D.B. Cooper: Where Are You?!

Here he is.

Stay low, guys.

Target is at the place of business now.

- Copy. - This could go south quickly.

He's getting out of the car.

Blue ball cap. Tan short-sleeve shirt.

Blue jeans, white sneakers.

Bob, why won't you just come out and say that you are not D.B. Cooper?

On Thanksgiving eve, 1971, a Northwest flight was commandeered...

The FBI couldn't crack the case...

Cooper became a legend after hijacking a plane

and parachuting out of it with $200,000 cash.

...the daredevil thief called D.B. Cooper.

D.B. Cooper...

- D.B. Cooper... - D.B. Cooper...

- D.B. Cooper... - D.B. Cooper...

The most clever and certainly the most audacious airplane hijacker

of all time.

It's incredible to think we've just passed the 50th anniversary

of the D.B. Cooper case,

and it's still the only unsolved skyjacking

in the history of our time.

What he accomplished was truly amazing.

He got away with it,

he stuck it to the man, and he didn't hurt any civilians doing it.

That is why he is the legend that he's become today.

We have eyewitnesses that have you in Oregon

at the time of the hijacking. Were you there?

My team has no doubt we have found D.B. Cooper.

We have over a hundred pieces of evidence.

We're dealing with a man who has multiple identities, and is a con artist.

I'm here because I want the truth out.

If it hurts, it hurts.

This case is a marathon.

It's a sacrifice, it's a gauntlet. It forces you to question your own sanity.

It forces you to truly believe in the impossible.

Bottom line is, I don't do theories, I don't do folklore, I don't do legends.

I do facts.

Hello?

A team of cold case investigators

are convinced that you are the infamous D.B. Cooper.

Infamous or famous? I thought it was famous.

Okay.

This ten-year journey is the longest I've been on a case.

I just want to share a question I always get,

and that is, "Why?"

Why am I tackling, and my wife too,

why we tackled a 50-year-old case?

It's affected my family members.

I watched my wife and I have frustration.

I watched my children grow up.

And we spent a lot of our own money through the whole thing.

But everyone agreed in our family to stick with it,

because they all believed we had the truth.

What Cooper was able to pull off was really, really difficult,

and he orchestrated it perfectly.

Especially when you consider this was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.

One of the busiest travel days of the year.

Fifty years ago, I was a sophomore at University of Oregon.

I had called my parents

and said, "I got this 37-minute flight from Portland to Seattle."

The sun was out, but it was cloudy.

Walked up the back steps, sat in the back on the left.

And I didn't notice anybody around me

until we took off.

I noticed the guy sitting next to me...

had sunglasses on.

And I thought, "That's kind of different."

"Who does he think he is?"

The flight from Portland to Seattle is a puddle jump.

There's barely even time to have a drink on the plane.

After the plane takes off...

this strange-looking man passes a note to the stewardess.

I just ignored him.

Then he said,

"I want you to read the note."

It was printed,

"Miss, I have a bomb in my briefcase."

"I want you to sit beside me."

This is the beginning of the extraordinary drama of D.B. Cooper.

I can remember her talking,

and then she'd get up and go to the phone.

But had no clue what was going on.

He asks for $200,000 in American currency and four parachutes.

It's one thing to ask for money,

but parachutes?

Why does this man want parachutes?

He was very smart. He didn't order one or two.

He ordered four.

He thought they were gonna dummy up a parachute on him,

so he'd die.

But if he's ordering four,

"He's taking a hostage. We can't dummy him up."

Very smart, brilliant.

The pilot comes on and says, "We have engine trouble,

and we're going to run out the fuel."

"Everybody can move up to the front of the plane."

During that incident, I didn't know what's going on.

We're still flying, so there was nothing to worry about.

Cooper did not want the jet to land in Seattle until all the stuff

was properly staged at the airport, so the jet had to circle around.

It's now getting dark.

This is turning into a dark and stormy night.

And once the hijacker knows that his demands have been met,

$200,000 in cash,

about $1,000,000 in today's currency,

and the parachutes he wants waiting for him...

the plane comes down for a landing in Seattle.

