The D.B. Cooper Ransom
He hijacked a plane, collected $200K in cash, jumped into the night—and vanished forever.
- Category
- buried
- Status
- lost
- Year lost
- 1971
- Region
- Pacific Northwest
- Country
- United States
The dossier
On November 24, 1971—the day before Thanksgiving—a man calling himself Dan Cooper boarded Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 from Portland to Seattle. He was wearing a business suit and carrying a briefcase. After takeoff, he handed a note to a flight attendant. It said he had a bomb. He wanted $200,000 in cash and four parachutes. The plane landed in Seattle. Cooper got his money—10,000 unmarked $20 bills, with every serial number recorded by the FBI. The passengers were released. Cooper then ordered the plane to take off again, heading south toward Reno. Somewhere over the dense forests of southwestern Washington, Cooper lowered the aft stairs, strapped on a parachute, and jumped into a freezing rainstorm at 10,000 feet. He was never seen again. The FBI searched for years. They found nothing. Then, in 1980, a boy named Brian Ingram found three packets of deteriorating $20 bills on a beach along the Columbia River near Vancouver, Washington. The serial numbers matched Cooper's ransom. It was the only physical evidence ever recovered. The remaining $194,000 has never been found. The FBI officially suspended the case in 2016 after 45 years. Theories about Cooper's identity and fate range from him dying in the jump to him living out his life quietly in the Pacific Northwest. The discovery of the bills near the Columbia River suggests the money may have been scattered by water—or buried nearby and partially washed out. The rest could still be in the forest or riverbeds of southwestern Washington.
Cargo and value
$200,000 in marked $20 bills (serial numbers recorded by FBI)
Legal status
FBI case suspended in 2016. No active law enforcement investigation. Any recovered bills are technically evidence in an unsolved federal crime, though statute of limitations has passed.