D. B. Cooper, where are you?

It's been 25 years since he took that big step out of a Boeing 727 at 10,000 feet, yet tips on D.B. Cooper still trickle in.

One of the most daring -- or dumbest -- criminals ever remains at large, having either flouted the laws of society or been foiled by the law of gravity.

"It's still a pending investigation," says Seattle-based FBI agent Ray Lauer, who adds that the case will stay open "probably forever."

The FBI here still stores 60 volumes of interviews and other documents telling how Cooper hijacked a jetliner, demanded and received $200,000, then jumped from the plane over the Cascade Mountains of southwestern Washington and into legend.

He hasn't been heard from since, although $5,880 of his loot was found by a boy playing on the banks of the Columbia River in 1980.

A few taverns and restaurants mark the anniversary of the nation's only unsolved skyjacking case. And now and then someone calls the FBI with a tip or suggestion.

"Surprisingly, yeah, we still get quite a few of them," Lauer says. "They tend to come in spurts, when they might get two to four in a week, then might not get any more tips for several months."

Wherever Cooper is, it's a safe bet his skydiving days are over: If he survived, he'd be 70 or older now.

On Nov. 24, 1971, the night before Thanksgiving, a man in his mid-40s wearing dark glasses boarded a Northwest Orient Airlines plane in Portland.

He bought a ticket under the name Dan Cooper -- a law enforcement official later erroneously referred to him as "D.B." and the initials stuck -- and took seat 18F in coach. He ordered a bourbon and water and handed flight attendant Flo Schaffner a note.

He apparently lacked a strong criminal presence; the busy Schaffner stuck the paper in her pocket, thinking it was a mash note, according to an account published in Northwest's 1986 corporate history, "Flight to the Top."

Not until takeoff did she bother to read the message: "Miss, I've got a bomb, come sit next to me -- you're being hijacked."

Fellow cabin attendant Tina Mucklow Larson recounted how she and Schaffner relayed dozens of messages from Cooper to the cockpit -- including his demands for $200,000 in used $20 bills and four parachutes.

He had no unusual characteristics, Larson recalled. He wore a dark suit, dark tie, white shirt and the sunglasses, which he never took off, and chain-smoked.

He also had a black briefcase, which he opened for Larson, showing her a couple of red cylinders, wires and a battery.

He collected the money, provided by the airline, during a stop at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, where the 36 passengers and two flight attendants were released. Larson and the two pilots remained on board. Cooper demanded the plane be flown to Mexico, agreeing to a refueling stop at Reno.

Just after takeoff, Larson said, Cooper asked how to lower the rear stairs of the 727, the only jetliner equipped with that feature. He then told her to go to the front of the plane and pull the first-class curtain shut.

About 40 minutes after takeoff, the cockpit's stair signal light flashed on. When the jet landed in Reno, the stairs were down and Cooper was missing, along with the money and two parachutes.

Such an exit would be impossible today: Cooper's lasting contribution to aircraft design is the "Cooper Vane," a latching device on Boeing 727s that prevents the tail stairway from being lowered in flight.

Cooper dove into a freezing rainstorm at 10,000 feet, wearing only a business suit and loafers. The temperature was 7 below zero, not counting a wind chill factor estimated at minus 70 because of the plane's speed of 200 mph.

Ralph Himmelsbach, the FBI agent assigned to the case before his retirement in 1980, has long maintained Cooper was a bumbler and a fool.

If the cold didn't kill him, if he withstood the powerful turbulence, Cooper was still parachuting into dense forest at night, at the onset of winter, with no food or survival gear.

"It was a bad place to land, and it is doubtful we would ever find the body," Himmelsbach said in a 1991 interview. "This was a desperate act you wouldn't expect from a normal man in his mid-40s. This was something you would expect from somebody who had nothing to lose."

Himmelsbach believes Cooper either landed in the Columbia and drowned, or died in the mountains and the money was washed out.

An extensive search turned up no traces. Nine years later, Mount St. Helens erupted and blanketed much of the area with ash. If hikers or hunters have stumbled across Cooper since, they've kept his secret.

Each year, celebrations are held at restaurants named D.B. Cooper in Salt Lake City and San Jose, and at a little bar in Ariel in southwestern Washington where, legend has it, Cooper paid an anonymous visit.

Dona Elliott, who has owned the Ariel Store for six years, says she wishes she had started keeping track of all the men who come in claiming to be Cooper.

The latest addition to her Cooper memorabilia is a flier from a Florida woman with a photo of her late husband. The woman said he confessed on his deathbed in 1995 to being Cooper.

"What do you think?" asked Elliott, while holding a photograph of the man next to a FBI composite drawing of Cooper. The man in the photo appeared to be at least a decade older.

The Ariel shindig will be held Nov. 30. The annual "Jump Night" at the Salt Lake establishment is Wednesday, and owner Basil Chelemes promises live music, free hors d'oeuvres and a trivia contest.

He'll decide on the contest prize -- either a trip for two to Seattle or free skydiving lessons -- after checking with his insurance agent.

"I just want to see if we can be held liable for the parachute lessons," Chelemes said.

