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Dec. 6, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
51:33
Edition 501 - Bruce A. Smith
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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is still Howard Hughes, and this is still the unexplained.
I can't even begin to tell you what the weather is like here in London at the moment.
It is successive grey, miserable, dank, damp day after successive grey, dank, miserable, damp day.
You know, I loathe the winter normally.
This kind of weather is really getting to me.
But, you know, we'll come out the other side.
It's just part of life's rich and varied tapestry, I guess.
But I just hate the northern hemisphere winter.
And this one is delivering a special one for us, I think.
Thank you very much for all of your emails that keep me going here.
If you want to email me with a guest suggestion or thoughts about the show, please go to the website designed and created by Adam.
Thank you, Adam.
Theunexplained.tv.
And you can also make a donation to the show if you want to do that through the website, theunexplained.tv.
Lovely emails that I've had recently, though, and it's nice to know that what I'm doing here seems to be playing a part in your life wherever you are in the world.
That means so much to me.
It really, really does, as I sit here, listen to this in the absolute silence doing this.
Okay, thank you.
The guest on this edition of the show is somebody we've had on before, Bruce Smith, in the northwestern part of the United States, with some new information, partly connected to two brand new documentaries about the D.B. Cooper case.
It happened 49 years ago.
It's nearly half a century, but people cannot stop talking about a man who hijacked a plane, grabbed a great big bag of money, $200,000, parachuted off it, and he and the money disappeared.
And over all of those decades, law officials and all of us have been asking, who is?
Who was D.B. Cooper?
So Bruce Smith, we're going to catch up with in just a second here.
Thank you very, very much for being part of this family that is the Unexplained as we march into 2021 and whatever that will hold.
It means a great deal to me that you're there.
Okay, let's get to the northwestern part of the United States, Washington State, and talk with Bruce Smith, a conversation originally recorded for my radio show.
Bruce Smith, thank you very much for coming on The Unexplained.
Oh, it's wonderful to be with you, Howard.
This is...
The D.B. Cooper case is a gift that keeps on giving, isn't it?
It certainly is.
And I think one of the reasons it keeps on giving is because the FBI walked away from it four years ago, trying to close the case.
And if they had any thought that this was going to bury the D.B. Cooper story, they are sadly mistaken because it has been rejuvenated by a lot of citizen sleuths and podcasters such as yourself.
And it is a gift that keeps on giving.
And the FBI has helped this resurgence along because they no longer control all the documents that they collected over 45 years of their investigation.
Those now belong to the people, and the FBI is simply the gatekeeper.
And every month they're releasing another 400 or 500 documents.
And we now have about 20,000 documents from the FBI.
So we're getting a much clearer picture of the inner workings of the FBI.
And fortunately, there's enough completists, if you will, in the DB Cooper chat rooms and in the DB Cooper world who have the eyeballs to read all of these federal documents.
Most of them are redacted, and it's a tough read.
My eyeballs are not up to the challenge.
I'm good for maybe half a dozen documents per day, and then I get a migraine headache reading this stuff.
But some of the young guys, they can just plow through it.
So we're getting a lot of good information coming out.
D.B. Cooper, the case is like a sports league, it seems to me, because everybody has their favorite suspect.
Yeah.
Everybody supports somebody or other.
All right, let's wind it right back then.
November the 24th, 1971.
And on November the 25th, 1971, the great Walter Cronkite, the finest newscaster, finest journalist of a generation on CBS News, came across with these words.
When he got on a plane in Portland, Oregon last night, he was just another passenger.
But today, after hijacking a Northwest Airlines jet, ransoming the passengers in Seattle, then making a getaway by parachute somewhere between there and Reno, Nevada, the description on one wire service, master criminal.
Bill Curtis reports.
36 passengers got off the jet ladder in Seattle last night, left aboard four crew members and the hijacker, dressed in a business suit, demanding $200,000.
And so the story unfolded.
Now, look, it's 49 years ago, Bruce.
How did America react to that?
I'll tell you how I reacted.
I was 22 years old, so I'm 71 right now, and I was in New York and I was in college.
And to me, it was an interesting piece of news.
And, oh, a guy, you know, jumped out the back of an airplane.
Interesting.
But back in those days, there was a skyjacking every week.
And so D.B. Cooper was just one of hundreds of guys stealing an airplane.
But this was different, though, wasn't it?
Because the others were, you know...
Yeah, most of it.
Yeah.
In fact, there was a joke on TV, you know, take me to Havana.
