On February 10, 1980, 8-year-old Brian Ingram (b. 1969) is smoothing sand for a campfire on the Washington side of the Columbia River when he comes across three deteriorating packs of $20 bills still bound by rubber bands. The bills were last seen on November 24, 1971, the night they were given to the hijacker known as D. B. Cooper, who demanded $200,000 and four parachutes on a flight from Portland to Sea-Tac International Airport. After getting the cash in Seattle, Cooper demanded the plane fly to Mexico, and shortly after 8 p.m. he jumped from the plane's back stairs somewhere over Southwestern Washington. Cooper’s case is the world’s only unsolved airplane hijacking, and the FBI says Ingram’s find is their first clue since Cooper jumped. More than a half century later, it’s arguably still their best.
D. B. Who?
On November 24, 1971, the day before Thanksgiving, a man in a black suit approached an airport ticket counter in Portland and paid $20 cash for a one-way flight to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. He signed for the ticket in red ink and then sat alone awaiting the short flight. On board, he sat in the airplane's last row, drinking a bourbon and soda and not drawing attention until he passed a handwritten note to a flight attendant. She figured it was a pickup attempt until the man in horn-rimmed sunglasses told her to read it. "I have a bomb," it said in part ("D. B. Cooper: 'Home free' ...").
The name on his ticket read DAN COOPER in capital letters. But when the United Press International wire service was rushing to move a story about the hijacking, the hijacker was mistakenly listed as D. B. Cooper. The FBI corrected it the next day in a news release, but by then the error had traveled around the world, and the D. B. moniker stuck.
In the air, flight attendant Tina Mucklow sat next to Cooper at his request. He opened a briefcase to show wires, a battery, and red sticks. He wanted $200,000 – roughly $1.5 million in 2024 dollars – waiting when they landed in Seattle. If Cooper got the money and parachutes, the 36 passengers and all but one of the flight attendant could go. The pilots would remain aboard.
After getting the money and refueling at Sea-Tac, the crew followed Cooper’s orders to fly Northwest Orient flight 305 to Mexico. Not long after takeoff, Cooper had the rear stairs extended – something airport officials didn’t realize could be done until Cooper demanded it. About 20 miles north of Portland – the FBI can’t pinpoint the spot exactly – Cooper jumped. The Boeing 727 constructed in Renton was going 196 mph at an altitude of roughly 10,000 feet. The wind chill at that altitude was well below zero. More than 50 years later, the FBI has not positively identified Cooper, and his case remains the world’s only unsolved airplane hijacking.
Finding the Money
It was Sunday, February 10, 1980, when 8-year-old Brian Ingram became the first and only known person to find part of Cooper’s loot (other than the FBI finding fragments at the same site). The boy and his parents, Harold and Patricia, were having a picnic on Tena Bar (also called Tina Bar) on the Washington side of the Columba River in Clark County, about 10 miles northwest of their hometown of Vancouver. Ingram was smoothing the sand so his dad could build a campfire. "I took my arm and raked it along the sand, and then I felt something fluffed up in the sand," Ingram told The Oklahoman in 1986 ("Fairy Tale Ends ..."). The 8-year-old dug the money from the sand – estimated between 3 inches and 3 feet down – with his cousin, 5-year-old Denise Ingram. "I thought, 'Wow!'" he told The Seattle Times. "I saw it was money and went over to my parents. They thought it was counterfeit" ("More D. B. Cooper Cash …").
Brian’s father said the find was like a ball of wet pulp. "I thought it was play money," Denise Ingram told a reporter in an account later disputed by Brian Ingraham’s mother. "We both found it. It was buried in the sand. I gave it to Brian" ("'I Thought It Was …'"). Denise’s mother, Crystal Ingram, said the kids used sticks to dig the rest of it. "There wasn’t nothing more," she said. "We dug for a while, but we didn’t find nothing but sand underneath. It was out Forth Plain Road. We were just out there watching the boats going up and down, roasting some hot dogs. It was really pretty out there Sunday. There wasn’t no bag. We just put it in a plastic bag from our bread. One of us did mention that it possibly could be D. B. Cooper’s. But we kept on going with our picnic and didn’t think nothing of it" ("'I Thought It Was …'").
The three crumbling bill packets were turned over to the FBI, and the agency identified the bills by the serial numbers that had been supplied the night of the hijacking by Seattle First National Bank (in a bag weighing 19 pounds, with the contents measuring 11 inches by 12 inches by 6.5 inches). The serial numbers were recorded on microfilm before Cooper received the money.
