Chapter 13

DAN COOPER COMICS

Dan Cooper was a Canadian cartoon character first drawn by the Belgian artist Albert Weinberg in 1954. In the French-language stories, Dan Cooper was a daring test pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force. According to the FBI website, one issue released around the time of the hijackings had a cover illustration of the hero, Dan Cooper, parachuting out of a plane. (You can see the comic cover at FBI — In Search of D.B. Cooper. I can’t show it here because it’s copyrighted.)

The idea of D. B. Cooper as a Canadian is further supported by the language he used in his instructions to Florence Schaffner that the ransom be paid “in negotiable American currency.” This is not generally how an American would refer to US dollars. Others see the comic inspiration as a possible indicator that D. B. Cooper had lived or served abroad or overseas, thus giving him an opportunity to be exposed to the Dan Cooper comics in Canada or Europe. Marla Cooper recalled her uncle being a fan of the stories and having a Dan Cooper comic tacked to his wall.

THE TIE

Never in the history of modern fashion has so much attention been paid to a polyester clip-on tie. The FBI described the tie as “A black clip-on tie which contained a tie clip, yellow gold in color, with a round, white pearl in the center. … The tie bore the label ‘Towncraft,’ a trademark of the J.C. Penney Company.” Tacky as it may have been, when it comes to the Cooper hijacking, the tie is haute couture. It may well hold the clues that could eventually break the case.

Hijacker’s clip-on tie from JCPenney left on board the airplane. (FBI.gov)

DNA Testing—Garbage In, Garbage Out

A possible partial DNA profile for the hijacker has been derived from a sample taken from the black clip-on tie from JCPenney the man calling himself Dan Cooper left on board the airplane. Several Raleigh cigarette butts smoked by the hijacker during the flight were recovered by the FBI but were, unfortunately, lost before DNA testing became a known forensic technique. The loss of the cigarette butts is an event that has waved a red flag before the conspiracy theory fringe who claim the FBI was covering up the hijacking. Additionally, fingerprints assumed to belong to the subject were recovered from the plane.

However, the FBI reportedly had concerns about whether the prints and DNA were actually left by the hijacker, since a commercial passenger jet is a high-traffic public location exposed to the DNA and fingerprints of many individuals coming and going every day. Astonishingly, despite these concerns, over and over the FBI has cleared possible suspects based on this DNA profile.

Worse, there is no evidence I could find in the public domain indicating that the partial profile was ever run through public genealogical databases. If the sample is sufficient to generate the necessary information for entry in the databases, that approach would give the investigators a fighting chance of using genetic genealogy to identify the donor of the DNA.

If it turns out that the DNA found on the tie belonged to a member of the cleaning crew or a loader from the catering service, then all of those possible suspects eliminated from the investigation based on the DNA profile can be thrown back into the suspect pool.

On the other hand, if the DNA could be traced to a relative of someone on the FBI’s actual suspect list, that individual would rocket up the chart to the number-one position on the list of D. B. Cooper top-forty hits.

Metal Particles Found on the Tie—Cooper Kryptonite?

A more interesting aspect of the tie is what the Citizen Sleuth group found when the FBI gave them access to it. (The Citizen Sleuths are a team of citizen scientists investigating the Cooper hijacking.) Independent researcher Thomas G. Kaye of the Foundation for Scientific Advancement is the group’s primary researcher. Kaye used scanning electron microscopy to determine that, among other metals, the tie contained particles of pure titanium.

Following Bread Crumbs through a Chemical Forest

Titanium is a metal with a wide variety of industrial uses. However, almost all of those uses involve titanium alloys, not pure titanium. Pure titanium is used in chemical manufacturing environments where extreme corrosion protection is required. So, Kaye concluded that the tie had to have been present either in a chemical manufacturing plant or in a metal fabrication plant where chemical manufacturing equipment was made.

Kaye also found particles of pure titanium embedded with stainless steel. The only place such a particle would be found is in a metal fabrication facility. Spiral chips of 500 series cast or 5000 series wrought aluminum were also present on the tie. The only way that aluminum is rendered into a spiral shape is as a shaving from the work of a metal lathe, drill press, or other similar equipment—again pointing to a metal fabrication plant producing equipment for use in chemical manufacturing.