D.B. Cooper, I came to learn once I moved from New York to Washington State and began to understand the nuances of the skyjacking because here where I live, I call it Cooper Country.
And D.B. Cooper flew right over my house on his getaway flight out of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on that night.
And he had told the pilots, just fly me to Mexico.
And so they were flying due south and they went right over my place.
So everybody around here keeps talking about D.B. Cooper.
and like you say, you know, it's like a sports league.
Everybody has a particular theory about, you know, did he live?
Did he die?
Yeah.
And on it goes.
I wonder why he asked to be taken to Mexico, because if he had knowledge, and it seems that D.B. Cooper had knowledge of parachuting, he must have had knowledge of parachuting to do this, but knowledge of aviation generally, perhaps gained from the inside, then he would know that to go to Mexico, you have to stop on the way.
You can't do it on one tank of gas.
Well, to back up just a little bit, D.B. Cooper was extremely astute in picking the airplane that he did.
He hijacked a 727.
Now, the plane is no longer in service, but back in the 60s and 1970s, it was one of the most common jetliners in use.
It's a small airplane that was designed to fly to lots of the smaller airports before.
In Europe, it was the mainstay of the package holiday industry.
You know, when I was a kid, my parents, I went so many places on those things.
Yeah.
And what made it special was that it had its own staircase inside the plane.
It was built into the plane.
So when a 727 would land at an airport, excuse me, they could drop the aft stairs, as they were called, and people could walk off.
And you could park the plane anywhere.
You didn't have to worry about rolling up any aft stairs, any, you know, either on wheels or on the back of a pickup truck, which is how it was done in the 50s and 60s, which is why the 727 was developed by Boeing, because it was a very cumbersome way to get passengers on and off an airplane.
So the 727 was very unique, and D.B. Cooper was able to exploit it.
And in fact, D.B. Cooper's knowledge of the 727 exceeded that of the pilots and of anyone in flight operations at Northwest Orient Airlines, because the plane that he stole was from Northwest.
And in fact, anyone else in the aviation industry, the pilots were instructed to comply with Cooper's requests because they were assured by the CIA.
It's like, oh, no, Cooper knows what he's doing.
Yeah, we can fly these planes with the aft stairs down.
We do it in Vietnam all the time.
And you have to go slow.
So flying south out of Seattle International Airport was very wise because Cooper knew the metrics about how to successfully parachute out of a 727.
And the number one thing, excuse me, is don't go over 10,000 feet.
And there are a lot of mountains around Tacoma and Seattle that are 14,000 feet high.
And the only way out of the area at the lower elevation is due south to Mexico.
So Cooper really had this staged.
He had it planned.
And when you talk to guys who are commandos and special forces, SEAL Team 6, things like that, they admire D.B. Cooper greatly.
As one commando told me, he says, he's just like us.
He did it exactly the way I would have done it.
And they're absolutely convinced that D.B. Cooper learned how to be D.B. Cooper on the government's nickel.
Was D.B. Cooper, I've got a question from one of my listeners here.
I'm just going to look at my papers and see which one it was.
I think it was Jerry.
Hang on.
Is it Jerry?
No, it's Gary.
Gary is very keen to know whether you think D.B. Cooper actually had worked for the CIA.
I think it's very possible.
It's hard to definitively state where D.B. Cooper came from or where he learned his information.
All we can say definitively is D.B. Cooper had access to top secret information.
It was not known in the aviation world that you could fly a 727 and jump out of it and that the plane would be stable and could successfully make the flight.
That was only known at the highest levels of the military leadership and of certain people in the CIA and at Boeing.
It was a top secret piece of information.
So the question is.
How did he know that?
How did he get access to that?
And that's why the guys who are commandos, who are using that information on a daily basis, for them, it's just another day in the office.
They feel D.B. Cooper was one of them, that he learned all of these little tricks.
Because there's more than just flying at 10,000 feet.
You need to fly the plane slowly, which means you have to set the flaps.
Now, the flaps are the little things at the back of the wings that curl down.
And you can see them when you're coming in for landing and you hear, you know, some motors churning on the wings.
Those are the flaps curling so that the wing becomes more curved, which means you get more lift.
And with more lift, you can fly more slowly.
And being a skydiver, one of the important things is you don't want to tumble too much when you leave the aircraft.
So you need to be under 200 miles an hour.
And you can do that in a 727 by lowering the flaps to either 15 degrees or 30 degrees.
And Cooper specifically told the cockpit, set the flaps at 15.
So he is somebody who's got a tremendous amount of knowledge.
Sorry, you were saying the man who's flying the plane.