When the bills were found, some were so badly deteriorated they were described as unreadable. Others were described as the size of a business card, and some were black. The family estimated only about 30 of the bills were still in good condition. Still, the assistant special agent in charge of the Portland FBI office, Bill Baker, said it was the first clue the FBI had since the night of the hijacking – and banner headlines were splashed above the fold of Seattle newspapers. The Ingrams went to the FBI the day after their discovery and made international news after their February 12 news conference at the FBI’s Portland office. The FBI confirmed the money was from ransom packets given to Cooper: two packets of 100 $20 bills and a third packet of 90, arranged in the same order as delivered in 1971. An FBI case agent said part of why they gave small bills was an attempt to weigh Cooper down.
The Search For More
FBI agents found more bill fragments while digging two days after Ingram’s discovery. The finds were the size of nickels and quarters roughly five feet from the Ingram site, FBI site coordinator Paul Hudson told reporters. Some fragments were three feet under the sand. On February 13, the FBI brought a backhoe and experts in soil, archeology and river currents to the area where the Cooper bills were found. The beach was adjacent to a dairy farm and a popular spot for steelhead fishing, The Seattle Times reported. Steelhead fisherman mixed with the curious onlookers, but both were turned away during the FBI search.
The international media spotlight quickly became unenjoyable for the Ingrams, who spent a day showing the FBI where they found the bills and another day talking with reporters. "My husband lost 1 1/2 days of pay and my sister-in-law won’t come over to my house anymore," Patricia Ingram told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer nearly two weeks after the find. "We’ve gone in the hole as the result of this." Her husband, Dwayne, lost about $100 in pay from his job as a heavy equipment painter. They couldn’t afford a phone and were living paycheck to paycheck. Previously, Northwest Orient offered a $25,000 for return of the $200,000 ransom. But the Ingrams were told that offer was withdrawn because the airline’s insurance company had reimbursed the airline for 90 percent of the loss. The Oregon Journal offered a $1,000 reward for the first $20 from the Cooper loot, though the Ingrams never saw that money and the newspaper went out of business in 1982. Brian’s mother, who disputed the claim that Brian’s 5-year-old cousin found the money, said the only bright spot was the hero reception in her son’s second-grade class. "Brian’s a hero in their eyes. The first couple of days, they demanded his autograph and they carried him around on their shoulders" ("'You Wish You Hadn’t Found It …'").
How the Money Got There
The FBI still can’t say with certainty how the bills ended up next to the Columbia. "It’s possible that it washed up here a period of time ago ... not nine years ago, but not necessarily recently," Hudson, the FBI’s site coordinator, told reporters three days after Ingram’s find ("More D.B. Cooper …"). That theory was echoed by a longtime fisherman, 80-year-old Sidney Tipper, who said he’d been going up and down that part of the river for 10 years and if the money had been there, Tipper thought he would have seen it. FBI agents said it may have been washed downstream, possibly by a tributary to the Columbia. An Army Engineers hydrologist told reporters the Washougal River was the only tributary that might have carried the money. An early FBI theory was that Cooper died in Lake Merwyn on the Lewis River north of Amboy. Some people theorized he went into the reservoir behind the Ariel dam. But the Lewis River enters the Columbia downstream from where the money was found.
Ralph Himmelsbach (1925-2019), the FBI agent who led the Cooper investigation from the night of the hijacking until his FBI retirement on the last day of February 1980, believed the bagged money was close to the bank of a stream and when water got high enough, it washed downstream before the bag finally degraded. "We think finally, tumbling down the river bottom, it [the bag] broke open and the money was carried on, wearing off little bits and pieces around the edges, grinding it down like it had been ground with sandpaper or a file, leaving the center portion" ("Agent 'Explains' ..."). John D. Pringle, assistant special agent of the Seattle FBI office at the time of Ingram’s find, thought Cooper was either dead or had dropped the money.
The small town of Ariel benefited from the speculation. Starting in 1976, hundreds of people went for the Ariel Tavern’s annual November 24 D. B. Cooper party to eat buffalo stew, search for Cooper, and wonder if he was among those who attended. After Ingram’s find, reporters said tavern owner Dave Fisher fielded calls from New York TV reporters and radio stations across the West Coast.