In January 2017, Kaye reported that he and his team had discovered particles containing the rare earth minerals cerium and strontium sulfide on the Cooper tie. These minerals were used in a variety of aerospace applications in the era of the Cooper hijacking, including Boeing’s supersonic transport development project. This suggested that Cooper could have either been a Boeing employee or a contractor who was present around the supersonic project.

Three Specs and a Patent

More recently, a Cooper researcher named Eric Ulis in Arizona made sense of another element found on Cooper’s tie. Kaye’s team found three specs of a titanium-antimony alloy in their analysis of the tie. Ulis discovered that a metallurgical company headquartered in Midland, Pennsylvania, called Rem-Cru Titanium, Inc., received a patent in 1957 for a titanium-antimony alloy. Ulis says that the alloy was never sold by the company, leading him to believe that the only place that alloy could have been found was inside of the Rem-Cru facility where it was developed.

Of further interest is the fact that Rem-Cru Titanium was a Boeing contractor, and representatives from Rem-Cru regularly traveled to Boeing’s facility in Seattle to conduct business. These visits may have offered the hijacker an opportunity to learn about the rear stairs of the 727. It also could explain the familiarity of the hijacker with the Northwest region of the United States.

Kaye observed that metal workers in fabrication facilities did not wear ties. In 1971, the only employees in those facilities who wore ties were either executives or engineers. While clip-on ties have long been the stuff of children’s clothes and cheap men’s attire, there is one group who have always worn clip-on ties—professional men who work around industrial equipment. If a traditional necktie were to become caught in machinery, the wearer could be seriously injured or even killed. Yet, a clip-on tie will safely snap off. An engineer working in or around a metal fabricating plant who encountered industrial equipment as part of his job would most likely have worn a clip-on tie. Better to be a fashion disaster than to be choked to death by a Louis Vuitton.

THE RECOVERED MONEY

Hijacking ransom bills recovered at Tena Bar. (FBI.gov)

Babe in the Woods

On February 10, 1980, nine years after the hijacking, eight-and-a-half-year-old second grader Brian Ingram of Vancouver, Washington, was helping his father lay wood for a fire during a family outing to the Tena Bar stretch of the Columbia River when he discovered a packet of soggy, buried twenty-dollar bills totaling $5,800. When the family returned to their home in Vancouver, Brian’s parents set the badly decomposed cash on the counter to dry.

Do the Feds Take Trade-Ins?

During a break at his job the next day, Brian’s father called his bank to see if the soggy bills could be replaced with fresh cash. The bank advised Mr. Ingram that the exchange could be made if the serial numbers on the bills were still legible and did not appear on any of the bank’s lists of stolen money.

The next day, Mr. Ingram called the FBI about the cash. The agents soon discovered that the few serial numbers still legible were on the list of bills provided to D. B. Cooper during his hijacking of Flight 305. The FBI began an exhaustive search of the area where Brian found the cash but found only tiny bits of bills. Funny how a second grader accomplished more in fifteen minutes than the entire federal law enforcement establishment had been able to do in nine years of working on the case.

Money, Money…You’re Out of Time

The working theory was that the cash had been buried by Cooper upon his landing then dislodged by the dredging of the Columbia River by the Army Corps of Engineers. However, the engineers hadn’t dredged that stretch of the river since October of 1974. The money was discovered above the dredge layer in the soil and depositional profile, indicating that the money was deposited at the location on Tena Bar sometime substantially later than 1974—at least three years after the hijacking.

In 1980, Thomas Kaye and his coauthor, Mark Meltzer, discovered a discreet selection of algae particles (diatoms) on one of the Cooper bills discovered by Brian Ingram. In the conclusions section of their paper published in the journal Nature, they describe how the genera, abundance, and elemental signatures of the algae particles found on the bills indicate the money was not submerged during November, but was more likely put in the water during May or June. Also, their research indicated that a human burial of dry bundles of cash was unlikely. In summary, the researchers stated, “Finding summer diatoms rules out the theory that Cooper landed in the river in November, soaking the money and then buried some of it on shore.” Their conclusion: the hijacking of the plane and the burial of the money did not take place at the same time.

To be continued…

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