Tremendous, tremendous.
And it was really specific to the 727 because the pilot fly on the plane told me, he said, when he told me to set the flaps at 15, he said, I knew this guy knew something about airplanes because the 727 was the only Boeing product at that time that had a pre what they call a pre-dent setting for 15 degrees.
The 707 was setting for 12 degrees.
The 757 was 18 degrees.
So there were variations across the whole spectrum of what kinds of planes were being flown in the sky.
So when the guy who's skyjacking a 727 says, set him at 15, he really knew the 727.
So this man gets a bag of money.
The bag of money is taken to him by a flight attendant.
He seems apparently more relaxed once he's got the money because it's almost mission accomplished.
The next bit is down to him.
And he then makes for, when they get to the appropriate place, he makes for that rear exit.
They lower the stairs.
We'll talk about this in another segment of this conversation, but there is a kind of bounce back as the stairs go down, or as he leaps off the back.
So people know that he's gone at that point.
And then he disappears into the darkness.
Yeah.
I make the point that so little is known about D.B. Cooper that it seems as if almost that D.B. Cooper came from nowhere.
And when he jumped out of his plane, he returned to nowhere.
We don't know his name.
We don't know his identity.
We don't know where he came from.
We don't know what happened to him.
We don't know where the parachute is, the body, the money, the bomb that he had on board.
Nothing has ever been found, not even any of the money, except for three bundles of ransom money that were found eight years later buried on a Columbia River beach.
And nobody knows to this day how the money got there or when.
So there were double, it's a double mystery.
There's really two things going on.
Because where the money was found is not anywhere close to where the FBI says the plane was flying.
So we know when Cooper left the plane because of that bounce back, that when he jumped off the stairs, they rebounded back into the fuselage and it called what's known as a pressure bump.
And the plane had to be trimmed out.
So the pilots really had to take control of the aircraft significantly then.
And the pilots said, you know, they told the flight controllers, mark your radar screens because our visitor, I think they called him the visitor or our gentleman guest or something like that, has just exited the craft.
And that was, according to various people involved, it was either at 8.12 p.m. in the evening or 8.13 p.m. in the evening.
And that may not seem like a big difference.
But even though the plane was flying slowly, every minute in the air at 200 miles an hour is still three miles.
So looking for a guy on the ground, the more precise your information can be, the better chance you're going to have to find him.
Right.
That's a very good point to park this for this moment, Bruce, because there have been this year, in fact, in recent weeks, two new documentaries.
One, a BBC Storyville documentary, which looks at the events, but talks to people sometimes for the first time in years connected with those events.
So I'd like to unpick that because you were part of that.
And then in the final segment of our conversation, I'd like to talk about the new History Channel documentary, which looks at this in a completely different way.
Actually goes and tries to find out the exact trajectory of the plane and the exact route that D.B. Cooper may have taken and other clues to his identity and also centers on one particular suspect.
And as we will hear, there are many of those.
There is no shortage of suspects.
They seem to be emerging all the time.
But, you know, the suspect file has never really gone cold over the years.
Totally fascinating case, a case about which we are constantly learning more.
The BBC documentary is interesting, I think, because it's the first time I've really seen to the extent that D.B. Cooper was, I won't say venerated, but a lot of people, it seems to me, especially in Seattle, aviation city, of course, a lot of people still have an awful lot of time for D.B. Cooper.
He is a kind of folk hero who stuck it to the man.
Yeah, D.B. Cooper, you might say, is our local Robinhood.
There are parties in his honor, and I love them.
They're great.
And there are conferences about the case.
And so there's a lot of local interest, and there's interest around the world.
Here, historically, the D.B. Cooper case is known as the only unsolved skyjacking in the history of the United States.
But I've just come to learn it's the only unsolved skyjacking in the history of the world.
And Bruce Smith, when you say unsolved skyjacking, you mean where the culprit, the person who did it, actually has disappeared.
Yes.
We don't know where he is.
We don't know what happened to him.
We don't know if he's alive or dead.
We don't know if he made it to the ground successfully.
We don't know if he spent his money.
We don't know his name.
We don't know where he came from.
We don't know anything.
It is an astonishing case to go 49 years.
And part of this, as I know you feel, is down to the fact that there was not a great deal of joined up thinking in the law enforcement, law enforcement agencies.
But we will come to that.
So this documentary by the BBC in the Storyville series looked at the cult of Cooper, as they call it.
And I think it is a cult.
There is no doubt about it.
There are many adherents to that cult.
They spoke to a flight attendant, and the detail from the flight attendant all these years on was very vivid.