Some Bills Go to Auction
Four parties tried claiming the bills: the FBI, Brian Ingram and his parents, Northwest Orient Airlines, and Globe Indemnity Company, the airline’s insurance company. On May 21, 1986, a proposed judgment was sent to U.S. District Court Judge Helen Frye to give the FBI $280 as evidence, and Ingram and Globe Indemnity would split the remaining $5,520. Brian Ingram received his $2,760 share in June 1986. As a then-15-year-old, he had plans to sell the money. "When we do make the money, if it is just OK, it will put me through college. If it's a little better than OK, then college and a down payment on a house. If it's better than that, then college and we'll buy a house," he told The Oklahoman ("Fairy Tale Ends …"). The Ingram family, which left the small central Oklahoma town of El Reno in fall 1979 to find work in the Pacific Northwest, was living in Portland when the judge’s decision was signed.
By 2006, Brian Ingram was a carpenter in Mena, Arkansas. He told a reporter he was working with an attorney to auction 17 of the torn bills and torn pieces of Cooper’s loot. Ingram, who had a wife and three children, said it was time to make a sale to invest in their future. His family moved back to Oklahoma when he was a teenager. Ingram then served in the Army for three years after high school and moved to Mena around 1994. He told a reporter the bills were kept in a safe deposit box.
By March 2008, Ingram, now with five children, selected PCGS Currency to authenticate the bills before auctioning 15 of them. That September, The Associated Press reported that 15 of Ingram’s bills fetched $37,000 through Heritage Auction Galleries of Dallas, two to three times more than expected. Some of the bills included initials of investigators who examined the money when it was first found. (After the 1980 discovery, the bills were sent to an FBI lab in Washington, D.C., for further examination.)
D. B., Where are You?
By 1975, five years before Ingram’s find, the FBI said it had run down thousands of leads and eliminated hundreds of suspects. Over the years there were many more – and even multiple deathbed confessions, none of which the FBI thought were legitimate. Among many films was an HBO documentary. As the 2015 finale of the TV Series Mad Men approached, there was so much speculation that lead character Don Draper was actually D. B. Cooper that the series creator addressed and denied it. In 2024, a convention of Cooper enthusiasts called CooperCon was planned for Boston, Dallas, and Seattle.
A couple of Tacoma guys claimed Cooper was alive in Puyallup and buried the money under the dump there. Other locals theorized that Cooper transition and identified as a woman. Multiple news outlets, including the Seattle Flag, published purported interviews or notes from Cooper, and two Kitsap County men were arrested for selling a bogus interview to Newsweek for $30,000. When Larry Carr, the FBI case agent from 2007-2010, took over the case, he sought public input and showed evidence from a carboard box that had been sitting in the Seattle FBI Office for years. While that brought renewed interest and many tips, Carr doubted the hijacker survived:
"You have D. B. Cooper walking down the stairs. As soon as he’s standing there, he really can’t feel the wind coming around him from the plane going 200 mph. And so when he jumps out of the aircraft, I think he just started tumbling. Right then, just tumbling. Panics. And once you panic, you really can’t do anything. So he’s falling, he doesn’t know where he’s at. He can’t see, he has no visual reference on the ground, he’s out of control in the air, and starts the panic. Can’t pull his chute, and hits the ground without ever opening his chute" ("D.B. Cooper: The Surviving Evidence”).
Case Goes Cold
At times, the FBI described the hijacking as a capital offense, which has no statute of limitations for prosecution. Still, on Thanksgiving Eve 1976 – the last day before the five-year statute of limitation for hijacking expired – a federal grand jury in Portland indicted "John Doe, also known as Dan Cooper" in case the FBI ever positively identified the hijacker.
On July 11, 2016, the bureau announced it was no longer actively investigating the Cooper hijacking, code named NORJACK. Spokesperson Ayn Dietrich-Williams called it "one of the longest and most exhaustive investigations in our history," but said the resources were needed for other investigative priorities. None of the thousands of well-meaning tips led to proof beyond a reasonable doubt ("D.B. Cooper Case No Longer …").
As for Cooper’s true identity? There’s this idea of a debonair guy, said Geoffrey Gray, author of the New York Times bestseller Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper. But his tie was a clip-on from JC Penney. His suit jacket didn’t match his pants. He didn’t demand large bills, so the FBI gave small denominations to add extra weight. Investigators doubt he realized that one of the four parachutes was sewn shut. The man, Gray told CBS News, is probably nothing like the myth.