USNEWS.COM

Skyjacker at large
A Florida widow thinks she has found him

BY DOUGLAS PASTERNAK

It was the day before Thanksgiving, Nov. 24, 1971. As Northwest Airlines Flight 305, from Portland, Ore., to Seattle, sped along the runway preparing for takeoff, the man in Seat 18C, wearing sunglasses and a dark suit, handed a flight attendant a note. It said he had a bomb and threatened to blow up the Boeing 727 unless he received $200,000 cash and four parachutes when the plane landed. The man in Seat 18C purchased his ticket under the name "Dan Cooper."

After receiving his booty at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport, the man released the 36 passengers and two members of the flight crew. He ordered the pilot and remaining crew to fly to Mexico. At 10,000 feet, with winds gusting at 80 knots and a freezing rain pounding the airplane, Dan Cooper–mistakenly identified as D.B. Cooper by a reporter–walked down the rear stairs and parachuted into history.

What followed was one of the most extensive and expensive manhunts in the annals of American crime. For five months, federal, state, and local police combed dense hemlock forests north of Portland. D.B. Cooper became an American folk icon–the inspiration for books, rock songs, and even a 1981 movie. Over the past three decades, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has investigated more than 1,000 "serious suspects" along with assorted crackpots and deathbed confessors. Most–but not all–have been ruled out. The case was back in the news just last month when FBI agents investigated a skull discovered nearly 20 years ago along the Columbia River. It turned out to belong to a woman, possibly an American Indian. Today, the D.B. Cooper case remains the world's only unsolved skyjacking.

In March 1995, a Florida antique dealer named Duane Weber lay dying of polycystic kidney disease in a Pensacola hospital. He called his wife, Jo, to his bed and whispered: "I'm Dan Cooper." Jo, who had learned in 17 years of marriage not to pry too deeply into Duane's past, had no idea what her secretive husband meant. Frustrated, he blurted out: "Oh, let it die with me!" Duane died 11 days later. Jo sold his van two months after his death. The new owner discovered a wallet hidden in the overhead console. It contained a U.S. Navy "bad conduct discharge" in Duane's name and a Social Security card and prison-release form from the Missouri State Penitentiary, in the name of "John C. Collins." Duane had told Jo that he had served time for burglary under the name John Collins. Still, says Jo, a real-estate agent in Pace, Fla., Duane rarely spoke of his past. "His life started with me, and that was it," she says.

The FBI sketch strongly resembles a photo of Duane Weber.

In April 1996, Jo discussed Duane's criminal and military past with a friend. She also mentioned that just before he died, Duane had revealed the cause of an old knee injury. "I got it jumping out of a plane," Jo recalls him saying. "Did you ever think he might be D.B. Cooper?" the friend asked.

Handwriting match. In May 1996, Jo checked out a library book on D.B. Cooper. "I did not realize D.B. Cooper was known as Dan Cooper," Jo says. The book listed the FBI's description: mid-40s, 6 feet tall, 170 pounds, black hair, a bourbon drinker, a chain smoker. At the time of the hijacking, Duane Weber was 47, 6 feet, 1 inch tall, and weighed around 185 pounds. He had black hair, drank bourbon, and chain-smoked.

The similarities between a younger Duane and the FBI's composite drawings struck Jo. "It's about as close a match as you can get," agrees Frank Bender, a criminal forensic reconstructionist who has worked with the FBI for 20 years.

Jo never knew Duane to go to the library. Yet in pencil in the book's margins was what looked to her like Duane's handwriting. On one page he had written the name of a town in Washington where a placard from the rear stairs of Flight 305 had landed. "I knew right off the bat that handwriting was his," says Anne Faass, who worked with Duane for five years.

Jo called the FBI the night she read the D.B. Cooper book. "They just blew me off," she says. Eventually she began a dialogue with Ralph Himmelsbach, the FBI agent in charge of the case from 1971 until his retirement in 1980. At his urging, the FBI opened a file on Duane Weber in March 1997. They interviewed Jo, as well as one of Duane's former wives and his brother. They compared his fingerprints with the 66 unaccounted-for prints on Flight 305. None matched, although the FBI has no way to know if any of the prints were Cooper's. Himmelsbach finds Jo Weber, who has agreed to take a polygraph test, to be credible. There is no reward money to motivate her. He thinks she simply wants to learn the truth about her spouse. "The facts she has really seem to fit," he says. But the FBI dropped its investigation of Weber in July 1998. More "conclusive evidence" would be needed to continue, they say.

Though the facts are few, the circumstantial evidence is compelling. Retired FBI agent Himmelsbach believes the skyjacker must certainly have had a criminal record, military training, and familiarity with the Northwest. U.S. News has confirmed that Duane Weber served in the Army in the early 1940s. He also did time in at least six prisons from 1945 to 1968 for burglary and forgery. One prison was McNeil Island in Steilacoom, Wash.–20 miles from the Seattle-Tacoma airport.

The skyjacking was a desperate act by a desperate man. In 1971, Duane Weber's emotional and physical health were failing. He was on the verge of separating from his fifth wife and had been diagnosed with kidney disease; he was not expected to live past 50. Himmelsbach believes the skyjacking may have been a criminal's last hurrah and says Weber is one of the best suspects he has come across.

A skeptic at first, Jo Weber now believes her husband of 17 years was D.B. Cooper. "If he is not," she says, "he sure did send me on the wildest ride any widow has ever been on."

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