I don't know what you thought, Bruce, but a great description of how she handed over the money, how she gave him cigarettes, he wanted a bourbon, and just a description of what it was like to be on that plane.
Yes, indeed.
The flight attendant, her name is Tina Mucklau, and she was in the company of D.B. Cooper for about five hours.
She was not the woman that D.B. Cooper announced his skyjacking to.
He gave a note to Tina's colleague, a woman by the name of Florence Schaffner.
But Florence read the note and freaked out and gave it to Tina.
And Florence was shaking so bad, was so anxious when she realized that this guy, he called himself Dan Cooper, had a bomb and was skyjacking the plane.
The best that she could do was go up to the cockpit and she spent the entire flight up in the company of the pilots in the cockpit.
And so Tina had to do all the heavy lifting with D.B. Cooper.
And the guy flying the plane, Bill Radicek, told me that Tina was the brains of the outfit.
And he really considers Tina to have really saved everybody's bacon.
She kept the Skyjacker cool, calm, and collected.
She didn't allow any interference from any of the passengers.
Everybody that was sitting around D.B. Cooper thought that he must have been a VIP from Northwest Orient Airlines because this pretty young stewardess was sitting next to him for the entire flight and lighting his cigarettes.
So this documentary from the BBC, it's called The Mystery of D.B. Cooper, I think is probably the best for understanding how the skyjacking unfolded, the details.
And we see people at length on screen.
This is the best interview that Tina Mucklau has ever given.
After the skyjacking, she went into a convent.
She retreated into a convent.
And yeah, she was in a convent for 12 years, in a cloistered convent, did not speak to anybody.
And when she came out, she continued not to speak publicly at all for another 20 years and has only recently started speaking publicly.
And she gives a masterful presentation of her experiences in the skyjacking.
Also, too, in the documentary, The Mystery of D.B. Cooper, the pilot, Bill Radicek, is interviewed at length, but so is the flight officer, the flight engineer, Andy Anderson.
And this is the first time, to my knowledge, that he has ever been in a documentary.
And his perspectives are very unique and very helpful.
And he fleshes it out.
He gives more detail about how the communications were handled with the FBI and the Northwest Orient folks back in Minneapolis.
Also, too, we see a number of people who aren't in any other documentaries, like Bob Furman, who is one of the few FBI agents who was actually on the case that night, who are still alive, and who are able to communicate with the public.
He's probably in his mid-70s now.
He was a young guy 50 years ago, obviously.
His number one job was driving the boss around or getting coffee for the other agents in the office.
But he was there, and he gives you a real good view of what it was like to be involved with the skyjacking that day.
Were they all under pressure?
I mean, this is a silly question.
They must have been under pressure to get this thing resolved.
Very much so.
I think they felt a tremendous amount of pressure.
And that's one of the things I write about in my book.
I have a book that's a case study.
In Cooper World, you call me a completist, I think.
And I think that's a good way to describe it because I don't champion a particular suspect or a particular angle or aspect of the case.
What I do is I try to provide a balanced overview of the whole thing.
What happened, who did what, and what was the FBI's investigation actually like.
And I shine a very strong and at sometimes very harsh light on the FBI.
And so I call my book D.B. Cooper and the FBI.
And it's as much about the FBI and their investigation as it is about the skyjacking, because the two dynamics are inextricably intertwined.
And the reality is that large bureaucratic law enforcement agencies do some things very well, and there are a lot of things they don't do very well.
One of the things that they do well is they can collect a lot of information very, very quickly.
They have a lot of people that'll go interview suspects and families and bus drivers and cabbies and waitresses and bars and things like that.
But synthesizing and integrating all that information, the connecting the dots, they don't do well.
And that was a problem back in the day in 1971, and it continues to be a problem to this day.
Okay, let's have a quick troll then.
And, you know, radio hours are short ones, as you know.
Yes.
So let's have a troll through the suspects as they are depicted to us on this documentary, which I thought was a very good one, too.
Very different from the one that we'll discuss from the History Channel in the final segment.
Barbara Dayton.
Now, Barbara Dayton had been born Robert Dayton, a man born into the wrong body.
But Barbara Dayton was of interest because Barbara Dayton was a great pilot, people noticed, and a parachutist.
And Barbara Dayton became and has become through history a suspect, yeah?
Yes, in fact, she was one of the first suspects.
There have been hundreds of people to have confessed to the D.B. Cooper case, and she's one of the first.
And as it turns out, Barb Dayton just lived down the street from me.
and that's how I reconnected with the case because I happened to meet a couple of her friends at an air show.
