D. B. Cooper: Did he pull a big gender switcheroo?
Mount Rainier … Mount Saint Helens … the Space Needle … Microsoft … Costco … Amazon.com … Washington State is famous for lots of stuff, but the world never seems to get enough of D. B. Cooper.
In case you haven’t yet recharged your memory with a morning Doubleshot at that other Washington icon (the one with the, uh, mermaid), D. B. Cooper was the guy who hijacked a Boeing 727 on Nov. 24, 1971, claiming he had a bomb. In that much simpler era, D.B. demanded – and got – $200,000 in ransom money and some parachutes, then bailed out somewhere north of Portland, Ore. Little else is known, although in 1980 a kid goofing around on the northern bank of the Columbia River came across $5,880 of the ransom money in deteriorating $20 bills half buried in the mud; and in early 2008 some more kids found what turned out to be the aforementioned parachute near the little town of Amboy, Wash., which no doubt can use the tourists.
I’ve heard speculation that Dan Cooper (what he actually called himself) couldn’t have survived his escape, given the weather, his light clothing and his apparent lack of skydiving expertise, but the FBI – which ought to consider recruiting more little kids to do their fieldwork – thinks differently: In 2001, they managed to pull a DNA sample from the black necktie that Cooper left behind, enabling them to eliminate at least one suspect, and they’re still actively seeking information. Check out their Web page on Cooper by going to www.fbi.gov and typing “D. B. Cooper” in the search box. (And if you call in a hot tip to the feds, tell ’em AmeriCollector.com sent you, because we need the traffic too.)
Someone else thinks Cooper made it out of the woods alive – and even got a sex change! In their book “D. B. Cooper: Death by Natural Causes,” Western Washington residents Patricia and Ron Forman recount how they befriended a woman who claimed to be the hijacker – a disgruntled pilot in her pre-transgendered life, she said. Sounds just like a John Waters film, right? The authors thought so, too, at first – but on digging deeper into their friend’s tale, they began to believe that it might not be as cockamamie as all that. Certainly, the OTHER Washington is full of people in elected positions with weirder résumés.
We’ll report further on this, you can be sure. Meanwhile, the Formans have a Web site with plenty of food for thought, where you can order a copy of the book autographed (by the Formans, not D. B. Cooper) if an unsigned copy from Amazon won’t do: Visit www.legendofdbcooper.com.
By the way, fellow collectors, you’ll be interested to know that those rotting twenties from Cooper’s loot were auctioned off by Heritage Auctions in Dallas in June 2008, with hammer prices going as high as $6,572. (A 1 x 1.3-inch fragment of a bill actually went for $358.50.) Talk about a high interest rate!
Photos courtesy of the FBI.
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