conflated "the bag" with "the briefcase". Anyway it was almost universally described by witnesses as a 14 inch by 14 inch beige paper shopping bag with the top rolled down to act as a handle. Not a brown supermarket bag, more like those bags you got at Macy's or Nordstrom's. One lady said it was fabric but whatever. Someone over at the DB Cooper subreddit got a similar bag and easily fit in jump boots, helmet, googles and gloves. Along with a revolver. Nobody ever saw what was in that bag, but given his planning I'm sure it was something to help with the hijacking so that stuff makes sense. So much for, "He jumped in a business suit and loafers." Also the, "He was an idiot who didn't know about parachuting. He choose the technically inferior chute and the sown shut dummy reserve." Both main chutes were exactly the same, other than size, canopy chutes. He chose the slightly smaller one. He'd specifically asked for "civilian chutes, not military ones." I think assuming they'd be steerable sports chutes. Instead they brought him "civilian" chutes that were emergency chutes for acrobatic pilots. Those rigs had no front D rings to attach a reserve chute to. He couldn't have used any reserve even if he wanted to. He probably chucked the dummy one out the back in disgust. That's sure what the FBI initially thought. They asked anyone to be on the look out for the intact dummy chute so they could try and more accurately track the plane's path. Over a dozen copycat hijackings occurred within the next 12 months. Everyone who jumped survived.
A DB Cooper subreddit!! THANK YOU!!!
Yeah everyone forgets no one knew what he had on him. As well as how hard it was to check money during that time.
I think he died too. Injured during the jump. And landed in some remote as hell wilderness at night. Bad double combo.
Clearly he's alive and working in the Las Vegas field office of the FBI....
Dude, it’s simple. He was whisked away from the plane by Heimdall on a magic rainbow called the Bifrost. Duh.
Nah he's tommy wiseau
He landed on the Woods and had to burn his cash to stay alive. His site was eventually found by 3 friends who went on an adventure to find his stash. They had a pretty wacky journey along the way. ;)
I feel like it's relevant to the context that the FBI does have a sample of his DNA. They got it from the tie he left before he jumped.
Why would a tie have a usable amount of DNA on it? Did he use it a jack off napkin?
"Usable amount" decreases year after year. I'm pretty sure a single epithelial cell is enough to sequence now.
A few cells from the part of a blastcoele that will later become the placenta is enough to do tons of genetic testing on to screen out aneuploidy, genetic disorders, etc
This story is about to get super interesting if Cooper left his placenta cells on his tie
Of course a tie would have a usable amount, that’s the entire selling point of PCR testing
You’d be surprised. The amount of DNA extracted from something smaller than a grain of sand is enough for most (q)PCR reactions
Hair, probably.
It's called skin.
You telling me I'm wearing a fucking NARC?!
Do they have it? For real? Did they try to find the person using data?
[Yes, really](https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/db-cooper-hijacking). I assume they ran it against CODIS/NDIS, but didn't find a match. It's not like the movies, they can't just instantly figure out who you are with your DNA alone.
Amazing, but probably they might find a match within a few years. Likely a distant relative or something. Many questions are open.
My favorite silly theory is that he’s Tommy Wiseau. Similar face shape, weird accent, and people who know Tommy say he’s 1) much older than he says and 2) showed up out in Hollwood with a mysteriously large amount of money.
I have also heard this theory before... But also that Wiseau is a former Eastern Bloc spy and all sorts of other stories. Also that DB Cooper was a Soviet/Eastern Bloc agent with an escape plan. There are so many conspiracy theories and rumours around both of them, so it's no surprise there are theories that overlap them.
One of the most likely guys was actually a spy, but for the US. He planted a bug in Party Headquarters, Hanoi. My pet theory is that the feds caught him, and then someone called them up, said "National Security" and they gave him lunch and a pack of smokes and let him go. It makes the most sense considering what is know.
I did always wonder if it was some kind of early red-team type test, just to see if it was possible, and that he's not unknown to the right people.
It's bullshit I did not hijack the plane I did noooot. Oh hi Mark
"I FED UP WITH THIS PLANE!"
"You're tearing me apart trees hit at terminal velocity!"
Anyway, how's your death life?
“Yeah, can I have 200,000 dollars please?” “Oh hi Tommy I didn’t know it was you. Here you go!” “That’s meeeeee, hi doh-gee!” “You’re my favorite hijacker.”