And they started telling me about Barb Dayton, and they had just written a book about her.
By the time I entered the scene, this is 2008, Barb Dayton had already died.
So her friends, Ron and Pat Foreman, had written a book, and it had just been published the day before I met them.
So I was introduced very, very quickly to a very fascinating woman and a compelling suspect.
I don't think who had a lot of knowledge, a lot of ability.
And the theory goes that if this had been Barbara Dayton, Barbara Dayton would have expertly jumped from that 727, landed, put on a blonde wig, and not been because, you know, there's a woman walking through, maybe walking by the railroad or walking by, you know, a highway there.
They're looking for a man.
Right.
The perfect disguise, eh?
Absolutely.
Then there's Marla Cooper.
Marla Cooper's not a suspect, but her uncles, I think L.D. and Dewey, seemed, she thought when she was a kid, she overheard them talking, they seemed to be plotting something.
And the theory is that one of these uncles was D.B. Cooper or may have been.
Yeah.
Marla comes on very, very strong.
In fact, L.D. Cooper is one of the last suspects that the FBI looked at, and they looked very, very strongly at him.
And the FBI told me they closed the case in 2016 because they had finally concluded that L.D. Cooper was not D.B. Cooper.
So Marla tells a great story.
She's great on screen.
She really believes her story that her uncle stole the airplane when she was eight years old.
And she has great vivid memories of interactions on Thanksgiving Day with the family and with her uncle L.D. and Uncle Dewey.
And she's passed a polygraph test.
So she tells a compelling story.
But again, I don't think her uncle is D.B. Cooper.
And why would you keep the name Cooper unless that's some kind of double bluff?
Maybe that's a double bluff.
Yeah, yeah.
Now we're trying to read the tea leaves, you know, in extremists here.
Interesting enough, L.B. Cooper was a very troubled man for most of his life and had a very strong dependency and addiction to alcohol and died in a rehab center in Eugene, Oregon, just down the street from where Tina Muckler, the flight attendant.
And did he ever talk about D.B. Cooper?
Was it something that he talked about?
No, the short answer is no.
I've talked to many of his family members.
I've talked to his sister-in-law.
I've talked to a lot of aunts and uncles and cousins and things and friends of the family.
I've talked to the guy who ran the rehab center where he passed away and Eugene.
And he never once said that he was D.B. Cooper.
All right.
Then there's Dwayne Weber.
Now, I'm fascinated by Dwayne Weber because Dwayne Webber, if anybody had a double or multiple life, this guy had.
He had other IDs.
One of them was John Carson Collins.
And after the skyjacking, this man, Dwayne Webber, bought two brand new cars.
Now, as we say over here in the UK, this man before that event in 1971 hadn't got two halfpennies to rub together.
I don't know whether you have that say, you know, that saying in the States, maybe you say two cents to rub together.
He had no money.
We don't have two nickels to rub together.
Right.
He didn't have two nickels to rub together, and yet he bought two brand new cars.
How come?
He was a good thief.
Did he steal an airplane?
No, I don't think so.
But he stole plenty of other stuff and got arrested for it.
He was in prison for at least 16 years on something like, I think he was arrested something like 20 times.
So he committed a lot of crimes, stole a lot of things, but he didn't steal an airplane.
But what makes Dwayne Weber so compelling is his wife, Joe Weber.
Joe Weber is a force of nature, and she almost single-handedly kicked the FBI's ass into gear in the mid-1970s.
Her husband, Dwayne, confessed to being D.B. Cooper on his deathbed in 1995, according to Joe.
And she says she was there.
Nobody else heard the confession, but Joe says she heard it, and then went to the FBI and just kicked the hornet's nest to get the Bureau investigating her husband.
And she is, I consider her to be the godmother of the revitalized, resurgent D.B. Cooper investigation.
And she has an uncanny ability to ferret out information from people.
Like, for instance, I was trying to get in touch with Tina, who has slammed the door in my face every time I've knocked on her door or hangs up the phone whenever I call her.
So I was talking to Tina's sister, and Tina's sister wouldn't talk to me either, but her husband came to the door.
He's an FBI agent, by the way.
And he had been telling me that his family had been talking to Joe Weber the night before at length.
And his quote to me was, yeah, I know who you are.
My wife camped out on the phone last night with Joe Weber, and she told me all about you.
So how Joe Weber was able to infiltrate and connect with people at all different levels at the FBI and law enforcement and the principles in the case is uncanny.
And she's still alive and she's in the documentary.
