D.B. Cooper: who jumped with the ransom?

What happened

No one has ever been arrested or positively identified as the man who hijacked a Northwest Orient Airlines flight and parachuted away with $200,000 in 1971. On November 24 of that year, a man using the name Dan Cooper bought a one-way ticket on Northwest Orient Flight 305 from Portland, Oregon, to Seattle, Washington. Once the Boeing 727 was airborne, he handed a flight attendant a note claiming he had a bomb, then demanded $200,000 in cash and parachutes. When the plane landed in Seattle, the airline handed over the money and parachutes, and Cooper released all 36 passengers unharmed.

The jump into the dark

Cooper ordered the remaining crew back into the air and told them to fly toward Mexico City, with a stop to refuel in Reno, Nevada. Somewhere over southwestern Washington, he opened the rear door of the aircraft, lowered its built-in stairs, and parachuted out with the ransom money strapped to him. He was never seen again, and no trace of him turned up in the searches that followed the hijacking.

What investigators found

The FBI kept the investigation active for 45 years. The National Archives at Seattle holds the case records as CR-0451, including photographs, an initial sketch of the suspect and experiments the FBI and the U.S. Air Force ran to work out how the hijacking was pulled off. Many of those records have still not been digitized, and the case was never solved.

The clearest physical lead surfaced in 1980, when an eight-year-old boy found deteriorating $20 bills along the Columbia River near Vancouver, Washington. The FBI matched their serial numbers to the ransom: $5,800 out of the $200,000 taken nine years earlier. No other bills from the ransom have ever surfaced, and the find did not lead investigators to a suspect.

Richard McCoy Jr. and the copycat theory

Several suspects have circulated over the decades, and none has ever been charged over the Cooper hijacking itself. Richard McCoy Jr. carried out a strikingly similar hijacking five months later, on April 7, 1972, demanding $500,000 and parachutes on a flight between Newark and Los Angeles before jumping from the plane in the same way. He was convicted of air piracy for that crime and sentenced to 45 years.

McCoy escaped prison in August 1974 and was killed in a shootout with the FBI in Virginia about three months later. In 2023, his children gave the FBI a parachute and harness found on the family's North Carolina property, along with a logbook they say places their father at the scene of the 1971 hijacking.

Christiansen, Rackstraw, and other names

Another name that recurs is Kenneth Christiansen, who worked for Northwest Airlines as a mechanic, flight attendant, and purser and had trained as a military paratrooper. His brother has said that Christiansen, on his deathbed in 1994, hinted there was something about his past he had never disclosed. Christiansen also bought a house in cash the year after the hijacking despite a modest salary. He was never charged, and he died in 1994.

A third name is Robert Rackstraw, a Vietnam veteran named by a team of authors whose 2016 book concluded, after a five-year inquiry, that he was Cooper. Rackstraw's own lawyer rejected the identification as baseless. Rackstraw was never charged in the case, and he died on July 9, 2019, with the question still open.

Where the case stands

The FBI treated the D.B. Cooper case as an active investigation for 45 years before redirecting its resources in July 2016. FBI Special Agent Frank Montoya Jr. said at the time that the bureau had reached the point of closing the case because nothing new remained to pursue. The bureau has said it exhaustively reviewed all credible leads, ran searches, collected the evidence available, and interviewed every witness it could identify, and that an enormous volume of public tips never produced definitive proof of anyone's identity.

The case remains formally unsolved: no one has been arrested, tried, or confirmed as Cooper. Interest has not gone away. Eric Ulis, who founded the fan convention CooperCon, told Oregon Public Broadcasting in 2021 that he believed advances in forensic science gave investigators a realistic chance of identifying Cooper within a decade. The ransom, adjusted for inflation, was worth about $1.35 million in 2021 dollars, a measure of how large the theft was for its time.

What is still missing

No named suspect has ever been tied to the hijacking by evidence that investigators consider conclusive. The McCoy family's 2023 parachute and logbook, Christiansen's cash purchases, and the Rackstraw investigators' claims are each contested, unproven, or dismissed by other researchers, and the FBI has not confirmed any of them as the answer.

What is also missing is most of the money: only $5,800 of the original $200,000 has ever been recovered, and no one has explained how those bills ended up on a riverbank nine years after the jump. Even Cooper's real name is unconfirmed. Dan Cooper was only the alias he gave at the ticket counter, and the name D.B. Cooper itself came from an early reporting error that stuck. Real or Legend files the case as unsolved.

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