The original 1971 Walter Cronkite report about the D.B. Cooper hijacking, heist and escape. Interviews with many members of the shaken flight crew.
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Tags: D.B. Cooper, Walter Cronkite
Four decades after his brazen crime and complete disappearance made the inscrutable man known as D.B. Cooper into an American folk hero, the FBI has credible evidence as to his identity. The opening of a well-written new article by Katharine Q. Seelye and Charlie Savage in the New York Times:
“He smoked Raleigh cigarettes, wore a black clip-on tie and drank whiskey, and when zero hour came, he was one cool cat.
From Seat 18C on a Northwest Orient flight from Portland, Ore., to Seattle, he passed a note to the stewardess — this was 1971, pre-‘flight attendant’ era. She slipped it in her pocket, unread.
‘Miss, you’d better look at that note,’ the passenger calmly advised. ‘I have a bomb.’ He opened his briefcase and showed her what could have been a bomb, nestled in a mass of wires.
With that, the man known as D. B. Cooper hijacked the plane, later parachuting out of it and into the unknown. His body was never found. Mr. Cooper became a folk hero, and the case remains the only unsolved hijacking in American history.
Now, 40 years later, comes what seems like a tantalizing new tip. The Federal Bureau of Investigation says it has a new suspect, one whose name has never surfaced in the ocean of tips that has washed in over four decades.”
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Treat Williams as D.B. Cooper:
Cooper looks cool in his dark glasses. Let's make a movie glamorizing him. Is Johnny Depp available to provide one of his overpraised, one-note performances?
I’m always amazed when criminals become folk heros, like when John Dillinger or Bugsy Siegel are glamorized because somehow their lawlessness supposedly tapped into the anti-authoritarianism of our collective psyche. We must be very bored.
Think of all the honest people who struggle through difficult times without committing crimes. Some are part of movements that attempt to make society fairer. Or perhaps they just quietly try as best they can to raise their children well. Those people are the heroes, but usually the geniuses with the guns and getaway cars get more attention.
One such unlikely antihero was the shadowy lowlife D. B. Cooper, who became a cult hero after hijacking a 727 aircraft in November 1971 and securing $200,000 in ransom from Northwest Airlines before parachuting into oblivion. Because of his daring crime and subsequent disappearance, Cooper became a huge cult figure
His wanted poster is textually matter-of-fact apart from mentioning that Cooper was a “heavy smoker of Raleigh filter tip cigarettes.” The images look fairly Warhol-ish, which isn’t surprising consider the Pop Artist’s stature in the culture at the time. There is no reward money listed.
Tags: Bugsy Siegel, D.B. Cooper, John Dillinger, Johnny Depp