She is.
And she's still kicking butt.
I mean, another person who's very compelling on camera.
Okay, we've only got two minutes in this segment, and we have to somehow deal with Richard McCoy, adventurer, Vietnam veteran, war hero, and a man involved in a copycat case after the skyjacking.
Now, you know, the big question that would hang over that is, you know, if he'd been D.B. Cooper, why would he do it again?
And the FBI's view is that because he lost the money the first time around, the money wasn't in a secure bag, so the money went everywhere.
And if you follow this line of thinking, Richard McCoy had to do it again.
That's the thinking.
So we know that Richard McCoy knows how to steal an airplane because he did it, and he got caught.
And he got caught with a lot of money.
He had a half a million dollars.
He had $100 bills.
Same volume and same weight as D.B. Cooper, just higher denominations.
So he doubled his take.
But he still got caught.
He's a different kind of guy than D.B. Cooper.
D.B. Cooper was very slick, very crafty, very disciplined.
Richard McCoy was not.
And he got caught because he was blabbing to everybody about what he did.
And he couldn't shut up his wife or his sister-in-law.
And they told everybody.
So that's how the cops found out about Richard McCoy, and they arrested him two days after the skyjacking.
And eventually he came to a very sad and sticky end, didn't he?
Because he was shot dead in an FBI shootout later.
Yeah, Richard McCoy is an interesting guy because before his personal skyjacking, so the plane that he stole occurred five months after D.B. Cooper stole the Northwest Orient 727.
And at that time, before D.B. Cooper, Richard McCoy was studying law enforcement in Provo, Utah, and had taken the test for a state trooper for Utah and scored number one on the test.
So here we go.
Here's a guy that wants to be a cop and then becomes an incredible criminal.
He escaped from prison twice, was on the lamb for months and highly successful in the Carolinas and Virginia, robbing banks, rural banks.
And ultimately, the FBI had to get really serious about catching him because he was causing so much trouble.
And it's believed that they leveraged the wife into telling them where Cooper, where McCoy was.
And they found him in Virginia Beach and had a shootout, and he was killed.
We're talking about the enigma of D.B. Cooper with Bruce Smith in Washington State in the United States of America.
And Bruce, very good of you to give me a time to do this.
The new investigation from the History Channel.
This is completely different and very compelling, I think, because it involves this one, an investigator.
The investigator who's featured is a gentleman by the name of Eric Ulis, who has been involved in the D.B. Cooper case for many years, but only recently has really come into the fore as being one of the major players in the D.B. Cooper investigation.
So not only is he involved in this particular production with the History Channel, but he also has been the organizer of the Cooper conferences over the last several years.
Right.
And there are two themes in this documentary that I think are very useful themes because they're ones that haven't been explored enough before.
Number one is the trajectory of the plane.
Was it exactly where we were told it was in the sky?
Or was it off-beam slightly?
Was it a few miles or more miles to one side?
Was it further west, in other words?
That's one thing that he investigates.
He also investigates the terrain looking for clues.
And then there is a sort of DNA strand to it all involving one particular suspect we'll get to.
His name is Sheridan Peterson.
When we're talking about the route of the plane, it was interesting that Eric was able to get in touch with Cliff Ammerman, and he's in this History Channel documentary.
This man was the air traffic controller, and my thanks to the History Channel, they've allowed me to give you a couple of clips here.
So here's Mr. Ammerman talking about it from the air traffic control perspective.
It's very uncertain just exactly where the airplane was within that target area that we're seeing.
So where's the airplane, actually?
There's quite a bit of variance in there.
Indeed, the jet could have actually been a handful of miles outside of this Victor 23 airway.
It seems to indicate that the jet indeed took a path that was more along the western side, that lines it up with the money find and all that good stuff.
That is not at all consistent with the official version of the flight path.
The pilot of Northwest 305 also said that they were not looking far enough west.
Well, that confirms it for me.
Yeah.
That's an area that they should have looked, but they didn't look.
And that is a key part of this investigation, because there you hear Mr. Hammerman, the air traffic controller, saying, well, maybe they were further west.
And that ties in, doesn't it, quite beautifully with the discovery of $3,000 worth of bills in a place where they should not have been, a place called Tina Barr.
Correct.
Most people don't know this, but all airplanes have to stay within an air corridor whenever they fly wherever they're going.
They just can't go willy-nilly anywhere in the air.
And air corridors are kind of like highways.
And when you fly south out of SeaTac Airport to go to Mexico, and you're only flying at 10,000 feet to avoid the mountains, you're going to be routed into an air corridor called Victor 23.
