Nearly 53 years ago, someone calling himself Dan Cooper purchased a one-way ticket for a Portland to Seattle flight for $20.
He skyjacked it, demanded and collected a $200,000 ransom, got the plane he hijacked refueled and back in the air only to jump out with a parachute and forever disappear into American criminal folklore as D.B. Cooper.
But how did he go from being Dan to D.B.? Last week, attendees filled the theater inside McMenamins Olympic Club to listen to Darrell Jabin explain how his father — Clyde Jabin — unintentionally cemented the name D.B. Cooper in American history.
Clyde was a reporter for United Press International (UPI) at the time, and covered the Portland Police Bureau on the fateful day of Nov. 24, 1971, when the skyjacking occurred.
Incidentally, Nov. 24 was also Darrell’s parent’s wedding anniversary.
After the news of the initial skyjacking broke and the plane had landed at Seattle where the ransom was delivered and the plane had taken off again, Clyde was at the Bureau still when news came over the wire that the hijacker had disappeared.
This was when Clyde noticed FBI agents also visiting the Bureau. He casually asked a file clerk why the agents were there.
“What the file clerk said was, ‘Oh, they’re looking for a guy named Cooper. D.B. Cooper,’ the clerk replied. ‘It’s something to do with that skyjacking this afternoon.’ What’s in a name? From the moment that reporter’s story hit the UPI wire, the magical combination of initials took over,” Darrell said. “Dan Cooper was lost to all but the most precise. The skyjacker who had threatened the lives of 42 persons and terrorized aircraft crew to escape with $200,000 was now known to eternity as D.B. Cooper. Through the power of the press, a legend was born.”
Despite one of the largest manhunts in FBI history, no trace of the skyjacker was ever found by investigators.
And to compound things, to this day nobody knows if Dan Cooper was even the skyjacker’s real name, as he was not required to provide ID in 1971 to purchase the plane ticket. But whatever his name was, FBI investigators were indeed looking for suspects named D.B. Cooper when Clyde wrote the initial UPI story.
On Feb. 10, 1980, $5,800 of the ransom money was discovered along the Washington bank of the Columbia River by an 8-year-old boy named Brian Ingram, who was camping with his parents.
During the 1970’s, banks would actually keep money on hand specifically for ransoms, and had each bill’s serial number recorded.
The serial numbers of the bills match and confirmed that the money Ingram had found was indeed some of ransom money taken by D.B. Cooper when he jumped out of the back of the Boeing 727.
“He managed to sell 15 of the bills in 2008 for $37,000,” Darrell added.
While some believe D.B. Cooper survived and escaped to start a new life with his money, others believe he either landed in the Columbia River or Lake Merwin and drowned, or got tangled in his own parachute and fell to his death somewhere in the Washington wilderness.
This didn’t stop people from both claiming they were D.B. Cooper or turning in people who they suspected might be the skyjacker.
“There were plenty of people who got turned in by relatives that said, ‘Oh yeah, he’s D.B. Cooper. He got all this money, I don’t know where it came from,’” said Darrell.
As for what his own father thought about D.B.’s ultimate fate, Darrell said Clyde held a pragmatic belief.
“We didn’t talk a whole lot about that stuff, he was pretty quiet … I don’t know really what my dad thought about it, but he was probably pragmatic about it and considered it another story,” Darrell said.
Following the end of his presentation, Darrell fielded questions from those in attendance.
Living in Salem, Oregon, Darrell calls himself “Oregon’s Traveling Historian” and traverses around the Pacific Northwest giving presentations on various historical locations and events.
For more information, follow Darrell’s Facebook page here https://bit.ly/3RFSI5l.
