Editor's note: On today's 43rd anniversary of the nation's only unsolved skyjacking, here is a story RGJ reporters Guy Clifton and Emerson Marcus wrote in 2011, 40 years after the infamous event.
Originally printed Nov. 24, 2011
On Thanksgiving eve 40 years ago a man calling himself Dan Cooper jumped from the belly of a Northwest Orient Airlines Boeing 727-100 and into infamy.
The mystery of what happened between Seattle and Reno on that night in 1971 has been the source of thousands of tips to the FBI, the subject of books and movies, the inspiration for copy cats, and the subject of untold hours of speculation by amateur sleuths who would love nothing more than to be the one who unlocks one of the country's great unsolved mysteries.
That includes Seattle lawyer Galen Cook, who is convinced letters sent to the Reno newspapers a few days after the incident hold the clues to the question everyone wants answered.
Who was D.B. Cooper?
"It's a 40-year old mystery that no one has been able to crack," Cook said. "To this day, the FBI has not come up with the solution. That's what keeps me going."
Cook is convinced he has pieced the puzzle together. He believes William Gossett, a Korean and Vietnam war vet who died in 2003, was Cooper.
Other sleuths are equally sure they know the answer.
The FBI, including its longtime lead investigator Ralph Himmelsbach, has long believed the hijacker could have never survived the jump.
"I still feel about it pretty much the same as I did the next day or two (after it happened)," said Himmelsbach, 86. "Most likely he's still lying in the weeds up there."
Regardless, the case remains the FBI's only unsolved skyjacking, and several times in the past four decades, the bureau has brought the case back into the spotlight with new leads or calls for help from the public.
Just this summer, the FBI said it had a "credible lead," when an Oklahoma woman came forward to say that D.B. Cooper was her late uncle. However, the uncle's DNA did not match DNA the FBI collected from the tie Cooper was wearing the day of the hijacking.
"It's still an open case," said Ayn Sandalo Dietrich, public affairs specialist with the FBI in Seattle. "There is an agent assigned to it. We keep handling tips about it. There is certainly a public interest in it."
'I have a bomb'
On Nov. 24, 1971, Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 was scheduled for a 30-minute hop from Portland, Ore., to Seattle that afternoon when a man dressed in a suit and carrying a briefcase bought a one-way ticket at the counter under the name Dan Cooper.
He took a seat near the back of the plane, which included 36 other passengers, and after it was airborne, about 3 p.m., handed flight attendant Florence Schaffner a note which she initially ignored, thinking the man was asking her for a date.
He leaned forward and whispered to her, "Miss, you'd better look at that note. I have a bomb."
He told her to sit beside him. She asked to see the bomb and he opened his briefcase to expose wires and red sticks resembling dynamite.
Then he relayed his demands: $200,000 in unmarked $20 bills and four parachutes.
The plane circled Sea-Tac Airport for two hours as FBI and Seattle police worked to secure the money and parachutes.
The plane landed on a remote runway and once the ransom money and parachutes were delivered, the other passengers were released. The pilot, first officer and one attendant were kept on the plane.
According to the FBI, Cooper then demanded to be flown to Mexico. However, he also ordered that the plane be flown with the landing gear down, the flaps at 15 percent, a speed of no more than 200 mph and an altitude no higher than 10,000 feet.
The flight crew — pilot William Scott, first office William Rataczak, flight engineer H.E. Anderson and flight attendant Tina Mucklow — convinced him the plane couldn't be flown to Mexico without refueling along the way so they threw out different destinations, and Cooper agreed to let the plane land in Reno.
It departed Seattle at about 7:40 p.m. It was a dark and stormy night in the Pacific Northwest.
About 40 minutes into the flight, the crew in the plane's cabin observed an indicator light showing the drop-down stairwell near the tail of the plane had opened.
Reno airport scene
At the Reno airport, a cadre of local, state and federal law enforcement officers was waiting.
A reporter from the Nevada State Journal, taking advantage of a short-wave radio operator's capture of the conversation between the pilot and the Reno tower, monitored the conversation with the pilot.
