THE mystery of DB Cooper has left America, the FBI and the rest of the world scratching their heads.
Here is all you need to know about DB Cooper and his criminal actions in 1971.
Who was DB Cooper?
DB Cooper boarded a flight from Portland to Seattle under the name of Dan Cooper - but this turned out to be fake.
Someone misheard his name as DB Cooper, and although people knew it was a mistake, the name sounded better and so it stuck.
Cooper hijacked the Northwest Airlines flight and got away with $200,000 on November 247, 1971.
Ever since then, no-one has managed to track him down or find the whole pot of money, just a small amount of it.
In the years since that event, no trace of Cooper’s body has been found, fuelling speculation he survived the jump.
Hundreds of theories emerged over the years - but the mystery remains.Some people said Cooper was a former paratrooper.
Various families claimed Cooper was their relative.
Someone pointed out the entire hijacking was eerily similar to the events of a 1963 French comic called Dan Cooper.
For a while the primary suspect was John List, who murdered his whole family days before the hijacking.
Other former suspects included a Vietnam veteran-turned-Catholic priest, a transgender mechanic, and a leather worker posthumously accused by his niece.
In 2011, Robert Rackstraw was identified as DB Cooper by investigator Thomas J Colbert.
In his book, The Last Master Outlaw, Colbert claimed the former Army pilot and ex-convict Rackstraw was behind the heist.
Rackstraw denied being Cooper and died in 2019.Geoffrey Gray wrote in his book Skyjack: The Hunt for DB Cooper: “The fascination with Cooper has survived not because of the FBI investigation, but because he was able to do something that not only captured the public imagination, but also maintained a sense of mystery in the world."
But no theory nor claim could confirm who Cooper was, why he hijacked the flight, and if he survived his daring jump.
What crimes did he commit?
DB Cooper boarded a Seattle-bound Northwest Orient Airlines flight in Portland, Oregon, on November 24, 1971.
He had a suitcase with him and sat in seat 18E.
Aged in his 40s and dressed in a smart business suit, Cooper calmly ordered a bourbon, lit a cigarette, and put on dark sunglasses.
Shortly after take-off, he handed a note to the flight attendant nearest to him, 23-year-old Florence Schaffner, which said the aircraft was being hijacked and Cooper had a bomb in his suitcase.
Cooper sat next to a terrified Schaffner and detailed his demands: four parachutes, a fuel truck on standby at Seattle airport — where the plane was headed — and a second flight to Mexico City.
He also demanded $200,000 in cash – estimated to be about $1.6million today.
Cooper opened his suitcase to reveal what Schaffner would later describe as a battery and eight red cylinders with wires attached.
The attendant relayed Cooper’s demands to the flight crew, and the crew informed the police.
As the plane approached Seattle, the FBI rushed to meet each of Cooper’s demands.
Then things took another unexpected turn.
After the Boeing jet touched down at Seattle airport, Cooper allowed the 36 other passengers and some crew members to disembark.
He stayed on the plane and told the pilot to fly him to Mexico, slowly, while remaining below 10,000 feet.
As the jet crept its way towards Reno, Nevada, for a planned fuel stop en route to Mexico, Cooper opened a rear door and, with the $200,000 cash and a parachute, jumped out.
Was DB Cooper even caught?
DB Cooper has never been caught despite numerous theories, an FBI investigations and amateur sleuths looking into it.
In 1980 a young boy digging in sand north of Portland unearthed bundles of cash that matched the serial numbers of Cooper’s ransom money.
In July 2016, after “one of the longest and most exhaustive investigations in our history”, the FBI admitted defeat.
The bureau said: “During the course of the 45-year [hijacking] investigation, the FBI exhaustively reviewed all credible leads, co-ordinated between multiple field offices to conduct searches, collected all available evidence, and interviewed all identified witnesses.
“Although the FBI appreciated the immense number of tips provided by members of the public, none to date have resulted in a definitive identification of the hijacker.”
America’s most experienced investigators had abandoned the case, but its armchair detectives refused to give up.
In January 2017, three scientists working on the case revealed analysis on a necktie likely left behind by Cooper could narrow down the hijacker’s elusive identity, and blow the now-closed case — the only unsolved hijacking in America’s history — wide open.
Sensational files also revealed three mystery suspects at the centre of the investigation - a failing businessman, a wealthy man living on a yacht in Mexico, and a person who had researched an identical scenario prior to the crime.
In August 2017, scientists working for Citizen Sleuths — a group that took up its own investigation into the Cooper case in 2007 — claimed they had a breakthrough.
The group, including principal investigator Tom Kaye, attracted the attention of an impressed FBI, which let them examine clues, including a tie.
The black, JC Penney clip-on necktie had been left behind on Cooper’s seat — 18E.
And that tie, the Citizen Sleuths said, has given them a solid clue about the man’s identity.
The scientists used a powerful electron microscope to find more than 100,000 particles of “rare earth elements” on the tie, including pure titanium, which caught their eye.
They said titanium was a rare metal in 1971, and linked Cooper to a “limited number of managers or engineers in the titanium field that would wear ties to work”.
Based on this finding, the scientists said they believed Cooper worked for Boeing — the maker of the very plane he hijacked.
At the time, Boeing happened to be working on a Super Sonic Transport plane that used those elements.
the group’s lead researcher, Kaye, told Seattle’s King 5 News: “The tie went with him into these manufacturing environments, for sure, so he was not one of the people running these [manufacturing machines].
“He was either an engineer or a manager in one of the plants.”
Also in 2017, TV executive and amateur sleuth Thomas Colbert claimed to have found a decades-old parachute strap.
He did not reveal the exact location, but told Fox News the strap was “right where a credible source claimed the chute and remaining money are buried”.
The FBI said it would preserve evidence from the case at its Washington, DC, headquarters but won’t act on further tips unless Cooper’s money or parachutes were found.
Where is DB Cooper now?
DB Cooper is still nowhere to be found.
Officials do not know whether he is alive or dead, but many think that he survived the parachute fall.
What does the DB Cooper case have to do with Prison Break?
In the TV series Prison Break the lead character Michael Scofield works out that one of the prisoners where his brother is caged is DB Cooper.
Charles Westmoreland, an elderly inmate at Fox River State Penitentiary who dies during the escape in season one, is revealed to be the mystery criminal.
He reveals where he buried the money which Michael plans to use to fund himself and his brother on the outside.
In the second season of the TV show the convicts all head to Utah to unearth the buried millions.