I love that man, he‘s my favorite actor Goodbye
[Relevant XKCD](https://xkcd.com/1400/)
there really is an XKCD for everything
That’s where I first heard it!
[Relevant XKCD](https://xkcd.com/978/)
Cheep cheep - wiseau bird noises
Anyway, how is your sex life?
"Why are you hijacking this plane?" "I can't talk about it, it's private. Anyway, hows your sex life?"
I did naaaat
Tommy made his money on “leather jackets” and his accent is from New Orleans.
Yeah I am from New Orleans we certainly do NOT talk like Tommy lol he had a relative that lived in Chalmette so that is his claim to New Orleans But Tommy made his money on selling underwear and jeans to the gay community in Cali (he still has the web store up; you can buy sexy undies that say WISEAU on the band)
He was born in Poland
hold on to your butts...
My favorite movie line
I love that he says it twice in the movie. Like the guy had just heard the phrase and now he’s the guy who over-uses his new slang.
I always wonder that if he died, why did no one ever notice that their friend/coworker/family member went to the airport and never came back? If he’s dead shouldn’t someone have noticed him missing?
Yes but its making the connection to DB Cooper that is the problem. I doubt he told people he was even going to the airport
“Why ya goin to the airport? Flying somewhere?”
Big gulps huh?
Well… see ya later!
Killer boots, man!
Cooper! I was *way* off!
Statistically speaking, you’re much more likely to die *on the way* to the airport than actually flying.
Does that include jumping out of the plane at 172mph at 10,000 feet in 15°F wind?
1971. No access to the internet, not everyone had access to a TV, etc. If he was from a rural area, forget about it. People moved, never to be seen or heard from again all the time back in the day. He could’ve ‘moved’ and no one would’ve questioned it.
I was watching a video yesterday of a hiker who died in the woods and it took a lot for them to identify him because he was estranged from everyone. No one thought he was missing because he hadn't talked to anyone he had known for years.
There was a famous case in the UK a couple years back of a man who went on a train from London to the countryside and died under unknown circumstances. Huge mystery, in the news every day, lots of speculation, until much later when it turns out that it was just a random guy who even had a brother living in London. Really doesn’t take much to vanish without anyone noticing
I wonder how many men went missing that year in the USA.
271,000 missing reports filed for men in the US in 2022.Population increased by ~1.5x since 1971 and it appears missing reports peaked in the 90s at around 900k/year (all genders). "About 70%" of missing persons are found/returned (recent fbi report) within 72 hours. I think it's safe to say based on current numbers and the increased technology and awareness about missing persons that the 1970s stats would be in the 10s of thousands range for men alone.
Don't forget the people who never get a missing report filed. Some guy, bit of a loner, from a small town, tells people he's moving to a job in the city or whatever, there's no LinkedIn or Facebook to check up on him, he just drops out of his quiet life and moves on, like tens of thousands of others do, except he doesn't go where he's saying he goes. If he was an only child with deceased parents and no other close relatives, would anybody notice, ever? Possibly not.
It's also possible he wasn't American since he oddly specified that the ransom be paid in "Negotiable American Currency", which would be an odd thing to say if he was a citizen.
It’s entirely possible that the kind of people who hijack airplanes for money and parachute out of them could be loners without many close friends or coworkers. It’s also possible that his friends and coworkers were also doing criminal stuff and so not particularly open to bringing police attention into their lives.
Well, nobody identified the very dead perpetrator of the [1973 Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce robbery](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Canadian_Imperial_Bank_of_Commerce_bank_robbery) either, so it's not impossible.
You assume the disappearance and the heist were close in time. If this was someone who had disappeared months or even years earlier, the connection might never be made. Or DB Cooper is someone that for whatever reason could quietly vanish and never be noticed as missing. No, just using missing people (i.e. known missing) won't do. What would be interesting is to find the identities of everyone within the US and Canada of about the right age who has a birth certificiate, but no death certificate and no current known whereabouts, then look at everyone whose trail goes cold around that time and a bit before. That might turn up something a lot more interesting. Truthfully, we're probably far better equipped to do the data science now than we were back then, providing there are enough complete records this would be a relatively achievable task for the kinds of bits of software the likes of Meta have created.
Come to Vegas and get your butt destroyed
I knew there was a reason Liberace moved there!
[LEMMiNO - The Search for D.B. Cooper](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbUjuwhQPKs)
I was looking for this comment, really good video
I’m down the rabbit hole now. Thank you :)
There used to be a dive bar in Kansas City called DB Coopers. My theory was always that the real db cooper took his money he got and opened a dive bar. He named it after the mystery to hide in plain sight.