"We will be landing with the airstairs down," the pilot told the Reno tower. "We have not communicated with our passenger."
The pilot then said he would be landing the plane at 11 p.m. "straight up."
"At this point, no one knew whether he was still on the plane," said Joe Martin, a retired Washoe County Sheriff's deputy. "We all took up positions. I was at the north end of the runway. The plane went right over us and landed. That's when we found out he was gone."
After landing, the pilot again radioed tower that the hijacker "took leave of us somewhere between Reno and Seattle."
Law enforcement using police dogs searched the airport grounds. A search was also launched in a nearby Reno neighborhood.
All that was found in the plane was the clip-on black tie and mother of pearl tie tack Cooper had been wearing, two of the four parachutes and several cigarette butts.
The flight crew was questioned by the FBI and spent the night at the Mapes Hotel before departing Reno the next day.
The Reno letters
On Nov. 29, five days after the hijacking, a letter arrived at Reno Newspapers, headquarters of the morning Nevada State Journal and afternoon Reno Evening Gazette (the papers that later combined into the Reno Gazette-Journal).
Postmarked from Oakdale, Calif. – a San Joaquin Valley town better known for producing rodeo team ropers – the letter in cut-out and pasted words from newspaper clippings read: "Attention! Thanks for Hospitality. Was in a Rut. D.B. Cooper."
The Reno Evening Gazette, scooping the Journal and probably much to the chagrin of the FBI, published the letter on its front page that evening.
Four days later, on Dec. 2, another letter arrived with similar cut-out type. It read: "Plan ahead for Retirement income. D.B. Cooper."
Warren Lerude, the Reno Evening Gazette's managing editor in 1971, recalls the mysterious letters. He also received angry phone calls blaming the paper for copycat incidents that happened in the year to come.
"People would call me up and say, 'If it weren't for you guys printing that story, we wouldn't have any copycats. The media's involved. The copycats are doing it because they're aware of it. Why do you print such irresponsible stuff,'" Lerude said. "It's news when a public institution receives a note from someone who's newsworthy."
Cook is convinced the Reno letters — along with letters to newspapers in Vancouver, British Columbia and Portland — were written by the hijacker, who wanted to taunt the FBI.
Cook said the first letter to the Gazette, postmarked Oakdale, was near where his suspect, William Gossett, lived. The second Reno letter carried a Sacramento post mark.
Cook started investigating Gossett as a suspect in 2008. In his records, Cook also has Gossett's 1978 marriage proposal to his fifth wife. The letter was written on "MGM Grand Reno" stationary.
"Reno seems to keep coming up in this mystery," Cook said. "I asked the widow what he was doing in Reno and she said she never knew and he never told her. I just find that interesting. Apparently, Mister Gossett had some business in Reno."
Cook suspects Gossett was laundering money through hotels in Reno.
Himmelsbach said the FBI did investigate the letters.
"We gave credence to everything," he said. "We promised the public through the media that we would look into every lead they gave us. We felt we probably would need a little help, that somebody out there would have an answer for us."
FBI spokeswoman Dietrich said the letters were sent to Washington, D.C.
"The letters were sent to the FBI laboratory for analysis but nothing was found," she said. "It was never proven if the actual hijacker wrote the letters."
The letters are not among the material the FBI has made public over the years and Dietrich said the FBI doesn't say where it keeps its evidence.
'It's inescapable for me'
Himmelsbach is 86 and long retired from the FBI. He lives in Woodburn, Ore., about an hour away from the area in southern Washington where many believe Cooper made his jump.
Himmelsbach said he understands the public's infatuation with the case and knows he will forever be linked to it.
"There is not a week that goes by without me getting something in the mail or a telephone call — some reminder of it," he said. "It's inescapable for me. I'm used to it now."
Last week, a reporter from NBC's Today Show spent a day with him, shooting a segment that will run this weekend.
Himmelsbach said he has mixed feelings as to whether the case will ever be solved.
"I hope that it will, but actually, I doubt that it will be," he said. "I would think that by now we would have found something. Whoever did it, if he survived, there is no way he's going to take it to his grave without saying something to somebody."
Story and photos: http://www.rgj.com
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