D.B.Cooper - Investigation and leads

Cooper left behind a few things, including the spare chutes and 8 Raleigh-brand cigarette butts. Authorities were surprised also to find the hijacker's black tie and tie tack, with a mother-of-pearl detail—an overlooked potential bit of evidence that was perhaps the only mistake he made. FBI crime-scene experts catalogued 66 fingerprints that could not be matched to the crew or other passengers. They led nowhere.

 

The authorities tried follow the plane, wait for him to jump, then track him to the ground.  but the opportunity was lost in a questionable choice of a chase plane. The Air Force scrambled up two F-106 fighter jets from McChord. Those pilots were instructed to follow at a safe distance and watch for a jumper. But the fighters are built to fly at speeds of up to 1,500 mph. They were useless in slow-motion, low altitude surveillance. The authorities tried to recover by sending up a slower-flying Air National Guard Lockheed T-33, but Cooper probably had already jumped by the time it arrived.

 

Nasty weather on the night of the jump led authorities to put off a ground search until the next day,  An exhaustive search, by land and by air, over several weeks failed to turn up any trace of the hijacker or his parachute.

In 1980, some of Cooper’s money surfaced. A boy found $5,800 in decomposing twenties buried in a bag, a few feet from a river. The FBI searched the area again, hoping to find more bills—or, better yet, a body. They found nothing.

 

The Cooper file is now a morgue of dead-end leads. It sits buried in the basement of the FBI’s Seattle field office and occupies several shelves in long rows that open and close by spinning black plastic wheels. The belief among agents handling the case now is that Cooper died in the jump—the conditions were simply too brutal to survive, and the twenties would have blown away. When a new tip arrives in the mail, the Feds typically shrug it off and file it away. 

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