The 3rd Edition of 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.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The true, unsolved story of D. B. Cooper’s 1971 airplane hijacking, one of the greatest cold cases of the twentieth century, by an author featured in D.B. Cooper: Where Are You?!, now streaming on Netflix “Here is writing and storytelling that is vivid and fresh—a delectable adventure.”—Gay Talese “I have a bomb here and I would like you to sit by me.” That was the note handed to flight attendant Florence Schaffner by a mild-mannered passenger now known as D. B. Cooper on a Northwest Orient flight in 1971. It was also the start of one of the most astonishing aviation whodunits in the history of American true crime: how one man extorted $200,000 from an airline before parachuting into the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, never to be seen again. The case of D. B. Cooper is a modern legend that has obsessed and cursed his pursuers for generations with everything from bankruptcy to suicidal despair. Now, with Skyjack, Geoffrey Gray obtains a first-ever look at the FBI’s confidential Cooper file, uncovering new leads in the infamous case. Starting with a crack tip from a private investigator, Gray plunges into the murky depths of the decades-old mystery to chase down new clues and explore secrets of the case’s most prominent suspects, including Ralph Himmelsbach, the most dogged of FBI agents, who watched with horror as a criminal became a counter-culture folk hero; Karl Fleming, a respected reporter whose career was destroyed by a D. B. Cooper scoop that was a scam; and Barbara Dayton, a transgender pilot who insisted she was Cooper herself. With explosive new information, Skyjack reopens one of the great cold cases of the twentieth century.

D.B. Cooper is wild and conservative, smart and stupid, careful and courageous. He has imagination, determination, and an adjustable conscience. You've got to like him and despise him. He is a pirate, a friend, a schemer, a drug dealer, a nurturer, a murderer, a family man. And now--a writer? It’s an intriguing tale. But D.B. Cooper is not a story character, he is real. He planned and schemed and prepared to hijack a plane, then did it and got away with it. Look it up--it was in all the papers, on television, in conversations around the country, around the world. People will say D.B. Cooper, Where are You is fiction, it is some writer's fanciful account of what may have happened Could be. You know what they say about becoming a writer. Write about what you know. Seems like Walter Grant knows way too much about skyjacking and growing pot. Sort of like D.B. Cooper.

He jumped out of a Boeing 727 into the November chill of the Pacific Northwest in 1971. He was carrying $200,000 and a briefcase he said contained a bomb. No trace of the man known as D.B. Cooper has ever been found. Who was he? Where is he? Will the D. B.Cooper mystery ever be solved?

The day before Thanksgiving in 1971, a man wearing a business suit and carrying a briefcase boarded a Northwest Orient flight in Portland, bound for Seattle. Claiming to have a bomb, the skyjacker held the passengers and crew for $200,000 ransom while demanding four parachutes. After getting his money and parachutes in Seattle, the Boeing 727 took off, going south to Reno. About a half an hour later, the mysterious hijacker jumped out the back of the aircraft, and disappeared forever. "Norjak" as the FBI would later label it, would become the only unsolved skyjacking in American history. Almost forty years later, new evidence was uncovered when the case was finally opened up to a select group of amateur sleuths. Now, their findings have confirmed one of the scores of stories surrounding the hijacking. Join in the race to find out who D.B Cooper was, following up on the Last Lead in one of America's great unsolved mysteries.