All of the bills were tracked via serial number. So we would know if any of the bills went into circulation
> So we would know if any of the bills went into circulation People keep saying this but it isn't true. None of those bill have come OUT of circulation. They are technically still IN circulation.
Thy're technically still in circulation by default of not being recorded as taken out but that doesn't mean they're out or ever were out being used anywhere since 1971. The avearge usable lifetimes of paper money has long passed for them and none have shown up in any search or in the recycling of money, where serial numbers are checked. $1 bill lasts 5.8 years; $5 bill, 5.5 years; $10 bill, 4.5 years; $20 bill, 7.9 years; $50 bill, 8.5 years; and $100 bill, 15 years. Bills that get worn out from everyday use are taken out of circulation, destroyed and replaced. Except for some found still bound in stacks in a sandbank 9 years later none of the 1971 hijacking bills ever have shown up.
Interesting to learn about how long these bills last. I don’t think a lot of people know paper money gets replaced so often because while it seems logical after thinking about it, old coins still get around and we run into shitty bills all the time so you just never think about it
Where did the B come from? The name on the manifest was Dan Cooper.
Because a reporter fucked up, and the rest is history. https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-db-cooper-confession-20160726-snap-story.html
One of the early suspects was called D. B. and people got them confused
I would imagine more money has been spent trying to find this guy than was stolen.
Statue of limitations has long passed, only thing they can get him on most likely is tax fraud (didn’t report crime income)
But that expires after 7 years I thought at least for the US IRS?
plot twist: the man known as D. B. Cooper moved to las vegas, and joined the FBI so he could destroy the last evidence linking him to the robbery...
Dude died, no doubt. They searched the wrong area for the body and have turned up nothing but some cash. Probably got turned into critter shit.
Sounds like something D.B Cooper would say…
He landed in the woods and stumbled and fell into an old mineshaft, where he broke both of his legs. Because of the extreme cold, he was forced to burn the money to stay warm
I remember that movie........ The treasure is life, burning the cash for a few more hours of life
There's definitely been more money spent on looking for him than he stole too. He got away with $200,000 in 1971 and the FBI were paying for DNA analysis 27 years later. Not to mention all the amateur sleuths who spent time and money going looking. He's a cottage industry bringing jobs to America!
A general store in the jump zone was broken into the night of the jump. They only took food and cigarettes. Pretty big coincidence.
Sure hope he didn't run into Bigfoot when he landed in the woods.
Oh, you're one of these tinfoil hat folks who think that Bigfoot isn't D.B. Cooper, smh.
I suddenly need to go take my pants off and pose with a gun in front of a mirror.
Died while trying to break out of prison.
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I like to think he aced the landing and was walking out of the forest when he was eaten by a bear.
If he survived he would have eventually spent some money, no bills ever hit circulation. He had to of died imo.
Also they recovered a small amount of the money from the columbia river nearby about a decade later. Could have fallen out of his bag, but it certainly makes it more likely that he didn't make it.
>they recovered a small amount of the money from the columbia river nearby money laundering
> He had to of died imo
That's really the next step in the evolution.
I'm pretty sure it turned out to be Loki Odinson/Laufeyson. I saw it on a documentary on Disney+.
I'm surprised yours is the only reference to Loki in this thread
EVERY SINGLE true crime podcast I listen to has the same story. The police lost the evidence.
Citizen sleuths got together, and tested the Cooper tie. They discovered microscopic rare earth minerals like titanium and bismuth….he likely was a manager or engineer at an industrial fabrication facility…..interesting stuff: https://citizensleuths.com/titaniumparticles.html
Those aren’t the only butts that got destroyed in Las Vegas. Believe you me.
Can you imagine how excited they must've been, when they first thought to DNA test those cigarette butts? How disappointing that would've been.
I think that the flight crew staged the hole thing.
lowkey think that that flight attendant who hung out with him the most and was the last to see him hid him in the plane somewhere or something lol. based on literally nothing
Doobie Keebler slips away again!
Wow its almost like they should investigate the Las Vegas field office or something
It's wild to me that this man planned all this out, but people for some reason don't think he planned out what happened after the jump.
Gotta admit. Kinda hope they never get him.
hasnt enough time passed that he wouldnt be able to he arrested anyways? itd almost be more fun to get him but not be able to “get him”
You'd think half burnt trash would stay pristine after 30 years in a Ziploc and thrown in a closet.