DB Cooper and the FBI: A Case Study of America's Only Unsolved Skyjacking

In 1971, a man known as DB Cooper hijacked a Northwest Orient airliner flying from Portland, Oregon to Seattle, Washington. After exchanging the passengers at SEA-TAC airport for $200,000 and four parachutes, Cooper instructed the pilots to fly him to "anywhere in Mexico.” A few minutes after take-off, he lowered the aft staircase and jumped into the chilly, rainy night skies north of Portland. He has never been seen since, and his identity is still unknown. After forty years of investigation the FBI still doesn’t know who Cooper was or if he survived, and nothing has ever been found of the skyjacking—no parachutes, no body or clothes, nor any of the money, except for $5,800 a young boy found eight years later buried on a Columbia River beach. Adding to the intrigue, no one knows how the money got there or when. As a result, it is as if Cooper came from nowhere and returned there when he made his getaway. Now after years of research and writing, a comprehensive case history of the skyjacking is available, and the reader can examine the facts of the case, and assess the FBI's efforts to find DB Cooper. Shockingly, the Bureau’s investigation has been crippled by lost evidence, inaccurate record-keeping, and ineffective leadership. As we learned in 9-11, the FBI has difficulty "connecting the dots" in complicated investigations that span multiple jurisdictions, and the same is true with DB Cooper. For example: the FBI gave DB Cooper a 40-hour head start before anyone went looking for him in the woods of southeast Washington State. More troubling, critical evidence has been lost—the eight cigarette butts Cooper left on the plane, which would give us his DNA profile via the dried saliva. Perhaps more disturbing, though, the cigarette butts went missing after their true value was realized in 2002, along with the documentation on the FBI's findings. In addition, the FBI’s chief technical expert, Earl Cossey, was murdered in 2013 when his credibility plummeted as Internet sleuths revealed his fraudulent and deceptive history, and how the FBI was duped. Or was it? But this book is more than a true-crime thriller. "DB Cooper and the FBI" reveals how law enforcement truly functions in our country, and so it delivers a measure of justice to the arrogant, the hubristic, and the guilty.