The Wild True Story of the World’s “Most Clever and Audacious” Plane Hijacker

51 years ago, on the eve of Thanksgiving 1971, a man boarded a plane in Portland, Oregon, bound for Seattle, Washington. It should have been a brief, 37 minute journey, but the man passed a note to the air stewardess announcing he had a bomb on the plane. He demanded $200,000 (more than $1.3 million in today’s money) and four parachutes. The other 35 passengers weren’t getting home anytime soon for a turkey dinner; the plane had just been hijacked, and the mystery man was about to pull off possibly the greatest heist of all time.

The story, which feels like it has been pulled straight from any number of Hollywood heist movies, has dumbfounded the public and stumped the authorities since 1971, and now a four-part Netflix documentary series, DB Cooper: Where Are You?! (directed by Marina Zenovich) has been dedicated to the wild tale. Here’s the inside scoop on a man once called, “The most clever and certainly thee most audacious airplane hijacker”:

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What happened to DB Cooper?

After the note was delivered, the stewardess asked to see the bomb, and recalled eight red cylinders in two rows of four, which she assumed to be dynamite. She escalated the issue to the captain, who contacted air traffic control. The plane company boss agreed to the demands and authorized the payment, on the condition that the passengers would be released.

The plane circled in the sky for more than two hours, allowing the Seattle police and FBI to pull together the not insubstantial amount of money and the four parachutes, which, as the documentary points out, suggested that Cooper was planning on taking hostages, so he wouldn’t be supplied with faulty equipment.

After the plane landed at Seattle Tacoma airport, all the passengers were allowed to leave and the money was delivered to Cooper in unmarked bills – but the serial number of one of them was noted. The plane took off again, with Cooper demanding to be flown to Mexico City at the minimum speed possible, with the rear exit open and the stairs attached. However, when he was informed that the limit a Boeing 727-51 could be flown without refueling was 1,000 miles, he agreed that they could stop to fill up on petrol in Reno, Nevada.

But they never made it that far. 20 minutes into the second flight, the cabin staff in the cockpit noticed there had been a change in air pressure: Cooper had jumped off into the pitch-black night with a parachute, along with the cash.

Cooper was never found again, and aside from a few bundles of cash with the same serial number of the bag of ransom money found in a stream in Vancouver, Washington in 1980, despite 50 years of searching, to this day it still remains the only one unsolved plane hijacking in history.

In 2016, the FBI announced it would no longer actively investigate the hijacking, calling its probe “one of the longest and most exhaustive investigations in our history”.

So, who is DB Cooper?

Well, for starters his name isn’t even DB Cooper. He’s always remained unidentified as he bought the airline ticket under the name of Dan Cooper, but because of a media misunderstanding, it was believed to be DB Cooper. For lack of a real name, it stuck.

As the documentary series points out, even if he had survived the fall – and it’s highly unlikely he didn’t – he’d be around 95 years old today, so most likely isn’t even alive now.

But over the years, there have been thousands of leads, suspects and confessions investigated by both the FBI and amateur sleuths, who have become obsessed with the case. Such is the urban legend around it that there’s even an annual CooperCon, where fans meet up to debate their own theories.

Over the years the finger of suspicion has fallen on people like Lynn Doyle Cooper, an ex-army man who told his niece he was planning something “very mischievous” the day before the stunt; Barbara Dayton, a trans woman and pilot who had been prevented from becoming and airline pilot because she was transgender; or death-bed confessions from people like Duane L. Weber or Walter R. Reca that turned out not to be true. It turns out, a lot of people wanted to take credit for the heist, as well… it makes for a cool story, right?

In the Netflix series, it focuses on just a couple of people. Dick Briggs, who is discounted, as it turned out as well as lying about being DB Cooper, he also lied about being in the army in the Vietnam War, and about being able to parachute – two things that Cooper had been profiled as having experience of.

It also suggests that it could have been a Canadian military person, as the name used for the plane ticket for the heist, Dan Cooper, was named after a Canadian jet fighter comic book hero, who regularly jumped out of planes in escapades.

DB Cooper Where Are You?! key suspect

But the main focus of the documentary is a man called Robert Rackstraw, and a writer and producer, Thomas Colbert, who has spent most of his life trying to prove that Rackstraw was the real culprit.

Rackstraw served in Vietnam and was seen in close conversations with a CIA agent, leading some people to suggest that he was an undercover agent for the organization, which theoretically overruled the FBI in their investigations. He was later charged with fraud and then tried to fake his own death when he stole a plane. To Colbert, and the growing group of armchair investigators he was involved with, he fit the profile of the hijacker perfectly. But in the series, Colbert is shown in a face-off with Rackstraw, who at the time was still alive, living in California and owner of a boat called Poverty Sucks. He offers him $20,000 if he admits to being Cooper, and sets out a plan to make millions more with a tell-all book and Hollywood film. Rackstraw denies being Cooper, and when the air stewardess who served on the stolen plane was asked to ID Rackstraw as Cooper, she said it wasn’t the same man. Did Colbert hound an innocent man until his death in 2019, or did Rackstraw just take the secret to the grave?

As with many of these real-crime docu-stories, it’s unlikely we’ll ever uncover the truth behind the slickest hijacker of all time. But it’s certainly not going to stop people speculating any time soon, as his legend appears to only be growing stronger over time.

How to watch DB Cooper: Where Are You?!

The four-part mini-series launched on July 12 on Netflix, and you can watch every episode here. While you’re at it, why not check out our rundown of the best Netflix documentaries.

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