Now, in 1971, Victor 23 was eight nautical miles wide, which is about 10 statute miles, regular miles, as people would figure like on the odometer on their car.
Now, Cliff, it had always been assumed, but never definitively corroborated, that the plane was flying smack dab down the middle of Victor 23, which would have put it basically a little bit east of Interstate 5, the main highway going between Seattle and Portland.
And the 727 would have flown right over downtown Portland.
It's believed that the plane flew more to the west.
And Cliff Ammerman, the air traffic controller, was actually the guy controlling the direction of the plane at the time D.B. Cooper jumped out.
We know he left the plane at 8.12 or 8.13, somewhere around there.
And at that time, the plane would have been very close to Tina Barr, which was on the very, very edge, western edge of the Victor 23 flight path.
So that opens up the whole possibility that D.B. Cooper landed somehow, dead or alive, we don't know, but somehow he's on the ground with his money, or part of it, at least, somewhere in the vicinity of Tina Bar.
And not very far from a railroad line, too, a BNSF train track.
Yes.
And it's fairly rural, but Vancouver is only about 10 miles away.
So civilization isn't all that far.
And Portland would be about 15 or 20 miles away.
You could certainly see the lights and hear all the port activities in the train yards and things like that.
So it is believed by some, and certainly by Eric, that D.B. Cooper landed just north of Tina Bar and started walking towards the lights of town and decided, you know, I can't bring the money with me, so I better bury it.
And where better to bury it, but in the sand of a beach because there's no rocks and there's no roots and things like that.
So that's how it's believed that the money actually arrived.
One element.
What about the rest of the money, though?
Yeah, about $6,000 was found.
So that leaves the remainder, you know, from the $200,000.
And the question is, what happened to that?
If he buried anything, what happened?
Now, here's one interesting part that is talked about widely, but for some reason did not make it into the documentary.
And I believe it didn't make it in because of COVID restrictions.
COVID hit right smacked ebb in the middle of the filming.
So what you see in the documentary is obviously stuff that all got filmed before COVID hit and then got spliced in segments towards the end, like on the DNA and things like that.
What they left out is why not all the money was found at the beach.
If he buried it, how come only part of it was found?
And here's the current thinking is that when Cooper buried the money, he didn't come back right away, but maybe came back in the springtime because we now know for additional research,
and this is not in the documentary, but it's widely talked about in the DB Cooper world now, is that the bills, more investigation has been done of the bills that were found, and they found diatoms, which are little aquatic creatures stuck on the bills.
And the diatoms that they have found on the bills only bloom in the springtime.
So that suggests to researchers that the money that was found was only exposed to Columbia River beach water in the spring and probably during a flood time.
And the major floods in that area were in the spring of 1972, six or seven months after the skyjacking, or 1974, which would be a couple of years later.
So the speculation is, is that Cooper buried the money, left the area, followed the papers and said, oh my God, the floods are coming.
I better go get my money before it washes out to the ocean.
Went back at night.
He got most of his money and left three bundles behind.
That's the current speculation.
Or could it have been that somebody else had found some money?
Right.
And separately, he decided, because that's hot money, to put it away, bury it for a period.
Right.
All speculations are possible.
This is D.B. Cooper, so there's nobody with a wrong answer.
Eric Ullis took a team of experts, this is pre-COVID, to absolutely stake out and go through an area of land that D.B. Cooper might well have been running through, fleeing through.
They didn't find very much that added up to anything.
There was a piece, I think, of a reserve parachute, or could have been, that might have been, but I think it was a tenuous link possibly, that might have been in some way connected.
So it was interesting.
From my point of view, I love this particular documentary because for the first time we see the terrain.
We see the place.
You know, we talk to people who know that area intimately.
So from my point of view, I thought that part of it was very useful, even if they didn't come up with very much.
Then we get, and sadly we don't have a lot of time to talk about this, to suspect Sheridan Peterson.
Sheridan Peterson still alive, very much up in years now.
And the dynamic between him and FBI agent Mary Jean Fryer, who interviewed him, even took a DNA sample from him in recent years.
This is a fascinating part of that documentary.
Yes, it is.
Sheridan Peterson is probably the number one suspect in the D.B. Cooper case.
He's been investigated by the FBI twice.
And on paper, he's perfect.
He's a former smoke jumper.
He worked at Boeing.
He knew all about the 727 and skydiving out of it.
He had access to top secret information.
He knew what the capabilities of a 727 were.
So he's a fearless kind of guy.
He's crusty.
