New Lead in D.B. Cooper Mystery
The Seattle Post-Intellengencer is reporting that the FBI has a new lead in the 37 year old D.B. Cooper hijacking case that raises more questions than it answers. A south west Washington resident’s children found a parachute while playing in a rural field he had recently plowed. The FBI believes the parachute is possibly of the same type used by a passenger identifying himself as Dan Cooper during the hijacking of a 727 in 1971. After receiving $200,000 in ransom money and releasing the jet’s passengers, Cooper instructed the pilot to take off, eventually jumping from the jet’s rear stairway mid-flight, ransom in hand. The recent parachute discovery is within the area where Cooper would have landed. If found to belong to Cooper, this new parachute raises some new issues that add to the theory that Cooper was not killed during his escape as the FBI claim. In 1980 a young boy on a picnic with his family found $5,880 of the ransom money along the Columbia River. Experts agree that because of the money’s shallow depth that it could not have been placed on the shores of the Columbia River any earlier than 1974, three years after the hijacking. The lack of a body at the parachute discovery site and its distance from the spot where the ransom money was discovered makes the possibility that Cooper survived the jump quite plausible if the parachute can be linked to the ones given to him in 1971. I personally think that Cooper made the jump, escaping with the ransom and the cache of money found on the banks of the Columbia was a back-up stash placed by Cooper if he felt he needed to run from where ever he settled. While we may never know what happened to D.B., please feel free to share your own theories in the comments.
Possible D.B. Cooper Chute Investigated [via Phantoms and Monsters]
More about D.B. Cooper @ Wikipedia
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