In November 1971, a man traveling under the name Dan Cooper hijacked a Boeing 727 en route from Portland to Seattle. After communicating to the flight attendant that he had a bomb in his briefcase, he demanded $200,000 and four parachutes, to be delivered after the plane landed. After receiving his ransom and releasing the passengers, Cooper ordered the pilots to take off and fly to Mexico, but while in the air over Washington state he lowered the rear stairs of the aircraft and jumped out, never to be seen again.
As if his story, with too many astonishing details to mention here, weren’t enough, four months later a man named Richard McCoy Jr. copied Cooper’s crime, but demanded $500,000. Because he bragged, and because he hitchhiked wearing a flightsuit afterward, McCoy was captured. He later escaped from prison and spent three months on the lam before being killed in a shoot-out with the FBI.
That these men successfully carried out skyjackings of commercial Boeing jets and bailed out over the United States strongly suggests to me that the 1970s were awesome.
If there is a more captivating tale of relatively innocent modern crime, I don’t know it. What’s better fuel for dreams than the perfect crime and then a completely successful disappearance into the world. I used to spend hours dreaming of D.B. Cooper when I was a kid. Trying to imagine if he was hiding in Sao Paolo or India or Tahiti or a cabin in Newfoundland or…
3 months ago