"DB Cooper: Case Closed?"

In Search of DB COOPER

AP Photo/Reid Blackburn

FBI agents scour the sand of a beach on the Columbia River in February 1980, searching for additional money or clues in the D.B. Cooper skyjacking case, in Vancouver, Wash. Several thousand dollars of the hijacking money was found in the area days earlier.

AP Photo/Eric Risberg

Part of the money that was paid to legendary hijacker D.B. Cooper in 1971 is shown during an F.B.I. news conference, Feb. 12, 1980, where it was announced that several thousand dollars was found 5 miles northwest of Vancouver, Wash., by Howard and Patricia Ingram and their 8-year-old son Brian. The couples son found the money while on a family picnic.

It is one of the most fascinating unsolved crimes of modern times, not to mention one of the greatest mysteries of the Pacific Northwest: Who was D.B. Cooper?

On Nov. 24, 1971, a man with that pseudonym skyjacked a commercial airplane heading from Portland to Seattle using a briefcase bomb, extorted $200,000 and several parachutes after the plane landed and the passengers left, demanded the crew fly him to Mexico, then parachuted out somewhere near the Oregon-Washington border.

Dressed like a character from Reservoir Dogs, the unidentified man wearing a suit, tie and sunglasses, and smoking a cigarette became an instant and enduring source of speculation. Hundreds of possible subjects have been eliminated over the years.

Now comes D.B. Cooper: Case Closed?, a two-part History Channel documentary premiering next week that investigates some of the more promising Cooper suspects.

And one of them a man with North Coast connections may be the real Cooper, according to a pair of investigative journalists who spent five years secretly digging into the case.

The program takes viewers into the journalists 40-member cold case team the first D.B. Cooper investigation enlisting former feds, a dozen of whom are FBI.

Is Cooper still alive? How could a man who did something so sensational fly beneath the radar (so to speak) for 45 years?

D.B. Cooper: Case Closed? claims to answer these and other tantalizing questions.

Part one airs 9 p.m. Sunday on the History Channel; part two will air Monday.

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Source: http://www.dailyastorian.com/Local_News/20160708/db-cooper-case-closed