He's cranky.
He is extremely opinionated.
I've spoken to him a number of times.
I've communicated by email with him a number of times.
And he could be D.B. Cooper.
I don't think he is, but he has lived a fascinating life, that is for sure.
And I think the kicker in it all was there was a tie recovered.
D.B. Cooper was wearing a tie, a smart tie.
And there's a link that has been much discussed about this tie having elements of titanium on it, which could only have been obtained or could only have got onto the tie if you'd actually worked at Boeing in Seattle, I think.
If you'd done work for them, then your tie would have titanium on it.
You know, that's one aspect of it.
But they did a DNA check, didn't they?
They got a lab in Los Angeles to do a DNA check on the tie.
And I think the aim was to try and tie this back to Mr. Peterson.
And that in itself was fascinating.
Let's hear what was said about that DNA from the tie.
We did end up with a profile from one male individual.
Is there some way to quantify the strength?
I mean, is it one of these things where one out of a billion people would match this particular profile?
Like, how strong is it?
What can it tell us?
Typically, once you have over 20 locations, you would have to see hundreds, thousands, millions of planet Earths with our same current population to expect to see that profile one time.
So once you have over those 20 locations, it usually becomes very rare.
So what you're telling me is that we are the very first people outside of the FBI to actually have D.B. Cooper's DNA profile.
And that gives us, you know, grounds for more investigations.
That certainly gives us ground to take this forward, and the authorities really should be doing that.
And that was the final conclusion of that.
But there is no DNA tie, literally no DNA tie to Mr. Peterson, is there?
Well, we don't know because, again, the documentary got caught short by COVID restrictions.
What we do know now is that the DNA sample that they retrieved from the Thai and tested was a contamination from the guy who was actually doing the testing.
It is 100% confirmed that the DNA that got tested is from Tom Kaye, who did the extraction of the DNA from the Thai.
How the sample got contaminated is unknown and is perplexing.
But the truth is, not only is that DNA sample not D.B. Cooper's, it is not Sheridan Peterson's because it's Tom Kay's.
Are there other DNA samples on the tie?
Tom Kay, who did the investigation, believes that there's up to 30 different samples, DNA samples, on the tie.
And the question is how to extract it.
The tie right now is in the control of the FBI, and the tie resides somewhere in Washington, D.C., and would need to be given back to researchers because the FBI is not going to look into it.
So the DNA theme isn't dead then.
If what you're telling me is true and this DNA that they found is not D.B. Cooper's DNA, but it was somebody known, somebody involved in investigating this.
Exactly.
Then it's not over, is it?
As you say, if there is a willingness to allow this thing to be examined, and if there is the technology that can separate out those, did you say 30 different kinds of DNA on that tie, then, all right, it's a maze.
It's going to be difficult, but it is a way forward.
Yes.
Yeah.
We're back to square one.
We don't know a lot of people have handled that tie.
So there's all kinds of evidence on the tie.
There's all kinds of contamination.
Not only do we have titanium, but we have rare earth minerals.
There's a real potpourri of strange stuff on the tie.
And so to disseminate all that and try to figure out, can we get any good DNA off the tie too?
It's a real conundrum.
Last question.
Do you think the authorities are going to have the will to pick this up and run with it, or do they just want it forgotten now?
I think the FBI wants to walk away from it.
But I think the case can be solved.
I think the investigation into D.B. Cooper is robust.
It's being handled by a lot of folks like you and me.
And people are ponying up money.
The History Channel and people involved, Josh Gates with Expedition Unknown, is actually putting tens of thousands of dollars into the investigation.
So there's an awful lot still to be discovered and hopefully in our lifetimes, Bruce.
Listen, we're totally out of time.
It's always a problem when you're doing these things.
There's never enough time.
Name of your book again so people can read it.
I'm Bruce A. Smith, and my book is D.B. Cooper and the FBI, a case study of America's only unsolved skyjacking, and it's available at Amazon.
And the Excellent History Channel documentary is The Final Hunt for D.B. Cooper.
It's going to be on Sky History Tuesday, 19th of January in the UK, 9 p.m. as part of Sky History's mystery season, and it is well worth seeing, as is the BBC documentary as well.
Bruce, thank you very much.
Great to talk with you again.
Always good to talk with you, Howard.
Your thoughts about Bruce Smith and about the D.B. Cooper case, gratefully received.
If you have some information about the case, I think Bruce Smith and I would be very, very pleased to hear from you.
Thank you very much for being part of The Unexplained.
We have more great guests coming up in the pipeline here.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online, and please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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