Snipers are watching the plane.

Cooper asks the stewardess to shut the windows.

The plane goes dark.

One stewardess comes out, a detective hands her the big money bag.

She then goes out for the parachutes, and all the passengers come off.

We're a mile away from the terminal,

so a bus comes and we get on a bus

and ride back to the airport.

Thirty-six passengers got off the jetliner in Seattle last night,

left aboard, four crew members and the hijacker.

And there's probably a hundred news people out there.

FBI agents there who are interviewing everybody.

Said, "Yeah, you were hijacked." And so that's the first I'd heard of it.

The crew kept us ignorant of what was taking place,

I guess to avoid a panic.

And so we really didn't know what was taking place.

We cruised around for two and a half hours up there.

Nobody knew anything was happening.

- When did you find out? - After we landed.

When they brought the money aboard.

The hijacker, dressed in a business suit,

demanding $200,000

and carrying a plain briefcase which he told the crew held explosives.

I saw a big battery with six dynamite sticks

wrapped around the battery.

And he said to me, "All I have to do is attach this wire to this gadget here,

and we'll all be dead."

I got home, and it started catching up to me.

The fact that, yeah, you know, I was sitting next to a bomb.

In the fall of 1971, when this hijacking took place,

the experience of airline travel was vastly different than it is now.

Walking into an airport back then was like walking into a supermarket.

- Hi. - Hi.

- Destination? - Let's just say, "Where the action is."

I love when people ask about airport security back in the 1970s,

because the answer, at least in my memory, was,

"What airport security?" I don't remember any at all.

You didn't need metal detectors.

You didn't have to take off your shoes. You didn't have dogs smelling you.

Certainly nobody searched you, or wanded you, or anything like that.

You just walked in, put down 20 bucks,

and got a flight to Dallas.

That was pretty much it.

And that is what Cooper did.

He went and bought a ticket that day. It was very, very casual.

Remember, this was the beginning of the boom of mass air travel.

They wanted to make the experience a fun, good time.

What kind of flying is that?

A champagne flight.

But unfortunately, at the time, the stewardesses became fetishized.

When a Braniff International hostess meets you on the airplane...

she'll be dressed like this.

In the early '70s, flight attendants have a really hard time.

They're sexually harassed constantly.

They're not paid as much as the men that they work with.

They have an impossible schedule.

They're held to really rigorous and unfair standards about their looks.

She's not just pretty. She's pretty smart.

When D.B. Cooper passed the stewardess the note,

he was probably the, like, tenth person that day to pass her a note.

At that time, being a stewardess is difficult,

and it quickly evolved into the realm of the dangerous.

Guerrilla hijack teams struck four airlines almost simultaneously.

One ticket agent in Houston, Texas, is dead, another agent is wounded.

Aerial piracy is not exactly a new phenomenon.

I was in the CIA.

We would get these reports of hijackings.

And maybe there'd be a report every month.

And then it just kept growing and it kept growing and it kept growing.

Fifteen Japanese radical students

armed with samurai swords,

pistols, and homemade bombs, hijacked a Japan Airlines jetliner.

And, of course, those hijackings, they all had a political goal.

They were punishing a country, they were punishing a group.

They were making themselves bigger and badder than they actually were.

What made you think he had a gun?

He confronted me with something hard in my back.

He said, "We're going to Havana, Cuba. Take me to the cockpit."

There were only two reasons that you hijacked a plane.

You either did it to threaten to kill people and get money,

or you wanted to get someplace, typically Cuba.

The Cuban ones were almost all young radicals

who needed to get out of town.

What did it turn out to be?

It turned out to be a metal comb with a pen on top wrapped with a sweater.

One of the things about crime, like any art form, it evolves.

And so with hijackings, the art form evolved,

and the greatest artist of them all was D.B. Cooper.

With the full ransom, collected from Seattle banks,

and four parachutes aboard, the plane headed for Reno.

Cooper looks into the money bag, he's happy.

And he has instructions.